VI
The Khazaki swore lividly. His sword seemed almost to leap halfway out of the scabbard. Carse swung the blaster warningly, and he clashed the weapon back. Useless, useless, when white flame could destroy him before he got moving.
“How did you get here?” he snarled.
The tall, bronze-haired man smiled again. “I wasn’t in the fight,” he said. “Volakech wanted to save my knowledge and told me to stay out of the battle. I wasn’t really needed. But it occurred to me that your assault was obviously a futile gesture unless you hoped in some way to capture the boat. So I hid in here to guard it—just in case. And now—we’ll take her up. We may just as well do so. Once I have the Star Ship—” He gestured at Alonzo. “Start the engines. And no tricks. I understand them as well as you do.”
Gonzales strapped himself in place and stood swaying with weakness while he manipulated the controls. “I can’t—reach that wheel—” he gasped.
“Turn it, Janazik,” said Carse. “About a quarter turn—that’s enough.”
The impassive faces of meters wavered and blurred before Alonzo’s swimming eyes. He had been pretty badly hurt. But the engines were warming up.
“Strap yourself in, Janazik,” said Carse.
The Khazaki obeyed, sickly. He didn’t really need the anti-acceleration webbing—Carse himself was content to hang on to a stanchion with one hand—but it would hamper his movements, he would have no way of making a sudden leap. Between them, he and Alonzo could handle the engines readily enough, Carse giving them their orders. Then once they were at the Star Ship he could blast them down, go out to capture Anse and Ellen—and the old books said one man could handle the ship if necessary—
How to warn the two in the pilot room? How to get help? The warrior’s brain began to turn over, cool and steady now, swift as chilled lightning.
The boat spouted flame, stood on its tail and climbed for the sky. Acceleration dragged at Carse, but it wasn’t too great for a strong man to resist. Carse tightened his grip on the stanchion. His blaster was steady on them.
Ellen’s signal lights blinked and blinked on the control panels. More on the No. 3 jet, ease to port, full ahead, cut No. 2. … Alonzo handled most of it, occasionally gasping a command to Janazik. The bellow of the rockets filled the engine room.
And in the bows, Dougald Anson saw the world reel and fall behind, saw the rainy sky open up in a sudden magnificence of sun, saw it slowly darken and the stars come awesomely out. Gods, gods, was this space? Open space? No wonder the old people had longed to get away!
How to get help, how to warn Anse—Janazik’s mind spun like an unloaded engine, spewing forth plan after unusable plan. Quickly, now, by Shantuzik’s hells!
No way out—and the minutes were fleeing, the rocket was reaching for the sky, he knew they were nearing the Star Ship and still he lay in his harness like a sheep and obeyed Carse’s gunpoint orders!
The disgrace of it! He snarled his anger, and at Alonzo’s gasped command swung the wheel with unnecessary savagery. The ship lurched as a rocket tube overfired. Carse nearly lost his hold, and for an instant Janazik’s hands were at the acceleration webbing, ready to fling it off and leap at him.
The man recovered, and his blaster came to the ready again. He had to shout to be heard above the thundering jets: “Don’t try that—either of you! I can shoot you down and handle it myself if I must!”
He laughed then, a tall and splendid figure standing strained against the brutal, clawing acceleration. Ellen’s brother—aye! And one could see why she wanted him spared. Janazik’s lip curled back from his teeth in a snarl of hate.
The rocket must be very near escape velocity now. Presently Ellen would signal for the jets to be turned off and they would rush weightless through space while she took her readings and plotted the orbit that would get them to the Star Ship. And if then Carse emerged with his blaster—
Anse had only a sword.
But—Anse is Anse, thought Janazik. If there is any faintest glimmer of a chance Anse will find it. And if not, we’re really no worse off than now. I’ll have to warn Anse and leave the rest up to him.
The Khazaki nodded bleakly to himself. It would probably mean his own death before Carse’s blaster flame—and damn it, damn it, he liked living. Even if the old Khazak he knew were doomed, there had been many new worlds of the Galactic frontier. He and Anse had often dreamed of roving over them—
However—
A red light blinked on the panel. Ellen’s signal to cut the rockets. They were at escape velocity.
Wearily, his hand shaking, Alonzo threw the master switch. The sudden silence was like a thunderclap.
And Janazik screeched the old Krakenaui danger call from his fullest lungs.
Carse turned around with a curse, awkward in the sickening zero-gravity of free fall. “It won’t do you any good,” he yelled thickly. “I’ll kill him too—”
Alonzo threw the master switch up! With a coughing roar, the rockets burst back into life. No longer holding the stanchion, Carse was hurled to the floor.
