Part 3

I'd been wondering how Thorsten was going to work a rendezvous right in the middle of the Belt, with renegade Marties that had held out from the war swarming all over the place, just waiting for a prize like this.

The answer was simple--he'd worked out an alliance with them. Probably the Marties thought they could use it to reconquer the System. If I knew Harry, he had other plans, but they were probably just as bad.

What in hell was I going to do?

One more thought hit me, that was the worst one of all, because it held out an impossible hope.

It was all right to picture Weidmann getting a boot out of me taking a woman along. Under ordinary circumstances, that might have been true. But this was too big, too important. There were two alternatives.

Weidmann must have known I was a D.O. I could assume that. But, knowing how important the job was, Weidmann wouldn't have let Pat come along, no matter what, _if he hadn't thought she and I were working together_.

And that one stopped me cold.

_Was she, or wasn't she?_

V

What was Pat doing, tied up with Thorsten? She was a high grade operator now, as far from the immature tease I'd known at the Academy as I could imagine. Where had she learned to handle a gun like that? Where had she gotten the experience that let her handle a job this size by herself?

I couldn't answer that--not any of it, and it was driving me nuts. I stared over the control banks at the forward screen, watching the stars, and beating my brains out.

We'd been out in space for two days, and I hadn't dared to try and find out. You don't, when you're alone with the woman you love.

She was standing next to me, and I looked up at her. The coveralls gave a pretty good indication of what lay beneath, and it was top grade. Not that her figure was that spectacular--she had something more than figures on a tape measure. There was a precision, a slim freshness and freedom to the way one curve flowed into another. It sounds silly, but the way she held herself reminded me of a thing I'd seen once; a rocket transiting the sun, fire sparkling from the shimmering hull, and the Milky Way behind it.

I finally caught what I was trying to phrase; she looked as if she was poised for flight.

She grinned down at me. "Like it?" she asked, chuckling. Her green eyes crackled with light, and there were little demons in her laugh.

I tried to think of a clever comeback, but I couldn't. I just said, "Yes."

I did like it. And I hated it, at the same time.

* * * * *

The ship was fast, but space is big. I had a week to plan my next moves while we worked our way through the area between Earth and Mars' orbit where the TSN kept the raiders down.

But the week went by, and I didn't think of anything. I'd be working over the control board, and then I'd look up, and she'd be smiling at me. I'd raise an eyebrow, and she'd stick her tongue out. We shared cigarettes. I'd take a drag, hand her the butt, and she'd cuff me when I blew smoke in her face.

"Hey, Goon," she'd say from behind the plotting board, "d'ja hear the one about the lady sociologist who wandered into Bessie's place on Venus?"

I taught her original verses to _The Song of the Wandering Spacemen_. Then she taught me the verses she knew.

We crossed Mars' orbit. I couldn't think of any way to find out what I'd been killing myself over except to ask.

"Ever hear of the D.O.'s?" I asked quietly.

"Will chewing chlorophyl tablets cure 'em?" she asked.

I laughed so hard that I cried.

"I don't think so," I answered automatically, and got busy checking the breech assembly on one of the ship's rocket launchers.

"Lay off that, apeface," Pat said. "We won't need it."

"How come?"

"If anybody comes around looking unfriendly, just give 'em this on the radio," she said, and whistled off a recognition signal in Martian.

I turned slowly away from the launcher.

Thorsten did have a deal with the Marties. What was more, Pat was in on it. She had to be.

She looked at my face.

"What's the matter, Lump? Something you ate?"

"Sit down, Pat," I said, pointing to the navigation table. "Go on, sit down!" I yelled.

She turned white.

"You know what kind of a ship this is, don't you?" I said, feeling like I was a hundred years old.

"Sure." She nodded. She was beginning to get it. "You weren't supposed to know about that."

"I didn't. Not until we were spaceborne."

Didn't she realize? Couldn't she see what she was doing to me?

"Pat, do you know what'll happen if the Marties get this drive? They'll be able to hit Earth and Venus with everything they've got, coming out of nowhere and going back into hyperspace when they're through. The TSN won't stand a chance against them."

She shrugged. "They probably would, if they ever got it, but they won't. Harry's going to assemble the drive, install it in his ships, and then we'll take off. The Marties'll be stuck."

