Bloodhype by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

spice all night. That led nowhere. One thing he was still certain of: Neither of the two men he’d surprised was a mad gourmet chef out for condiments, which would be the case if the green bottles contained nothing but spices. While attractive, the metal case was clearly in no way valuable—although alloys
could
be deceiving. Still, it was likely that whatever Rose was so desperately concerned with was tied in with those spices. If there were drugs present, he’d do well to stop tasting.
    There was another possibility. The “key” might contain some sort of coded message. Well, Rose could cry for that. Mal tucked the box under his arm. He’d give the stuff to Japurovac and see what she could come up with.
    He took a step to his left and several square meters of floor nearby exploded in haze and superheated dust. He dove behind the nearest stack of containers, rolled, and came up running. He dodged down canyons of mining machinery, around monoliths of fresh fruit, ziggurats of preserved fish. He knew what had happened. Clearly, the two thieves hadn’t been alone. The sore-armed escapee had returned with friends. No wonder he’d been willing to talk! Now he was out to see that his garrulity was rectified. Mal didn’t think he’d find the little man especially forgiving.
    Pity you’re such a peaceable chap, old man, or you’d be carrying a decent gun of your own. Still, the laser he’d borrowed was nasty enough at close range. He paused abruptly behind a far corner and waited. A dim figure came tearing blindly around the bulky equipment, gun at the ready. Mal hastily remembered to readjust the pistol for a killing beam, took careful aim, and fired. The red light cut through the man at waist level as though he was a cartoon drawing and continued past to sear a black spot on the plastic cases behind him. The figure looked down at itself for several seconds, dumbfounded, and pitched forward onto the ferroconcrete floor. Mal looked at the tool in his hand with more respect. It was a good deal more powerful than its size hinted at.
    Two more figures poured around the corner. They spotted the body and reversed their direction with admirable rapidity. They would move after him much more cautiously now.
    He ran again. Another pile of crates went up in crackling smoke far to his left. He had them shooting at shadows now. Sooner or later, however, someone would slip behind him and fire at a shadow that wouldn’t be so insubstantial. It was up to him to put that meeting off permanently, if possible.
    His knowledge of the floor plan of the great building was superficial at best. Ship-masters didn’t stoop to supervising storing procedure first hand. He knew that there should be several small personnel entrances spotted around the enormous expanse of metal and plastic, however. Warehousing permitted little flexibility in construction; they rarely varied except in size from port to port. The same lack of variance also told him that none of the personnel entrances would be left unlocked at night unless operations were proceeding. It happened that tonight the nearest new cargo was light-minutes off. He doubted that his pursuers would be so stupid as to permit him to slip unnoticed out the main entrance.
    Zig-zagging constantly, laser at the ready, he made his way unevenly to the closest section of wall. There was a door there, all right. It was locked, all right.
    He turned the laser to pencil thinness and began cutting around the circular automatic lock. If nothing else, that ought to alert the port police to the presence of intruders. Obviously the watchman had been taken care of. There was the chance that this alarm was tied in to the one at the main entrance, in which case it would have been rendered useless when the thieves cut the main one. Not that the police would arrive in time to save his own skin, whatever the case.
    It was slow work, damnably slow! The high-intensity pistol was built to cut packing plastic and maybe