Doomstar Read online

  Three blue-skinned kids with fuzzy white topknots stood up from a table, their eyes bugging and their hands arrested in the act of cramming their mouths with food. A buxom blue-skinned woman with a rill of white hair down her back dropped a wine cup into her lap and rose up with a cry, shaking her skirt and staring.

  A blue-skinned man sat with his back to Kettrick. He had a magnificent silver mane, trimmed to run down the center of his skull and neck. He was naked except for a pair of grimy shorts, his body squat and immensely strong. Across the humped muscle of his left shoulder ran the white weal of a scar, and in the lobe of his left ear a flawed red stone gleamed like a drop of blood.

  Kettrick said, "Boker!" like a lover greeting his adored one. Relief came over him in a wave. He felt Chai catch him and set him in a chair, and then there was a lot of talking and Boker was shoving a wine cup at him. He drank greedily. The kids had retired to the far corner of the room and were staring mostly at Chai. The woman was talking and no one was paying any attention to her. Boker was swearing very profanely, his teeth flashing, his silver mane shaking like a freetted stallion's.

  "Where did you drop from, Johnny? Are they after you? What happened? What do you need? A hole to hide in, a couple of murders, or both?" He talked loud to cover his surprise, and poured more wine into Kettrick's mouth. His eyes were concerned. "You look like you tangled with a Cetian soldier."

  "He's hurt," the woman said. "Let him breathe." She came over to Kettrick, keeping a ginger eye on the big gray Tchell crouched behind him. "Hello, Johnny." Her name was Pedah. "Can I get a doctor?"

  "I'm an illegal alien. No doctor."

  "Where is it, then?"

  He pointed to his ribs. "But I'm starved. Give me something to eat first."

  "You'll only heave it up again," she said matter-of-factly, and felt his side. He decided she was right.

  "Feed Chai, anyway. We've both had a long swim, and a long day."

  "What does she eat?" asked Boker.

  Kettrick laughed. "I doubt if she'll be picky." In her own tongue, he said to Chai, "Feed, rest. We be safe."

  "Good," she answered, and settled down against the wall. Boker brought her food and she ate. But she never once took her eyes from Kettrick while Pedah was binding up his side.

  When that was done she let him eat. And Kettrick talked to Boker, in the lingua franca which Chai did not understand, telling him about his meeting with Seri and what had happened afterward.

  "I wasn't sure, you see. I couldn't be. But I couldn't trust him, either."

  "Wise man," said Boker. He and Kettrick had met out on one of the wilder worlds, in the days when Kettrick was still young and green. Boker had given him some excellent advice about poaching on posted preserves, and then they had helped each other out of a tight spot with an I–C patrol, and after that they had been friends. In later times Boker had skippered one of Kettrick's ships after he lost his own, and they had gone many voyages together, especially in the years immediately before Kettrick's exile.

  "You were going to go this one with me," Kettrick said. "At least I hoped you were. Unless you've got timid too."

  Boker laughed. "No, I'm still at it, Johnny. It's duller than when you were here, and the I–C boys have got smarter, but I can still run into a quiet harbor here and there and make a dishonest credit robbing the natives." He had drunk a lot of wine but he was not drunk, only excited. His eyes shone, small and black and bright in his broad-featured face. He got up and began to stride around the room, flexing his shoulders, slapping his bare flanks with his hands. "The White Sun, eh? A million credits, eh? Hell, man, you don't need Seri's Starbird. For that kind of money I'll take you in my jaws like a cub and fly you there myself!"

  A small pulse of hope beat in Kettrick. "Have you got a ship?"

  "A ship, Johnny?" The silver crest shook in the lamplight, the white teeth gleamed. "Depends on what you call a ship. If you call a dropsical-bellied, rust-eaten old excuse of a tin tub a ship, then I've got a ship. Mind you, I don't own all of this beautiful creature, only a third share. Glevan and Hurth own the other two, or better let's say we three own the mortgage on her. But she'll get to the ground. At least she always has."

