"All right, Kane! All right. The woman goes with you. But she stays right here until you've done a job on my batteries!"
"You win, I'm not arguing. Let's get it over with."
Haine led him out of the NIC room, and he could feel Deanne's accusing eyes at his back. She hated him now. He knew it.
XI
The thin disc shown weirdly in the light of the tortured binary, and Jon guided Deanne's suit-bloated figure up over its lip, then clambered to its sleek metal surface himself. It was a tricky business, without weight, and without sufficient handling knowledge of the alien-built power pack to attempt the delicate maneuvering required with it.
Together, wordlessly, they reeled in the cylindrical capsule which contained their tools.
A scant ten thousand miles off, B-Haaq waited in the Flagship. Waiting, Jon knew, for an element of Tinker ships to arrive and form about him in battle formation. And when they came. Yes, he knew what B-Haaq would do.
He looked back, and could barely discern the dark mass of Stine's great craft as it blotted out the myriad of stars behind it. Power against power. They would have to hurry.
He moved toward Deanne, and she moved away. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her to him, touched her helmet with his, and spoke rapidly.
"Keep your radio off, and we'll talk this way! Now do just as I say, and before you put me down for a sellout, work like you've never worked before! We may have thirty minutes—an hour maybe, before this whole system goes to pieces! And less than that before the other fireworks start!"
Then he was busy getting at the tools, getting at the heart of the Justifier.
Stine's men had messed it up pretty badly. B-Haaq's men had not made matters any better. The operation itself was a simple one, but there was so much to be undone.
Wordlessly, Deanne worked with him in the awful silence. He thought as he worked how ridiculous it must seem to whoever watched—two pygmies on the face of a mechanism hardly a hundred yards across, pitting their wits against a Nature gone mad—two pygmies, attempting to come to grips with an entire solar system! Working alone, in the cold and the dark, with only their helmlanterns to guide their eyes and hands.
Deanne worked smoothly where she recognized the few standard procedures that Jon employed, fumbled a little as he took shortcuts that she had never imagined possible. Yet somehow, he noticed, she managed almost to keep up with him, seemed to be following his thinking almost by instinct.
And that was about all it was that differentiated him from the standard ITA technician. Instinct; imagination coupled with it, and the knowledge that could only be learned by an ever-inquiring mind. Jon Kane. Scientist.
Finally, he touched her helmet again.
"That does it, girl. She's going. Within twenty hours the storm'll be over; within less than one, things will start taming down on the planets. And then we'll get your uncle to take us back to Sol system, and do a real job on the one there."
He saw her eyes widen. "My—uncle?"
"Yeah. Now keep quiet a minute. I—"
"Turn around, both of you! I want to see your faces just once more!"
Jon whirled. He saw Deanne shriek inside her helmet. At the lip of the great disc, B-Haaq stood, a hand-weapon in each gauntlet!
"I knew who they'd send, Master Kane! Did you think I would leave this little project all to you, and give away all the credit to boot? Stand still!"
"It's Director Gentech Starn who gets the credit for this one, B-Haaq! And I'm pretty sure, after seeing you in action, that he'll know, this time how to use it! Because he knows now that you can't do today's business with yesterday's tools and be in business tomorrow!"
"Damn pretty, lover boy! Is that the way you take other men's women, too?"
Damn him, Jon thought. Time's running out now. Running out.
"Suit yourself on that! I think I trimmed you good!" And with that Jon kicked viciously against the ponderous mass of the tool cylinder, launched himself straight at B-Haaq!
Two guns flared!
The twin beams flashed straight into Jon's flying figure, then bounced harmlessly into Space!
And then the two of them were drifting in the void, fighting silently and desperately for a death hold.
The universe wheeled crazily as Jon fended off the other's gauntlets as they grabbed for his tank hoses, and then he struck with all the strength he could at the fragile face plate. And was parried.
Then for a moment their helmets touched.
"You're a real jerk, Majtech! Why do you think I didn't take any of those guns with me from the Flagship's arsenal? Hell, there wasn't one in there that worked!"
B-Haaq made a desperate grab for the side-dog on Jon's helmet; caught it, began to twist!
Jon clamped the suited arm, held it ... held it, twisted his body. Then fingered the suit pack into blazing life, melting a horrible, gaping hole in the Majtech's suit!
For the merest fraction of a second he saw the terror stricken grimace of hatred and disbelief on B-Haaq's thin face, and then the interior of the helmet was a mass of exploding flesh and blood.
He whirled. Blasted recklessly back to the Justifier, almost missed; back-blasted, slid.
He grabbed Deanne about the waist of her suit, and then flicked on his space radio.
"This is Kane calling Stine! Kane, calling Stine! Do you hear me, Stine?"
His earphones crackled. "What the blue Jupiter is going on out there, Kane? Have you—"
"Stine, you're a real dumbhead! A real Prokyman bat brain! You should have learned better who to trust by this time! The girl and I have done a job for you out here. You'll never get it fixed now, not in ten million years! Sure, a system dies; it gives its life, but so that people like you can't make other people think you're God and enslave others like it! You're through, Stine!"
"Kane, you're going to die where you stand!" The earphones almost shook from their connections.
And Jon pulled at Deanne, pulled her prone beside him on the smooth metal of the nearly-flat disc!
"Shield your eyes!"
Every gun in Stine's batteries blazed. Blazed, and smashed inward in a blinding, coruscating sea of blue-white flame that for a moment seemed to rival Procyon herself! For silent seconds, the great ship seemed to devour itself in the pent up energies suddenly unleashed in a single hell-spawned torrent of fire from its erupting bowels, then it was no longer matter but a great wraith of superhot gasses fast dissipating into the dark of Infinity.
"Jon! Jon, darling—"
"It's O.K., princess. It's O.K. now."
"But you—"
"I fixed his guns for him. He made me do it, remember? Oh, I fixed 'em good!"
And then they both laughed. Laughed until the tears came, two pygmies in Space, two pygmies against a solar system of planets with a whole universe to hear them.
Then slowly, two fine trails of fire started toward a slender, streamlined shape that hovered ten thousand miles off.
Somewhere high above them, a Cepheid winked. Knowingly.