"Wait a minute--you just mentioned taking off. Where to?"

She looked up at me. "Harry says there's another planet out in hyperspace, somewhere, circling another star. He says people can live on it." Her eyes were shining, and I remembered a girl on a terrace, back at the Academy, with a dream in her voice that I'd been too dumb to recognize.

"He does, does he? Can he prove it? How do you know what he's really going to do?"

"Because he's told me!" she flared. "He's going to by-pass the fumbling bureaucrats who run things on Earth and take mankind out to the stars--mankind, Ash, the toughest, the strongest men in space, and their women. Space belongs to us, Ash, not to those Earthbound lilies!"

"And whose speech are you repeating?" I said, getting more and more mad every minute. "Thorsten's?"

"Yes!"

"All right, if you think so God damned much of him, suppose you tell me what he is to you now?" I asked.

"He's my husband." She didn't even hesitate.

* * * * *

I started for her, before I could think of words for the doublecrossing....

She came off the navigation table like a coiled spring. She had a gun in her hand.

"Ash--get back! I don't want to hurt you. Ash--can't you see why? Do you think I'm the kind who--?"

I kept coming. "No," I said, "I can't see why. I'm not built so I could see why. And yes, I do think you're the kind."

"I don't know why I had to pick you!" she screamed then. "Maybe I remembered something--maybe I found something out, after it was too late--"

She was crying, but she was bringing the gun up at the same time.

I didn't care. I didn't care if she pulled the trigger or not.

"I told you," I said between my teeth.

She had the gun aimed right at me. Her face was gray, and her hand was shaking.

"I told you the last time what I'd do if you ever pointed a gun at me again." My voice was coming out low, but it had absolutely nothing in it. It was just words, coming out one by one.

The gun muzzle was shaking badly. She put up her hand to steady it.

"I--" she said. There were tears running down her cheeks in a steady wet stream.

She should have pulled the trigger. I think she should have. But she didn't.

I smashed my fist against the gun, and it was out of her hands, crashing into metal somewhere.

"Ash!" she screamed, and raked her nails across my face.

She kicked up her knee, and fire exploded in my groin. I fell forward, slamming her down on the deck, and threw my entire dead weight across her shoulders.

I didn't have to. Her head had hit the deck, and she lay unconscious, blood seeping out through her hair.

* * * * *

She wouldn't talk to me. She lay on her bunk, her chest rising and falling under the straps I'd buckled around her.

I tried to explain, to make her understand, somehow.

"Pat, I've got a responsibility to the people I work for. I've spent the last ten years keeping characters like Harry Thorsten from taking over this System. It's a rough job, and it's a dirty one. I can't help that. I don't like it. Pat, it's got to be this way."

She wouldn't talk to me. She wouldn't listen. I walked out of her cabin, locking the door behind me.

Locking a door and forgetting what's on the other side are two different things.

I went up to the control room and set a course for Titan. Maybe once we got out there, I'd be able to convince her.

It was a lousy hope. I didn't even understand her--she was like something I'd never seen before. How could she be like she was? How, goddam it, _how_?

VI

Titan lay ahead of me, pursuing its track around Saturn.

My ship drove toward it, flaming out fuel in reckless amounts as I poured on the acceleration. I had to get there fast. We'd already missed our rendezvous time with Thorsten by two days. He was going to figure out what happened--must have done so already--and would be hot behind us. I had to land, get the engines installed, load supplies, and take off into hyperspace before he hit.

It was a race against time. I built up velocity to a point no sane skipper would ever dream of, leaving just enough fuel to brake with, knowing I wouldn't need it to get back.

Part of me sat in the control room, plotting curves, charting fuel consumption figures on a graph, watching the black line rise hour by hour to the red crayon slash that meant I had done all I could.

And part of me was down in the cabin with Pat, but if I'd let the two parts mix....

* * * * *

No ship in the System had ever hit the speed I begged out of my ship's heaving engines. No human being had ever traveled as fast before, tracing his track across the white stars in the blue fire of his jets.

