“We can step up the output—it doesn’t matter if they soon burn out.
Flash a distress signal.
Against the dark background of the desert, somebody would see it from space!”
“We’ll try that,” agreed Jay Kalam.
“Might not be a Legion cruiser, but it would have a transmitter to call one.”
“Ah, lad, what did I tell you?
What did poor old Giles Habibula tell you?
Didn’t a drop of wine sharpen your brain?”
When the green afterglow was gone, and the cold, clear dark of the Martian night crashed down on the red landscape, John Star was ready on the platform of the north tower, his pocket light-tube in hand, its coils rewound to increase its brilliance a thousand-fold.
Into the purple, star-shot night he flashed it, forming again and again the code letters of the Legion signal of distress. The tube burned his hand, as the electrodes fused and the over-loaded coils went dead.
But Jay Kalam was ready with another, its potential stepped up in the same way; he kept flashing the silent appeal for aid.
It seemed incredible to him, as he stood there, that Aladoree had been with him that morning on the same platform.
Incredible, when now she was lost somewhere in the black gulf of space, perhaps ten million miles away.
With a little ache in his heart, he pictured her as she had stood—slender and straight and cleanly molded; eyes candid and cool and gray; sunlit hair a splendor of brown and red and gold.
His determination to restore her to safety could hardly be less, he knew, were she just an ordinary bit of humanity, not the keeper of the System’s priceless treasure.
It was long after midnight when the last light-tube went out.
Then, until the lemon-green dawn, they waited on the platform, scanning the star-sifted purple, anxious for the blue rocket-exhausts that would brake the descending ship.
But they saw no moving thing, save the faint tiny spark of Phobos, rising in the west and creeping swiftly eastward.
Giles Habibula was with them, lying on his back, peacefully snoring.
He woke with the dawn, and went down to the kitchen.
Presently he called up that breakfast was ready.
The others were about to leave the tower in despair, when they heard the roaring rockets of a ship landing.
A long silver craft, an arrow of white flame in the morning sun, it dropped across the fort, pushing ahead the blue flare of its rockets.
“A Legion cruiser!” John Star exulted.
“The latest, fastest type.”
His blue eyes keener than they appeared, Hal Samdu read the name on its side:
“Purple—something—she’s the Purple Dream!”
“Purple Dream?” echoed Jay Kalam.
“That’s the flagship of the Legion fleet.
The ship of the Commander himself!”
“If it’s the Commander’s ship,” John Star said slowly, his high spirits falling,
“I’m afraid it won’t bring us much good.
Commander Adam Ulnar is Eric Ulnar’s uncle. The real leader of the Purples.
“It was Adam Ulnar who sent Eric on that interstellar expedition and Adam Ulnar who found that Aladoree was hidden here, and sent Eric to be commanding officer of her guard.
I’m afraid we can’t expect much but trouble from the Commander of the Legion.”
6 The Empty Throne
The four of them went out of the old gate.
Giles Habibula still eating morsels he had stuffed into his pockets, and down the red boulder slope to the Purple Dream, lying amid the yellow dunes of the sand desert.
Her officer, a man too old for his rank, thin and stern, with a jaw like a trap, appeared in the open air-lock.
“You flashed a signal of distress?”
“We did,” said John Star.
“What’s your difficulty?”
“We must leave here.
We have an urgent matter to report to the Green Hall.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s confidential.”
“Confidential?” the officer repeated, looking down with frosty eyes.
“Very.” “Come aboard, then, to my stateroom.”
They climbed the accommodation ladder to the great valves, and followed him down the narrow deck into his cabin.
Closing the door, he turned on them with sharp impatience.