Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Almost with the thought, she saw Wergard’s hand move on the viewscreen controls, and in the screen the area about them was replaced by a multiple-view pattern.

Nothing stirred in the various panels; no defense field was ablaze about any of the buildings shown. The entire great Depot seemed empty and quiet.

“At a guess,” Wergard remarked thoughtfully, “it’s hanging around the main building again now.” He moved back a step from the screen, still watching it, began to unfasten his antiradiation suit.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He glanced over at her. “Getting out of it. One thing these suits weren’t made for is fast running. I expect to be doing some of the fastest running in my career in perhaps another minute or two.”

“Running? You’re not—”

“Our alien,” Wergard said, “should take action concerning Volcheme’s boys next. But whatever it does, the instant we see it involved somewhere else, I’ll sprint for the control building. It may be the last chance we get to yell for help from outside. And I don’t want to be slowed down by twenty pounds of suit while I’m about it.”

Danestar swallowed hard. He was right. But there was something, a feeling. . . .

“No! Don’t go there!” she said sharply, surprising herself.

He looked around in bewilderment. “Don’t go there? What are you—watch that!”

His eyes had shifted back to the screen. For an instant, she couldn’t tell what he had seen. Then, just as the view began to blur into another, she found it.

Volcheme’s space shuttle had darted out of the cover of the main building, swung right, was flashing up a wide street toward the eastern section of the Depot.

“Making a run for the Keep!” Wergard said harshly. He fingered the controls, following the shuttle from view section to view section. “They might just—no, there it is!”

The great fire body—flattened, elongated—whipped past between two warehouse complexes, a rushing brightness fifty feet above the ground, vanished beyond the buildings.

“Too fast for them!” Wergard shook his head. “It knows what they’re doing and is cutting them off. Perhaps their guns can check it! You watch what happens—I’m going now.”

“No! I . . .”

Then at last the realization surged up. Danestar stared at him, completely dismayed.

“It’s a trap,” she said evenly. “Of course!”

“What is? What are you talking about?”

“The control building! Don’t you see?” She jerked her head at the projection field. “I said a section of the thing was splitting off from the main body! When it came out through the barrier again, that section wasn’t showing any shock effects. I saw it but didn’t understand what it meant. Of course! It didn’t come through the barrier at all. It’s still in there , Wergard! In the control building. Waiting for any of us to show up. There’re two of them now. . . . ”

She watched stunned comprehension grow in his face as she spoke.

The smugglers’ shuttle was caught not much more than a minute later. It had discovered the enemy between it and the Keep section, turned back. When the space thing followed, tiny bursts of dazzling white light showed the shuttle’s energy guns were in action. The fire body jerked aside and paused . . . and now the shuttle turned again, flashed straight at its pursuer, guns blazing full out.

For a moment, it seemed a successful maneuver. The great creature swept up out of the path of the machine, slipped over the top of a building, disappeared. The shuttle rushed on toward the Keep—and at the next corner a loop of purple radiance snared it, drove it smashing into a building front. The fire giant flowed down, sent the shuttle hurtling against the building again, closed over it. For seconds, the radiance pulsed about the engulfed vehicle, then lifted into the air, moved off. There was no sign of the shuttle until, some hundreds of yards away, the fire body opened to let the shattered machine slide out, drop to the surface of the Depot. Its lock door was half-twisted away; and Volcheme and his companions clearly were no longer within it.

To Danestar, watching in sick fascination, it had seemed as if a great beast of prey had picked up some shelled, stinging creature, disarmed it, cracked it to draw out the living contents, and flung aside the empty shell.

The alien swung west, toward the central section of the Depot, seemed to be returning to the main building complex, but then flowed down to the surface, sank into it and vanished.

Minutes passed and it did not reappear. Again the Depot’s sections stood quiet and lifeless in the viewscreen.

“It may be waiting for somebody else to break from cover,” Wergard said suddenly. “But you’d think the first thing it would do now is push into the main building and get its gadget! Volcheme must have left it there—the thing wouldn’t have slammed the shuttle around like that if it hadn’t been sure the contraption wasn’t inside.”

Danestar didn’t reply. Their nerves were on edge, and Wergard was simply thinking aloud. They had no immediate explanation for the thing’s behavior. But it had been acting purposefully throughout, and there must be purpose in its disappearance.

All they could do at present was wait, alert for signs of an approach on any level. She had discarded her antiradiation suit, as Wergard had done previously. The men in the shuttle might have gained a second or two of life because of the protection the suits gave them; but against so overwhelmingly powerful a creature they obviously had made no real difference. And they were cumbersome enough to be a serious disadvantage in other respects. If there were indications that the second energy body, the smaller one in the control building, had left it, Wergard would still attempt a dash over there.

There were no such indications. There were, in fact, no indications of any kind of activity whatever until, approximately ten minutes after it vanished, the big space creature showed itself again.

It was rising slowly from the ground into the square before the deserted main building when Wergard detected it in the screen. Then, while they watched, it flowed deliberately up to the building and into it.

And no defending force fields flared into action.

As it disappeared, they exchanged startled looks. Wergard said quickly, “Volcheme must have had the barriers shut off just before they left by the lock—so the thing could pick up its device. . . . ”

“And let them get away?” Danestar hesitated. There’d been talk of that before she escaped from Volcheme’s group. But she was not at all certain that the smuggler, even under such intense immediate pressures, would abandon his prize completely. The flight might even have been designed in part to draw the raider away from it.

“Otherwise—” Wergard scowled, chewed his lip. “Has there been anything in the projection pattern to show it’s split again?”

She shook her head. “No. But if you’re thinking it could detach a section small enough to get in through a personnel lock and turn off the building’s barrier—”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Danestar shrugged, said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell that, Wergard. I’ve been watching the projection. But it would be too minor a difference to be noticeable. It may have done it.”

He was silent a moment. “Well,” he said then, “it has the gadget it came for now. We’ll see what it does next.” He added, without change of tone, “Incidentally, it doesn’t have all of it, does it?”

Danestar gave him a startled glance.

“How did you guess?” she asked.

A half-grin flicked over Wergard’s tense face. “It’s the sort of thing you’d do. You’ve been hanging on to that valise as if there were something very precious inside.”