As it is—I don’t know. But leave me alone.”
Giles Habibula shrugged philosophically, and carried the tray back to the galley.
Deliberately, he demolished its contents, belched and yawned, and looked hopefully about the shelves.
“A mortal pity,” he sighed, “that the Basilisk didn’t use his fearful magic to pick us up a few bottles of wine.
If he’ll let me join him—I know a few good, well-guarded cellars—aye, vintages five centuries old—that his instrument might reach.”
He pried himself upright again with the cane, labored aft, and tumbled into one of the tiny staterooms.
Soon a series of softer sounds rose against the keen hum of the hard-driven geodynes: whistle and flutter and sob and moan, whistle and flutter and sob and moan—the snore of Giles Habibula.
When the regularity of those new sounds had become well established, another person slipped out of the rearmost of the four tiny cabins. A woman.
The quick grace of her tall slim body spoke of unusual strength.
Platinum-colored hair framed a face of surpassing loveliness.
Alertly watchful, her clear eyes were violet.
Moving with no sound audible above the hastening song of the geodynes and the snoring of Giles Habibula, she went swiftly for-ward.
One slender hand clung near a singular jewel, like a great white snow-crystal, that hung from her throat. And the other, with the practiced and familiar grip, held a proton blaster of the newest Legion design.
She came to the little opening in the bulkhead behind the pilot bay, and stood watching Chan Derron, with the ready weapon leveled at his heart.
His broad back was toward her, his whole big body was tense.
He seemed absorbed in his task.
His great hands moved deftly over the controls as he fought to drag from power cells and geodynes the last possible quantum of energy. For a long time she watched him.
Once a telltale flashed suddenly.
Chan Derron started.
His big hands moved convulsively, and the steady musical note of the geodynes rose higher in the scale.
“In tomorrow’s name!” she heard him mutter. “For one more ton of cathode plates—
An unwilling little glisten had come into her eyes.
Her blond head flung angrily.
She caught her breath, and lifted the blaster. He would never even know.
But the Basilisk ought to know.
All his crimes had earned a long, long taste of the bitterness of death.
She let the blaster sink again and watched. Telltales and detectors told her that the fleet was in pursuit.
Set up on the keyboard of the calculator, she could read the destination of the Phantom Atom—a point in Draco, ten billion miles from the sun.
And every taut movement of Chan Derron reminded her that this was a desperate race.
What was located at the point?
And why the haste to reach it?
Her pressure on the blaster’s release would destroy all hope of answering those questions.
That was the only reason, the girl told herself, that she must wait.
But she turned suddenly, and went swiftly and soundlessly back down the corridor, toward the cabin where she had been concealed.
The whistle and flutter and sob and moan of Giles Habibula’s snoring had never faltered.
But, the instant after the girl had passed his cabin door, it ceased abruptly, and a wheezing voice softly advised:
“Stop, lass, right where you stand.”
The girl spun very swiftly, the proton gun leaping up in her hands.
She found Giles Habibula standing out in the corridor.
His thick cane was leveled at her body, and her own weapon dropped from the look in his slate-colored eyes.
“Ah, thank you, lass,” he sighed.
“It would be a shameful pity to destroy a thing as lovely as you are.
And I beg you not to force my hand.
For I know you, lass.
Old Giles could never forget the mortal beauty of Luroa.”
Something swift and cold and deadly flashed in the violet eyes.
The blaster jerked again in the girl’s strong hand.
But it was met by an instant motion of the cane.
Her reply was a smile—so lovely that the old man blinked and gasped.
“And I know you,” her smooth voice said.