“Message beamed from Commander Lientand, sir,” reported the Grade One robotic controller. It no longer attempted to offer advice to Maran. “Message warns of interdiction throughout the Quadrant. You are advised that this ship is now in an interdicted zone.”
Liz felt a chill passing through her body. She knew the jargon of the Enforcement Service sufficiently well to understand what Commander Lientand was telling Maran.
“I think it would be as well to listen to the commander,” said Maran. He gave orders. “It will be a close-run thing, Miss Deffant. Our warp-shift wake is breaking up, but they are closing.” He was worried, but his massive calmness had a reassuring effect on Liz. She realized helplessly that she was placing some kind of trust in this monstrous creature; his strangely haunting eyes had a warmth that did much to cancel out her fear of him. At the same time, she wanted him caught. Caught, not obliterated. Commander Lientand was brief and precise: “Maran, you can’t escape. I have a squadron of cruisers closing in. I have placed an interdiction on the Quadrant. It is my duty to apprehend you, but if I can’t I am empowered to use my main armament to destroy the transport. I order you now to hold the ES 110
in a normal condition of Phase and beam your present coordinates. You will be safe. Your treatment will be in accordance with Galactic Council Penal Code Regulations. You have my personal guarantee that all will be done to insure your well-being. Reply at once.”
“He makes no mention of you,” said Maran thoughtfully.
“It doesn’t matter! Do as he says!”
“And you are not afraid for yourself,” Maran said approvingly.
“I am! But it’s over! The ship’s not built to stand this kind of strain! Give it up!” Low-grade systems complained bitterly. Maran swung the ship away on a new spiraling series of maneuvers, always toward the majestic menace of the Singularity. All over the great infragalactic ship, units were failing under the strain of the mad flight. Maran silenced the complaining machines, subordinating them, one by one, to his will. The fabric of the bridge shivered as it drifted near a small white star; Maran used its gusting radiation to sling the ES 110 even more wildly toward the rotating blotch that was the Singularity.
“No reply, sir,” reported the young lieutenant “Excuse me, Commander,” the medical officer said.
“There’s something you should know.”
Commander Lientand’s thoughts were on the man who had seized an Enforcement Service vessel—arrogant, of lightning decision, adroit, a man of infinite resource. To destroy that mind was a cruel waste. Lientand’s tired face remained grim.
“Well?”
“Rosario was conscious for a few moments, sir. He was asking about a girl.”
“Girl? I see. One of the female expellees.”
“No, sir. A passenger.”
“Passenger? On the ES 110?”
“A female ecologist, sir. With New Settlements. She would have clearance, especially if she had friends at Center. Rosario was insistent, sir. Very distressed when we couldn’t give him any assurances.”
“She wasn’t in a cylinder?”
“No, sir.” The medical officer went on: “I’m guessing at this, but I think she’s the one who gave him first aid. And then launched the two pods we picked up. Rosario in one, the other empty.”
“So she stayed behind.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lientand watched the growth of the Jansky Singularity on the vast blue-pulsing screen. “She stayed with Maran.”
“She is a Miss Elizabeth Deffant, single, sir. Rosario was rambling, but he remembered her name from the log.”
“Did he say why she remained?”
“No, sir.”
A girl, thought Lientand. It had not been easy to think of the holocaust swallowing up the ES 110 and its bizarre commander; but he could have done it and lived with his conscience afterward. Lientand could only speculate helplessly on the impulse that had made the unknown Bureau girl send Rosario away to safely while she watched the empty survival-cylinder leave without her. Perhaps she had been afraid at the last moment. Perhaps the thought of the colossal storms of hyperspace spuming the tiny pod about was too much for her. He shook his head. Another thought struck him, but he dismissed it. The New Settlements people were highly-motivated and resourceful people: could it be, however remote the possibility, that she had stayed to confront Maran?
Maran! thought Lientand savagely, Maran had not answered his orders, not so much as replied with a single word. Maran knew the value of his position. There was everything to be gained by keeping his pursuers in doubt: by blanking off all communication with the cruisers, he could keep them guessing as to his intentions. The girl’s presence was a bonus, a source of doubt and confusion.
“Sighting?” he asked.
“Nothing, sir,” said his field man. “There’s a lot of discontinuous action about the Singularity—we’ve lost his wake.”
“Can you trace him?”
“With three sets of scanners, almost certainly, sir. We can do an integrated plot—”
“Do it. Sungun ranged on first sighting,” he said to his young lieutenant. “Shoot on my order.”
“Sir! The girl—”
Lientand silenced the opposition. Bleakly he said: “I won’t take my ships into that.” He pointed to the raging fury of the Singularity. “And I won’t risk losing Maran.”
“But there is the girl, sir,” the medical officer insisted. Tight-lipped, he faced Lientand’s drawn face. “She saved Rosario.”
Lientand turned away. “She would forgive me.”
Buchanan had been asleep for more than five hours when the ES 110 registered its presence in the locality of the Jansky Singularity. There was a subdued metallic discussion and then, eventually, a decision. The couch began to heave gently. Impulses were directed through nerve-centers. Tiny alerts jangled, speaking of an emergency.
“Report,” said Buchanan, yawning in spite of the sharp tingling of nerve-ends. The deep uninterrupted sleep had restored him, but it still invested his tissues.
“This system has readings of approach of a Galactic Service vessel, sir. Designation: Enforcement Service vessel One-Hundred class.”
“A transport.”
“Yes, sir. On routine voyage to the Rim. Crew of six, accommodation for—”
“About a hundred expellees.”
“Modified for control-monitoring of not more than eighty expellees,” the robot corrected. Buchanan was not even mildly irritated. He remembered the earlier message. “Show.”
“Yes, sir.”
Scanners ranged and Buchanan saw the transport. Its warp-shift scattered wide showers of broken molecules.
“It’s the ES 110!”
“Yes, sir.”
Buchanan realized that the deep sleep had drugged his senses. He punched commands and allowed sensor-pads to slide into his palms. Information roared into his mind. He lost his sleepy, relaxed look. The craggy features became sharper, the eyes narrowed; his wiry body became taut with suppressed muscular energy.
“You let me sleep!” he exploded after a minute. “While Red Alerts go out from three cruisers—when there’s a hijacked prison-ship heading for us!”
“Your instructions, Commander, were that you be left to sleep. There are no standing orders overriding your instructions. This system did take it upon itself to awaken you when your sleep-requirement quotient was effectively satisfied.”
Buchanan snorted and then contained his useless anger. He scanned the bulky transport as ft soared around the edges of a decaying white dwarf star. Its engines pushed space and clouds of interstellar dust aside. A blast of solar wind obscured its drive: on the screen, the wake showed as an uneven tidal wave.