and mores and resented interference from uninformed planet dwellers. For all Dasinger knew, their blue-eyed lady pilot enjoyed roughhousing with the burly members of her crew. If the thing wasn’t serious. . . .
He heard the man rap out something in the Willata Fleet tongue, following the words up with a solid thump of his fist into the girl’s side. The thump hadn’t been playful, and her sharp gasp of pain indicated no enjoyment whatever. Dasinger stepped quickly into the room.
He saw the girl turn startled eyes toward him as he came up behind the man. The man was Liu Taunus, the bigger of the two crew members . . . too big and too well muscled by a good deal, in fact, to make a sportsmanlike suggestion to divert his thump­ings to Dasinger look like a sensible approach. Besides, Dasinger didn’t know the Willata Fleet’s language. The edge of his hand slashed twice from behind along the thick neck; then his fist brought the breath whistling from Taunus’ lungs before the Fleetman had time to turn fully towards him.
It gave Dasinger a considerable starting advantage. During the next twenty seconds or so the advantage seemed to diminish rapidly. Taunus’s fists and boots had scored only near misses so far, but he began to look like the hardest big man to chop down Dasinger had yet run into. And then the Fleetman was suddenly sprawling on the floor, face down, arms flung out limply, a tough boy with a thoroughly bludgeoned nervous system.
Dasinger was straightening up when he heard the thunk of the wrench. He turned sharply, discovered first the girl standing ten feet away with the wrench in her raised hand, next their second crew member lying on the carpet between them, finally the long, thin knife lying near the man’s hand.
“Thanks, Miss Mines!” he said, somewhat out of breath. “I really should have remembered Calat might be somewhere around.”
Duomart Mines gestured with her head at the adjoining control cabin. “He was in there,” she said, also breathlessly. She was a long-legged blonde with a limber way of moving, pleasing to look at in her shaped Fleet uniform, though with somewhat aloof and calculating eyes. In the dim light of the room she seemed to be studying Dasinger now with an expression somewhere between wariness and surprised speculation. Then, as he took a step forward to check on Calat’s condition, she backed off slightly, half