“Oh—you did it! Thanks! I didn’t believe that you—that anybody—really could!” Luda was almost hysterical in her joyous relief.
“Nothing to it,” Cloud deprecated. “How are you doing on the mopping up?”
“Practically clean,” Luda answered, grimly. “We now know who is who. Those who fought against us or who did not fight for us are, or very soon will be, dead. But the Nhalian fleet comes. Does yours? Ours takes off in moments.”
“Wait a minute!” Cloud sat down at his plate, made observations and measurements, calculated mentally. He turned on his communicator and conferred briefly.
“The Nhalian fleet will be here in seven hours and eighteen minutes. If your people go out to meet them it will mean a war that not even the Patrol can stop without destroying most of the ships and men both of you have in space. The Patrol task force will arrive in seven hours and thirty one minutes. Therefore, I suggest that you hold your fleet here, in formation but quiescent, under instructions not to move until you order them to, while you and I go out and see if we can’t stop the Nhalians.”
“Stop them!” Luda’s thought was not at all ladylike. “What with, pray?”
“I don’t know,” Cloud confessed, “but it wouldn’t do any harm to try, would it?”
“Probably not. We’ll try.”
All the way out Cloud pondered ways and means. As they neared the onrushing fleet he thought at Luda:
“Darjeeb is undoubtedly with that fleet. He knows that this is the only inertialess ship in this part of space. He wants it more than anything else in the universe. Now if we could only make him listen to reason . . . if we could make him see. . . .”