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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
Spoor of the Bat by Arthur Leo Zagat is a thrilling blend of mystery and horror that plunges readers into a shadowy world where fear reigns supreme. In a city gripped by terror, a series of gruesome murders points to a creature of the night—a bat-like figure that leaves no trace except for the chilling spoor of its deadly hunts. As the body count rises, a determined investigator must delve into the darkest corners of the city and his own fears to unmask this terrifying predator. But as he draws closer to the truth, he discovers that the line between hunter and prey is perilously thin. Can he catch the bat before it claims its next victim, or will he become the hunted? This spine-tingling tale will keep readers turning pages late into the night.
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Seitenzahl: 72
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Spoor of the Bat
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Spoor of the Bat
Again the ray shoots out from the black tiger-shark—and catches the "Luna" square. The dance of death is ended.
CHAPTER I
I CAN shut my eyes and see my brother Darl again as he was on that flaring, riotous night at Nick's when we celebrated his first command. I can see the wide-shouldered, thick bulk of him, a strand of yellow hair across his brow, his broad-planed face flushed with the potent greenwine of Jupiter, square jaw outthrust, and gray eyes meeting mine in level challenge. His voice was a bit thick, but so was mine.
"I'll beat you to Calinoor, old socks, or split a rocket tube trying."
My head went back, and I roared with laughter, jeering laughter in which all the crowded, roistering room joined. Those bronzed young master rocketeers knew the absurdity of that defiance. At dawn we should blast-off for Mars, I in the Terra, he in the Luna, sister ships as like as two peas. Only superior spacemanship could give one an advantage over the other, and I had captained space ships for five years, while the ink was not yet dry on his master's ticket.
They laughed, yet I could see grudging admiration in their eyes. The gall of him, the consummate nerve of the bantling, they were thinking, and their hearts warmed to the cockerel.
I taunted him, baited him till his eyes slitted, and there were two white spots either side his nostrils. "You weanling!" I roared. "You squalling infant! I'll be rolling down the Sloora before you've shut off the refrigeration tubes in the Luna's skin. You beat me!"
Darl's hand clenched, and the glass that was in it shattered, tinkling to the floor. His neck, where he had ripped open his tunic collar, corded so that he had to squeeze utterance through his anger-white lips. "By Gemini!" he husked. "I'll make you eat that, Brad Hamlin. If the Luna is not first on Calinoor tarmac I shall never fly again. I dare you to say the same!"
That hushed the grinning listeners knotting close around us. It was life itself Darl proposed as the stake of the gamble, they knew, for to him who has known the exaltation of interstellar flight to be Earthbound is no better than to be dead. I slammed my fist down on the table. "It's a bet, Darl! The one of us who checks in last at Calinoor, grounds himself for good!"
A great shout went up, and they pledged our healths in greenwine, and Martian slota, and palate-searing lanrid smuggled from Venus, crushing round us with mazed babble of hour lines, ether eddies, meteor swirls, and all the manifold jargon terms of our craft. Then suddenly they were thundering the sky song of the rocketeers:
"Blast old Earth from under keel,
Shape our course for Mars.
Spurn apace Sol's burning face.
We're off for the farthest stars.
"The comets set our cosmic pace
As through the void we soar.
We've said good-by to the human race,
For we'll never come back any more.
We'll never come back any more!"
A roly-poly chap in cits leaned maundering on my table. "There's lots of 'em never come back, eh, captain?" He chuckled. "The best of 'em, too." His little round belly shook with laughter. "'Specially if the Black Bat gets on their tail."
I stared at him, slow anger mounting. What the devil was funny in that? But before I could say anything some one yelled, "Hey, Toom, come give us a song!" and he was weaving off, trolling some doggerel in a not-unpleasing voice.
"The piebald pony and the gaunt gray cat
Sliding down to Venus on a comet's tail—"
IT wasn't till almost time to leave for the blast-off that I could find chance for a whispered word with Darl: "Well played, lad! They're nicely fooled."
There was an instant's gravity in his look. "I'm not so sure, Brad. That bird in the corner—I've been watching him. There was an odd cast to his eye when we put on our act. Who is he, anyway?"
I reeled as if I could scarcely hold my feet and got a glimpse of the man he meant. A squat fellow, black-haired and swarthy, with an old blast burn across the right side of his face that had seared the eye from its socket. There was a sardonic twist to what was left of his mouth.
"Don't know," I answered. "First time here, came with Jack Nevis, I think. But he's got the rocket, with three stars—an old-timer."
"There's more than one old-timer gone wrong. And the leaks must be coming from somewhere—No; I'm not crayfishing! If either of us is yellow it's you."
I took the cue. "You unlicked brat! Say that again, and I'll turn you over on my knee and spank you."
He pawed at me drunkenly. "Can that big-brother stuff or I'll sock you. I'm a better man'n you in space or on er groun'."
Roisterers swirled between us, forced us apart. And that was the last I saw of Darl until—
Except for one more glimpse across the tarmac of New York space-ship terminus. The Luna was mountainous above him in the dim pre-dawn light. But somehow his tiny figure dominated her. First voyage or not, he'd take her through, I thought. He had been the aptest apprentice a space pilot ever had, had conned the Terra from Venus to Earth our last trip together with never a word of help from me, had made as pretty a spiral landing as ever I'd seen. No need to worry.
Unless the "Black Bat" swooped across his course.
The Black Bat was the only pirate the spaceways had ever known, his loot the concentrated wealth in solar dollars that once an Earth-month is sent winging from planet to planet to adjust the trade balances of the system's commerce. For two years now he had spotted, with uncanny prescience, the very ships secretly convoying the treasure, had appeared suddenly from the depths of the interstellar void, had made his raid and disappeared, leaving no witnesses!
Leaving no witnesses. For the Bat, having won his booty, pithed his victim from end to end and left it a gigantic coffin floating forever in the empyrean with its freight of frozen, changeless bodies.
That was the reason for the drama Darl and I had staged at Nick's. The I.B.C.'s fastest ships had succumbed to his unheard-of speed. He had darted in among a convoy of five Triplanetary Union patrol ships, smashed his prey, and was gone before they could bring their heat cannon to bear. Now the Interplanetary Board of Control was attempting guile to get the shipment through. And we had been chosen to work the trick.
Speed was needed, of course. And there must be excuse for it. So Darl had feigned himself a drunken braggart and flung the challenge at me, and I had accepted it, and all the system knew, or thought they knew, why our craft would be pushed to the uttermost getting across space to Calinoor.
Secrecy was needed, too. So neither Darl, nor I, nor any save one gray-haired man knew which chest it was of the twins in the Luna's chart room and mine contained the currency and which was an empty fraud. One of us should get through, one of us at least. There was a fifty-fifty chance of the plan's succeeding. A fifty-fifty chance for each of us that he live to reach Mars' treaty port.
CHAPTER II.
THE second Earth-day out, while Earth was still a shining sphere against the black of space, I was writing up the log in my control room when suddenly there was a click in the intra-ship communication disk. I raised my head, expecting some report from Jed Morse, my first, who was checking manifests below, or Grendon Elliot in the tube room. But it was neither of these who spoke. Rather it was a lugubrious voice that came from the disk, singing:
"The piebald pony and the gaunt gray cat
