She rose from the table and prepared to leave. That consisted mainly of removing the warm velveen clothing which would no longer be needed when she went on power. She walked through the cabin and paused, looking at the bow Holm had made her. It was a handsome piece of work, and she was tempted to take it and a few arrows along as mementos.
Well, why not? If Marvis Jans were still around, she wanted to lead her away, didn't she? The extra mass of the bow ought to slow her just enough to keep Marvis from growing quickly discouraged. She slung it across her shoulder and tied the quiver of six arrows to her belt.
Gweanvin stepped outside, took a final glance around, then semi-inerted and activated her propulsion field. Rapidly she soared up into the clear morning sky, lifting directly away from the planet, enjoying the physical comfort of having all her life-support systems going again and the freedom of motion which could come no other way.
Her detectors showed a spot of activity off to the southeast . . . the settlement of Lopat, she guessed. Nothing showed at High Pines; none of the few possessors of life-support systems there were using them at the moment.
There were no signs of pursuit yet. She had not expected anything this quickly. Marvis might well have stationed herself near Arbora by this time, working on the assumption that if Gweanvin were still in the Independency at all, it was because she was on a planet where a recharge was hard to find. In short, on Arbora. But Marvis wouldn't be on the ground. She would be in space, ready to pounce on Gweanvin when she emerged from the atmosphere.
Gweanvin hoped she would be waiting for her. That would save the trouble of buzzing every planet in the Independency looking for her.
Soon she had cleared the atmosphere, and immediately went into warp toward an opening in the gas clouds that led into the Commonality. Within two minutes she was sure Marvis had not picked her up.
She frowned in thought. Was it really worthwhile to search the Independency for Marvis, when the Lontastan agent might even have given up the chase by now and returned home? Or, if not that, might be waiting in ambush at one of the warpshift points in the cloud crevice ahead?
It was not, she decided. If Marvis wasn't hanging around Arbora itself, what chance was there that she would encounter someone who would say, "Hey, I know a guy with a nose just like yours"? Almost no chance at all.
So the only real risk was that Marvis was near Arbora, but Gweanvin's quick departure had caught her napping. Or perhaps the planet had been between them and had blocked out detection.
Well, that possibility could be checked out quickly.
Gweanvin reversed warp and went back to the Arbora system, overshooting the planet some thirty thousand miles. She had departed from the early-morning side, and now she hung over the early-evening side, studying her detector-screen.
Nobody was on power anywhere in nearby space. The only flickers came from the planet itself, and not many of those. Only one of those flickers was dopplering, indicating a person moving upward through the atmosphere. Marvis Jans? Hardly likely.
Gweanvin hesitated. Was there anything else to do before heading home? Well . . . not really. There came a time when the best thing to do was leave well enough alone and—
The dopplering spot on her screen flicked off, and Marvis Jans emerged from miniwarp less than fifty yards away. Before Gweanvin had time to react, the Lontastan fired her zerburst pistol.
An intense pain lanced through Gweanvin's left hip. She warped hurriedly, and the purring voice of Marvis came through the comm receiver in her left ear.
"Dear little Gweanny! Did I give you a nasty old hole in the hip? I'll try to do better next time!"
Gweanvin was busy shifting warp vectors, paying no heed to the diminishing pain in her hip. The maintenance units of her life-support system were already at work on the wound. Localized intensity of her countervac pressor screen had halted the bleeding almost as soon as it began, and within seconds internal reagents were forming walls of pseudo-tissues to contain organ ruptures for the hour or so that would pass before normal healing processes could replace them.
If, of course, she lived that long.
The zerburst beam had passed too close to her transport packet implant. The device itself had not been hit, but from the way it was malfunctioning she knew it had been heavily ionized. That was a self-correcting problem . . . given time. But for the present she was warping with the speed of a three-hundred pounder, and her miniwarps were breaking short of her projected exit points.
She couldn't outrun Marvis in this condition!
"I'm really sorry this has to be curtains for you, Gweanny," came the older woman's voice. "If I had a suitable alternative—but I don't. You're just too tricky to take chances with, dear. So . . . happy re-embodiment."
Gweanvin guessed Marvis' regrets were sincere. Even frontliners hated to kill without ample reason. And Marvis knew she would be destroying half the female population of her own species. But Gweanvin could see her point. A Primgranese agent who had gained such vital information as she about Lontastan plans for expanding Monte's sphere of dominance could not be allowed to return home.
