The Cinnabar's death knell was muffled now. Like a tocsin of the dead, it rang dully in his ears as he reached for the levers. But confidence returned as he felt the familiar handles beneath him. The life ship was complete, self-sufficient. Charts were reduced to a simple form, instruments were direct-reading, course plotting almost automatic, so that the commonest spaceman could navigate the tender at need. He had himself operated it during the Cinnabar's emergency landing a month ago.
He punched the internal-combustion engines into life, watched the generator output mount, then cut in a weak repulsion field. With a lurch the little ship tore free from its parent vessel and retreated from the long, gleaming shape of the freighter. He switched over to the space-induction field coils. Power thrummed in the depths of the tiny craft; it swerved about and obediently plunged ahead, fleeing the coming tragedy. After ten minutes at full field he turned it around and held it motionless in space with respect to the now distant Cinnabar.
The slim freighter, gleaming gold in the light of the distant sun, seemed to float upon a soft, star-sprinkled darkness. There was no trace of movement, although she was still flying, with untended engines, at three-quarters field. He bit his lips, waiting. Then, soundlessly, catastrophe struck!
From amidships flowered a terrible, consuming blossom of blue-white flame, a petalled fire that engulfed the Cinnabar from bow to stem and limned itself fantastically against the velvet heavens behind. Streamers of white-hot gas, sunlike in intensity, burst and flared in the brief glory of destruction, then as swiftly collapsed upon themselves, dimmed to the lesser glow of molten metal. The Cinnabar, a slender, white-hot needle, broke into a thousand dripping fragments, droplets of fire spattering the sky.
Akars chuckled uneasily, swore, rubbed his ear with the back of a hand. That was that. Somewhere in the swirling, far-flung wreckage he must find the tiny block of unbelievably heavy, practically indestructible Urulium, flung out of the shattered strong room which he could have penetrated in no other way. The explosion should have released the treasure and wiped out all evidence against him at the same time. Like the rest of his plan it was simple, direct, foolproof.
He flung the little tender back through space toward the glowing debris which now milled about itself, spinning about a common center. A few fragments had ripped free from the gravitational whirlpool of the rest. He dodged a piece half as large as the life ship itself. Red hot still, it swept past the port, more like a blazing meteor than anything, made by man. Past other wreckage he swept, evidence of the terrific energy of spontaneously exploded fuel—gruesome human debris as well as that of the Cinnabar itself. The temperature within the tender climbed slowly as it absorbed heat from glowing fragments outside. Uneasily he checked his own fuel refrigerator, turned thermostatic controls to maintain a lower temperature.
Something swept into his field of vision with startling speed. He ripped the helm over, swearing in sudden panic. The tender swerved, but not sharply enough. A grating shock, a metallic crash, told that the vessel had been hit. The jar of the concussion almost threw him from the control seat.
His temples throbbing madly, Akars waited for the dread hiss of escaping air, the drop in pressure which his ear drums would quickly detect. The tender was small; a gash in the hull plates would empty it of air rapidly.
But the pressure remained normal, and he relaxed at last, certain that the collision had done no more than dent the hull plates. He forgot the incident upon spying what had been the strong room door. Cautiously he worked the tender alongside it, scanning nearby debris closely.