He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and a
pistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple of
Oscar's followers, dragging him out, said:
"He's been sleep-gassed."
Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been on
guard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight.
I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been what
had gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weapons
on Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it looked
to me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used it
to knock out our guard. Taken it off his body I guessed. That crowd
wasn't any more interested in taking prisoners alive than we were.
We laid the man on a workbench and put a rolled-up sack under his head
for a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't think
we were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close to
my gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and none
of them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to.
The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any of
them. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hear
firing outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked my
handphone.
"We're in," I said when Joe Kivelson answered. "Stop the shooting;
we're coming up to the vehicle port."
"Might as well. Nobody's paying any attention to it," he said.
The firing slacked off as the word was passed around the perimeter,
and finally it stopped entirely. We went up into the open arched
vehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half a
dozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing.
"We're going up," I said. "They've all lammed out. The place is
empty."
"You don't know that," Oscar chided. "It might be bulging with
Ravick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down."
Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren't
running, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush by
starting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that I
wasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of us
went over and looked behind the bar, which was the only hiding place
in it. Then we went back to the rear and tiptoed to the third floor.
The meeting room was empty. So were the offices behind it. I looked in
all of them, expecting to find Bish Ware's body. Maybe a couple of
other bodies, too. I'd seen him shoot the tread-snail, and I didn't
think he'd die unpaid for. In Steve Ravick's office, the safe was open
and a lot of papers had been thrown out. I pointed that out to Oscar,
and he nodded. After seeing that, he seemed to relax, as though he
wasn't expecting to find anybody any more. We went to the third floor.
Ravick's living quarters were there, and they were magnificently
luxurious. The hunters, whose money had paid for all that magnificence
and luxury, cursed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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