Galactic Bounty by William C. Dietz Page A

sorta thing. Or, better yet, let's just put a torp in 'er."
    "Both your suggestions are tempting, Amos," McCade replied with a smile. "But the first would take too long, and the second would leave us with a lot of unanswered questions, not to mention some unhappy owners. No, I'm gonna have to board her."
    "We're going to board her!" Laurie said.
    "Right, boss," Van Doren added, eyes gleaming with anticipation. McCade sighed, and shook his head in mock exasperation.
    Half an hour later McCade swung open the hatch to Leviathan's lock.
    He paused for a moment, giving thanks that nothing had blown up, and then entered.
    Back aboard Pegasus, Van Doren sat stoically in his gun blister, eyes searching, finger on the trigger. Below him Laurie fumed at the ship's controls. Neither was happy. But in McCade's judgment anything else would be stupid. If there was trouble it wouldn't help if they all got killed. This way they could come to his rescue if required. Besides, it was a one-person job. Or at least that's what he'd told Laurie. Deep down, a part of him wondered if he was grandstanding. Trying to make up for his failure to think of the hyperspace shift. Pushing those thoughts aside, he opened the inner hatch. What he saw was not pretty. Three bodies lay sprawled in a jumbled pile before him.
    The first thing he noticed was that none of them were wearing armor. So the module had been pressurized when they'd come aboard. He checked for atmosphere and then opened his visor. A quick and unpleasant inspection revealed that none of the bodies were those of Bridger or Votava. There were two men and a woman. All three were dressed in coveralls bearing the logo of the Meteor Tug Company. They'd all been shot at close range with a small caliber slug gun. As far as he could tell they'd been unarmed. They hadn't been killed, they'd been executed. The coldness of it turned his stomach. Bridger was no longer a rational being. Any sympathy McCade had ever felt for the two fugitives was replaced by a hard knot of burning anger that settled in his stomach and wouldn't go away.
    McCade allowed himself to fall back into a fold-down seat. He couldn't take his eyes off the bodies. Why? It didn't make sense. He tried to imagine how it had happened. The tug routinely coming alongside. The crew wondering aloud about the missing cargo pods. The slight hiss of escaping pressure as the locks made contact and then opened. A murmur of conversation as the crew entered, expecting to find an empty module. Instead, what? A confrontation? Probably. Followed by three cold-blooded killings. There was no doubt about who had done it. Then what? Bridger and Votava had used the tug to place the torpedoes and then headed for Weller's World. A planetary tug couldn't take them much farther anyway.
    McCade fastened his armor, found a cigar butt, and lit it. The smoke helped to disguise the fetid air. His thoughts drifted back to the cockpit of his Interceptor. The image of a pirate ship sharp and clear in the old-fashioned weapon sight, his thumb on the firing stud, and two voices fighting to command him. The first a woman's voice, a pirate, pleading with him to spare her ship, swearing she had only women and children aboard. The second voice was Bridger's, hoarse from hours of shouted commands, ordering him over and over again to fire.
    The cigar butt burned his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it under his boot. He began to search the tiny cabin. Bridger and Votava had lived in the tiny space for almost two months. At some point the overloaded recycler had broken down and trash had started to pile up on the deck. Discarded clothing, rotting food and other less identifiable debris were all mixed together into an unpleasant history of their confinement.
    As McCade sorted through it in random fashion, he began to notice scraps of writing. Sometimes it was on common note paper, but more often than not it was on other things, the margins of pages torn out of operational