The woman's voice trailed off. Then, after a moment, it rose again, with such violence the amplifier screamed protest.
"Don't you understand, you fool?" she cried hysterically. "If you come in now, Igor's willing to live up to his bargain with Mawson. But if you give him trouble, he'll kill you for the FedGov bounty. Only if he does that, then he'll have to murder me too, so I can't give him away to Mawson when he claims pushing you off was an accident, or self-defense, or whatever other story he decides on!"
Again, silence, broken only by the whish of blowing sand and the ululations of the wind.
The woman sighed audibly. "All right, Thigpen. Don't say I didn't try to give you a chance." Emptiness, defeat, had replaced the desperation in her voice.
The amplifier clicked off. A moment later a landing ladder ratcheted into view below the cruiser's cylindrical hull. A man with radiation-pocked skin and an ugly, livid scar down his right cheek appeared in the open hatchway and, locking his legs about the ladder's uprights, slid swiftly to the ground. Another man of the same hard-faced cut followed, and then another.
For a moment, the cold-eyed trio paused beneath the ship, adjusting breather-masks and checking short-barreled blasters. Then, spreading out, they moved warily towards the rock pillar behind which their quarry had disappeared.
Still there was no visible move from the man addressed as Thigpen. Swinging wide down the slope in a crouch, the scar-faced member of the searching party circled so as to approach the pillar from the rear.
A moment later his voice rasped through a hand-amp: "Rack the dirty starbo! He isn't here!"
Instantly, the cruiser's speaker clicked on again. "What do you mean, he's not there?" A note of repressed excitement echoed in Veta Hall's words. "He's got to be there, Igor! There's no way he could have broken clear!"
The scar-faced man laughed harshly. "That's right, lover-girl. There's no way. So don't waste energy hoping we'll miss him."
Now the landing party's two other members came abreast the pillar. A second hand-amp cut in: "There's a little cover over this way, Cheng. Maybe our boy snaked on over to the next outcrop."
The third man: "Well, you can't find him, can you?"