Dallis' head and right shoulder vanished in the searing blast.
Dallis' head and right shoulder vanished in the searing blast.
Dallis' head and right shoulder vanished in the searing blast.
Iris screamed once, a shriek of horror and fury, then flung herself on Lucas. He wasted no effort, deflecting her blow with his left hand, his right chopping down with the whistling Blandarc to crush the long barrel against her temple, shattering her fragile skull. A mask of glistening scarlet shot instant threads across her livid face. She fell heavily, collapsing across the twitching corpse of her late partner, Dallis. The light gleamed on her outflung arms and upon the blood slowly running down their ivory slopes to drip more slowly still from her lax and impotent fingers.
Scorn tinged Lucas' whole bearing as he glanced across at the shocked and silent figure still motionless in his lounge-prison.
"You blind fool," he flung contemptuously at Thorne.
The latter did not answer for a long, slow minute. Then he nodded.
"So it seems, Lucas," he replied, quietly.
The big pirate shrugged, flinging back his long cape to holster his gun, and a vivid flower of scarlet bloomed in the doorway as the lining caught the light.
"I suppose they told you your paralysis is incurable," he said, walking forward with no further glance at his victims. "You'll be out of it by noon tomorrow. But now, just to dispel any fond hope you might be entertaining, Captain Thorne, you may consider your personal fortunes as unchanged. You are still for sale ... to yourself."
"At what price?"
"Twenty-five billion."
"You raise the price?"
"Do you think I am one of these?" Lucas sneered, nodding at the dead beside him. "Petty thieves using my name for a shield." He sat down, crossing his black-sheathed legs. "Now, Captain Thorne, let us discuss the terms. I am a busy man."
"And I am not," growled Thorne, angrily, staring full into the evil-looking mask Chain Lucas wore as the visor of his helmet. "I've had a hard day, Lucas, and I'm tired ... tired of merchants and Senators turned pirate ... tired of masks.... Suppose you remove yours ... General."
For a long, taut moment the outlaw did not move. Then he slowly unbuckled his linked chin strap, removing his steel helmet and the black hood within it. Thorne smiled wickedly.
"Good evening, General."
Chain Lucas was General Wheelwright, Inspector-General of the Planet Patrol.
"How did you know?" The outlaw's voice was flat, expressionless.
"Your voice. Your evident contempt."
"Well?"
"Why should I have suspected Iris Chanler? Did I know she was in your pay, sponsored as she was? Your tone implied me a fool to have succumbed to her charms, to have let myself be lulled into this fool's trap. But it was I who was to have led her into the trap of Banya Tor, and if I failed in that, who knew I had attempted it save you and Bannerman? And your walk and voice are not Bannerman's."
"You guessed."
"I knew. Why I had been taken into the Patrol with my drunken antecedents all against me, why sent on this fool's errand? And who alone had authority to arrange for all that has befallen?"
Wheelwright nodded, his face impassive. "I see. It was I. All the way." He kicked idly at the dead foot of Dallis. "These poor fools never knew. They hired me as Chain Lucas to play the hero and be their shield in trouble, and I used them in their turn. I gave them information and the hidden routes of ships. I postured when I attacked, scattering my loot openhandedly, for the loot they stole was far surpassing mine and I knew the cave on Luna in which they keep it. I'll leave it there, I suppose."
He leaned back, a faint smile twisting the hard mouth. "It looked big once, Thorne. Big enough to kill for. Now ..." he shrugged expressively. The golden chains winked brightly across his chest.
"Now it's a drop in a very big bucket," Thorne concluded. "What happens if I fill it for you?"
"What could happen, Thorne? You die. You all die. The ship vanishes, as others have vanished. Chain Lucas will be seen no more."
"You can't destroy or hide a liner, General. Your own Patrol will track you down."
Wheelwright shrugged again. "A high-orbit course, over the trade lanes, and I send the ship and you into the Sun. Will you seek fingerprints there?"
Thorne fell silent, watching Wheelwright from narrowed eyes. Finally he spoke.
"It's been your plan from the start, hasn't it?" It was not a question.
"From the moment Bannerman told me he had taken you into the Patrol, for all your record. I could have taken you at any time. But I wanted more than the ransom you can pay. I wanted peace in which to enjoy it."
Slowly Thorne's eyes widened. "You ... you yourself ordered the massacre at Banya Tor."
"Of course. You should know by now, Captain Thorne, that my men do not get out of hand. They tortured and killed at my word, that I might have a spectacle savage enough to justify calling in both you and the late Senator Chanler. She came at the suggestion of the pirate Chain Lucas, planning the treachery you heard. She never knew how futile it was."
"A masterpiece," agreed Thorne, dryly. His hand had slipped loosely from the arm of the lounge and fallen to his side. His head nodded wearily.
"These two betrayed their friends, their country, and would have betrayed each other as they did us once the money was paid," he went on, watching the quiet bodies on the deck. A thin trickle of darkening blood runneled out across the magnificent carpet to stain Wheelwright's polished boot. "You know what you have betrayed, General Wheelwright. You live a lie even in your greater lie. You fail your own pose of mock-hero, grasping more than you can hold."
"I hold you, Thorne."
"I pay you nothing, you pirate!" flashed back Thorne, defiant even in his apparent helplessness.
"You haven't seen Banya Tor," snarled Wheelwright. "My men can change that tune."
