Duomart, pinning her down, pulled out the gun, fired without aiming.
Quist reversed his direction almost in mid-stride. Dasinger fired
again, saw Egavine dart towards the lock, hesitate there an instant,
then disappear down the ramp, Quist sprinting out frantically after him.

A moment later he drove one of the remaining kwil needles through the
cloth of Duomart's uniform, and rammed the plunger down.

The drug hit hard and promptly. Between one instant and the next, the
plunging and screaming ended; she drew in a long, shuddering breath,
went limp, her eyes closing slowly. Dasinger was lifting her from the
floor when the complete silence in the compartment caught his attention.
He looked around. Calat was not in sight. And only then did he become
aware of a familiar sensation ... a Hovig generator's pulsing, savage
storm of seeming nothingness, nullified by the drug in his blood.

He laid the unconscious girl on the bench, went on to the lock.

Dr. Egavine and Quist had vanished; the thick shrubbery along the lake
bank stirred uneasily at twenty different points but he wasn't looking
for the pair. With the Mooncat inaccessible to them, there was only one
place they could go. Calat's body lay doubled up in the rocks below the
ramp, almost sixty feet down, where other human bodies had lain six
years earlier. Dasinger glanced over at the Fleet scout, went back into
the compartment.

He was buckling himself into the third salvage suit when he heard the
scout's lifeboat take off. At a guess Hovig's little private collection
of star hyacinths was taking off with it. Dasinger decided he couldn't
care less.

He snapped on the headpiece, then hesitated at the edge of the deck,
looking down. A bubble of foggy white light was rising slowly through
the water of the hold, and in a moment the headpiece of one of the other
suits broke the oily surface, stayed there, bobbing gently about.
Dasinger climbed down, brought Liu Taunus's body back up to the lock
compartment, and recovered the Mooncat's master key.

He found Graylock floating in his suit against a bulkhead not far from
the shattered vault where Hovig's two remaining generators thundered.
Dasinger silenced the machines, fastened them and a small steel case
containing nearly a hundred million credits' worth of star hyacinths to
the salvage carrier, and towed it all up to the lock compartment.

A very few minutes later, the Mooncat lifted in somewhat jerky, erratic
fas