Plague Ship, Andre Norton [e books free to read txt] 📗

earth it’ll be where we won’t have visitors to infect⁠—”

“And that is where?” Ali, who knew the deserts of Mars better than he did the greener planet from which his stock had sprung, pursued the question.

“Right in the middle of the Big Burn!”

Dane, Terra born and bred, realized first what Rip was planning and what it meant. Sealed off was right⁠—the Queen would be amply protected from investigation. Whether her crew would survive was another matter⁠—whether she could even make a landing there was also to be considered.

The Big Burn was the horrible scar left by the last of the Atomic Wars⁠—a section of radiation poisoned land comprising hundreds of square miles⁠—land which generations had never dared to penetrate. Originally the survivors of that war had shunned the whole continent which it disfigured. It had been close to two centuries before men had gone into the still wholesome land laying to the far west and the south. And through the years, the avoidance of the Big Burn had become part of their racial instinct as they shrank from it. It was a symbol of something no Terran wanted to remember.

But Ali now had only one question to ask. “Can we do it?”

“We’ll never know until we try,” was Rip’s reply.

“The Patrol’ll be watching⁠—” That was Weeks. With his Venusian background he had less respect for the dangers of the Big Burn than he did for the forces of Law and order which ranged the star lanes.

“They’ll be watching the route lanes,” Rip pointed out. “They won’t expect a ship to come in on that vector, steering away from the ports. Why should they? As far as I know it’s never been tried since Terraport was laid out. It’ll be tricky⁠—” And he himself would have to bear most of the responsibility for it. “But I believe that it can be done. And we can’t just roam around out here. With I-S out for our blood and a Patrol warn-off it won’t do us any good to head for Luna⁠—”

None of his listeners could argue with that. And, Dane’s spirits began to rise, after all they knew so little about the Big Burn⁠—it might afford them just the temporary sanctuary they needed. In the end they agreed to try it, mainly because none of them could see any alternative, except the too-dangerous one of trying to contact the authorities and being summarily treated as a plague ship before they could defend themselves.

And their decision was ably endorsed not long afterwards by a sardonic warning on the com⁠—a warning which Ali who had been tending the machine passed along to them.

“Greetings, pirates⁠—”

“What do you mean?” Dane was heating broth to feed to Captain Jellico.

“The word has gone out⁠—our raid on the E-Stat is now a matter of history and Patrol record⁠—we’ve been Posted!”

Dane felt a cold finger drawn along his backbone. Now they were fair game for the whole system. Any Patrol ship that wanted could shoot them down with no questions asked. Of course that had always been a possibility from the first after their raid on the E-Stat. But to realize that it was now true was a different matter altogether. This was one occasion when realization was worse than anticipation. He tried to keep his voice level as he answered:

“Let us hope we can pull off Rip’s plan⁠—”

“We’d better. What about the Big Burn anyway, Thorson? Is it as tough as the stories say?”

“We don’t know what it’s like. It’s never been explored⁠—or at least those who tried to explore its interior never reported in afterwards. As far as I know it’s left strictly alone.”

“Is it still all ‘hot’?”

“Parts of it must be. But all⁠—we don’t know.”

With the bottle of soup in his hand Dane climbed to Jellico’s cabin. And he was so occupied with the problem at hand that at first he did not see what was happening in the small room. He had braced the Captain up into a half-sitting position and was patiently ladling the liquid into his mouth a spoonful at a time when a thin squeak drew his attention to the top of Jellico’s desk.

From the half open lid of a microtape compartment something long and dark projected, beating the air feebly. Dane, easing the Captain back on the bunk, was going to investigate when the Hoobat broke its unnatural quiet of the past few days with an earsplitting screech of fury. Dane struck at the bottom of its cage⁠—the move its master always used to silence it⁠—but this time the results were spectacular.

The cage bounced up and down on the spring which secured it to the ceiling of the cabin and the blue feathered horror slammed against the wires. Either its clawing had weakened them, or some fault had developed, for they parted and the Hoobat came through them to land with a sullen plop on the desk. Its screams stopped as suddenly as they had begun and it scuttled on its spider-toad legs to the microtape compartment, acting with purposeful dispatch and paying no attention to Dane.

Its claws shot out and with ease it extracted from the compartment a creature as weird as itself⁠—one which came fighting and of which Dane could not get a very clear idea. Struggling they battled across the surface of the desk and flopped to the floor. There the hunted broke loose from the hunter and fled with fantastic speed into the corridor. And before Dane could move the Hoobat was after it.

He gained the passage just in time to see Queex disappear down the ladder, clinging with the aid of its pincher claws, apparently grimly determined to catch up with the thing it pursued. And Dane went after them.

There was no sign of the creature who fled on the next level. But Dane made no move to recapture the blue hunter who squatted at the foot of the ladder staring unblinkingly into space. Dane waited, afraid to disturb the Hoobat. He had not had