Thai hesitated and was lost. The others obeyed. There were clatterings as the spears came to rest against the metal hull. Six of Don Loris’ retainers followed Thai admiringly into the spaceboat’s interior, to gaze at it and at Bron Hoddan who so recently had given them the chance to loot a nearby castle.
“Sit down!” said Hoddan cordially. “If you want to feel what a spaceboat’s really like, clasp the seat-belts around you. You’ll feel exactly like you’re about to make a journey out of atmosphere. That’s it, lean back. You notice there are no viewports in the hull? That’s because we use these vision screens to see around with.”
He flicked on the screens. Thai and his companions were charmed to see the landscape outside portrayed on screens. Hoddan shifted the sensitivity point toward infrared, and details came out that would have been invisible to the naked eye.
“With the port closed,” said Hoddan, “like this,” the port clanged shut and grumbled for half a second as the locking-dogs went home, “we’re all set for take-off. I need only get into the pilot’s seat…” he did so, “and throw on the fuel pump.” A tiny humming sounded. “And we move when I advance this throttle!”
He pressed the firing-stud. There was a soul-shaking roar. There was a terrific pressure. The seven men from Don Loris’ stronghold were pressed back in their seats with an overwhelming, irresistible pressure which held them absolutely helpless. Their mouths dropped open. Appalled protests tried to come out, but were pushed back by the seemingly ever-increasing acceleration.
The screens, showing the outside, displayed a great and confused tumult of smoke and fumes and dust to rearward. They showed only stars ahead. Those stars grew brighter and brighter, as the roar of the rockets diminished to a deafening sound. Suddenly the disk of the local sun appeared, rising above the horizon to the west. The spaceboat, naturally, overtook it as it rose into an orbit headed east to west instead of the other way about.
Presently Hoddan turned off the fuel pump. He turned to look thoughtfully at the seven men. They were very pale. They all sat very still, because they could see in the vision-screens that a strange, mottled, again-sunlit surface flowed past them with an appalling velocity. They were very much afraid that they knew what it was. They did. It was the surface of the planet Darth.
Tin glad you boys came along,” said Hoddan. “Well catch up with the fleet in a moment or two. The pirate fleet, you know! I’m very pleased with you. Not many groundlings would volunteer for space-piracy, not even with the loot there is in it.”
Thai choked slightly, but no one else made a sound. No one even protested. Protests would have been no use. There were looks of anguish, but nothing else. Hoddan was the only one in the spaceboat who had the least idea of how to get it down again. His passengers had to go along for the ride, no matter where it led.
Numbly, they waited for what would befall.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HODDAN did not worry about his captive-followers. Soon he saw the weird spacefleet.
The spaceboat drew up alongside the gigantic hulk of the leader’s ship. The seven Darthians were still numbed by their kidnaping and the situation in which they found themselves. They looked with dull eyes at the mountainous object they approached. It had actually been designed as a fighter-carrier of space, intended to carry smaller craft. It must have been sold for scrap a couple of hundred years since, and patched up for this emigration.
Hoddan waited for the huge door to open. It did. He headed into the opening, noticing as he did so that an object two or three times the size of the spaceboat was already there. It cut down the room for maneuvering, but a thing once done is easier thereafter. Hoddan got the boat inside, and there was a very small scraping and the great door closed before the boat could drift out again.
Hoddan turned to his victim-followers once the spaceboat was still.
“This,” he said in a manner which could only be described as one of smiling ferocity, “this is a pirate ship, belonging to the pirate fleet we passed through on the way here. It’s manned by characters so murderous that their leaders don’t dare land anywhere away from their home star-cluster, or all the galaxy would combine against them, to exterminate them or be exterminated. You’ve joined that fleet. You’re going to get out of this boat and march over to that ship yonder. Then you’re going to be space-pirates under me.”
They quivered, but did not protest.
“I’ll try you for one voyage,” he told them. “There will be plunder. There will be pirate revels. If you serve faithfully and fight well, I’ll return you to Don Loris” stronghold with your loot after the one voyage. If you don’t—” He grinned mirthlessly at them, “if you don’t, out the airlock with you, to float forever between the stars. Understand?”
The last was pure savagery. They cringed. The outside-pressure meter went up to normal. Hoddan turned off the vision screens, so ending any views of the interior of the hold. He opened the port and went out. Sitting in something like continued paralysis in their seats, the seven spear-men of Darth heard his voice in conversation outside the boat. They could catch no words, but Hoddan’s tone was strictly businesslike. He came back.
“All right,” he said shortly. “Thai, march ’em over.”
Thai gulped. He loosened his seat-belt. The enlistment of the seven in the pirate fleet was tacitly acknowledged. They were unarmed save for the conventional large knives at their belts.
“Frrrd, harch!” rasped Thai with a lump in his throat. “Two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four. Hup…”
Seven men marched dismally out of the spaceboat and down to the floor of the huge hold. Eyes front, chests out, throats dry, they marched to the larger but still small vessel that shared this hold compartment. They marched into that ship. Thai barked, “Hmmmmm halt!” and they stopped. They waited.
Hoddan came in very matter-of-factly only moments later. He closed the entrance port, so sealing the ship. He nodded approvingly.
“You can break ranks now,” he said. “There’s food and such stuff around. The ship’s yours. But don’t turn knobs or push buttons.”
He went forward, and a door closed behind him.
He looked at the control board, and could have done with a little information himself. When the ship was built, generations ago, there’d been controls installed which would be quite useless now. When the present working instruments were installed, it had been done so hastily that the wires and relays behind them were not concealed, and it was these that gave him the clues to understand them.
The space-ark’s door opened. Hoddan backed his ship out. Its rockets had surprising power. He reflected that the Lawlor drive wouldn’t have been designed for this present ship, either. There’d probably been a quantity order for so many Lawlor drives, and they’d been installed on whatever needed a modem drive-system, which was every ship in the fleet. But since this was one of the smallest craft in the lot, with its low mass it should be fast.
“Well see,” he said to nobody in particular.
Out in emptiness, but naturally sharing the orbit of the ship from which it had just come, Hoddan tried it out tentatively. He got the feel of ft. Then as a matter of simple, rule-of-thumb astrogation, he got from a low orbit to a five-diameter height where the Lawlor drive would hold by mere touches of rocketpower. It was simply a matter of stretching the orbit to extreme eccentricity as all the ships went round the planet. After the fourth go round he was fully five diameters out at aphelion. He touched the drive button and everybody had that very peculiar disturbance of all their senses which accompanies going into overdrive. The small craft sped through emptiness at a high multiple of the speed of light.