Free Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster

And he couldn’t lead them there.
    There was one alternate possible happening, though. Haney might blunder within the distance in which the lifeboat could be seen visually. He’d not waste time demanding anything. He’d destroy the lifeboat while they did not even know he was near.
    Twenty hours after Dunne had cut off all contact with the cosmos outside the lifeboat’s hull, Nike said nervously, “Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm to look out the viewports!”
    “No harm,” agreed Dunne. “But very little good.”
    Nike went into the control room. She looked out each of the ports in turn. She saw nothing but the featureless dust-mist outside. Perhaps she could see half a mile, but she couldn’t tell. There was nothing on which to focus one’s eyes. The rings were unsubstantial. There was nothing real to look at. The haze was so completely uniform that the viewports might have been closed by blankets-lighted from behind-in contact with their transparent plastic. It was as nerve-racking as a blindfold would have been. It seemed that at any instant some dark shape must appear, swimming through the fog…
    She went back to the main cabin, shivering.
    “It’s—awful,” she said shakily.
    “You could get used to it,” Dunne told her. “You’re already used to things you couldn’t have imagined on the way to Outlook. The thing is, you can adjust—even to being scared.”
    She stared at him. “I can’t imagine you frightened!”
    “Say, uncomfortable, then,” he told her. “The longer we stay undiscovered, the better our chances of staying undiscovered. I think the odds are well in our favor, now.”
    She was silent. He looked at his watch.
    “In an hour I’ll try listening in on the universe,” he said. “If there’s nothing to hear, I think we can go about our business. We’ll have lost our trailers. And, as it happens, I think we’re not too far from where we’re bound.”
    “You mean we can go and get my brother?”
    He nodded. But he did not look at her. “We can try.”
    “And then—he can go back to Horus with me?”
    “If you want to try it in this lifeboat. I wouldn’t like to try it—without extra supplies. It’s a long run. A lot depends on how many crystals he’s found. The next pickup ship would be a better way to travel. I pretty well cleaned our account with the Minerals Commission to get this boat. If your trouble calls for money—”
    “I don’t know what it calls for,” said Nike unhappily. “I have to ask him.”
    Dunne nodded grimly. He began to pace up and down the cabin of the lifeboat. There was much more room here than in a donkeyship. But a donkeyship was built for highly special work in a highly special environment. The mining of abyssal crystals from their gray matrix required operations quite unlike the proper demands on a space-liner’s lifeboats.
    The hour he’d mentioned went by. It seemed to last for centuries. Then Dunne went into the control room. He looked out the viewports, without expectation. He flipped on the communicator. Moments later, he turned on the radar.
    He saw nothing but mist out the viewports. The radar showed nothing especially menacing. The communicator picked up only appropriate sounds, faint rustling sounds that came by short-wave from the sun. Small, crackling, crashing sounds considered to be lightning bolts in the atmosphere of the planet Thothmes. That was all.
    No. There was a faint series of sounds from the speaker. They weren’t drive-noises. They were musical. The effect was eerie. The sounds were barely audible, monotonous, “ tweet… tweet… tweet …”
    They stopped abruptly. Nike barely whispered. “That’s the same sound…”
    “Supposedly,” said Dunne, “it’s the noise of a gook ship, creeping about the Rings to spy on us men and snipe at us when the chance comes.” He added humorously, “Anyhow, that’s supposed to be the reason donkeyships sometimes vanish without explanation.”
    He felt a certain