If I made it to Titan in time to get into hyperspace, I would have Pat with me. There'd be stars to look at, and the worlds that circled them. Star on star, marching past the ship, world after spinning world, fair against the stars, and a million things to see, a thousand lifetimes to live.

Out there, where other beings lived, was adventure enough for both of us, and enough of dreaming. Maybe she'd forget Thorsten, maybe some of the things she'd said had been lies, maybe the whisperings in darkness were true.

If I could get to Titan in time.

I might as well have walked. I knew there was no hope before I finished landing.

Titan was an empty moon. Where the project bubble had been was a circle of fused concrete around a mess of melted alloys. A corpse in a TSN spacesuit lay on its back and stared at Saturn.

I looked down at it, cursing, my shoulders slumping under the weight of my helmet.

And I heard the voice on the command frequency.

"Hey--you--you down by the bubble." The voice was weak, and getting weaker.

"Yeah!" I shouted into my mike.

"Holcomb?"

"Yeah, for Christ's sake! Where are you?"

"Your right--about a hundred yards. Start walking over here. I'll talk you in."

I started off at a lope, kicking my way over the rough ground. That voice was pitifully weak.

I found him, curled around a rock, his head and arm supported on a rifle that was leaned against the stone.

"Holcomb--"

"Yeah." He couldn't even turn his head to look at me.

"I'm Foster--Lou Foster. Commanding, Marine guard detail."

I remembered him. The one who filled a practice football with water.

"Yeah, Lou. How's it?"

"No damn good at all, Ash. I've been waiting for you."

"Thorsten?"

"Yeah--our old classmate, Harry the horse. About thirty-forty hours back."

"You been in that thing all this time!"

"Sure--snap, if you breathe shallow and don't drink anything. Helps to have a couple of spare tanks." He could still try to chuckle.

"Well, hell, guy, let's get you over to my ship."

"No can do, Ash. No sense to it."

I was straining to hear the words now, even with his set right next to mine, I knelt down and touched helmets with him.

"Listen, Ash--he's got the stuff. The diagrams, the charts, the figures--everything. He's even got the tech detail to put it together for him."

"All right, Lou. It figured. But can the yak. Come on, boy, over my shoulder you go, and down to the can with you."

"Lemme lay! Goddam it, quit tryin' to move me! I didn't walk over here--I got flung when the dome let go!" He was screaming.

"Sorry, Lou!"

"S'all right." He bubbled a chuckle. "I see by my infallible little TSN instruments that I'm gonna run outta breathin' material 'na couple minutes. 'S'all right by me. Luck to ya, Ash."

"Yeah."

But he didn't strangle. He didn't choke in his helmet; there was still air in his tanks when he died.

* * * * *

I went back to my ship and sat behind the control board, smoking a cigarette. I rubbed a hand across my tired eyes, and wondered what I was going to do next.

Thorsten had thought of everything. He couldn't have found technicians to assemble the drive anywhere else, so he'd come out here and kidnapped them. That was an elementary move, obviously planned far in advance.

I'd been running a useless race. I would have realized it long ago, if I hadn't been half-crazy about Pat.

She laughed at me when I told her about it, but she laughed in a peculiar way.

"I could have told you," she said, laughing. "Ash Holcomb, the big undercover agent, heading like mad for Titan! And what does he find?"

"I found Lou Foster, Pat," I said, feeling the steel in my voice slicing upward in my throat.

"That wasn't anybody's fault!" she said quickly. "He happened to get in Harry's way."

"Go tell Andrea Foster," I said.

"Stop it, Ash! You can keep bringing up horrible examples, but it still doesn't mean anything, compared to travel to the stars."

"What was wrong with the way it was going to be done?" I asked.

But she was pulling her protective shell of mockery around her again. "Oh, stop it, Ash! You're licked, and now you're trying to justify it by claiming foul, the way losers always have."

But the last thing she said, as I slammed out of the cabin, was: "This time, you got the spanking, Ash. Now stop crying about it." But somehow, she didn't sound as happy as she'd probably expected.

I took the ship back out into space, finally, heading Sunward. All I could do was hope I'd get within radio range of a TSN ship before Thorsten found me.

But that didn't happen. I wasn't anywhere near the Belt when I had to sit and watch Thorsten's fleet come flaming at me out of space and surround my ship, sliding into tight courses that held me on a deadly and invisible leash.

