Then the Horus waited. She was twenty millions of miles from the planet Mekin. Bors ordered that for intervals of up to five minutes no electronic apparatus on the ship should be in operation. In those periods of electronic silence, his radars swept all of space except Mekin. He had no desire to have Mekin pick up radar-pulses and wonder what they came from. The rest of the system, though, he mapped. He found two meteor-streams, and a clump of three planetoids in a nearly circular orbit, and he spotted a ship just lifted from Mekin by its landing-grid. It went out to five planetary diameters and flicked out of existence so far as radar was concerned.
It had gone into overdrive and away. Another ship came around Mekin, in orbit. It reached the spot from which the first ship had vanished. It began to descend; the landing-grid had locked onto it with projected force-fields and was drawing it down to ground.
Bors growled to himself. It was not likely that this ship was the one he'd pursued, sight unseen, since the end of the fight off Meriden. But it was a possibility. If it were true, then everything that mattered to Bors was lost forever.
Then a blip appeared. It was at the most extreme limit of the radar's range. A ship had come out of overdrive near the fourth planetary orbit of this solar system.
Bors and the yeoman computer-operator figured its distance to six places of decimals. Bors set the microsecond timer. The Horus went into low-speed overdrive and out again. Then the electron telescope revealed a stubby, rotund cargo-ship, about to land on Mekin.
Bors swore. It would be days before this tub reached Mekin on solar-system drive. But it must not report that an armed vessel had inspected it in remoteness.
"We haul alongside," said Bors angrily. "Boarding-parties ready in the space-boats."
Another wrenching flicker into overdrive and through breakout without pause. The cargo-boat was within ten miles.
"Calling cargo-boat!" rasped Bors, in what would be the arrogant tones of a Mekinese naval officer hailing a mere civilian ship. "Identify yourself!"
A voice answered apologetically, "Cargo-ship Empress, sir, bound from Loral to Mekin with frozen foods."