  Kettrick said, "Glevan and Hurth. They haven't reformed either?" Hurth was a blue Hlakran like Boker and had been his mate for as long as Kettrick had known them. Glevan was an engineer from Pittan, a small swart ugly man who had been chief with Boker in the later days. These were the men Kettrick had meant when he told Seri he would get his own crew. "Would they go along on this?"

  "If they don't," said Boker, "I'll know it's time to shoot them. A million credits. Ah, and we came so close before!"

  "You got into trouble before, too."

  "Not the first time, Johnny. And probably not the last. Hey, now, it'd be worth doing for nothing, just to wipe Sekma's eye for him. Eh?"

  "Better get hold of them and be sure," Kettrick said. He felt like a heel, not telling Boker the whole story. But Sekma had impressed upon him the danger of trusting anyone, even those he would ordinarily trust with his life, and so he salved his conscience with the thought that whatever he did about the Doomstar would not affect at all what he did about the White Sun.

  He was perfectly determined to do what he said…complete the interrupted million credit deal he had started with the Krinn. He intended to do this right under Sekma's nose and get away with it.

  It occurred to him, as it had occurred several times since the explosion, that it would make things a lot easier if Sekma thought he were dead, too. Then nobody would be looking for Johnny Kettrick.

  Boker had been busy on the communicator, bawling in his own language, presumably to Hurth on the other end. He came back to Kettrick.

  "He'll get Glevan. They'll be here in a few minutes. I only told him it was important."

  "Good." He hesitated. "Boker, was there anything in the news about Seri's launch blowing up?"

  "Don't remember anything. Pedah? She follows the newscasts, Johnny. Just like gossip."

  "There wasn't a thing," said Pedah. "I'd have remembered that."

  Kettrick hadn't supposed there would be. If it were murder, certainly not. If it were an accident…well, Seri wouldn't want to publicize the fact that Kettrick had been using his launch.

  But it made a difficulty. Sekma knew that he was going to contact Seri, and was expecting to hear from him. If he did not hear from him, he would not necessarily think that something had happened to Kettrick. Much more likely, he would think that Kettrick was trying to doublecross him…which he was…and that would only make him angry and more inquisitive. Unless he knew that there had been an accident. But Kettrick could hardly be the one to tell him, and nobody else could, either.

  Dying was harder than he thought.

  Boker was frowning about something, rubbing his nose with his thumb. "Starbird, you said?" Kettrick nodded. Boker got up. "Something sticks in my mind about that ship. Back in a minute."

  He went out. Pedah brought Kettrick more wine and asked how he was doing.

  "Fine," he said. "Thanks to you." He looked up at her. "How do you feel about Boker going with me?"

  "Let him go," she said, and laughed. "I got enough babies, for now. She patted the curve of her stomach where another one was just beginning to show. "You keep him out there for a while, eh?"

  "I'll try."

  "Just one thing, Johnny. You've been gone a long time, and where you were you wouldn't hear about it. Boker, he can handle the White Sun, and he can eat the little I–C boys for supper, I don't worry about that, but there's something else. Something the men don't like to talk about. I don't know if they really think it's silly, or if maybe they're scared. But don't you laugh, Johnny. And when you're out there, you watch and be careful."

  A small cold stillness formed in the pit of Kettrick's stomach, down below the warmth of the food and wine.

  "What shall I watch for, Pedah?"

  "I don't know exactly," She stared at him, her eyes un
focused so that he knew she was looking not at him but at something in her own mind. "I hear it in the marketplace. And one of the Gurran women that runs a fish stall, we got to be pretty good friends, I buy so much fish…all these kids, and it's cheaper. She told me that in their meeting hall a man told them that trouble was coming soon. I hear it, Johnny. Men think women are all silly fools, but we have ears and tongues, and sometimes a little sense between them. I hear it. Trouble is what they say, and something called the Doomstar will bring it."

  The cold stillness spread and moved down deeper into Kettrick's belly. The memory of his dream came back to him with the force of physical reality. "When do they say the trouble will come?"

  "Soon. I don't know. Some say one thing, some another."

