The ship was ruined, if not completely destroyed. Heywood pushed aside the horrible steel-hard blobs of red which had been human beings with no apparent qualms, nor troubled himself that it had been he who had slain them all as surely as with gun or knife. With the bows crushed shapeless by the headlong smash into the asteroid and the stem blown wide by its own thermoblast bombs, nothing was left them but a length or two of warped and twisted main cabin hardly capable of retaining the Earth atmosphere still flowing through the tiny purifier engines he had seen to preserving. Cleaning out the unrecognizable dead, he rigged up a rough shelter for them. They had occupied it by now for over a week.
He kicked again at a rock, watching it spiral slowly up and over a crevasse in slow-motion. The jewels were still intact, hidden in the ship's safe. He had not risked her discovering him tampering with either, nor the safer course of destroying her as he had her companions. There was no assurance that another ship than Gion's rescuing craft might not discover them first.
That Gion would send a ship for him he believed with implicit faith, tempered by the knowledge that it would be the loot and not the thief that the powerful Marward coveted. He had no illusions concerning Gion, and so had survived. Thus, as he glanced skyward to see a tiny star moving perceptibly across the blazing night of interspatial glory, Allen Heywood flattened himself behind a huge rock quite as promptly as from the devil himself.
A blaster slid into his hand. The green eyes were intent.
The little ship was coming down.
The long blue glare paled across the unwinking stars and a red column of fire poured viciously from Kurland's ship, whitening to a rigid arc lancing into the broken rocks below. Eyes intent, the outlaw bent forward over his keys, searching the ragged terrain as he braked his easy dive. Then his firm lips thinned, cruelly hard in the thick beard masking his copper face. The broken ribs of the lost space-ship thrust up against the sun, half-hidden in the shadows of a stoney ledge.
Kurland shut off his drive, thrusting in breakers and snapping down his forward beams. The eight-man ship he had made known and feared through all the distant Jovian system drifted easily through the empty sky, feeling its way on walking tractor beams. The star-shine glinted on the black lines and heavy armament, hesitating to further lighten the dark menace of the craft.
A green beam lanced into a nearby crag, splitting it from top to bottom, and toppling it in soundless ruin across the crater floor. Nothing stirred about the silent wreck.
Lightly the ship touched the crater floor, rocking gently on its beams. A broad figure in black swung down and moved swiftly across the rock toward the broken hulk of the Plutonian. Heywood softly drifted into the shadows, floating easily from hollow to hollow, following.