"You lie," returned Thorne, coldly. "You killed your own lieutenants, Revere and Pahboard, merely to provide convincing proof you had caused the Banya Tor massacre. You destroyed Dallis' ship and crew and the men he brought aboard this ship. Would a treacherous snake like you leave any alive behind him to share the loot? Would you spare your own crew of cutthroats?"
General Wheelwright grinned malevolently. "You are very clever, Captain Thorne. And very daring. I could have used you." He shook his head. "Of course, none remain. Dallis' men are dead. My own died at mess, poisoned. Only I am left ... and I am Chain Lucas." There was pride in his voice, a hard, brittle savagery rasping through the charged atmosphere of the littered saloon.
"You are a fool, General Wheelwright," replied Thorne, evenly. "I came to this assignment better prepared than you think."
"What's that?" Wheelwright leaned forward, his amusement vanishing.
"There are three button dictographs in this room," jeered Thorne. "There are fifty scattered throughout the ship to record Iris Chanler's reaction to Banya Tor, should she have desired backing out once we returned to base. My idea, Wheelwright."
"You hound!" cried Wheelwright, springing to his feet and half-drawing his Blandarc. "You threaten me?"
"Your own words convict you, not I."
Suddenly the pirate renegade thrust back his gun and flung back his grizzled head in a splutter of laughter. "What odds, Thorne? This ship goes into the sun and they with it."
"But we're not going into the sun," said Thorne.
"And who's to stop me?" demanded Wheelwright, laughing still.
"Myself," said Thorne, abruptly coming to his feet with a tigerish surge, the barrel of his gun leaping from the holster on which his hand had been resting, the lethal volt-ball at its muzzle square between Wheelwright's startled eyes.
Jaw agape, the General could only stare and stare, his hands lax at his side, and Thorne went softly on.
"You spun your webs too fine, Lucas. I told you, as I told Bannerman, I was cured of the t'ang habit. He believed. You refused to believe. Now you pay for it."
"You ... you weren't paralyzed at all?" stammered Wheelwright, sheer unbelief still apparent in his eyes.
"My t'ang-soaked body did not absorb the catalystic salts Iris fed us," smiled Thorne, bleakly. "If I can no longer drink, neither can I be poisoned. Your cat's paw and his ray meant nothing to me." His voice tightened. "Enough, renegade! Your gunbelt! Unbuckle it. Drop it."
Slowly the General unfastened the broad gold buckle of his rich belt, his head bowed. Then, as he released it, he suddenly thrust up his left arm to free his black cloak, jerked the belt forward smartly, and clipped Thorne across the wrist with the buckle. The belt, weighted down by the heavy gun, was torn from his grasp, but it had at least knocked the Blandarc from Thorne's hand as well.
Snatching a knife from the lining of his cape, Wheelwright plunged forward with a snarl of triumph. He was all Chain Lucas now, all black-and-scarlet pirate.
But as he leaped, his own treachery rose up to avenge his victims upon himself. Thorne flashed out his heavy Martian sword ... and Lucas stepped on Iris Chanler's dead and blood-soaked arm.
He went staggering sideways, slipping in the half-dried blood she and Dallis had spilled so thickly across the carpeted deck, and as he struck in vain at Thorne the Captain leaned swiftly forward across Iris' body and drove his straight blade half-way to the hilt between the golden links of the pirate's golden chain.
He did not die easily, Chain Lucas. Sprawled across the corpse of Dallis, he writhed and screamed, a hideous, bubbling scream of anger and fear. He clawed for the gun Thorne had dropped and Thorne pierced his arm to the bone. And when he managed to scrabble to his knees, still wielding the knife, the Captain stepped forward relentlessly.
"This for Banya Tor," he whispered. And Chain Lucas, once the Inspector-General of the Planet Patrol, died as he had lived, a renegade and a traitor.
Slowly Thorne sheathed his sword. He did not wipe it. He put his gun in the holster at his belt.
Looking down at the dead, he spun the jeweled dial set in his own massive golden belt-buckle. He lifted a tiny ball from the hidden compartment revealed by the opening and spoke wearily into the screen set in the polished sphere.
"You heard, Captain Bannerman?"
"Everything, Thorne. Everything." Bannerman's voice quavered and broke. "Unbelievable."
"I never thought I'd have to kill him." Thorne shook his head, "I never thought to see Chain Lucas dead at my feet."
"Where better?" Bannerman was more practical. "The Senator? Any hope, Thorne?"
He looked down at Iris. She was no longer beautiful, but her blood had doubtless saved his life. "She loved the romance of piracy, Bannerman. She's paid in full."
"I put her on the air, Thorne," said Bannerman, grimly. "Cut all telecasts from Earth to Pluto and every word went out crystal clear. The main bands are broken and the pirate cult forever discredited, Thorne. Lucas and his lieutenants wiped out." His voice thickened. "We can't give you a reward, Thorne. Not to you."
"I did a job. Not for reward."
"The Senate heard you, Thorne. Listened to Chanler and Lucas and the whole thing. The President called. The law's been repealed. You can go home."
"I don't understand, Bannerman."
"You're free of the ban, son. They say if you can cure yourself of the t'ang habit, as you just proved to every living one of them listening tonight, then they can cure the others who suffer with it. You lifted the law with your own hands, Thorne. You freed yourself. They repealed it not ten minutes since."
Bannerman's voice sharpened, rose abruptly. "We're sending ships. Hold the fort, Captain Thorne. You're an Earthman again!"
Slowly Thorne closed the sending ball. He stood tall and straight among the frozen and the dead. He was going home.