Janazik clawed at his webbing to get free. Carse leveled his blaster on Alonzo. The engineer threw another switch at random, and the direction of acceleration shifted with sudden violence, slamming Carse against the farther wall.
His blaster raved, and Alonzo had no time to scream before the flame licked about him.
And in the control room, Anse heard Janazik’s high ululating yell. The reflexes of the wandering years came back to galvanize him. His sword seemed to leap into his hand, he flung himself out of his chair webbing with a shout. …
“Anse!” Ellen’s voice came dimly to his ears, hardly noticed. “Anse—what is it—”
He drifted weightless in midair, cursing, trying to swim. And then the rockets woke up again and threw him against the floor. He twisted with Khazaki agility, landed crouched, and bounded for the stern.
Ellen looked after him, gasping, for an instant yet unaware of the catastrophe, thinking how little she knew that yellow-maned savage after all, and how she would like to learn, and—
The rocket veered, crazily. Anse caught himself as he fell, adjusted to the new direction of gravity, and continued his plunging run. The crash of a blaster came from ahead of him.
He burst into the control room and saw it in one blinding instant. Alonzo’s charred body sagging in its harness, Janazik half out of his, Carse staggering to his feet—the blaster turned on Janazik, Janazik, the finger tightening—
Tiger-like, Anse sprang. Carse glimpsed him, turned, the blaster half swung about … and the murderous fighting machine which was Dougald Anson had reached him. Carse saw the sword shrieking against his face; it was the last thing he ever saw. …
Anse lurched back against the control panel. “Turn it off!” yelled Janazik. “Throw that big switch there!”
Mechanically, the human obeyed, and there was silence again, a deep ringing silence in which they floated free. It felt like an endless falling.
Falling, falling—Anse looked numbly down at his bloody sword. Falling, falling, falling—but that couldn’t be right, he thought dully. He had already fallen. He had killed Ellen’s brother.
“And I love her,” he whispered.
Janazik drifted over, slowly in the silent room. His eyes were a deep gold, searching now. If Ellen won’t have him, he and I will go out together, out to the stars and the great new frontier. But if she will, I’ll have to go alone, I’ll always be alone—
Unless she would come too. She’s a good kid. … I’d like to have her along. Maybe take a mate of my own too. … But that can never be, now. She won’t come near her brother’s slayer.
“You might not have had to kill him,” said Janazik. “Maybe you could have disarmed him.”
“Not before he got one of us—probably you,” said Anse tonelessly. “Anyway, he needed killing. He shot Alonzo.”
He added, after a moment: “A man has to stand by his comrades.”
Janazik nodded, very slowly. “Give me your sword,” he said.
“Eh?” Anse looked at him. The blue eyes were unseeing, blind with pain, but he handed over the red weapon. Janazik slipped his own glaive into the human’s fingers.
Then he laid a hand on Anse’s shoulder and smiled at him, and then looked away.
We Khazaki don’t know love. There is comradeship, deeper than any Earthling knows. When it happens between male and female, they are mates. When it is between male and male, they are blood-brothers. And a man must stand by his comrades.
Ellen came in, pulling her way along the walls by the handholds, and Anse looked at her without saying a word, just looking.
“What happened?” she said. “What is the—Oh!”
Carse’s body floated in midair, turning over and over in air currents like a drowned man in the sea.
“Carse—Carse—”
Ellen pushed from the wall, over to the dead man. She looked at his still face, and stroked his blood-matted hair, and smiled through a mist of tears.
“You were always good to me, Carse,” she whispered. “You were … goodnight, brother. Goodnight.”
Then turning to Anse and Janazik, with something cold and terrible in her voice: “Who killed him?”
Anse looked at her, dumbly.
“I did,” said Janazik.
He held forth the dripping sword. “He stowed away—was going to take over the ship. Alonzo threw him off balance by turning the rockets back on. He killed Alonzo. Then I killed him. He needed it. He was a traitor and a murderer, Ellen.”
“He was my brother,” she whispered. And suddenly she was sobbing in Anse’s arms, great racking sobs that seemed to tear her slender body apart.
But she’d get over it.
Anse looked at Janazik over her shoulder, and while he ruffled her shining hair his eyes locked with the Khazaki’s. This is the end. Once we land, we can never see each other, not ever again. And we were comrades in the old days. …
Farewell, my brother.
When the star ship landed outside Krakenau’s surrendered citadel, it was still raining a little. Janazik looked out at the wet gray world and shivered. Then, wordlessly, he stepped from the airlock and walked slowly down the hill toward the sea. He did not look back, and Anse did not look after him.