His two companions did not even seem to be armed. They just stood quietly watching the executive officers die. They died on the launching platform and on the smooth deck beyond, two of them simply dropping in their tracks, a third sprawling grotesquely, and the last staggering on for a few paces. There were four executive officers, and not one escaped. It was butchery, pure and simple, cruel, savage beyond belief.
Helen Ramsey was already on the ship, and there was no possible way for him to get her off.
The thought that he was himself in the deadliest kind of danger never even crossed his mind.
The killer returned his gun to its holster very slowly and deliberately, and then he took it out again. It was a very strange gesture, when every passing second must have been of vital importance to him, but it revealed something very unusual about the man. He evidently liked to feel that he had completed one job and packaged it to his entire satisfaction, before going on to another.
It was that more than anything else which jolted Corriston into complete awareness, and made it impossible for him to doubt the reality, the utter horror, of what had taken place. The killer had gestured to his companions, and he was coming up the ramp.
He came slowly up the ramp, and for the first time Corriston saw his face. It was not a face that he would ever forget or ever want to forget. It was the face of the man he had grappled with in the dark and seen once in the light. But now his features were turned away. It was exactly the kind of face which Corriston had pictured him as having, except that it was just a little uglier looking. The slant of the cheekbones even crueler, harsher, the eyes more venomously narrowed, the mouth an uglier gash.
"All right, Lieutenant," he said, gesturing with the gun. "Go on ahead. Go on board. We're going to need you to help pilot this ship to Mars."
14
The silence in the chart room was like the hush that comes over a desert when hurricane winds have died down, or like the stillness of a rocky coast when waves have ceased to pound, and dangerous rocks stand out with all of their saw-edged teeth exposed.