Doomstar

7

It was good to be in space again.

Grellah was every insulting thing Boker had said about her, but she had gotten off the ground. Her name was the Hlakran equivalent of Beautiful Queen, a joke that Boker and Hurth were very proud of; you changed one letter and got a dirty word instead.

Kettrick's emergency fund, or part of it, had stocked her, with Boker making the most of the money by dealing bits of it here and there to his creditors. The only thing Kettrick had insisted on was trade goods of top quality and suited for their markets.

It was absolutely essential that they should trade as they went, keeping a semblance of normality. The I–C had a vile habit of dropping in for spot checks on many worlds where they did not maintain a permanent office, and where there no formal port facilities and therefore no records. Kettrick might rely on his friends to keep his own presence secret, but just in case an I–C ship should happen by, he wanted Boker to look completely legitimate.

Kettrick had been smuggled aboard without much trouble. And in the end he had done nothing about contacting Sekma because there did not seem to be any way of doing it short of calling him up on the communicator and talking with a full audience listening in. Their prearranged meeting had become impossible, and so he let the whole thing slide.

Chai had been more of a problem to get on board. She could hardly be passed off as anything but what she was, and the Tchell were rigidly protected. To move one from place to place required papers they did not have and could not possibly get. The boys would just as soon have forgotten the whole thing, but Kettrick was obdurate and they had finally sneaked her in with a load of supplies.

They had posted a fraudulent manifest and sweated blood until they got their clearance. Then, grumbling and creaking, Grellah heaved up off her pad and waddled away into the dark seas of the Cluster that washed the island suns, outbound for Gurra, Thwayn, Kirnanoc, and Trace.

The route of Seri's Starbird.

"Why?" Boker had asked him, when they planned their course. "I know you want to kill the traitor, but…"

"Because," said Kettrick, "this is the course I would take to get to the White Sun. You look at the chart and tell me if there's a better one."

He did not tell Boker that it was also almost identical with the course he and Sekma had discussed, choosing worlds where the rumors of the Doomstar sounded loudest.

An odd one for Seri to pick. Except for Kirnanoc, they were backward worlds and not especially lucrative for traders unless, like Kettrick, you had the right touch with the people. Kirnanoc was not backward, but it was famous for the very odd ideas its quite odd people cherished about humans. It too needed a special touch.

Boker had admitted that there was not a better course, except that there were a couple of equally good alternates for Gurra, as far out as Kirnanoc. But from there on…

"Trace," he said, "is ridiculous as a jumping-off place for the White Sun. From Kirnanoc it's right away in the wrong direction."

"I know that," said Kettrick. "That's why we won't really go there. We'll jump straight from Kirnanoc."

Boker stared at him. "You crazy?" He stabbed a thick blue forefinger at the chart. "You lost your touch or something, Johnny? Look at the distance. Your big Earth-built ships could do it in one hop, all right, but not these inter-Cluster cans. Your jump unit can only wind up so much power, to jump you so far. You go over that peak, and boom! Your whole unit blows, and they post another black-edged notice in the Spaceman's Hall."

"Very true," said Kettrick. "And I have seen Grellah's jump unit, so I'm aware that her peak is more like a trough."

"So?"

"So even Grellah ought to be able to do it in two jumps." He indicated points on the chart. "Come out of the first jump about here and run on conventional power…"

"Johnny, look. Look where you're waving your finger around. The first jump would put us right in the middle of the Lantavan Bank, the worst jungle of drift in the Cluster. Like throwing yourself out of the window into a cement-mixer. It…"

"No. We come out of the first jump this side of the drift, in clear space. Then we go through the Bank on conventional. We're bound to find a piece of drift big enough to set down on, so we can service the jump unit and recharge the fuel loads. Then…"

"We go through the Bank?" said Boker.

"Right here." Kettrick sketched a diagonal line through the darkened area on the chart. "Where it's narrowest."

"And thickest." Boker had a spaceman's natural horror of drift. "Look, be sensible. From Whard you can do it easy in one jump. Even Mardir would be better, in spite of the patrols."

"That's where we got into trouble before," Kettrick reminded him. "Mardir is the gateway for a whole sector that's barred to general trade, so we knew better than to try that. But Whard looked like a very attractive back door. It even worked a couple of times. By the third trip the I–C boys had caught on. What do you want to bet they've got it marked in red on the charts now?"

He shook his head. "Kirnanoc is perfect. It's clear out of that complex, too far away for a normal jump, with a barrier of the drift in between. Only it isn't a barrier if you don't think of it that way. That's the way I planned it. And the only way I know that might work."

"Okay," said Boker. "How do we get back?"

"The same way. Only from the Bank we jump for Trace, instead of Kirnanoc, thus fulfilling our posted i-t, and go on our merry way, rich and unsuspected."

He faced Boker squarely. "There's a risk, I won't try to deny that, but I think we can make it. I haven't been in the Lantavan, but I've been in other banks and gone through them. If we go the safe, logical, simple way we'll never make it at all." He paused. "You can still say no."