And I could feel things crumbling inside me. All the principles the Academy had built in, and love, and fear--remorse, friendship, bravery--none of it meant anything. They were things that human hearts and minds were capable of, but when yesterday's love is today's revulsion, when friends are deadly enemies, when all the world thinks of you as just another space bum--what then? I had the destiny of the System riding in the holds behind me, and nobody really knew or cared that I'd break my heart to keep it safe.

They were my eyes, but they weren't altogether normal as I stared out of the control room screens at the waiting fleet.

They kept their distances. They all had their launchers pointed at me, and on a few of the old T Class rack-mounts I could see the homing torps lying in wait on the flat upper decks.

I went back to Pat's cabin. She was sitting up on her bunk, staring at me. Fire lay buried deep in her eyes, but she kept her face smooth.

"Okay, Pat," I said. "Thorsten's got his crew in a globe around me. He wants this ship. Should I give it to him?"

What I was saying didn't match my voice. I was tired, and mad, and I couldn't look at her. I could feel my lower teeth sliding back and forth against my upper ones.

"No--I know you too well, Ash," she said. "Not the way you'd give it to him." She pushed herself up and stood in front of me. Her eyes kept getting wider and wider. "Ash! You're crazy. If you think you can fight your way out of this--" her voice broke. "You know you don't have a chance. I've seen Harry's fleet in action. This is one ship, Ash--_one ship!_"

* * * * *

Her entire body was radiating urgency. She was standing stiff-legged, every muscle quivering, trying to get her words through the desperate red haze that was building up in front of my eyes. I couldn't see her very clearly.

But I could see her well enough to laugh at her.

"Fight?" I said. "_Fight?_ I've had fighting--all the fighting I'm ever going to do. I've been fighting too much, too often. I had a name and a friend, once--and I had a girl, once, too. Now all I've got is a job, and some orders, and a conscience, maybe. No--I'm not going to fight." I threw back my head and laughed again. I reached out and grabbed her arm. "Come on--you're going to have a grandstand seat."

I pulled her up the companionway and into the control room, and threw her into the co-pilot's seat. I pulled out my gun.

"Reach for those controls," I said, "and I'll blow your hand off." She sat in the chair, her face gray, staring out at Thorsten's fleet.

I reached over and switched the radio to Thorsten's frequency.

"Thorsten!"

"Yes. Holcomb?"

His, too, wasn't quite the same voice it had been. It was even, clipped, used to commanding a crew that didn't enjoy being commanded.

"I've got Pat," I said, keeping my gun on her.

"Let's stick to relevancies, Holcomb. How much for the ship?"

He'd given himself away! I could have laughed.

"No, Thorsten, let's keep it where I want it--how much for Pat?"

There was a pause on the other transmitter. I was playing my cards right. Thorsten had me, and the ship. But I had his wife, and that was swinging the scales my way. Why should he offer to pay me, now? A bluff? No--he had a better one in the ships, with their launchers ready. Why should he be willing to dicker for the ship? Because she was in it, that was why. If I refused to give up, he could always blow me out of space, or take the ticklish chance of trying to disable the ship without wrecking the engines. But he wasn't going to do that. Pat was worth too much to him.

"Thorsten! You heard me--how much for your wife?"

He cursed me. His voice was a lot lower than it had been.

"I've got a gun on her, Thorsten."

Suddenly, he sighed. "All right, Holcomb. You win--but not as much as you'd think. I'll make a deal."

I laughed at him, still keeping my gun pointed at Pat with a rock-steady hand. "What am I supposed to think you've _been_ doing, Thorsten?"

It was getting to be too much for me. I could feel all the pressure that had built up in the last ten days starting to come to a head, ready to explode and to hell with who the pieces hit.

"Oh, no, Thorsten--no deals. No bargains, no sell-outs, no compromises. I'm up to here on doublecrossing and crisscrossing. I hired out to you and Transolar, and before that I hired out to anybody who had money or a chance for me to get some. And all the time, I was hired out to Earth government. I've had too many jobs, Thorsten--my gun's been on the line too long. There are too many oaths and too many loyalties. Too much of my honor's been spread from one end of the System to the other. Now I'm quitting. The towel's going in, and from now on, it's me that I fight for."

