The Starry Rift Read online

If Raven hadn’t been as old as he was, he wouldn’t have understood the nasty implications of that sustained EM chord. But he’d been fighting men who knew it well. And although it’s now outlawed, he knows that some unpleasant Last War gadgetry is still around.

  He opens his caller’s coils and, with the utmost care, sets himself to duplicate that frequency. If this is what he fears, his duplication must be perfect, or people will die hideously.

  When he has it to his satisfaction, he gets up and rummages out two more loud EM transmitters from Blackbird’s ample stores. He opens them up and lays in his best copy of that multiple frequency. Perfect; it has to be perfect. He gets them operating to his specs, pushes the master copy under his couch, pulls out a can of Sticktite, and loosens his extrusion grapple, to be ready for fast work.

  Meanwhile he is desperately keeping Blackbird hidden behind that ultrasuperabsorptive field. This is no game of trying out equipment, now.

  He is almost on the connected ships, flying by visual guidance. Incredible that they haven’t sensed him. But the EM transmission must be jamming their sensors, and they’re probably busy.

  He had a good look at the strange ship. It might have been a colony ship once—half-hidden under bums and smears he can see her name: New Hope. But she isn’t one now. Colony ships have an unmistakable look—so clean, and scribbled with messages of good luck and bravado. This ship is dark with dirt and ill maintained; a work beast in uncaring hands.

  And Raven sees he’s been given a stroke of good luck; the New Hope has closed with Mira along her bows and locked on so that they drift head to tail. Tied together, neither would get away. And that’s just what Blackbird is built to accomplish. He’s about to float over them; time to act.

  He fires up the torque and sends Blackbird rolling around the linked ships, whipping out her wreck-securing cable. His sensors show EM peaks—alarms must be going off within both ships, but they’re no help to them now. In one circuit he has the pair lashed together with the twin-strand cable that could pull a liner out of a thousand gees. And as he goes around them, he has accomplished the vital task—with his extruded grapples he has slapped and stuck a sending transmitter onto each hull. That will take care of them for a while—gods send he’s set them right!

  Now, with the speed of long practice, he reverses to a stop above Mira’s emergency port and slams the lip of his work-dock tunnel around it. His big magnetic grapple lays hold of the port and spins it in, tearing the plastic bag, as he had often spun-in the ports of burnt, corroded wrecks. He drops it inside, where voices can be heard crying out and cursing in panic. He takes no notice but snatches up his projector gun, already loaded with sleep-gas, and fires a canister straight in. Then he edges closer to the port and fires another into Mira in the direction of the main lock, where she is joined to Hope.

  In a minim the sounds within have quieted.

  He snaps shut his faceplate and draws a work curtain across the tunnel behind him—no need to saturate Blackbird—and waits till the last few stirrings from beyond the tunnel cease.

  Now everyone should be asleep—unless somebody was suited up. So far only instants have passed; he has another three minim before the situation of any captives would become lethal, if he has misduplicated those frequencies.

  He whips down a large sack, blows it up, and sticks it on the gun. Then he makes a few approach noises and edges the bag into sight beyond the inner port.

  Bang—clash! A ballistic weapon fires into the bag, and a blade chops through it to the gun barrel. Damnation—one of the raiders is suited up and is waiting for him alongside the port.

  Well, Raven still has a trick left, if that’s a standard suit. Salvage operations often require fishing things out of inaccessible holes. The bastard who fired and slashed must be tight up against the hull.

  Raven reaches back for his fishing equipment—actually a whippy metal rod bearing a reel wound with superwire, tipped with a vicious automatic minigrapple. With one skillful cast he sends the triple-barbed hook spinning through the port, then checks it hard right-handed so it sweeps around the inside of Mira’s hull, where the slash came from; the action is almost too fast to see. On his second sweep he connects with something. He braces and jerks hard, sets the rod in its stanchion, and commences reeling in. The reel is geared heavy enough to pull an asteroid out of orbit. In a few spins he succeeds in dragging part of a resisting, suited leg into sight across the port. Fabric starts to tear. A hand appears, sawing futilely at the wire with the bayonet.

