No…He tried to roll over, and couldn’t.
When he groaned, a hand lifted his head. Cool wetness touched his mouth. “Drink this,” Djana’s voice told him from far away.
He got down a couple of tablets with the water, and could look around him. She stood by the bunk, staring down. As the stimpills took hold and the pain receded, her image grew less blurred, until he could identify the hardness that sat on her face. Craning his neck, he made out that he lay on his back with wrists and ankles wired—securely—to the bunkframe.
“Feel better?” Her tone was flat.
“I assume you gave me a jolt from your stun gun after I feel asleep,” he succeeded in croaking.
“I’m sorry, Nicky.” Did her shell crack the tiniest bit, for that tiniest instant?
“What’s the reason?”
She told him about Rax, ending: “We’re already bound for the rendezvous. If I figured right, remembering what you taught me, it’s about forty or fifty light-years; and I set the pilot for top cruising hyperspeed, the way you said I ought to.”
He was too groggy for the loss of his fortune to seem more than academic. But dismay struck through him like a blunt nail. “Four or five days! With me trussed up?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t dare give you a chance to grab me or—or anything—” She hesitated. “I’ll take care of you as best I can. Nothing personal in this. You know? It’s that million credits.”
“What makes you think your unknown friends will honor their end of the deal?”
“If Wayland’s what you say, a megacredit’s going to be a microbe to them. And I can keep on being useful till I leave them.” All at once, it was as if a sword spoke: “That payment will make me my own.”
Flandry surrendered to his physical misery.
Which passed. But was followed by the miseries of confinement. He couldn’t do most isometric exercises. The wires would have cut him. A few were possible; and he spent hours flexing what muscles he was able to; and Djana was fairly good about massaging him. Nonetheless he ached and tingled.
Djana also kept her promise to give him a nurse’s attentions. Hers weren’t the best, for lack of training and equipment, but they served. And she read to him by the hour, over the intercom, from the bookreels he had along. She even offered to make love to him. On the third day he accepted.
Otherwise little passed between them: the constraints were too many for conversation. They spent most of their time separately, toughing it out. Once he was over the initial shock and had disciplined himself, Flandry didn’t do badly at first. While no academician, he had many experiences, ideas, and stray pieces of information to play with. Toward the end, though, environmental impoverishment got to him and each hour became a desert century.
When at last the detectors buzzed, he had to struggle out of semi-delirium to recognize what the noise was. When the outercom boomed with words, he blubbered for joy.
But when hypervelocities were matched and phasing in was completed and airlocks were joined and the other crew came aboard, Djana screamed.
Chapter XI
The Merseians treated him correctly if coolly. He was unbound, conducted aboard their destroyer, checked by a physician experienced in dealing with foreign species, given a chance to clean and bestir himself. His effects were returned, with the natural exception of weapons. A cubbyhole was found and curtained off for him and the girl. Food was brought them, and the toilet facilities down the passage were explained for her benefit. A guard was posted, but committed no molestation. Prisoners could scarcely have been vouchsafed more on this class of warcraft; and the time in space would not be long.
Djana kept keening. “I thought they were human, I thought they were human, only an-an-another damn gang—” She clung to him. “What’ll they do with us?”
“I can’t say,” he replied with no measurable sympathy, “except that I don’t imagine they care to have us take home our story.”
A story of an intelligence ring on Irumclaw, headed by that Rax—whose planet of origin is doubtless in the Roidhunate, not the Empire—and probably staffed by members of the local syndicates. Not to mention the fact that apparently there is a Merseian base in the wilderness, this close to our borders. A crawling went along his spine. Then too, when word gets back to their headquarters, somebody may well want a personal interview with me.
The destroyer grappled the spaceboat alongside and started off. Flandry tried to engage his guard in conversation, but the latter had orders to refrain. The one who brought dinner did agree to convey a request for him. Flandry was surprised when it was granted: that he might observe approach and landing. Though why not? To repeat, they won’t return me to blab what I’ve seen.
Obviously the destination coordinates that Rax had given Djana meant the boat would be on a course bringing her within detection range of a picket ship; and any such wouldn’t go far from the base. Flandry got his summons in two or three hours. He left Djana knotted around her wretchedness—serves her right, the stupid slut!—and preceded his armed guide forward.
The layout resembled that of a human vessel. Details varied, to allow for variations in size, shape, language, and culture. Yet it was the same enclosing metal narrowness, the same drone and vibration, the same warm oily-smelling gusts from ventilator grilles, the same duties to perform.
But the crew were big, green-skinned, hairless, spined and tailed. Their outfits were black, of foreign cut and drape, belts holding war knives. They practiced rituals and deferences—a gesture, a word, a stepping aside—with the smoothness of centuried tradition. The glimpses of something personal, a picture or souvenir, showed a taste more austere and abstract than was likely in a human spacehand. The body odors that filled this crowded air were sharper and, somehow, drier than man’s. The dark eyes that followed him had no whites.
Broch—approximately, Second Mate—Tryntaf the Tall greeted him in the chartroom. “You are entitled to the courtesies, Lieutenant. True, you are under arrest for violation of ensovereigned space; but our realms are not at war.”
“I thank the broch,” Flandry said in his best Eriau, complete with salute of gratitude. He refrained from adding that, among other provisions, the Covenant of Alfzar enjoined both powers from claiming territory in the buffer zone. Surely here, as on Starkad and elsewhere, a “mutual assistance pact” had been negotiated with an amenable, or cowed, community of autochthons.
He was more interested in what he saw. Belike he looked on his deathplace.
The viewport displayed the usual stars, so many as to be chaos to the untrained perception. Flandry had learned the tricks—strain out the less bright through your lashes; find your everywhere-visible markers, like the Magellanic Clouds; estimate by its magnitude the distance of the nearest giant, Betelgeuse. He soon found that he didn’t need them for a guess at where he was. Early in the game he’d gotten Djana to recite those coordinates for him and stored them in his memory; and the sun disc he saw was of a type uncommon enough, compared to the red dwarf majority, that only one or two would exist in any given neighborhood.
The star was, in fact, akin to Mimir—somewhat less massive and radiant, but of the same furious whiteness, with the same boiling spots and leaping prominences. It must be a great deal older, though, for it had no surrounding nebulosity. At its distance, it showed about a third again the angular diameter of Sol seen from Terra.
“F5,” Tryntaf said, “mass 1.34, luminosity 3.06, radius 1.25.” The standard to which he referred was, in reality, his home sun, Koiych; but Flandry recalculated the values in Solar terms with drilled-in ease. “We call it Siekh. The planet we are bound for we call Talwin.”