Just then Tengu, his systems engineer—or one of them—came bursting in. The lean, dark-skinned man seemed hot and tense.
“Those stories we heard were true,” he said in a clipped, harsh accent. “They’ve got matter transmitters aboard. They use them to transfer from ship to ship.”
Ragshok stared at him. “You’re sure?”
“Chief, you can eat my brains if I’m ever wrong.”
The privateer captain turned away. His face was slack, his eyes glazed. The idea that was bubbling, fermenting, bursting within his skull was just too good…
The strident clamour that rang through the craft as it approached the edge of the planetary system ahead made Hesper Positana grit her teeth in frustration. It was the “every man for himself” call.
Sheathed in one of the forward bubbles (she was supposed to be manning a dart—a short-range missile launcher), she banged a fist angrily on her communicator and heard the voice of the captain issuing final instructions to his officers.
The ship had once been a licensed police craft and was one of the few vessels in the rebel fleet—one of the few in the whole of Escoria—actually built as a fighting vessel. They had done some fighting, but not nearly as much as they had been running, so it seemed to her, and all her gall was in her voice as she yelled, “What in space’s name is this?”
“We can’t outrun them, Hesper,” the captain’s voice came back. “Save yourself.”
“Then let’s make a fight of it!”
“It’s no good Hesper—it’s the flagship itself that’s after us.”
She swallowed. The alarm was still ringing.
Then, with a snarl and “Tcha” of annoyance, she loosed off all three remaining darts in succession and, moving lithely, snaked herself through the hatch at her back and loped down a narrow corridor to the escape station. There were several survival eggs left. Without more ado she tucked herself into one, pulled down the starting blind, and felt herself go down the chute.
On the glowing screen before her eyes she could see what was happening. The Shark—the ex-police cruiser—was by now ploughing halfway into the planetary system where they had hoped to hide, crossing the orbits of the gas giants. As the survival eggs sprayed out of the feetol field they carried its remanence; they would guide themselves as close as possible to any near inhabited planets.
The screen tracked the paths the eggs were taking. Many were making for a small planet with a reddish hue. But others, herself included, had chosen a different target: the next world inward, of which she could make out little.
Then the dot that was the Shark flared briefly: a point of light momentarily brighter by virtue of a consuming instant of nuclear fusion. A feetol shell had found its mark.
The survival egg was decelerating rapidly but it would probably take her, in the next minute or so, to the inward planet it had selected. Its inertial protection was without sophistication, and barely adequate. She was spun at she did not know what rate, at thousands of rotations per second, on a hundred different axes, as it handled and dissipated the excess inertial energy arising from a slowing down to below the speed of light and lower still, and which would otherwise have converted her to a puff of gas. Even so, she passed out several times.
A calm, confident voice sounded in her ear, designed to encourage a forward-looking attitude in the egg’s occupant. “Atmosphere. Please prepare to look out for a landing place.”
She could hear thin upper air whistling past the eggshell now. There was a blip and a radar map of the terrain below appeared on the screen before her. She squinted and tried to make it out.
She heard, with a crack, the rotor blades opening.
Pout was quivering with pleasure and excitement. He had left his following, telling them to stay in one place until he got back, and had walked two or three miles through the savannah. His people were used to him wandering off and he knew they would wait for him; they had no choice.
The boy Sinbiane had told him there was a village here. Pout had seen the flat roofs of the houses from some distance off. Now, crawling on his belly atop a grassy bank, a perfect vision awaited him.
It was dusk. The air was mild and spicy. And down the other side of the bank, scarcely more than a few yards away, he was staring straight into a girl’s bedroom.
She had her light on; all the cosy details of the room were visible through the open window with perfect clarity. The girl was sitting at a table with a mirror on it; he couldn’t make out quite what she was doing. But now she rose, and in full view of where Pout was lying, pulled off her upper garment over her head. Underneath, she was bare to the waist. Her breasts were heavy and voluptuous, and they bounced when released from the garment.
Pout was only partly human. Sexually his libido was vague. A woman, various female apes, were all capable of arousing him, but to what end was blurry to his mind. His sense of the erotic had, however, found its object.
He brought out the zen gun from where he kept it in his bib, chuckling inanely in his throat. He cradled it to his cheek, crooning.
“I can maim and I can kill, with my zen gun.”
So ran the refrain that passed through his mind whenever he took the gun in his hand. He had learned many tricks with it by now. It did not have to kill every time it fired. Its power was variable. It could just cripple—or simply hurt.
Pout like it when it hurt.
He had set the studs for pain. He pointed the gun. He squeezed the trigger stud. He did not have to aim with any accuracy. His thoughts did the targeting; he had learned that long ago.
The pink stitching wavered leisurely through the air. It entered the window, sparked on the girl’s breasts. First the left breast, then the right breast, then the left breast… prodding at the nipples.
The girl doubled up, her mouth agape in a soundless grimace of agony, clutching at herself, hitting at her breasts as if she could strike off the pain. But she could not strike it off.. Pout kept pointing the gun, directing the stitches with his mind. Left breast, right breast…
His sparse pelt became damp. Unlike other primates, Nascimento’s chimera had both sweat glands and fur.
At last she managed to get her breath long enough to scream, and in a minute other people rushed into the room. Pout slid back down the bank, put away his gun, and began to lope towards the horizon, keeping low and hiding himself behind the tall tufts of coarse grass.
Once he paused. He thought he saw the glimmerings of a falling star in the sky overhead, but then it turned into a white dot which drifted down and finally disappeared.
When he was out of sight of the village he slowed his pace. It was an hour before he returned to his group of followers. Apart from the kosho, who as usual sat cross-legged off by himself, they were gathered round a wood fire.
It was not yet dark, and Pout saw straight away that a stranger sat among his half dozen slaves. He bared his teeth briefly, a reflex of uncertainty, and put his hand to his bib to feel the comforting stock of his gun.
At his approach, they rose. The stranger was staring at him. It was a female, a young woman with a pale, blunt face and black cropped hair. She had a restless, energetic way of moving, a way of looking at one directly, that disconcerted him a little. She wore a form-hugging body garment of sheened black and silver, calf-high black boots, and a wide waist belt that held, among other things, what looked like a scangun. Although bare-headed, she carried a transparent globe helmet in one hand.
“You’re Pout,” she said at once, not waiting for him to speak.
Lacey, the prairie bum who, after the kosho and the boy had been Pout’s first convert, sidled close to Pout and spoke softly in his humble, apologetic way. “She just came in,” he mumbled. “Some kinda shipwreck… dropped outa the sky in an escape capsule. She gave us some grub.” He held out his hand, offering a stick of emergency rations. Pout took it, sniffed, then bit. It was chewy, if not too appetising. He gulped it down, then licked his fingers.