  Kettrick remembered his own brilliant piece of deduction back in Vickers' library. The meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds, he had said, would be the time to show the power of the Doomstar. If there were one. And he had calculated six units of Universal Arbitrary Time until that meeting.

  There were three and one quarter units left now. Not much. If there were a Doomstar.

  He would have asked more questions of Pedah, but Boker came stooping in through the low door.

  "Something damned strange," he said. "Tell me again, Johnny. What did Seri tell you about Starbird?"

  "That I could have her. That she was unscheduled. That she'd be ready to go in three days."

  "Three days, eh?" Boker grunted. "I went down to the Spaceman's Hall to check the day's posting again, just to make sure. Starbird had a full cargo, scheduled to Gurra, Thwayne, Kirnanoc…"

  "Had?"

  "When she took off," said Boker. "As of this morning."

  "I'll be damned," said Kettrick. The icy coldness in him dissolved in a burst of heat. He began to shake. "I'll kill him," he whispered. "Accident, is it? Go to the island and I'll let you know, Johnny. Three days, Johnny." He gripped the edge of the table, tried to stop his shaking. "I'll kill him."

  "You'll have to jump fast, then," Boker said. "After Starbird. Because he went with her."

  7

  It was good to be in space again.

  Grellah was every insulting thing Boker had said about her, but she had gotten off the ground. Her name was the Hlakran equivalent of Beautiful Queen, a joke that Boker and Hurth were very proud of; you changed one letter and got a dirty word instead.

  Kettrick's emergency fund, or part of it, had stocked her, with Boker making the most of the money by dealing bits of it here and there to his creditors. The only thing Kettrick had insisted on was trade goods of top quality and suited for their markets.

  It was absolutely essential that they should trade as they went, keeping a semblance of normality. The I–C had a vile habit of dropping in for spot checks on many worlds where they did not maintain a permanent office, and where there no formal port facilities and therefore no records. Kettrick might rely on his friends to keep his own presence secret, but just in case an I–C ship should happen by, he wanted Boker to look completely legitimate.

  Kettrick had been smuggled aboard without much trouble. And in the end he had done nothing about contacting Sekma because there did not seem to be any way of doing it short of calling him up on the communicator and talking with a full audience listening in. Their prearranged meeting had become impossible, and so he let the whole thing slide.

  Chai had been more of a problem to get on board. She could hardly be passed off as anything but what she was, and the Tchell were rigidly protected. To move one from place to place required papers they did not have and could not possibly get. The boys would just as soon have forgotten the whole thing, but Kettrick was obdurate and they had finally sneaked her in with a load of supplies.

  They had posted a fraudulent manifest and sweated blood until they got their clearance. Then, grumbling and creaking, Grellah heaved up off her pad and waddled away into the dark seas of the Cluster that washed the island suns, outbound for Gurra, Thwayn, Kirnanoc, and Trace.

  The route of Seri's Starbird.

  "Why?" Boker had asked him, when they planned their course. "I know you want to kill the traitor, but…"

  "Because," said Kettrick, "this is the course I would take to get to the White Sun. You look at the chart and tell me if there's a better one."

  He did not tell Boker that it was also almost identical with the course he and Sekma had discussed, choosing worlds where the rumors of the Doomstar sounded loudest.

  An odd one for Seri to pick. Except for Kirnanoc, they were backward worlds and not especially lucrative for traders unless, like Kettrick, you had the right touch with the people. Kirnanoc was not backward, but it was famous for the very odd ideas its quite odd people cherished about humans. It too needed a special touch.

  Boker had admitted that there was not a better course, except that there were a couple of equally good alternates for Gurra, as far out as Kirnanoc. But from there on…

  "Trace," he said, "is ridiculous as a jumping-off place for the White Sun. From Kirnanoc it's right away in the wrong direction."

  "I know that," said Kettrick. "That's why we won't really go there. We'll jump straight from Kirnanoc."

  Boker stared at him. "You crazy?" He stabbed a thick blue forefinger at the chart. "You lost your touch or something, Johnny? Look at the distance. Your big Earth-built ships could do it in one hop, all right, but not these inter-Cluster cans. Your jump unit can only wind up so much power, to jump you so far. You go over that peak, and boom! Your whole unit blows, and they post another black-edged notice in the Spaceman's Hall."

