She leveled out on course with short jerky bursts from the various banks of tubes. Mury was doing all his own course-plotting now, and his teeth were sunk in his lower lip as he frowned at the charts and at the rows of figures that spun into view on the calculator. He was still correcting feverishly when the stars dimmed and space throbbed like a tympanum.
A voice clanged through the strobophones. "Shahrazad! Algol calling Shahrazad! Cut your drive to one vertical gravity. We will parallel and send a boat across. That is all."
Mury's right hand moved slightly on the sloping ledge and closed the throttle. The forward thrust again collapsed into weightlessness, and the Shahrazad seemed to hang motionless for a moment before the underdrive took up the load. And meanwhile the meters told their tale of the swift onrush of the great battle cruiser in whose forward sphere of exhaust gases they already flew. Across the starry sky ahead crept a vast belt of hazy light like a zodiacal glow.
"The Algol," said Mury musingly. "A stellar dreadnaught. They aren't sparing precautions...." Abruptly he dropped his right hand from the dashboard, grasped a sheathed wire that curved away beneath the radiodetector box, and detached it with a brisk jerk. The needles dropped instantly to a uniform zero. The chain of causation was complete.
So there was no warning of the approach of the spaceboat. It bumped alongside and grappled to the towship's starboard airlock a couple of minutes later; Ryd stiffened, drew a long breath, and held it as if he would hold it forever. Mury, hand steady, depressed the studs that opened the lock ... for the second time since the ship had lifted.
The man who came aboard, from the warship hanging somewhere out there among the stars, was the very avatar of the Fleet in that second decade of the ninth century. Incarnate in space-blue and silver stars, with smoothly smiling face, shaven with a more than military meticulousness, that radiated power and the confidence of power. Power flanked and overshadowed his medium-tall figure, in the shape of two armed robot marines. The eyes of the Panclast masked their smoldering lights as they met those beneath the winged officer's cap; but the latter, aristocratically bored, noticed little or nothing.
"You appear to have had an accident, Captain Yaher," said the lieutenant with unblinking calm. "We noticed from a distance that your undershell was badly scored as if by collision with some solid body. Unfortunately ... and remarkably. Is any of your equipment out of order?"
Mury shrugged without effort, jerked a gloved thumb at the dangling wire. The lieutenant raised narrow eyebrows.
"Damaged before you lifted?"