The Cosmic Looters

There were places for four beside the pilot, spaced around the circular cockpit. Wyatt strapped himself into the seat nearest the girl. He imagined the take-off would be something special, and he was braced for it, but even the almost instantaneous transition from a state of sitting still on the ground to one of shooting straight up into the sky at a hell of a rate was hard to take. He jammed the gun into her back between the shoulders and said,

"Not too high. We're not going to Alpha Centauri."

"There are commercial air lanes," she said irritably, "and military air bases and radar installations, and ground-to-air missiles. Even in this ship I couldn't guarantee to elude every one of them."

Wyatt considered that, uneasily aware that his gun was now largely a bluff. He was not likely to use it on her, unless he wanted to come down a lot faster than he went up, and she would know that. He said, "All right, get up over the obstacles, but don't try anything too clever. I'm a pretty good pilot and I could gamble on flying this thing myself."

That was a flat lie, but he thought it might be worth telling.

The girl did not seem to be interested one way or another. The craft continued to go straight up, whistling shrilly as it went, and then it swerved around with surprising gentleness and headed east. Wyatt looked out the small double-sealed window beside him.

The stars blinded him. They had ceased to twinkle, and they had grown huge, and they had multiplied. The sky was no longer flat but deep and endless, so that even as countless many stars as there were did not crowd it. Far below there was a dark wrinkled rind like the edge of a round cheese, and Wyatt knew that it was the Earth.

It was the most magnificent sight he had ever seen, and he wished intensely that he was not seeing it. It was the final touch of insane reality that made the whole wild nightmare consistent.

"I was just lying there minding my own business," Wyatt said bitterly, turning away from the window. "Why did you have to pick on me?"

"You were obviously a technician, and it would require a technician to grasp what I had to tell you. The others seem not to believe even when they see."

"Others?" asked Wyatt startled by a new thought.

"Of course. How do you suppose we plan our attacks? How do you suppose we learn the things we must know, including enough of the language to be able to communicate with the people after the invasion? In the normal course of events I would have considered you an especially valuable find. The accessible ones have all been herders of animals or fishermen or primitive tribesmen or poor wanderers, who could not tell us much beyond their own language and their own calling."

"You mean," said Wyatt, "that if you hadn't decided to give me the warning instead, you'd have kidnapped me? Taken me—" he nodded at the window, "—out there? Or tried to?"

"Of course."

"Well," said Wyatt. "I'll be damned."

He was enraged, and more alarmed than ever. "Don't forget for a second that I've got this gun in your back."

"I'm not likely to," she said in a curiously calm voice. "How are you called?"

He told her.

"I am Brinna Halphard—Brinna the Dark, I think you would say."

It seemed a little ridiculous to say, How do you do? Wyatt grunted uneasily and asked, "Why the sudden friendliness?"

"I'm a soldier, and I know it is impossible to win every skirmish. I've learned to make the best of things."

"That's fine," said Wyatt, not trusting her for a minute. But he was curious. "Are all women soldiers where you come from?"

"As many as wish to be. There is no difference made between the sexes, only between individuals according to their abilities. There are many women in the task force—pilots, technicians, officers, gunners, ordinary troops."

"Nobody thinks a thing of it?"

"Why should they?"

Wyatt could not really think of any good reason, except that on Earth they did.

Brinna reached for a panel at her right side and started to open it.

Instantly Wyatt was alert. "What are you doing there?"

"You want to go to Washington. Unless you can tell me the exact coordinates yourself, I must have the computer work out a course."

"Okay," said Wyatt. "Open the panel, but slowly."

Behind it there was only a remarkable compact receptor-effector unit. "You see?" she said. "Now if you will allow me—"

He allowed her. He asked, "Do you have a chart designation for Washington already in that thing?"

"For everywhere in your world," said Brinna. "
Naturally.
"

A chill went crawling down Wyatt's back. Some of the larger implications of the situation were beginning to catch up with him.

Enemies had entered the skies of Earth, spying, charting. Enemies from another star, so far away that Earth had never heard of it. Earthmen had been kidnapped, the names of cities had been written down, plans had been made. And somewhere out there, in the immense black and fire-blazing gulf that surrounded Earth—not any longer as a protective barrier but as a pathway for invasion—an alien fleet proceeded on its way.

Wyatt stared in horror out the window and wondered how, even if all Earth's defenses were mustered, she could fight off an attack by an enemy so superior in technology that interstellar flight was a commonplace.

"Brinna," he said, "what—" He started to turn his head toward her and out of the tail of his eye he saw her hand move on the controls but it was already too late to do anything. The plane went out from under him sideways and the window tried to push itself through his head. Then he was thrown the other way with a violence that nearly snapped his neck. The seat belt cut into him and his arms flew out wildly. The gun was pulled from his hand as by a powerful magnet. He yelled involuntarily and then for the second time direction was reversed and his head slammed into the window again and all the stars went out.

When he came to he had no weapon at all and his hands were securely fastened to the back of the seat with his own belt. His head ached abominably. "That was a dirty trick," he said. "Now I see why you made that first turn so gentle—so I wouldn't know how fast this thing could maneuver at right angles."

Brinna said, "Would you have expected me to give you a performance sheet?"

"All right," he said sourly, hating her, hating the feeling of helplessness and disadvantage, raging at the combination of circumstances that had chosen him to grapple with a situation that no one man could possibly have handled. "Where are we going now?"

"Back to where I found you. You'll have to get to Washington with the warning some other way."

Wyatt groaned. "What do I have to do to make you understand? Nobody will believe a word I say."

"It's your world," she said. "I can do no more than tell you what will happen."

"You mean you
won't
do any more," he said furiously. "What's your game, anyway? If you really cared whether Earth is attacked or not you'd make sure—"

A pair of little blue lights began to flash alternately at the left of the control panel, accompanied by a shrill buzzing.

Brinna started. She said something in her own language that sounded like a curse.

"What's the matter?" Wyatt asked.

"Trouble. Oh, not with the ship, that's only the communicator." She put out her hand and at the same time she gave him a hard glare. "Just keep quiet. Don't say anything at all, or you may only make things worse for yourself."

She flipped a switch. The flashing and buzzing stopped and a man's face appeared in a tiny screen. Wyatt could not see it too clearly from his angle, but it seemed a not unlikeable face of which the chief characteristics were strength and a sort of inner weariness. The man spoke to Brinna and she answered him, and Wyatt could not understand a word of what they said.

Some part of the conversation seemed to concern Wyatt himself. He became more and more frantically uneasy. When the contact was broken and the screen was blank again, he leaned forward against his bonds and demanded, "What's all that about?"

Brinna nodded briefly toward the window. "Look out there." Her brows were drawn down into a black angry bar and she seemed to be thinking hard. Wyatt looked out the small window.

A second disc-shaped craft had joined them. It was about four hundred feet away, keeping pace. Even while he looked at it the craft tilted, showing a glowing pink center surrounded by the black outer ring, and appeared to shoot away into the starry void.

Brinna followed it.

Wyatt said, "Hey. You said you were going to put me off on the mesa—"

She shook her head. "Not now. That's Makvern out there, the good gray Makvern who would be suspicious of his own father. He knows you're aboard. There is only one place I can take you." She pointed expressively. "Out. If I tried to drop back down to Earth now I'd be in front of a court-martial before breakfast."

She turned to face him. It seemed that she had done her thinking, compensating for the sudden change in direction that Makvern's appearance had necessitated.

"Listen," she said. "I'm the only hope you have of getting back to Earth before the attack. If you tell anyone that I tried to pass on a warning, that one hope will be gone. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly," Wyatt said. He had been doing some thinking too. "I am also your only hope of getting a warning to Earth before the invasion, which you badly want to do not because you give a tinker's damn what happens to Earth, but because of the effect you think it will have on some deal of your own. So I guess in a sense we're partners, then?"

"You could say that." Her eyes were as bright and hard as two chips of blue stone. She was as handsome a girl as Wyatt had ever seen, and she scared the devil out of him. "Partners. Yes. But whatever my motives may be they do not concern you, or Earth. And if I do not succeed with my plan this time—" She shrugged. "There will be other worlds."

Wyatt said shrewdly, "They might not be as well able to fight back as Earth, though. We don't quite have space flight yet, but we do have nuclear weapons. Enough to give even your force a real jar. And that's what you want, isn't it?"

Her face changed slightly. He thought she almost smiled, in a wry unhumorous way.

"You're far too clever," she said. "Don't let your cleverness betray you."

"I'll watch it," he said, not feeling clever at all, feeling sick and agonized as the last thin rim of Earth dropped away out of sight and all of a sudden he knew that he was in space.

For one wild moment he thought, This whole thing is a dream, it happened too fast and it's all too crazy to be real, and pretty soon I'll wake up. But he knew it was not a dream. He was here, awake and substantial, and he was a captive, going with bound hands into an unknown void.

And going fast.