  "Very true," said Kettrick. "And I have seen Grellah's jump unit, so I'm aware that her peak is more like a trough."

  "So?"

  "So even Grellah ought to be able to do it in two jumps." He indicated points on the chart. "Come out of the first jump about here and run on conventional power…"

  "Johnny, look. Look where you're waving your finger around. The first jump would put us right in the middle of the Lantavan Bank, the worst jungle of drift in the Cluster. Like throwing yourself out of the window into a cement-mixer. It…"

  "No. We come out of the first jump this side of the drift, in clear space. Then we go through the Bank on conventional. We're bound to find a piece of drift big enough to set down on, so we can service the jump unit and recharge the fuel loads. Then…"

  "We go through the Bank?" said Boker.

  "Right here." Kettrick sketched a diagonal line through the darkened area on the chart. "Where it's narrowest."

  "And thickest." Boker had a spaceman's natural horror of drift. "Look, be sensible. From Whard you can do it easy in one jump. Even Mardir would be better, in spite of the patrols."

  "That's where we got into trouble before," Kettrick reminded him. "Mardir is the gateway for a whole sector that's barred to general trade, so we knew better than to try that. But Whard looked like a very attractive back door. It even worked a couple of times. By the third trip the I–C boys had caught on. What do you want to bet they've got it marked in red on the charts now?"

  He shook his head. "Kirnanoc is perfect. It's clear out of that complex, too far away for a normal jump, with a barrier of the drift in between. Only it isn't a barrier if you don't think of it that way. That's the way I planned it. And the only way I know that might work."

  "Okay," said Boker. "How do we get back?"

  "The same way. Only from the Bank we jump for Trace, instead of Kirnanoc, thus fulfilling our posted i-t, and go on our merry way, rich and unsuspected."

  He faced Boker squarely. "There's a risk, I won't try to deny that, but I think we can make it. I haven't been in the Lantavan, but I've been in other banks and gone through them. If we go the safe, logical, simple way we'll never make it at all." He paused. "You can still say no."

  Boker shut his eyes. "I am thinking hard," he said, "about one million credits. If I think hard enough, I might forget the rest."

  Then his eyes popped open, bright with alarm. "Johnny,
did you tell Seri about jumping off from there? Could he be trying to pick off that million credits for himself?"

  Kettrick shook his head, frowning. "No, I didn't tell him. And I don't see how he could, without me. The Krinn wouldn't trade with him. They'd be much more likely to eat him."

  Boker grunted. "That's true enough. I guess it's just a coincidence. But it's damned funny…"

  "What is?"

  "Seri going into space himself. It must be the first time in history that he's pried himself away from the elegant life and the pretty ladies."

  "He must have his reasons," said Kettrick grimly.

  Reasons, yes. A reason to lie, a reason to kill. Kettrick was viciously determined to find out what those reasons were. In the meantime, he wondered. He wondered if Larith had known when she talked to him what Seri meant to do. Wondered if she was with him in Starbird.

  Jump time was a good time for wondering. Before that, when they were making their first run out of the planetary safety zone, there was much to do and much to see. Kettrick had looked with the joyous eye of the returning exile into the heart of the Hyades, the dark magnificent heart studded with the fires of the orange-red giants that made up most of that starry archipelago, with here and there the scattered blaze of the few white stars, of which their destination was one. The Cluster was an open one, not like the close-packed globular star swarms of Cygnus and Hercules. Here a man might drift for a lifetime between the lazy drifting suns, finding such beauty and terror as he might wish for, with a quiet haven always waiting somewhere close at hand.

  He could look at it and believe that it had not changed. Except that the star charts now showed, far out on the western fringes, an area marked in red. Deadly radiation, it said. And if he looked closer, using the long range 'scope turned up to full power, he could see the star at the center of that zone of red. The poisoned star. And he could wonder with a chill unease whether the killer shark had not indeed entered the lagoon, the serpent come to Eden.