The Altar at Asconel by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

of ropes.
    “I don’t think you’ll have to beat the information out,” Spartak ventured. “I have some stuff with me which will probably make him talk a lot faster than that.”
    “Such as what?” Vix found a length of braided leather and a short flexible chain, and started to bind the man’s limbs.
    “I—uh—brought some medical things I thought might come in handy,” Spartak said, swallowing hard. Ever since his childhood, fighting and violence had physically upset him, and the glee in Vix’s voice as he proposed torturing the man to make him talk had picked up the backwash of the nausea from the drive and redoubled it. “I’ll go fetch it right away!”
    But first, he told himself, he’d better take a dose of something to calm his own stomach.
    He was at the door of the lower cabin, fumbling to open the sliding panel, when he felt the knocking beneath his feet.
    Astonished, he stared down at the flooring of featureless metal plates. The knocking came again, more vigorously, and his eyes suddenly spotted a small cluster of bright new scratches at one end of the plate on which he stood.
    “By the moons of Argus!” he exploded, and dropped to his knees to lever up the plate and push it aside.
    In the compartment beneath him lay the missing Vineta, a crude cloth gag in her mouth, her clothing torn and a huge bruise discoloring the soft olive skin of her right cheek. She was small and slender, but even so her assailant had had to cram her by main force into the tiny space under the floor.
    Frantically he lifted her out and set her on her feet; she stood for a second holding on to him, shaking out her space-black hair, then seemed to recover a little and letgo of his arm. He made to remove the gag, but she shook her head and tore it out herself.
    “Are you Vix’s brother?” she whispered. Her voice was pitifully hoarse.
    “Yes—yes, I’m Spartak.”
    “Is he—?”
    “He’s all right. He’s up in the control room tying up the man who attacked him—and you too, presumably. How did it happen?”
    “He had a message sent from the port controller to say he was some sort of official.” Vineta swallowed painfully. “And Vix had told me that on Annanworld they had lots of regulations left over from Imperial days, which we’d have to comply with or be delayed in leaving … so I let him come aboard.”
    She passed a weary hand over her forehead and then touched the bruise on her cheek, wincing. “Thank you for letting me out,” she whispered. “I was so afraid …”
    And she turned to hurry in search of Vix.
    Spartak watched her go. The rips in her costume exposed much more of her tight, firm body than he cared to see, and a completely irrational envy overcame him against his will, at the thought of the endless succession of beautiful women Vix had enjoyed and abandoned. Contrary to the assumption Vix had made, his order on Annanworld didn’t demand celibacy, and even Father Erton had kept up an association with a woman in the same specialization as himself, which had endured for almost thirty years. But his own two or three attempts to form such a relationship had foundered on his shyness and his reluctance to detach himself from his studies.
    Now, without warning, he found he was wistful, as if he had left some very important part out of his life.

VII
    T HE LAST thing he expected to find when he returned to the control room clutching his large black medical case was a full-blown shouting match. But he heard it even before he came in. Vix was bellowing at the girl.
    “You realize he could have killed me? You just let him in—opened the lock for him and let him in! You didn’t keep a gun on him, or anything sensible like that—oh no, you wouldn’t have thought of it!”
    “But you told me yourself we had to.…!” The answer dissolved on a high note which foreshadowed tears.
    “What conceivable reason could the controller have to send someone aboard before I got back?” Vix thundered. “I