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She stared at the floating monster, blinked as a piece of its head appeared to lift. "A fishboat." She watched as a man's figure became outlined blackly against the reflecting water.
She grabbed her hand weapon and dropped three 'shots forward of the fish snout, waving her arms in a broad semaphore to attract the Welladan's attention. To her amazement, he dove back into his ship. Within seconds the craft submerged.
Cursing her bad luck, wondering how else she could have attracted his attention, and a
Of all the rotten luck, Murv was growling to himself. The air in the fishboat was rank with human and machine stenches. He was weary and sore from the rough transit of the old cha
His sonar indicated an overhang along the south coast of the lagoon: Good. He would be undetectable there and could find out who that trigger-happy ape was. And if it just so happened that he was the pirate —stranded?
Pirate? He was jumping to conclusions. Flads, who else would be on Crown Lagoon in the middle of a storm. Tallav had only ordered two fishboats out, and the figure on the rocks was too rangy to be Odis!
Murv's irritation quickly dissolved. He found himself eagerly scrambling into his gear. What luck! What sheer unadulterated luck! To find that passage into the lagoon itself and to spot the pickup. Flads, where had the pirate hid his ship? Crown Lagoon was one fardling big place.
The unmistakable triple cracks of a hand weapon had echoed around the lagoon, u
Three shots, he reflected. A signal? He glanced upward at the yellow-clouded skies. There was plenty of time for them to make a transfer before the winds picked up again. And he would have plenty of time to find that space shuttle. There was more than one way to milk a whale!
He secured the outboard gear and went below for his suit and water-aids. He snapped a remote-control drone unit to his belt, a knife to his calf sheath and a buckle-and-line sphere to his shoulder harness. He carefully checked the assist-tanks before he strapped them on. Then, jumping into the water, he began to swim with rapid and powerful strokes around the southern edge of the outer Crown. He knew that he would find better mooring for a space shuttle on the lower south edge of the island.
When she finally reached the shores of the lagoon, Shaha
"Slimy coward. Twice coward! What were you ru
She paused. Maybe Welladans were under attack from the same ship that had fired on her. Maybe that's why the repeated demands for the iodine had been ignored. Perhaps that coward had merely acted with sensible caution. Oh ho, that put a new light on the fishman's retreat. And, if he thought she was one of the invaders, she'd never see him again. That was certain!
Disgusted, she sank down to the beach and leaned wearily against a convenient rock. She forced herself to rest, to drain off the poisons of fatigue caused by her difficult descent. Even though this planet did have a lighter gravity than her own, her efforts had been tiring.
Displacing enough water to inundate the narrow beach and half drown Shaha
"That's the last, remember," a rough voice yelled at her. "And remember, if I'm not off this fardling world in five revolutions, I set the Investigators on you when they get here. And they're coming."
Shaha
"Wait," she cried as the fish-snout began turning away from her.
"Can't wait, you fool. And neither can you if you want to get off this fardling planet before the storm socks us in again. Grab that stuff and get off-world."
Shaha
She dropped to her knees, her arms involuntarily starting to grab up the cube. My God! She pulled back. It just had to be—a cubeful of radioactive iodine! Liters of it, just thrown at her feet. She threw back her head and laughed: "Well, I got what I came for, certainly. They've got to give me marks for that!"
She rose to her feet, absently brushed the clinging dark sands from her legs. Her ship had already sent out the death knell. That would eventually co
Suddenly she felt much better. With a deft twist, she yanked the heavy cube to her back and began to retrace her steps to the shallow cave. That would be a difficult hole to find, but there she'd be safe from the storm. Her ascent was slower and far more treacherous than her descent because the cube was an unbalancing burden, its weight a strain even on her heavy-world strength. Shaha
Murv watched the delivery take place with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation. He was too far away to make out the features of either party, or the code letters of the fishboat fins. He took careful note of the odd gait of the receiver—definitely an off-worlder, someone used to a heavier gravitational pull. Murv knew to a kilogram how heavy that iodine cube was, yet the off-worlder had shouldered it with ease.
Muscles or not, Murv decided, that was going to be a fardling hard climb. The pirate must have ducked into the lagoon at the onset of the storm, probably in a small shuttlecraft. Must be a fladding good pilot, too, Murv grudgingly admitted, to land on a stormy Welladan sea, ride out a mach-storm and then trip along like that. Murv glanced over his shoulder toward the west. The black and ochre clouds were still low on the horizon but coming in fast. He gri