The Yarrow went on. It passed the Cytheria and left it astern. In due time the Cytheria's drive-whine ceased to register on the Yarrow's detector. Trent had made no move against it, yet only a relatively short time ago he'd have abandoned all else and turned toward it. He'd have blown its drives and blasted a way into it with shaped charges if it hesitated to surrender, and he'd have gone raging through it like death itself. But that was when he believed Marian aboard it.
Now he was sure she wasn't. Because the Cytheria had landed somewhere between its capture and its call for mail on Loren. It would have landed to put off prisoners, most probably, and cargo, certainly, to have her light for her errand. With no cargo she was safe against stoppage by any burdened vessel. So Trent was confident that if Marian had been alive so long after the Cytheria's capture she'd been landed on the world of the botanical specimens from her landing-fins. And in passing her as he'd done, Trent had gotten an exact bearing to her destination, which was his. But he wasn't through with her yet.
He knew the world to which the Cytheria should be bound. But he needed a guide to the exact spot, the precise location, the exact place among scores of millions of square miles of planetary surface to which pirate ships would resort. Finding a black grain on a sandy beach would be a promising project by comparison. But Trent left the Cytheria behind and went on to Kress Three.
McHinny came into the control room, humiliated and desperate. He wanted Trent's promise to try out his marvellous pirate-frustrating invention once more. During the waiting time on Loren he'd taken no part in the repair work. He'd labored frantically to rebuild his gadget yet again. It had been tried twice; and now it was rebuilt for a third test in combat. It couldn't be said that McHinny was resolved. He was frantic to force the acceptance of his genius. He was truculent and waspish and bitterly on the defensive, but he'd built the contrivance all over again. Now, he said defiantly, he'd found the weakness in his former design.
The trouble was that he hadn't allowed for a Lawlor drive in operation in the ship his device was to make helpless. When tested before the Yarrow's owners, it was tested against a ship in overdrive, but not moving. It was lying in an overdrive field which kept it out of normal space. With a Lawlor drive operating in overdrive, the gadget blew itself out. But, with the new modification, it would blow out not only the pirate's overdrive, but the Lawlor drive too. The weak point was not only eliminated, the device became an infinitely better weapon against pirates.
It was not his nature to be humble or to ask a favor. He was much more likely to be scornful and to demand. But this time he was nearly human. He asked almost tearfully for one more chance to prove his device, and hence his genius.
"All right," said Trent. He felt impatient. "If the opportunity offers, we'll try it again. But only if the opportunity offers! What we're about is too tricky to let us take any chance we can avoid."
McHinny couldn't refrain from a truculent statement. "You won't be taking any chances this time!"
Trent nodded. He was impatient. He was very, very busy. He had to keep himself from hoping on Marian's account. He had to remind himself that she was undoubtedly dead. He had to keep his mind furiously busy lest it begin to spin out reasons to hope. And what he had to do was not to be carried out by a man deceiving himself in any fashion. It had to be arranged and carried out in cold blood, with only one purpose, an utterly ruthless and merciless destruction of any man however remotely connected with pirate operations in the Pleiads.
It happened, though, that he was deceiving himself. In actual cold blood he wouldn't have felt the deep hatred and killing hunger that filled him. He wouldn't have experienced moments when his voice was thick with fury, though he denied it, and when his hands tended to clench and unclench of themselves as if lusting to do murder. But he was able to tell himself that this was not on Marian's account alone. This was righteous fury, normal hatred; the reaction of any honorable man to the fact that pirates made a business of murder for their strictly personal benefit.
And, whether in cold blood or hot, his brain worked well enough. He got the Yarrow into orbit around Kress Three without provoking any sign that she had been detected. He even found a hiding place for her in a peculiar, bumbling aggregation of mountain-sized boulders tumbling around the smoky planet in an orbit like a moon.
So far, everything was almost ludicrously simple.
The planet Kress Three was of typical third-planet size among the solar systems of type G suns. It was a little smaller than Manaos, and a little larger than Sira, and very nearly the same as Loren. There were, naturally, only very slight differences in gravity among the four of them. Kress Three should have had ice-caps. It didn't. Its axis was parallel to the axis of its sun, and therefore normal to the ecliptic, and there would be no perceptible seasons such as summer or winter anywhere. Its atmosphere had a rather high CO2 content, so the hot-house effect of carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat would operate. It would be warm. Also, there was a good trace of sulphur dioxide in its atmosphere. This meant that the seas would be acid, which modified everything. And there were volcanoes.
Trent surveyed it with angry, questing eyes from the Yarrow's hiding-place among the mountains bumbling into each other in their orbit. Down below, on the planet, there were lines of volcanoes, nowhere very far from a sea. There were areas where the ground was barely visible because of local smoke. There were coastlines, here and there, where steam bubbled up and swirled hugely in white clouds, some of them scores of miles in length.
But there were no highways, which can be seen from space much sooner than cities of ordinary size. There were places, to be sure, where vegetation flourished, but also there were vast fields of lava, not all of it cold, on which certainly no plants and perhaps no bacteria could live. Trent searched feverishly. The pirate's base could not be on a plain of un-cooled lava. It could hardly be where mountains smoked and poured molten rock down their sides. There were islands in the acid seas, but they were small and unlikely places for pirates to use.
The Yarrow floated among the huge boulders which dwarfed her. The planet revolved underneath her. Trent fidgeted bitterly. The radar-detectors insisted that there was no radar-scanning of the sky above the unpleasant, smoky planet. Trent hadn't expected it. Radars need to be watched conscientiously. In the pirate base they simply wouldn't be, if only because they couldn't be expected to report anything near a useless planet far from any normal, colonized world. Only passive devices like drive detectors, calling attention to their own reports, would be really useful. So Trent had taken up this position on normal, Lawlor drive, and so hadn't disturbed anybody. An overdrive would have been a different matter.