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then froze.
"Fetal position, Rumney," he said, enjoying himself for a minute. Rumney
obliged, and froze again.
"Come on, Zinder, let's see to this ship," he snapped, sounding more like
Mavra Chang than he knew. They went into the ship.
This wasn't Trelig's yacht; Chang had taken that. They were left with the
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shuttle, which was basically well stocked. There were enough emergency rations
for maybe three weeks, no more. Yulin cursed under his breath. Enough to take
care of the spongies, but not the others. Oh, well, Trelig said he wanted to
deal with them, and he was sure they didn't know how little food there was.
Obie, of course, could create more when things settled down. Create the food,
and also use the people on New Pompeii to replace the expired guards. Slavery
without sponge-that would appeal to Trelig.
He checked everything out. He wasn't the best pilot in the world, but he was
an adequate one, and the ship was rather simple. Barring a major emergency, he
could run it without much trouble.
It had been charging all the time it was in dock, so there was no problem
there. Atmosphere good, pressurization potential normal. He nodded as he
checked each one. He looked for a weapon, but found none-naturally. Trelig
had taken no chances.
Sighing, he closed the port and sat down to wait. There was no way he was
going back to the buildings of New Pompeii.
Trelig was several hours in coming, and Ben Yulin had started to worry again.
There were several false alarms-guards stopping by to check, a few of the
bigwigs, too. Since he'd placed the bottle next to Rumney, nobody questioned
him being there. Nobody even blamed him.
Finally, hearing some noise outside, Yulin opened the hatch and spied three
guards coming in.
One, he was sure, was Trelig. Those sexual screw-ups all looked alike. All
three looked grim, and one, not Trelig, entered the ship first, followed by
the other two. Ben caught Trelig's eyes and a subtle nod. The nerves were
back.
"We've decided to let anybody who wants to make a break for it," the lead
guard told the woman in the pilot's chair. "If you get blasted, well, then
it's quick. If you don't-more power to you."
"And you?" Yulin asked.
That grim expression hardened. "I will die quickly, not slowly. We have
already held a meeting to decide that. We've just finished killing the poor
devils who were much worse than we. None of us wants to become like that.
We'll go help the people who want to run for it to get everything together,
and then-well, that's it."
Yulin, facing them, saw Trelig slowly draw his pistol and point it at the two
guards. He uttered a silent prayer to ancestral gods never believed in, and
nodded to the other two.
"I understand. We'll try and do our best. I guess this is good-bye."
The guard started to say something, but at that moment Trelig fired, two
short bursts at very close range and at full power. Yulin and Zinder ducked in
reflex, but the former councillor's aim had been perfect. The two guards
seemed bathed in a bright-orange glow, then faded out. There was nothing left
of them but some burns in the ship's carpet and an extremely unpleasant odor.
"Close the hatch! Let's get out of here!" Trelig shouted, and Yulin needed no
more urging.
There was a shudder and a whine, and the clunking sound of docking equipment
being jettisoned, and then, almost before the other two were seated and
strapped in, Yulin took off.
"Hold it, you idiot!" Trelig snapped. "You don't want to kill us! We're away!
They can't get to us now!"
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Yulin seemed to stare at the man and at the controls for a moment, as if in a
daze. Then, with a little quiver, he snapped out of his trance.
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The robot sentinels shot their challenges, and Trelig gave the codes needed
to get past them.
"Where to?" Ben Yulin asked Antor Trelig.
"Might as well take a look at this incredible planet," the boss replied. "I'm
kind of curious about it myself."
Yulin brought the ship around, and eased slowly back toward the
strange-looking orb.
Trelig turned to the figure of Nikki. "Gil Zinder!" he called. -"Come to the
fore and join us!"
There was a slight, subtle change in the manner of the fat girl, and she
slipped off the straps and came up to the screen.
Gil Zinder was fascinated in spite of himself. "Incredible!" he said in his
daughter's voice.
"But why are there two completely different halves?" Trelig wondered.
"Look-you got all those jewel faces on the south, but you can tell it's lots
of green and ocean and stuff like that. Our kind of world. Then you got that
great dark-amber strip around the equator, and then a whole different kind of
world up top."
"The poles are interesting, too," Gil Zinder noted. "See how dark and thick
they are, and how huge. Almost like great buildings hundreds, maybe thousands,
of kilometers across."
"Let me swing down around one of those poles," Yulin suggested. "Look at the
center of them."
They looked, and saw what he meant. In the center was a great, yawning
hexagonal shape composed of absolute darkness. "What is it?" Trelig wondered
aloud.
Gil Zinder thought a moment. "I don't know. Perhaps something like our big
dish, only much more sophisticated."
"But why hexagons?" Trelig persisted. "Hell, they're all hexagons, even the
little facets both north and south."
"The Markovians were in love with the hexagon," Yulin told him. "Their ruins
are full of them;
their cities are built hi that shape. I saw one as a child."
"Let's take a look at the north," Trelig suggested. "It's so wildly
different. There must be a reason for it."
Yulin applied power, and the image swirled and whirled on the screen. "Kind
of tricky," the pilot told them. "Ships like this weren't built to go this
slow except in landing and docking modes."
They crossed the equator, a true barrier they saw- strange, imposing, and
opaque.
"I wish we had some instruments," Zinder said, genuinely interested in
something again. "I
would love to know what makes those strange patterns. Methane, ammonia, all
sorts of stuff, looks like."
They crossed the terminator and went into darkness.
"Somebody's living there, though," Trelig noted, pointing. Some of the areas
in some of the hexes were lit, and there were a few clear major cities down
there.
"A pity we can't get a little closer," Zinder said sincerely. "The
atmospheric distortion is really intense."
"Maybe a little lower," Yulin answered. "I'll try to skim just over the top
of the
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stratosphere. That'll keep us high enough to be effectively in a vacuum, but
low enough to see some detail."
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Hearing no dissent, he cautiously took the ship down. They crossed the
terminator once again and went into blinding sunlight.
And then the engine seemed to give a start, and the lights flashed.
"What's the matter?" Trelig snapped.
Yulin was genuinely puzzled. "I-I don't know." It happened again, and he took
over manual helm and started to fight it. "Sudden losses of power, very
intermittent."
"Take us up!" Trelig commanded, but, at that mo-ment,the lights really went
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