  Raven doesn’t bother trying to parley. He has armed himself with a small aerosol canister stuck on the end of his projector. This is not salvage equipment, but a choice item one of his friends in the Patrol gave to him. Its formal name is Suit-Off, but it is usually referred to as “Balls-Off.”

  As the tear in the suit widens, Raven gets the aerosol nozzle aimed and shoots in a couple of healthy puffs before the knife bangs him away. Then he waits.

  A heartbeat later comes a torrent of high-volume curses, and the knife clatters to the tunnel side. The hand ungloves and dives into the tear in the suit leg, tearing it farther. The leg convulses, the hand scratches violently, and another hand appears briefly as the owner rips open his crotch hooks. In a moment the stranger will be free of his suit; but the grapple and line are obstructing him. To save time, Raven wrangles the grapple loose and reels the line in.

  The stranger falls back from the port in a tangle of limbs and suit; he is trying to scratch and unsuit at once. With difficulty, he forces his helmeted head to the port opening. Raven can see his mouth opening and closing but can hear no words. Behind the mouth is space-burned black skin and dirty pale hair. Raven shrugs.

  The stranger tears open his faceplate to yell, “Give me the drench, you bastard, or I’ll kill ’em all!” The “drench” is the closely guarded antidote to the ferocious itching power of Suit-Off. Raven shrugs again. He is more interested in a transmitter clamped to the man’s wrist. He had been right. They were collar-slavers. And hence, desperate. The Federation’s penalty for collar-slavery is death.

  Slave collars are made of an alien alloy sensitive to radio waves. So long as the collar receives its frequency it stays loose. If the frequency is cut off, the collar constricts abruptly, shutting off the victim’s air and blood supply. Attempts to loosen one by force also make it contract. The slave-controller carries an EM transmitter with a spring-loaded switch, which closes if he relaxes his grip, thus making him impossible to attack. The vicious things surfaced in enemy prisons during the Last War and are thought to have all been destroyed. But these raiders must be in possession of more. It vaguely occurs to Raven that there is quite a large Federation reward out for any; but he doesn’t think about that.

  Is Raven’s duplication of the loosening frequency working, or are the raiders’ captives strangling to death?

  He can wait no longer. That yell had cost the raider a lungful of gas, he’s crumpling into sleep. Raven vaults over him, whirling to check that no other suited men are in ambush for him, and then stops to yank the transmitter off the slaver’s sleeve. It’s as he expected, the transmitter has a pressure switch now released to “off.” Raven squeezes it on and locks it—that’ll relieve the emergency, if it isn’t too late—and stands up, breathing hard, to look around Mira.

  A line of bodies lie sprawled on the big lounge couch—Raven sees the orange suit of bar Palladine, the shower of pale hair that hides Illyera, and the mounds of the other three. Asleep or dead? He goes to them.

  They haven’t collared her—the white throat lies sweetly pulsing, unblemished. But bar Palladine’s ruffled collar is cruelly compressed under a slender metallic circlet. He seems to be breathing normally, no signs of recent crushing. Raven cautiously releases the transmitter in his hand, leaving control up to his duplicate on the hull. Bar Palladine’s collar doesn’t move. So Raven’s duplication is green! And it’s sending with sufficient strength to keep the collars loose. Now he has all the time he needs.<
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  Two other raiders in addition to his assailant lie sprawled nearby. All of them wear dingy black shirts, like some kind of uniform.

  Before releasing the captives—Raven is a cautious man—he makes himself take the time to snatch out his pack of syrettes and shoot each of the raiders a dose that will keep them out of trouble. No need to waste drench on the blond who had attacked him; the itching would wear off in his slumbers. He arranges the man’s clothing decently—Raven is also a man of the Spacers’ Code.

  As he runs from body to body, it occurs to him that there’s every legal and practical reason for him to kill them then and there. It would save air, water, and trouble. But some old scruple makes him pass over the black syrettes and use the red knock-out instead... Besides, these beasts may be wanted alive by Fed, for questioning on the source of the collars.

  As he works, he keeps an eye on the open lock connecting with the pirates’ ship; anything could be in there. Just to be on the safe side, he lobs another canister of sleep-gas into New Hope before turning to the captives.

