The girl nodded again. She was horribly tense. She'd known complete despair only a little while ago. She wore, now, a very fine air of composure. But her hands were clenched tightly. She seemed not to be aware of it. She was trying hard to keep her lips from quivering. Trent approved of her.
"And you," he turned to the Hecla's skipper, "were so sure you'd nothing to fear that you told this pirate that he was going to get into trouble. You thought it was the Bear, and it had stopped you."
"And blown our drive," said the skipper. "Of course I thought he'd get into trouble! Miss Hale was aboard!"
"And—"
"The man at the pirate's communicator laughed. He laughed! And then we knew what had happened, and we tried to run away, and they followed and headed us off again and again. Finally they began to fire on us. Then a shell went into our engine room so we couldn't even try to run away any more."
Trent could picture it very clearly. The Hecla, plump and matronly and informed of coming doom, would have tried desperately to postpone the inevitable by crazy, panicky flight. The pirate followed. Perhaps for amusement it would have headed off the clumsy merchantman until that diversion palled. On the whole, it would have been very much like a man chasing a chicken or a pig when the time for it to die arrived. It would be horrible! In any case the pirate had put shells into the Hecla to drain her of air, and one shell hit the engine room and stopped the Lawlor drive, and then sent boats to take over. The pirates might have been admitted by airlock to commit their murders. Some people will cooperate most docilely with their intending killers, merely to get a few minutes more of life. Otherwise the pirates would have blasted a hole in their helpless victim's hull and entered through that.
Trent could picture it very clearly, from information about similar events elsewhere.
"And then we arrived," he observed.
"Nothing can ever repay you," said Marian warmly. "I… I've never really believed that anything dreadful could really happen to me. But it could, and it almost did. And you rescued me. So I… want to thank you."
"You've done it very nicely," said Trent, "but we haven't reached Sira yet. We might still run into trouble. Let me say that you're very welcome and let it go at that. Meanwhile, why don't you take over my cabin and rest up and get relaxed? You've had a pretty unpleasant experience.
She smiled at him and went out. The Hecla's skipper followed her. Trent turned back to the instrument board. He looked at the detector dial with special care.
The Yarrow's mate said dourly, "Captain, sir, no matter how it turned out, that was a bad fix for us to be in!"
"Yes," agreed Trent drily. "One should never take the owners' word about gadgets. I didn't like the affair, either. But if the fact means anything to you, we're heroes."
"It don't mean anything to me," said the mate bluntly.
"Then next time," said Trent, "we won't be heroic. Next time we run into pirates, we'll just let them cut our throats without any fuss."
But after the encounter, the effect of assured isolation produced a sort of coziness. The ship felt safe. Beautifully safe. Its air apparatus functioned perfectly. Its temperature control was set so that different parts of the occupied parts of the ship were at different degrees of heat or trivial chill, which made it feel somehow more natural. There were differences in smell. There were even growing plants in a suitable compartment. And the crewmen stood their watches placidly, and those off-watch loafed and gossiped.
But there was, at this moment, a spot illimitably removed from the Yarrow where a ship cut its overdrive and broke out back to normal space. Starlight shone on it. Its bow plates were dented and buckled. The forward third of its hull was airless, and no man could go there save through emergency airlocks between compartments, and they would die immediately if without a spacesuit. This was, of course, the ship that had called itself the Bear when summoning the Hecla to surrender.
The pirate's ship's company was not only raging but desperate. There were fewer crewmen than before it hailed the Hecla. When air left the forward third of its hull, there'd been men there without spacesuits on. In theory they'd had thirteen seconds in which to get into space-armor. None of them had made it. Nobody has ever made it. The surviving part of the crew wanted horribly to take revenge for the Yarrow's act of self-defense.
But at the moment, the crew of the pirate ship labored with oxyhydrogen torches to repair the damage done by the Yarrow's ramming attack. Extensive if temporary repairs were necessary for anything like normal operation of the ship that had named itself the Bear. But even after repair this ship couldn't go to a spaceport and there pass itself off as an innocent merchantman. Repairs couldn't be made in space that wouldn't need to be explained on ground. And it was very likely that the whole matter of the Hecla's crippling would be known all through the Pleiads and elsewhere as fast as the news could travel.
In short, if before this event the pirate had ever passed in any spaceport as an honest craft about its lawful occasions, it couldn't do so any longer.
There was just one possibility. The Hecla had been disabled and hulled. Very probably, if the meddling Yarrow had the nerve to stand by to take off its crew, it was abandoned. But if the pirate ship could recover the Hecla—
The Yarrow drove for Sira. And Trent made tentative plans, tentatively allowing for what he thought the pirate might possibly do. If any of his guesses should turn out to be right, the pirates would most ferociously resent it.
III
Marian Hale watched out a viewport while the great globe of Sira swelled and grew gigantic through the Yarrow approach. The Hecla's skipper pointed out one of the three moons as the ship went past and explained what a Trojan orbit was. Later he pointed out landmarks on the enlarging world of Sira.
Eventually the ship touched ground. The girl, smiling, turned to Trent.
"We're aground, and there was a time when it didn't seem we'd ever be aground again! What are you going to do, Captain?"
"It's nearly noon here," said Trent. "Before sunset I'll have to do a little trading and I've some personal chores. Then I'll lift off again."
"When?"
"As soon as possible," he told her. "I'm not here for fun."
"I need to get in touch with our business agent," she observed. "We don't have ambassadors, here in the Pleiads, just business agents. Don't you think I'll be perfectly safe going on to Loren from here?"
He shrugged. He wasn't sure. There'd been one pirate ship, certainly, and while it wasn't likely to be professionally active again for a certain length of time, there might be more pirates in this area. There would be, to be sure, ships taking to space in the belief that the Yarrow had struck a hard blow at piracy. But that would make the time ripe for pirates to make many and rich captures.
"I'm not qualified to advise you. I'd say no, though I'm lifting off myself. If I were your father, I'd tell you to stay safely aground here until there'd been no ship missing for a good many months."
She smiled again. She held out her hand. He took it.