“Good,” said the captain. “Frankly, the Watchman has been a royal nuisance aboard my ship. He’s disrupting everything.”
“How can one man disrupt an entire star ship?”
The captain took a fast final gulp of his drink. “You don’t know this one man.”
As the captain approached his star ship in his personal shuttle craft, he could sense something was wrong.
It was nothing he could see, but the ship simply did not seem right. His worries were confirmed when the shuttle docked inside one of the giant star ship’s air locks. The emergency lights were on, and they were very dim at that. The outer hatch was cranked shut by two spacesuited deck hands, and it took nearly fifteen minutes to bring the lock up to normal air pressure, using the auxiliary air pumps.
“What in the name of all the devils has happened here?” the captain stormed to a cringing junior officer as he stepped out of the shuttle.
“It… it’s the power, sir. The power… shut off.”
“Shut off?”
The officer swallowed nervously and replied, “Yessir. All at once… all through the ship… no power!”
The captain fumed under his breath for a moment, then snapped, “Crank the inner hatch open and get me to the bridge.”
The deck hands jumped to it, and in a few minutes the captain, junior officer, and lower ratings had deserted the air lock, leaving the shuttle empty and unguarded.
Out of the pressurized control compartment at the far end of the lock stepped Hector, his thin face wary and serious, but not without the flickerings of a slightly self-satisfied smile.
They should be finding the cause of the power failure in a minute or two, he said to himself. And as soon as the main lights go on, out I go.
Hector tiptoed around the lock, making certain adjustments to the temporarily inert air pumps and hatch control unit. Then he climbed into the little shuttle, sealed its hatch, and studied the control panel. Not too tough… I think.
It had been a ridiculously easy job to cause a power breakdown. All Hector had needed was a little time, so that the guards would begin to allow him to roam certain parts of the ship alone. He had spent long hours in the observation center, learning the layout of the mammoth ship and pinpointing his ultimate objective—the Ministry of Intelligence, where a dueling machine was.
An hour ago, he had taken one of his customary strolls from his quarters to the communications center. His guards, after seeing Hector safely seated among a dozen Kerak technicians, relaxed. Hector waited a while, then casually sauntered over to the stairwell that led down to the switching equipment, on the deck below.
Hector nearly fouled his plan completely by missing the second rung on the metal ladder and plummeting to the deck below. For a long moment he lay on his face, trying to look invisible, or at least dead. Finally he risked a peep up the ladder. No one was coming after him; they hadn’t noticed. He was safe, for a few minutes.
He quickly found what he wanted: the leads from the main power plants and the communications antennas. He pulled one of the printed circuit elements from a stand-by console and used it to form a bridge between the power lead connectors and the antenna circuit. While the rules of physics claimed that what he was attempting was impossible, Hector knew from a previous experience on a Star Watch ship (he still shuddered at the memory) exactly what this “accidental” misconnection would do.
It took about fifteen seconds for the power plants to pump all their energy into the short circuit. The effect was a quiet one: no sparks, no smoke, no explosion. All that happened was that all the lights and motors aboard the ship went off simultaneously. The emergency systems turned on immediately, of course. But in the dim auxiliary lighting, and the confusion of the surprised, bewildered, angry men, it was fairly simple for Hector to make his way along a carefully preplanned route to the main air lock.
Now he sat in the captain’s shuttle, waiting for the power to return. The main lights flickered briefly, then turned on to full brightness. The air-lock pumps hummed to life, the outer hatch slid open. Hector nudged the throttle and the shuttle edged out of the air lock and away from the orbiting ship.
The Kerak captain needed about ten minutes to piece together all the information: the deliberate misconnection in the switching equipment; Hector’s disappearance; and, finally, the unauthorized departure of his personal shuttle.
“He’s escaped,” the captain mumbled. “Escaped. When we were just about to send him back.”
“What shall we do, sir? If the planetary patrols detect the ship, he won’t be able to identify himself satisfactorily. They’ll blast him!”
The captain’s eyes lit up at the thought. But then, “No. If we lose him, the whole Star Watch will pour into Kerak.” He thought for a moment, then told his aides, “Have our communications men send out a flight plan to the planetary patrol. Tell them that my shuttle and an auxiliary boat are bringing a contingent of men and officers to the Ministry of Intelligence. And get one of the boats ready for immediate departure. Take your best men. This mess is going to get worse before it gets better.”
8
Odal paced his windowless room endlessly: from the wall screen, around the lounge, past the guarded door to the outside hall, to the bedroom doorway, back again. And again, and again, across the thick carpeting.
He was trying to use his mind as a dispassionate computer, to weigh and count and calculate a hundred different factors. But each factor was different, imponderable, non-numerical. And any one of them could determine the length of Odal’s life span.
Kanus, Kor, Romis, Hector, and Geri.
If I returned to Kerak, would Kanus restore me to my full honors? I hold the key to teleportation, to a devastating new way to invade and conquer a nation. Or has Kanus found other psychic talents? Would he regard me as a traitor or a spy? Or worst of all, a failure?
Kor. Odal could report everything he knew about Romis’ plot to kill the Leader. Which wasn’t much. Kor probably already had that much information and more.
What about Romis? Is he still bent on overthrowing the Leader? Does he still want an assassin?
And the Watchman, that bumbling fool. But a teleporter, and probably as full talented as Odal himself. I can impress Leoh and Spencer by rescuing him. It would be risky, but if I do it… it will impress the girl, too.
The girl. Geri Dulaq. Yes, Geri. She has every reason to hate me, and yet there is something other than hate in her eyes. Fear? Anger? They say that hate is very close to love.
The view screen chimed, snapping Odal from his chain of thought and pacing. He clapped his hands and the wall dissolved, revealing the bulky form of Leoh sitting at his desk in the dueling machine building. The machine itself was partially visible through the open doorway behind the Professor.
“I thought you should know,” Leoh said without preliminaries, his wrinkled face downcast with worry, “that Hector has apparently escaped from Romis’ hands. We received a message from one of Romis’ friends in the Kerak embassy that he’s disappeared.”
Odal stood absolutely still in the middle of the room. “Disappeared? What do you mean?”
Shrugging, Leoh replied, “According to our information, Hector was being kept aboard an orbiting star ship. He somehow got off the ship in a shuttle craft, presumably heading for the Kerak dueling machine. The same one you escaped from. That’s all we know.”
“That machine is in Kor’s Ministry of Intelligence,” Odal heard himself saying calmly. But his mind was racing: Kor, Hector, Romis, Geri. “He’s walking straight into the fire.”