  He has thought that he’d have to go for his molecular disrupter kit. But first he bethinks himself to try an old rumor about the later imitation collars. He pulls bar Palladine into sitting position and brings the radio’s transmitter into contact with the thin circlet around his throat. In a moment the thing sags loose, looser yet—until he can actually pull it off over the man’s head. Good! So these are later Human-manufactured collars, not the alien originals. The Federation has located and demolished a Human manufacturing plant on one of the Black Worlds. The process is difficult and requires a rare catalyst; maybe these are part of its original make, not a new source. But that’ll be for the Feds to settle.

  Raven has been untangling the other bodies and arranging them decorously on the couch, including that slim, luscious sleeper he scarcely dares to touch. She is not quite inert and makes a tiny protesting sound that means she will soon awaken. Raven finds her translucent scarf up in the pilot’s area and wraps it around her sitting figure.

  “It’s all right, Iliya,” he opens his faceplate long enough to whisper to her. “I’m here, it’s all right now, my girl.”

  The two ex-Talkers turn out to be what Raven thinks of as typical Fed-Central rich old boys; their skins glow with expensive health, their now limp muscles are expensively exercised; faint marks show where wattles have been discreetly clipped and eye-pouches tightened. One has a full head of white hair, the other is stylishly bald. Only the bald man is wearing a collar; the raiders might be short. Raven brings up the transmitter and eases him out of it.

  The man Raven thinks of as the Fat Boy is at the end of the line, his embroidered robe askew and a collar murderously tight on his plump neck. He must have struggled, from fear or pain, Raven judges, squeezing him free. As he does so, he notices an odd tonsure shaved in the man’s hair and guesses that he might be some sort of priest or cult healer attached to one of the older men.

  When he has them all free, he pockets the collars and turns to tackle his next job—New Hope’s contents.

  No sounds have come from the pirates’ ship that he could detect while he was occupied. Raven edges silently into Mira’s lock and from there into a short, dirty tunnel leading into New Hope. Her lighting is dim and gravity weak; Raven guesses she’s short of power. He uses his extension mirror to check that no one has been waiting for him and emerges into a long, empty chamber with the pilot chairs to his left and a pile of some sort of pads aft and at the end. A few sleep-chests are by the hull. A man could be hiding there or in the crude waste cubicle; Raven wrinkles his nose as organic stink penetrates his filters. The slavers must have been living in here some time.

  He peers at the pilots’ chairs and makes out a blacksleeved arm dangling from one. As he watches, it stirs aimlessly. Raven cracks another canister of sleep-gas and hurls it forward. The arm jerks once and is still.

  He then leaps to the side, applies his stethoscope to the hull, low down, and settles silently to wait. Is he hunter or hunted? He doesn’t know, but either demands patience.

  The minims pass. Nothing. Silence, except for one rattling snore from the limp pilot.

  Just as Raven is about to give up, it comes—something slithers against the hull down by the heap of pads. He freezes, listening hard. The soft dragging sound comes again, followed by a click against the hull.

  All right.

  Raven hangs the steth in his belt to serve as an in-air receiver, takes out his welding-pistol, and gives the pads a burst that starts a smudge.

  “I’m going to flame this pile,” he tells his invisible listener. “If you don’t want to get burnt, come out crawling. I want to see both hands flat empty.”

  The pile heaves, and a slender black-shirted figure wiggles out from under, reaching out for the floor with one hand. The other is occupied, Raven sees, holding up the hose of an emergency nose-mask. As the figure wriggles free, it shows as a woman, with an air tank slung over one shoulder.

  If that tank had been oxy, she’d have been dead, Raven thinks belatedly. He unhooks an extinguisher can from the hull and works the long-unused nozzle to foam the smudge.

  “I think you’ll be better off asleep for a while,” he tells the girl. “I’m not going to hurt you while you’re asleep, I give you my word. Put down that mask and breathe.”

  She turns big glinty eyes on him above the mask, looks him over for a few blinks. Then she takes a deep breath of canned air, lowers the mask, and cries out fiercely, “I’m not one of them! I’m a prisoner! Help! Don’t let them get at me—” But she has to breathe in. Her head bows under its shock of black hair, and she crumples down, asleep.

