Hideout — Text and Context

Those were the days when a man had friends--and now, all that Jeremy Cutlass had had, scattered as they'd been from one end of the Universe to the other--were either dead or sweating out their last days in the penal colonies of Earth or Mars. All except for old Doc Raven--and he'd be under lock and key too if the _Vulture_ hadn't been able to carry out Jeremy's dying command--to rescue him from the penal colony of Mars, regardless of the cost. The cost had been the last eleven ships of the fleet.

It had been worth it, yes. Not just because the conniving old toad was probably the best scientist Mars had ever produced, but because--

The intercom squealed frantically even as Cutlass saw what was happening in his own screen.

"Cap'n Cutlass! It's a trap, sir! I'm tracking Patrol ships from all points--"

There were at least 200 of them.

Even the Raven drive couldn't keep the _Vulture_ from slewing, losing some of her precious speed as Cutlass tapped out an unprecedented ecliptic-deviation and trajectory-variation pattern on the master control console.

A screen generator whined its overload as the Patrol ships got the _Vulture's_ range and pounded her with everything they had. This time, they were too many--and too fast.

"Run!" Cutlass howled to the drive-room. "Godammit, _run_!"

His eyes were hot and wet with the rage that rasped in his voice. No Cutlass that had ever buccaneered Space for four generations had ever given that command. But now the notorious _Vulture_, last of her kind in the Solar System, finally was forced to take to her jets or be torpedoed to cosmic dust like all the rest.

Two screen generators went to hell and plastered the control room with jagged shards of smoking metal. There was a searing pain in Cutlass' shoulder, and blood trickled the length of his arm and along his fingers as he flipped the ship's inter-teleco switches. Just a glance told him they'd gotten through the screens--the jagged, gaping holes in the _Vulture's_ ripped flanks told him he didn't have a gunner or a radarman left alive.

Damn them _damn them_....

He choked on the acrid fumes of the burnt-out screen generators as he fumbled painfully into a space-suit. Old Doc had bragged to him once that a man could travel the system end to end and back in a Raven-built suit--with a certain amount of pirates' luck, of course. Well, the Patrol wasn't to have Robbin Cutlass alive--

He was less than five thousand miles out when he saw the _Vulture_ die. It was a Viking's death--a great mass of blinding white flame which seemed to rip Space wide open for a silent, coruscating second--and then there was the cold darkness of any grave.

Pluto glimmered eerily a hundred million miles ahead of him. And somewhere, a half-light-year beyond, was Doc's old freighter. Doc, with his well hidden laboratory, circling away the last years of his life in the quiet solitude of Deep Space--all that was left.

Barrel-chested and heavy-browed like his father, Robbin Cutlass stood there, his space-suit crumpled in a heap at his feet, and looked about him. Doc had explained it to him, but he still was not sure he understood.

This was the freighter--or, more accurately, Doc Raven's great laboratory, suspension-built in the long, tapering mid-section of the battered, engineless ship which drifted silently in its dark, remote path around a pale sun. Only a scant five years ago Doc had been brought here following his costly Martian rescue, yet his equipment, which had been salvaged from a half-dozen hidden sanctuaries on as many different planets and brought here for him to assemble, had in that time grown to twice its original bulk. Sometimes Robbin thought of Doc as something less of a scientist and more of a wizard. It was often said, in the deadly seriousness that marked the spaceman's legends, that there is more to the Martian mind than a man of Earth might even dream of.

The long banks of control consoles emitted a blue-green glow of their own, silhouetting as they did the rows of relays, grid-circuits and reactor-registers.

Robbin did not know the little Martian scientist's source of power--but he knew that through this Colossus of engineering enough must pour to change the very courses of the planets in their paths, if Doc should will it.