Fugitive of the Stars

CHAPTER V

It was two days later before Horne made his move.

It was a forlorn hope, and he knew it. But if he was ever to find Ardric and clear himself, he had to start doing it now, before they took him back to Vega. The detention room was tight and the man who guarded him was careful. He could see only one way. He sent Wasek a message. If you'll bring me what money's due me, he wrote, I'll confess to the Board now that I was derelict in duty.

Horne was gambling on two things. One was that Wasek could not get another berth as captain until he was completely cleared of the Vega Queen disaster. A confession by Horne would clear him right away, and Horne thought he would come. The other thing was a little-known clause in the Space Code which he hoped his guard had never heard about.

He had sent his message just before sunset, for it was essential that Wasek should come after dark. He sat watching the bit of sky in the high loophole window turn from orange to pale yellow to dusk, and the velvety night of the planet came down, and nothing happened. He began to sweat. If Wasek didn't come until morning, or if he didn't come at all…

Wasek came. The door was unlocked and opened and the guard let the visitor in, then closed and re-locked the door from the outside.

Grim and bitter, Wasek shoved an envelope at him. “Here it is, your wages for the outward trip. Though what need you'll have of money where you're going, I couldn't say."

"I'll need a lawyer, to work up a clemency plea,” Horne said sullenly, and took the envelope.

"I've notified the Board you'll make a full confession,” Wasek said. “They'll hear you in the morning."

Horne nodded. “But first there's one thing…"

"What?"

"This,” and Horne swung with all his strength.

His fist caught Wasek on the jaw. The Captain staggered and slithered and Horne sprang forward and caught him with the solicitude of a lover, easing him down to the floor without a sound.

Wasek was not knocked out but he was so near to it that it made no difference. His eyes were glazed and his hands fluttered vaguely, and a slurred whisper came from his mouth.

Horne worked fast, taking Wasek's belt to tie his wrists behind his back, ripping a strip from his sleeve to make a gag that wouldn't choke the man to death. Then he fumbled frantically for the little pocket inside Wasek's jacket. The sweat sprang out on his forehead and his fingers were all thumbs, and for a moment he thought the thing wasn't there, but then he felt the flat, hard outline of it and in a moment held it out in his hand.

There was a clause in the Space Code which said that the licensed master of a ship had the right and duty to possess and carry at all times a semi-lethal weapon. The clause had been put there in older and wilder days, for good reasons connected with some classic mutinies. Most masters these days complied with the regulation by carrying a miniaturized pocket-stunner they never used, and Horne had gambled that his guard didn't know this, and it seemed now he hadn't.

As he straightened up with the little weapon, he saw that Wasek had come around. The look in his pale eyes was like a laser-beam of hate.

"I'm sorry,” Horne said. “You see, I was telling the truth the first time and I've got to prove it, and this is the only way…"

Under the blaze of those eyes, his voice trailed away. Then his anger returned and he said, “The hell with you."

He went and knocked loudly on the door.

The guard came and opened it. The guard was a careful man but he was not a very fast one. He was not supposed to have any captives more dangerous than drunken spacemen to watch. He tried to get his weapon out but the stunner in Horne's fist buzzed like a baby rattlesnake and the guard went down. Horne dragged him in and laid him beside Wasek. He figured that Wasek would probably work himself loose before the guard woke up which gave him very little time.

He was keyed up for anything now, and when he went out into the corridor he was ready to use the stunner on anyone who got in his way. It was a slight anticlimax to find that there was nobody. The hour was late and the Port Authority building was not built or run like a prison. It was the simplest thing in the world for Horne to walk downstairs and out a side door.

The twisting streets of the spacemen's quarter took him in.

He knocked twenty minutes later at a door in an ill-lighted alley, and the face of a man looked out at him — one of those faces that seemed to have been dragged right through the slime and crime of a hundred planets.

"You'll remember me,” Horne said. “I was in court here when you were questioned in that vian-smuggling case two years ago. You were guilty as hell, but they couldn't prove it."

The face smiled. “Ah, yes, Officer Horne. But we are in trouble now, are we not? We have broken detention or jumped bail, and come here for…"

Horne pushed past him into a dingy room and laid money on the table. “For enough of a disguise to get me past the port police, for a Spaceman First Class ticket, and for a berth on the first ship that goes to Skereth. There's three hundred credits."

The face laughed out loud. “Really, for a sum as small as that, it is naive to expect."