  A new puzzle. Raven bends over her, feeling his backbone twitch, but can see no collar, no weapons. He puts back the welder and picks her up, by her slim waist, in the light gravity and hangs her over his shoulder, fighting the mop of dirty hair from his faceplate. ~

  The pilot still hasn’t moved as far as he can see. Raven dumps his captive in the lock and goes forward. The figure on the pilot couch is wearing a black shirt, but he has a collar on. Puzzle number two. Is this man a raider or a prisoner? No matter, no man should wear one of the diabolical things. Raven takes out his transmitter and loosens it. Then he sits down in the other seat and makes a careful space check to be sure the linked ships aren’t drifting into trouble, and a quick check of New Hope’s readouts. As he suspected, they’re low on fuel. Everything else seems normal.

  He starts to pick up the pilot, then slaps his own helmet.

  “Slowing down!” he mutters, and turns back to the controls. In an instant he locates their trail recorder, extracts and pockets the cassette. This will tell where the raiders came from:

  The pilot, if that’s what he is, is lightly built, but by the time Raven has lugged both captives into Mira and tied them up in armchairs where they can’t see each other, he is tired from long work in a suit. Bar Palladine and his guests are beginning to open their eyes and stir. Mira’s air system is good. Raven knocks back his helmet and takes a chair facing everybody.

  The two older men and Fat Boy emit waking-up grunts, but bar Palladine’s hooded eyes come steadily awake, eyeing Raven, then glancing around the lounge at the recumbent pirates and, finally, at Illyera. One hand steals to his throat and his eyes go back to Raven. Raven nods. “I came back. I thought you’d be better off without that. Now, do you see what I meant about not stopping for strangers?”

  Bar Palladine’s face clouds, but he only says controlledly, “Thank you... They had a girl, a girl did all the talking. Iliya insisted—Hell, it’s my ship. I stopped. And I was godlost sorry I did.”

  “Well said.” Raven nods at the girl, who is murmuring with oncoming wakefulness. “I assume that was the girl? Did you have any reason to think she was a prisoner, or one of them?”

  “A prisoner, I’d say. She was crying, and she begged our pardon, until one of them knocked her down.”

  “Oh,” the girl cries weakl
y. “Oh, yes—they were torturing Bobby. With the collar... I couldn’t stand it. And we were out of fuel, I don’t know what they would have done if you hadn’t stopped. But Jango said it was only for the fuel—”

  “Jango?” Raven asks her.

  “Jangoman, that one. He’s the leader... Oh! They aren’t tied up!”

  “As good as,” Raven tells her. “They’ll be well wired before they come to.”

  But the girl keeps staring so fearfully that Raven gets up and wires the pirates’ ankles and wrists behind them to Mira’s hull holds. Meanwhile bar Palladine has risen and is riffling through Mira’s fancy-looking aid cabinet. Raven sees that his left shin has a nasty laser bum through the orange silk. One of his companions, the bald man in the blue lounge suit, is with him, holding his forearm. The raiders must have used that laser before they got the collars on them. Raven does a quick search of the raiders’ pockets, finds a nasty-looking little laser pistol. He puts it with the collars in hi* work-pocket.

  Bar Palladine is slathering tannic acid in gel on both of them. Raven approves. It turns you black, but it’s the only efficient bum medication. Somebody with sense had packed the aid kit.

  Raven stands tall and stretches. He’s used to long hours in a suit, but playing war-games is something else. His condensers are sweated through.

  “All right, Myr-and-Ser. First I suggest this girl tells us her story. Your true story this time, please.”

  “I haven’t lied,” the girl protests. “They made me say we were out of fuel—and we are.”

  Bar Palladine snorts. “Giving me to understand you were a colony ship full of women and children.”

  “Th-that was Jangoman.”

  “All right, the story,” Raven repeats impatiently. He can’t quite look at her. “Where are you from?”

  “From Cambria. Both Bobby and I are. They—Jangoman and his men—landed, oh, I haven’t been able to keep track, but a long time back, and th-they killed several people and took us. Cambria has a lode of gemstones, see. They made them promise to dig a lot to ransom us, or they’d come back and kill some more. And they wrecked our transmitter so we couldn’t call for help.”