The Pirates of Ersatz Part 31

"Boys!" he gurgled. "He don't know what we got for him!"

One man looked up. Two. They beamed. They got to their feet, dripping jewelry. Thal went ponderously to one of the two owners' staterooms the yacht contained. At the door he turned, expansively.

"She came to the port," he said exuberantly, "and said we were wearin'

clothes like they wore on Darth. Did we come from there? I said we did.

Then she said did we know somebody named Bron Hoddan on Darth? And I said we did and if she'd step inside the s.h.i.+p she'd meet you. And here she is!"

He unfastened the stateroom door, which had been barred from without. He opened it. He looked in, and grabbed, and pulled at something. Hoddan went sick with apprehension. He groaned as the something inside the stateroom sobbed and yielded.

Thal brought Nedda out into the saloon of the yacht. Her nose and eyes were red from terrified weeping. She gazed about her in purest despairing horror. She did not see Hoddan for a moment. Her eyes were filled with the brawny, mustachioed piratical figures who were Darthian gentlemen and who grinned at her in what she took for evil gloating.

She wailed.

Hoddan swallowed, with much difficulty, and said sickly:

"It's all right, Nedda. It was a mistake. Nothing will happen to you.

You're quite"--and he knew with desperate certainty that it was true--"safe with me!"

And she was.

XII

Hoddan stopped off at Krim by landing grid, to consult his lawyers. He felt a certain amount of hope of good results from his raid on Walden, but he was desperate about Nedda. Once she was confident of her safety under his protection, she took over the operation of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. She displayed an overwhelming saccharinity that was appalling. She was sweetness and light among criminals who respectfully did not harm her, and she sweetened and lightened the atmosphere of the s.p.a.ce yacht until Hoddan's followers were close to mutiny.

"It ain't that I mind her being a nice girl," one of his mustachioed Darthians explained almost tearfully to Hoddan, "but she wants to make a nice girl out of me!"

Hoddan, himself, cringed from her society. He could gladly have put her ash.o.r.e on Krim with ample funds to return to Walden. But she was prettily, reproachfully helpless. If he did put her ash.o.r.e, she would confide her kidnaping and the lovely behavior of the pirates until n.o.body would believe in them any more--which would be fatal.

He went to his lawyers, brooding. The news astounded him. The emigrant fleet had appeared over Krim on the way to Walden. Before it appeared, Hoddan's affairs had been prosperous enough. Right after his previous visit, news had come of the daring piratical raid which captured a s.h.i.+p off Walden. This was the liner Hoddan'd brought in to Krim. All merchants and s.h.i.+p owners immediately insured all vessels and goods in s.p.a.ce transit at much higher valuations. The risk-insurance stocks bought on Hoddan's account had multiplied in value. Obeying his instructions, his lawyers had sold them out and held a pleasing fortune in trust for Hoddan.

Then came the fleet over Krim, with its letter threatening planetary destruction if resistance was offered to single s.h.i.+ps which would land and loot later on. It seemed that all commerce was at the mercy of s.p.a.ce marauders. Risk-insurance companies had undertaken to indemnify the owners of s.h.i.+ps and freight in emptiness. Now that an unprecedented pirate fleet ranged and doubtless ravaged the skyways, the insurance companies ought to go bankrupt. Owners of stock in them dumped it at any price to get rid of it. In accordance with Hoddan's instructions, though, his lawyers had faithfully if distastefully bought it in. To use up the funds available, they had to buy up not only all the stock of all the risk-insurance companies of Krim, but all stock in all off-planet companies owned by investors on Krim.

Then time pa.s.sed, and s.h.i.+ps in s.p.a.ce arrived unmolested in port. Cargoes were delivered intact. Insurers observed that the risk-insurance companies had not collapsed and could still pay off if necessary. They continued their insurance. Risk companies appeared financially sound once more. They had more business than ever, and no more claims than usual. Suddenly their stocks went up--or rather, what people were willing to pay for them went up, because Hoddan had forbidden the sale of any stock after the pirate fleet appeared.

Now he asked hopefully if he could reimburse the owners of the s.h.i.+p he'd captured off Walden. He could. Could he pay them even the profit they'd have made between the loss of their s.h.i.+p and the arrival of a replacement? He could. Could he pay off the s.h.i.+ppers of Rigellian furs and jewelry from the Cetis stars, and the owners of the bulk _melacynth_ that had brought so good a price on Krim? He could. In fact, he had. The insurance companies he now owned lock, stock, and barrel had already paid the claims on the s.h.i.+p and its cargo, and it would be rather officious to add to that reimburs.e.m.e.nt.

Hoddan was abruptly appalled. He insisted on a bonus being paid, regardless, which his lawyers had some trouble finding a legal fiction to fit. Then he brooded over his position. He wasn't a business man. He hadn't expected to make out so well. He'd thought to have to labor for years, perhaps, to make good the injury he'd done the s.h.i.+p owners and merchants in order to help the emigrants from Colin. But it was all done, and here he was with a fortune and the framework of a burgeoning financial empire. He didn't like it.

Gloomily, he explained matters to his attorneys. They pointed out that he had a duty, an obligation, from the nature of his unexpected success.