"There's more,” said Horne, and reached into his pocket and brought out the stunner. “There's this. A splitting headache for a week. Or would you rather take the credits?"

Ten days later, looking not very much like himself, Horne was deep in the bowels of a dumpy Fringe trading-ship as it lifted off for Skereth.

Horne had time to think on the long, slow voyage back out through the Fringe. He had time to turn over and over in his mind everything he knew about Ardric. There wasn't very much, and the main part of it was that Ardric had said his home was at Rillah, which was the old ruling city of Skereth and lay across a small landlocked sea from the new spaceport town. Of course, Ardric might have lied about that as he had lied about everything else…

When he thought too long about Ardric, his hands would tremble a little. He had begun to fear that if he ever did find Ardric he would kill him outright instead of making him tell the truth. Then the black depression would come back on him and whisper to him that Ardric was really dead, that he could never have made it away from the wreck in time, and that he was an idiot to go hunting a dead man, a phantom…

Skereth finally rolled toward the freighter, a tawny globe. When the ship went down through the eternal cloud-layer to the busy spaceport at Skambar, Horne felt a pang, thinking of how short a time ago he had left here as the Chief Pilot of a good ship without a worry in the world.

When the freighter docked, Horne did not leave it with the rest of the crew. He deliberately scamped on a job, and had timed it so that a cursing Second Officer swore that he would have no planet-liberty until he did his task over. Horne sulked and went to work, using every opportunity to keep an eye on the docks outside the ship.

There was a little group of Skereth men outside the dockgate. They were not officials, but they stood there talking among themselves and watching every man who came out of the ship. From time to time one or two of them went away and then came back in cone-fliers.

Were they police?

Maybe. Horne had known quite well that his escape would be broadcast, and that officials on Skereth would receive the warning.

But what if they weren't police? Unless he was dead wrong in all his deductions, there was a big, deep conspiracy on Skereth… one that had used Ardric to kill Morivenn so that Skereth would stay out of the Federation. He, Horne, had implied as much in the testimony he had given at his hearing, and nobody had believed him.

"No, not police,” thought Horne. “The men who sent Ardric on his errand…"

They would guess that Jim Horne, escaped prisoner, might come back to Skereth looking for Ardric. He had shouted his charges against Ardric loudly enough. And if Jim Horne came back to Skereth they were, quite apparently ready for him.

Horne revised his plans. He was not going to be able to walk out and take the first public flier across the landlocked sea to Rillah. He would have to go some other way.

He made his work last until night, was profanely forbidden liberty that night, and went to his bunk. In the small hours of the morning, in the forever starless darkness, Horne slipped out of the ship. The watchers were still out there, though there were only three of them now. He could use the stunner, but he had a pretty sound idea that there would be others close by, and he did not think he would get very far that way.

There was an electrical barrier around the ship, not lethally charged but highly unpleasant if you touched it. Horne touched down in the dark on the other side of the ship from the gate, and began work with the insulated tools he had filched out of the ship.

Twice he had to stop and crouch like a motionless shadow while cone-fliers went by overhead with a lazy, whistling sound. He was pretty sure that these were other watchers. They were, it seemed to Horne, awfully thorough about this.

Too thorough, too ruthless. There must be more to all this than just a political bias against Skereth joining the Federation. But what could it be?

Horne made his opening and slipped through it, and bumped head-on into two figures coming along so quietly he hadn't heard them.

He jumped back, and then he saw that they were Nightbirds. They raised no alarm, they did not even glance twice at him, but minced along on their ridiculous avian feet, soundless as shadows. He saw them go on around the dock and pass the little group at the gate without stopping, and he remembered how Mica had said that they worked in the spaceport area by night and had little to do with humans and nothing to do with human police.

He had been sorry for that, the night that he and Vinson were attacked. He was glad of it, now.

Within an hour, Horne stood in the heavy darkness on the fishermen's wharf of Skambar. The light metal powerboats lay along the narrow wharves chuckling sloppily among themselves as they rose and fell. There was no watchman on the wharf. The landlocked sea of Skereth was so famously full of hideous forms of life, that only the hardiest of men fished it by day and no one in their eight mind would take a boat out on it at night.

"So I'm not in my right mind,” Horne muttered, and picked out the likeliest boat for his purpose, a metalloy two-man skiff with good power.

It occurred to him, as he took it out, that he was taking some fisherman's wealth and livelihood. The old Jim Horne would have felt pangs of conscience about that. The new Horne dismissed the thought. All that mattered now was that he was on his way to Rillah… and Ardric.