Aladoree Anthar met him as he returned to the court, her face shadowed with worry and alarm.
“John Ulnar,” she greeted him, and winced at the name, “where are my three loyal men?”
“I have locked Samdu and Kalam and Habibula in the old prison.”
Her face was white with scorn.
“Do you think they are murderers?”
“No, I really doubt their guilt.”
“Then why lock them up?”
“I must obey orders.”
“Don’t you see what you have done?
All my loyal guard are murdered or locked up.
I’m at the mercy of Ulnar—and he’s your real murderer! AKKA is betrayed!”
“Eric Ulnar a murderer!
You misjudge———”
“Come! I’ll show him to you, a murderer and worse.
He has just slipped out again.
He’s going back to that ship that landed last night —to his fellow traitors.”
“You’re mistaken.
Surely———”
“Come!” she cried urgently.
“Don’t be blind to him.”
She led him swiftly along ramps and parapets to the eastern flank of the old fortress, up to a tower platform.
“Look! The ship—where it came from, I don’t understand.
And Eric Ulnar, your hero of the Legion!”
Age-worn precipices and tumbled red boulder-fields fell away from the foot of the wall to the lurid plain.
There, not a mile from them, lay the strange ship.
John Star had seen nothing like it.
Colossal, so vast it stunned his mind.
Intricate and strange. All shining, jet-black metal.
The familiar space-craft of the System were all spindle-shaped, trimly tapering; all of them silvered mirror-like to reduce heat radiation and absorption in space; all comparatively small, the largest liners not four hundred feet long.
This machine had a spidery confusion of projecting parts—beams, braced surfaces, vast, wing-like vanes, massive, jointed metal levers —all jutting from the hull, which was a gigantic black globe.
It was incredibly huge; the metal skids on which it rested lay along the red desert for a full half mile, the sphere was a thousand feet thick.
“The ship!” whispered the girl.
“And Eric Ulnar, the traitor!”
She pointed, and John Star saw the man’s tiny figure, scrambling down the slope—dwarfed to the merest insect in the shadow of that machine, so huge and strange and queerly black.
“Now do you believe?”
“Something is wrong,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Something… I’m going after him!
I can overtake him, make him tell me what’s going on.
Even if he is my officer.” He plunged recklessly down the stairway from the old tower.
4 Well, John, I Am a Traitor!“
The black mass of the strange flier filled the eastern sky, the central globe looming like a dark moon fallen in the red desert.
The black skids, lying for half a mile upon the debris of boulders they had crushed, were like tall metal walls.
In the shadow of that incredible machine, the toiling man ahead was shrunken to the merest human atom.
Midway to the black hull—almost under the top of the dark wing that covered an eighth of the sky—he still had not looked back.
John Star was within forty yards of him, breathing so hard he feared the other would hear.
He gripped his proton gun, shouting:
“Halt!
I want to talk to you.”
Eric Ulnar stopped, looking back in astonishment.
He made a slight movement as if to draw the weapon in his own belt, but stopped when he saw John Star’s face.