Boker shut his eyes. "I am thinking hard," he said, "about one million credits. If I think hard enough, I might forget the rest."

Then his eyes popped open, bright with alarm. "Johnny, did you tell Seri about jumping off from there? Could he be trying to pick off that million credits for himself?"

Kettrick shook his head, frowning. "No, I didn't tell him. And I don't see how he could, without me. The Krinn wouldn't trade with him. They'd be much more likely to eat him."

Boker grunted. "That's true enough. I guess it's just a coincidence. But it's damned funny…"

"What is?"

"Seri going into space himself. It must be the first time in history that he's pried himself away from the elegant life and the pretty ladies."

"He must have his reasons," said Kettrick grimly.

Reasons, yes. A reason to lie, a reason to kill. Kettrick was viciously determined to find out what those reasons were. In the meantime, he wondered. He wondered if Larith had known when she talked to him what Seri meant to do. Wondered if she was with him in Starbird.

Jump time was a good time for wondering. Before that, when they were making their first run out of the planetary safety zone, there was much to do and much to see. Kettrick had looked with the joyous eye of the returning exile into the heart of the Hyades, the dark magnificent heart studded with the fires of the orange-red giants that made up most of that starry archipelago, with here and there the scattered blaze of the few white stars, of which their destination was one. The Cluster was an open one, not like the close-packed globular star swarms of Cygnus and Hercules. Here a man might drift for a lifetime between the lazy drifting suns, finding such beauty and terror as he might wish for, with a quiet haven always waiting somewhere close at hand.

He could look at it and believe that it had not changed. Except that the star charts now showed, far out on the western fringes, an area marked in red. Deadly radiation, it said. And if he looked closer, using the long range 'scope turned up to full power, he could see the star at the center of that zone of red. The poisoned star. And he could wonder with a chill unease whether the killer shark had not indeed entered the lagoon, the serpent come to Eden.

Jump time, there was nothing to see, nothing to do but watch the gauges, bear a hand with Glevan as he nursed the grumbling and uncertain unit, eat, sleep, and listen to the sounds of disintegration chattering along Grellah's seams. And hope.

And think.

He brought up the subject of the Doomstar.

They were all in the bridgeroom, the only place in the ship where the lighting system worked adequately and where the energy-bleeders functioned well enough to keep the temperature down to a tolerable level. It tended to build up during jump; if your bleeder system failed, you fried. The subspace, or hyperspace, or whatever you chose to call the notness into which the FTL unit took you, apparently did not conduct anything away from a body passing through it. It was as though the ship were received encapsulated like a pill in its own skin and shot through an environment that hated and violently rejected it, passing it on and out of itself as quickly as possible. There were a lot of beautiful equations and theories to explain the phenomenon, but it still remained, like electricity, a mystery. The scientists knew how it worked, and they knew what they could do with it, but they didn't know why. For all practical purposes, it didn't matter.

Even with the bleeder system working full blast, it was hot enough. They were all stripped to their sweating skins, except for Chai, who sat as close to Kettrick as she could get, her gray fur lank and her jaws wide open as she breathed.

"I heard some talk," said Kettrick. "A couple of the hands on the Aldebaranian ship I came out in were full of something they called the Doomstar." That was not true, but he did not want to tell them the truth, at least yet. "Then Pedah mentioned it. What's it all about, anyway?"

"Blibber blabber," said Boker. "Pedah's as good as they come, but she's female, and she waggles her tongue as hard as she does her behind. She's always coming home with some great tale the market women told her."

Glevan, the little dark Pittanese, shook his head. The blue Hlakrans were a sanguine breed. Glevan was not. Around his village fires men spoke seriously of serious things. His monkey face was drawn with thinking, his eyes puckered from peering at mysteries.

"I have heard the same story, and not from women in the marketplace. That little star out there, Johnny, that one with the ring around it…that was a sign."

"Sign?" said Hurth. He was not as massively built as Boker and his crest was less impressive. On the other hand he had ten children, a fact he did not let Boker forget. Now he laughed at Glevan. "A sign of what? That things go wrong sometimes even with stars?"

Boker said, "Oh, no. A deity will come forth, his feet straddling the Cluster, and his voice will be as thunder, crying 'Woe, woe!' Hey, Johnny, why don't they ever cry, 'Hooray,' or something pleasant? Eh? How about the ones you got on Earth?"

"Deities," said Kettrick, "tend to be rather doleful everywhere. What kind of a sign, Glevan? Ignore these pigs."

"A sign of trouble," answered Glevan darkly.

"God-made? Or man-made?"

Glevan stared at him in honest surprise. "Johnny, if a man could do that to a star he'd be a god."

Boker and Hurth began to build on that idea a fantasy of such riotous obscenity that soon even Kettrick was laughing. But underneath it he thought that Glevan was right. And he thought that Boker and Hurth did laugh too much, as men will when they fear something and try to charm it away with ridicule, pretending that Medusa is really a clown.