She continued miniwarping frantically, knowing Marvis would catch up with her quickly during any warp of more than a few second's duration. They were still in the system of Arbora, zig-zagging outward toward a type-J gas giant.
The failure of Marvis to kill her with that first shot was not due to lack of deadly intent. It came instead from Marvis having to warp in close enough to identify her quarry by sight, much too close for a zerburst flare. A zerburst pistol emitted a thin pencil of extremely intense light, so intense as to drill a hole through almost any substance it struck. Its intensity also created a linear warp along its length, resulting in trailing portions of the beam propagating more rapidly than the leading portions. When the back end caught up with the front, and the beam had theoretically no length at all, it became an unsustainable singularity that broke up in an instantaneous release of all its concentrated energy. That was the flare.
The more intense the beam, the quicker and closer the flare would be. But a pistol could not be so powerful as to produce a flare only a few yards from its muzzle, and in any event such a flare would vaporize the shooter as well as the target. So the worst Marvis could do to Gweanvin at recognition distance was drill a quarter-inch hole through her, without time to aim and make that hole deadly before Gweanvin reacted and warped away.
But now that the chase was on, the pistol would be more in the situation for which it was intended. Marvis could set the weapon's intensity to flare at a certain range, then bide her time until she maneuvered herself to precisely that distance from Gweanvin.
Perhaps, thought Gweanvin, if I can circle behind that gas giant I can lose her long enough to—
But again she dropped out of miniwarp too quickly. The condition of her transport packet wasn't improving. She caught a flashing glimpse of a large object off to her left and with no hesitation warped to put it between herself and her pursuer.
This time she had allowed properly for her malfunctioning implant. Her warp exit was less than half a mile above the surface of the object, one of the gas giant's airless minor moons. Immediately she went full inert, killing all power consumption except for pressor field and detector. An instant later the detector screen showed the spot that was Marvis flash quickly on and off several hundred miles up as the Lontastan agent jumped around searching for her. Gweanvin, under the gravitational attraction of the moonlet, drifted slowly to the ground.
"Very bright of you, Gweanny, dear," came the voice of Marvis. "Taking cover could add whole minutes to your life-expectancy."
Which was accurate enough, Gweanvin supposed, as she touched ground feet first with an experienced knee-jiggle to prevent bouncing. All Marvis had to do was close in on the surface to a range where Gweanvin would be detectable, despite low-power usage, and circle on semi-inert until she spotted her target.
Gweanvin looked around for shelter, but saw no good hiding-place, no hole to crawl into. A rill-cliff, its top in sunlight and its base in deep shadow, was the best cover she could find. A few long leaps brought her into the shadow where she stood, back to the cliff, watching her detection screen.
A hell of a way to be caught, weaponless and with a loused-up transport implant, she told herself bitterly.
Weaponless?
* * *
She swung her bow off her shoulder and gave the string a testing tug. Surprisingly, the wood responded normally, as if it had been treated in the manner of professionally made bows against deterioration in vacuum. She wondered fleetingly how Holm had come to anti-space the wood, but this was a bit of luck too good to question.
She fitted an arrow to the bow and held the weapon ready, making sure that more arrows were poking handily out of the quiver for quick drawing.
A ludicrous situation . . . pitting a bow against a zerburst pistol. She snickered grimly at the thought. Why, Marvis could fire, miniwarp, and fire again while a single arrow was crawling its way toward her original position!
But if she could score a hit, the arrow would penetrate the agent's defensive screen. Though an arrow was light in weight, it still packed a lot of mass in relation to the size of its penetrating tip. More than a bullet did, or many other far more sophisticated projectiles that defensive screens were designed to stop. Its relatively low speed in effect would "fool" the screens into treating it as a minor threat, since the screen could not see all that inert mass behind it.
However, the only possible advantage she could expect from an on-target arrow was one of surprise, in that Marvis would not expect her to have any weapon at all . . .
And there was Marvis! She came into view and into detection at the same time, flying slowly over the top of the cliff and not far to Gweanvin's left.
Gweanvin raised the bow, drawing back the string, and released. Without waiting to see the results, and while Marvis spotted her and aimed her zerburst pistol, Gweanvin miniwarped right up from the surface to a point fifty feet above her enemy. There she went on inert propulsion and drove straight down at Marvis. There was a slight jar when her shield screen banged into that of the semi-inert Lontastan, and a bruising jar when her impetus slammed both of them down on the rocky moonlet, with Marvis on the bottom. A shield screen had to flex under such punishment.