THE COMETEERS
1 The Prisoner of Phobos
Phobos spun on the time of Earth—for the ancient conquerors of that moonlet of Mars had adjusted its rotation to suit their imperial convenience.
They had clad its dead stone with living green, and wrapped it in artificial air, and ruled the planets like captive islands from its palaces.
But their proud space navies had been beaten and forgotten long before these middle years of the thirtieth century.
All the human islands around the sun were free again, and the youngest heir to the tarnished memories of that lost empire was a restless prisoner in the humbled Purple Hall.
Night was fading now into an ominous dawn, as the long crescent of Mars came up like a blood-rusted scimitar before the sun.
Beneath its reddish light, a glass door slid open and he came out of the towering central pylon into the wide roof-garden on the western wing.
A slight young man, he wore the green of the Legion of Space, without any mark of rank or service decoration.
With a frown of trouble on his boyish face, he paused to search the dark sky westward.
Another man in green burst out of the door behind him.
“Bob Star! Where—ah, lad, there you are!”
The older soldier of space was short and bald and fat, his tunic patched with the emblems of a long career but now unbuttoned in his haste.
“Can’t you wait a moment for poor old Giles Habibula?”
“Sorry, Giles.”
Bob Star turned quickly back, his thin, sunburned face warmed with a smile of amused affection for his panting bodyguard.
“I tried to slip away, but only for a glance at the sky.
Must you follow every step I take?”
“You know I must,” the fat man puffed.
“Hal and I have your fa-ther’s orders, to guard your life every instant with our own.
And the great John Star is an officer who expects obedience.”
“The great John Star!”
A momentary bitterness edged the young man’s voice, before he saw the other’s outraged loyalty.
“I suppose my father’s really great.”
He nodded soberly.
“I know he’s the hero of a terrible war and the owner of Phobos and my mother’s husband.
“But why must he have me guarded like a criminal?”
“Please, lad!”
Giles Habibula came waddling anxiously to his side, through the transplanted shrubbery that made the garden a fragrant bit of the far-off Earth.
“Perhaps your father’s sterner than old Giles would be, but he’s only trying to make a soldier of you.
And you know why you must be guarded.”
“For my own safety.”
His trim shoulder lifted impatiently.
“So my father says.
But I’m a graduate of the Legion Academy, with honors enough.
I’ve been taught how to fight.
Why can’t he trust me to defend my own life, like everybody else?”
“But the stake is more than your life, lad.”
Giles Habibula looked quickly about the empty walks, and drew him cautiously farther from the door.
“And your danger more than John Star’s doing.
It’s no secret to Hal and me that you have been named by the Council to receive your mother’s trust.”
Apprehension thinned Bob Star’s brown face.
“You mean—AKKA?”
His voice dropped with a wondering awe when he spoke of the mighty secret known by that brief symbol.
The most precious possession of the united human planets, it was a weapon of most desperate resort, a power so awesome that each legal keeper of it was sworn to reveal it only to the next.
“That’s your appointed duty, lad,” the old man was breathing solemnly.
“The noblest destiny a man can dream of—to be sole custodian of that great weapon, as your precious mother is.
It was the order of the Council that you be guarded, from the day you were chosen.
Hal and I are proud to serve you.
Why fret about it?”