If he let things go, now, the currently thriving business of risk insurance would return to its former unimportance. His companies had taken on extra help. More bookkeepers and accountants worked for him this week than last. More mail clerks, secretaries, janitors and scrubwomen. Even more vice presidents! He would administer a serious blow to the economy of Krim if he caused a slackening of employment by letting his companies go to pot. A slackening of employment would cause a drop in retail trade, an increase in inventories, a depression in industry....

Hoddan thought gloomily of his grandfather. He'd written to the old gentleman and the emigrant fleet would have delivered the letter. He couldn't disappoint his grandfather!

He morbidly accepted his attorneys' advice, and they arranged immediately to take over the forty-first as well as the forty-second and-third floors of the building their offices were in. Commerce would march on.

And Hoddan headed for Darth. He had to return his crew, and there was something else. Several something elses. He arrived in that solar-system and put his yacht in a search-orbit, listening for the call-signal the s.p.a.ceboat should give for him to home on. He found it, deep within the gravity-field of Darth. He maneuvered to come alongside, and there was blinding light everywhere. Alarms rang. Lights went out. Instruments registered impossibilities, the rockets fired crazily, and the whole s.h.i.+p reeled. Then a voice roared out of the communicator:

"_Stand and deliver! Surrender and y'll be allowed to go to ground. But if y'even hesitate I'll hull ye and heave ye out to s.p.a.ce without a s.p.a.cesuit!_"

Hoddan winced. Stray sparks had flown about everywhere inside the s.p.a.ce yacht. A ball lightning bolt, even of only warning size, makes things uncomfortable when it strikes. Hoddan's fingers tingled as if they'd been asleep. He threw on the transmitter switch and said annoyedly:

"h.e.l.lo, grandfather. This is Bron. Have you been waiting for me long?"

He heard his grandfather swear disgustedly. Not long later, a badly battered, blackened, scuffed old s.p.a.cecraft came rolling up on rocket-impulse and stopped with a billowing of rocket fumes. Hoddan threw a switch and used the landing grid field he'd used on Walden in another fas.h.i.+on. The s.h.i.+ps came together with fine precision, lifeboat-tube to lifeboat-tube. He heard his grandfather swear in amazement.

"That's a little trick I worked out, grandfather," said Hoddan into the transmitter. "Come aboard. I'll pa.s.s it on."

His grandfather presently appeared, scowling and suspicious. His eyes shrewdly examined everything, including the loot tucked in every available s.p.a.ce. He snorted.

"All honestly come by," said Hoddan morbidly. "It seems I've got a license to steal. I'm not sure what to do with it."

His grandfather stared at a placard on the wall. It said archly: "_Remember! A Lady is Present!_" Nedda had put it up.

"Hm-m-m!" said his grandfather. "What's a woman doing on a pirate s.h.i.+p?

That's what your letter talked about!"

"They get on," said Hoddan, wincing, "like mice. You've had mice on a s.h.i.+p, haven't you? Come in the control room and I'll explain."

He did explain, up to the point where his arrangements to pay back for a s.h.i.+p and cargo he'd given away turned into a runaway success, and now he was responsible for the employment of innumerable bookkeepers and clerks and such in the insurance companies he'd come to own. There was also the fact that as the emigrant fleet went on, some fifty more planets in all would require the attention of pirate s.h.i.+ps from time to time, or there would be disillusionment and injury to the economic system.

"Organization," said his grandfather, "does wonders for a tender conscience like you've got. What else?"

Hoddan explained the matter of his Darthian crew. Don Loris might affect to consider them disgraced because they hadn't cut his throat.

Hoddan had to take care of the matter. And there was Nedda.... Fani came into the story somehow, too. Hoddan's grandfather grunted, at the end.

"We'll go down and talk to this Don Loris," he said pugnaciously. "I've dealt with his kind before. While we're down, your Cousin Oliver'll take a look at this new grid-field job. We'll put it on my s.h.i.+p. Hm-m-m--how about the time down below? Never land long after daybreak. Early in the morning, people ain't at their best."

Hoddan looked at Darth, rotating deliberately below him.

"It's not too late, sir," he said. "Will you follow me down?"

His grandfather nodded briskly, took another comprehensive look at the loot from Walden, and crawled back through the tube to his own s.h.i.+p.

So it was not too long after dawn, in that time-zone, when a sentry on the battlements of Don Loris' castle felt a shadow over his head. He jumped a foot and stared upward. Then his hair stood up on end and almost threw his steel helmet off. He stared, unable to move a muscle.

There was a s.h.i.+p above him. It was not a large s.h.i.+p, but he could not judge of such matters. It was not supported by rockets. It should have been falling horribly to smash him under its weight. It wasn't. Instead, it floated on with very fine precision, like a s.h.i.+p being landed by grid, and settled delicately to the ground some fifty yards from the base of the castle wall.

Immediately thereafter there was a muttering roar. It grew to a howl--a bellow; it became thunder. It increased from that to a noise so stupendous that it ceased altogether to be heard, and was only felt as a deep-toned battering at one's chest. When it ended there was a second s.h.i.+p resting in the middle of a very large scorched place close by the first.

Neither of these s.h.i.+ps was a s.p.a.ceboat. The silently landed vessel, which was the smaller of the two, was several times the sizes of the only s.p.a.cecraft ever seen on Darth outside the s.p.a.ceport. Its design was somehow suggestive of a yacht. The other, larger, s.h.i.+p was blunt and soiled and s.p.a.ce-worn, with patches on its plating here and there.