I had the mike up against my mouth, and I was yelling into it. "I know what you're going to offer me, Thorsten. I know what I'd offer. You want the girl and the ship. You want one as bad as the other, but you won't settle for half. So you're offering me my life, and a free ride to Earth. Well, you can take that deal and stuff it. Earth! Who the hell would want to live on the Earth you'd leave, after you and your Martie friends got through with it. No, Thorsten, it's no bargain. It's a Heads you win, Tails I lose proposition, no matter how you slice it."

I laughed again, enjoying it, because it was going to be my last laugh.

"Holcomb!" He must have guessed what I was working myself up to do, because there was sheer desperation in his voice, but I cut him off.

"Shut up, Harry! I told you I was quitting. You know the racket I'm in. You don't just quit it. You go out with your hand on the wheel and your jets full on. _And here I come!_"

I fed flame into my portside jets, throwing the mike away from me as I grabbed the controls. The ship arced over, singing her death-song in snapping stanchions and straining plates, in the angry howl of the converters, in the drumfire of jets that coughed and choked as fuel poured into them, but which opened their throats and bellowed just the same.

"Ash!" That was Pat.

"Holcomb!" That was Thorsten.

But I was pure metal-jacketed, fireborne death, howling silently toward the sleek cruiser that was Thorsten's flagship, the best known and most feared silhouette in space.

* * * * *

The gates of Hell opened in space. Every ship in the hemisphere ahead of me vomitted fire as the ones behind me and beside me lanced out of the way of the arrowing missiles.

There was no way for Thorsten to avoid me. Fire blossomed at the throats of his jets, and the flagship shot forward.

I snarled, twisted the wheel, and kept my nose pointed for his bridge.

Proximity torps began exploding all around me. They weren't doing Thorsten a bit of good. Either they hit me, or, without air to carry the shock, they were as good as not there at all.

"Here's your hyperspacial drive, Harry!" I howled. "Here it comes--compliments of Ash Holcomb, hired gun!"

Suddenly a missile exploded under my bow. It was a clean hit. The ship screamed escaping air, and shuddered, bucking upward. It wasn't just stanchions ripping loose now, or buckling plates. It was snapping girders, and metal spewing out into space like teeth from a broken mouth. The trouble board winked solid fire at me.

I didn't care about that. The ship was unhurt in the only place that counted--her engine room--and the stern jets kept firing. But I was bent over the wheel, sobbing in pure, white-hot, frustrated rage, because I was going to miss. I'd been slammed up off my trajectory high enough to miss, and Thorsten's ship was firing every tube he had to drive herself down and away, behind a protective screen of other ships.

I could hear the hysterical relief in Thorsten's laugh over the radio.

I could hear something else, too. It hadn't mattered what Pat did, once I'd swung the ship into line. I couldn't have pulled it out of the collision course myself. It had taken an atomic rocket to blast me out of the way.

But it was different, now.

I was folded over the wheel, blood running down my chin from my bitten lip, my knuckles aching as I tightened my fists.

Pat said: "Ash--I'm sorry." There was a sob in her voice. "But you won't give up," she stumbled on. "You'll never give up, until you and Harry are both dead. And I couldn't stand losing both of you."

I never knew what she hit me with, but the back of my skull seemed to explode inward, and I slid out of the seat to the deck. I started crawling toward her. She sobbed, but she hit me again.

VII

The fleet had scattered back to the hundreds of hidden berths among the farflung Asteroids. I came awake in a pressurized burrow dug out in the particular rock Thorsten had chosen for himself and his crew. I'd been dropped in a corner and searched down to my shorts. There wasn't anything on me that I could use for a weapon.

Except--no, I caught myself before there was even a quiver in my left arm. Now wasn't the time to press against my ribs, to try to feel the almost imperceptible bulge of the singleshot capsule between my ribs.

I groaned and let my eyes flicker open.

"How's it, Ash?"

I looked up. Thorsten was standing a few feet away from me, looking down from under his spreading black eyebrows.

I put my hand up to my head. "Crummy. She hits hard."

Harry chuckled.