"We"ll come in," said Hoddan. "Thal, collect the pistols and bring them inside."
Fani swung lightly to the ground and followed him in. She looked curiously at the cables and instrument boards and switches inside. On one wall a red light pulsed, and went out, and pulsed again. The red-headed man looked at it.
"You"re being called," said Hoddan. "Don"t answer it."
The red-headed man scowled. Thal came in with an armful of stun-pistols in various stages of discharge. Hoddan briskly broke the b.u.t.t of one of his own and presented it to the terminals he"d used the day before.
"He"s not to touch anything, Thal," said Hoddan. To the red-headed man he observed, "I suspect that call"s been coming in all night. Something was in orbit at sundown. You closed up shop and went home early, eh?"
"Why not?" rasped the red-headed man. "There"s only one ship a month!"
"Sometimes," said Hoddan, "there are specials. But I commend your negligence. It was probably good for me."
He charged one pistol, and snapped its b.u.t.t shut, and snapped open another, and charged it. There was no difficulty, of course. In minutes all the pistols he"d brought from Walden were ready for use again.
He tucked away as many as he could conveniently carry on his person. He handed the rest to Thal. He went competently to the pulsing call-signal.
He put headphones to his ears. He listened. His expression became extremely strange, as if he did not quite understand nor wholly believe what he heard.
"Odd," he said mildly. He considered for a moment or two. Then he rummaged around in the drawers of desks. He found wire clips. He began to snip wires in half.
The red-headed man started forward automatically.
"Take care of him, Thal," said Hoddan.
He cut the microwave receiver free of its wires and cables. He lifted it experimentally and opened part of its case to make sure the thermo battery that would power it in an emergency was there and in working order. It was.
"Put this on a horse, Thal," commanded Hoddan. "We"re taking it up to Don Loris"."
The red-headed man"s mouth dropped open. He said stridently:
"Hey! You can"t do that!" Hoddan turned upon him and he said sourly: "All right, you can. I"m not trying to stop you with all those hard cases outside!"
"You can build another in a week," said Hoddan kindly. "You must have spare parts."
Thal carried the communicator outside. Hoddan opened a cabinet, threw switches, and painstakingly cut and snipped and snipped at a tangle of wires within.
"Just your instrumentation," he explained to the appalled red-headed man. "You won"t use the grid until you"ve got this fixed, too. A few days of harder work than you"re used to. That"s all!"
He led the way out again, and on the way explained to Fani:
"Pretty old-fashioned job, this grid. They make simpler ones nowadays.
They"ll be able to repair it, though, in time. Now we go back to your father"s castle. He may not be pleased, but he should be mollified."
He saw Fani mount lightly into her own saddle and shook his head gloomily. He climbed clumsily into his own. They moved off to return to Don Loris" stronghold. Hoddan suffered.
They reached the castle before noon, and the sight of the Lady Fani riding beside a worn-out Hoddan was productive of enthusiasm and loud cheers. The loot displayed by the returned wayfarers increased the rejoicing. There was envy among the men who had stayed behind. There were respectfully admiring looks cast upon Hoddan. He had displayed, in furnishing opportunities for plunder, the most-admired quality a leader of feudal fighting men could show.
The Lady Fani beamed as she and Thal and Hoddan, all very dusty and travel-stained, presented themselves to her father in the castle"s great hall.
"Here"s your daughter, sir," said Hoddan, and yawned. "I hope there won"t be any further trouble with Ghek. We took his castle and looted it a little and brought back some extra horses. Then we went to the s.p.a.ceport. I recharged my stun-pistols and put the landing grid out of order for the time being. I brought away the communicator there." He yawned again. "There"s something highly improper going on, up just beyond atmosphere. There are three ships up there in orbit, and they were trying to call the s.p.a.ceport in nonregulation fashion, and it"s possible that some of your neighbors would be interested. So I postponed everything until I could get some sleep. It seemed to me that when better skulduggeries are concocted, that Don Loris and his a.s.sociates ought to concoct them. And if you"ll excuse me--"
He moved away, practically dead on his feet. If he had been accustomed to horseback riding, he wouldn"t have been so exhausted. But now he yawned, and yawned, and Thal took him to a room quite different from the guest-room-dungeon to which he"d been taken the night before. He noted that the door, this time, opened inward. He braced chairs against it to make sure that n.o.body could open it from without. He lay down and slept heavily.
He was waked by loud poundings. He roused himself enough to say sleepily:
"Whaddyawant?"
"The lights in the sky!" cried Fani"s voice outside the door. "The ones you say are s.p.a.ceships! It"s sunset again, and I just saw them. But there aren"t three, now. Now there are nine!"
"All right," said Hoddan. He lay down his head again and thrust it into his pillow. Then he was suddenly very wide awake indeed. He sat up with a start.
Nine s.p.a.ceships? That wasn"t possible! That would be a s.p.a.ce fleet! And there were no s.p.a.ce fleets! Walden would certainly have never sent more than one ship to demand his surrender to its police. The s.p.a.ce Patrol never needed more than one ship anywhere. Commerce wouldn"t cause ships to travel in company. Piracy-- There couldn"t be a pirate fleet! There"d never be enough loot anywhere to keep it in operation. Nine s.p.a.ceships at one time--traveling in orbit around a primitive planet like Darth--a fleet of s.p.a.ceships.
It couldn"t happen! Hoddan couldn"t conceive of such a thing. But a recently developed pessimism suggested that since everything else, to date, had been to his disadvantage, this was probably a catastrophe also.
He groaned and lay down to sleep again.
VI
When frantic bangings on the propped-shut door awakened him next morning, he confusedly imagined that they were noises in the communicator headphones, and until he heard his name called tried drearily to make sense of them.
But suddenly he opened his eyes. Somebody banged on the door once more.
A voice cried angrily:
"Bron Hoddan! Wake up or I"ll go away and let whatever happens to you happen! Wake up!"
It was the voice of the Lady Fani, at once indignant and tearful and solicitous and angry.
He rolled out of bed and found himself dressed. He hadn"t slept the full night. At one time he couldn"t rest for thinking about the sounds in the communicator when he listened at the s.p.a.ceport. He listened again, and what he heard made him get his clothes on for action. That was when he heard a distinctly Waldenian voice, speaking communications speech with crisp distinctness, calling the landing grid. The other voices were not Waldenian ones and he grew dizzy trying to figure them out. But he was clothed and ready to do whatever proved necessary when he realized that he had the landing grid receiver, that there would be no reception even of the Waldenian call until the landing grid crew had built another out of spare parts in store, and even then couldn"t do much until they"d painfully sorted out and re-spliced all the tangled wires that Hoddan had cut. That had to be done before the grid could be used again.
He"d gone back to sleep while he tried to make sense of things. Now, long after daybreak, he shook himself and made sure a stun-pistol was handy. Then he said:
"h.e.l.lo. I"m awake. What"s up? Why all the noise?"
"Come out of there!" cried Fani"s voice, simultaneously exasperated and filled with anxiety. "Things are happening! Somebody"s here from Walden!
They want you!"
Hoddan could not believe it. It was too unlikely. But he opened the door and Thal came in, and Fani followed.
"Good morning," said Hoddan automatically.
Thal said mournfully: