here don’t know another thing except that I’m wanted, but we can’t afford to wait any longer. We’ll have to take them along. Get set to leave as soon as we’re inside!”
The eight men who brought him through the ship’s ground lock—six handling his stretcher, two following helpfully—were of Gull’s toughest; an alert, well-trained and well-armed group, prepared for almost any kind of trouble. However, they never had a chance.
The lock closed soundlessly, but instantaneously, on the heels of the last of them. From the waiting ambulance and a number of other camouflaged vehicles outside concealed semi-portables splashed wild gusts of fire along the ship’s flanks—then they were variously spun around or rolled over in the backwash of the take-off. A single monstrous thunderclap seemed to draw an almost visible line from the docks towards the horizon; the docks groaned and shook, and the ship had once more vanished.
A number of seconds later, the spaceport area was shaken again—this time by the crash of a single fixed-mount space gun some eighty miles away. It was the only major weapon to go into action against the fugitive on that side of the planet.
Before its sound reached the docks, two guns on the opposite side of Gull also spewed their stupendous charges of energy into space, but very briefly. Near the pole, the ship had left the planet’s screaming atmosphere in an apparent head-on plunge for Gull’s single moon, which was the system’s main fortress. This cut off all fire until, halfway to the satellite, the robot veered off at right angles and flashed out of range on the first half-turn of a swiftly widening evasion spiral.
The big guns of the moon forts continued to snarl into space a full minute after the target had faded beyond the ultimate reach of their t