He sat back on his haunches, getting his bearings. The night pressed against his eyeballs; silence rang in his ears. No popping of dum-dum fire was to be heard. Whether the raiders had won, or Cabot was still in possession of his ship, he couldn't tell. But the fight was over. X, himself, he realized, couldn't possibly have reached Jupiter yet. Even if he had been aboard one of the ships which had pursued the Nova out from Venus, a whole year must elapse before he could arrive. Then, if X's men had attacked the Nova, they had been planted here earlier and had been waiting in ambush. That meant X had been tipped off to the location of the hidden slave cantonment on Jupiter. Something brushed against Gavin's face! It felt like cold fingertips. Gavin's arms flailed the air in stark terror. He struck a soft, cold, hairless body. There was a barrage of half-human squeaks. The air was full of the fluttering of wings. Scavenger bats! Gavin felt a prickling of cold sweat break through his skin. He began to grope feverishly for the girl's body again, working outward in an ever-widening spiral. After an hour he had lengthened the radius of his search until he was among the debris of the cantonment. He sat back on his haunches, sure of only one thing. Nadia Petrovna was not there! The air above the demolished cantonment was thick with the squeaks and wing rushing of the hairless bats. A faint yellow glow heralded the dawn. If the Nova hadn't sailed, there was still hope. Gavin drove himself to his feet, prowled the debris in search of the road. He started hundreds of the half-human scavenger bats into whispering, squeaking flight, stumbled across countless bodies. The raiders had been thorough. At length he found the paved highway, began to follow it by feel. A wind was blowing across the road. Gavin had to fight it like a man fording a stream against a strong current. The light, though, continued to brighten until he could make out the trace beneath his feet. Then the towering bulk of the Nova loomed dead ahead. She wasn't gone! Gavin flung himself gasping on the ground, trembling with exhaustion. He rested only long enough to control his trembling muscles, then began to skirt the ship towards the blind spot in the rear. He stayed out of sight. He had no desire to be spied by a possible watch posted at the scanner. The disposal chute was just forward of the rear jets. Gavin reached it unobserved, as far as he could see, and began to worm his way up the inside of the tube like a climber ascending a chimney. He reached the lock and got his shoulder beneath it. The lock had been designed to operate in space where the pressure inside the ship helped seal it. Now, aided by Jupiter's dense atmosphere, he succeeded in prying the lock up and scrambling into the trap. Ten minutes later, he climbed out of the chute directly aft of the galley. The air was warm and light, bringing him the odor of cooking soup.