Cruel, jutting ridges of red volcanic rock, projecting from yellow sand like broken fangs.
Solitary boulders, carved by pitiless, wind-driven sand into grotesque scarlet monsters.
Crouching above the plain were the hills.
Low, ancient, worn down by erosion of ages immemorial, like all the mountains of dying Mars.
Tumbled masses of red stone; broken palisades of red-black, columnar rock; ragged, wind-carved precipices.
Sprawling across the hill-top was an ancient, half-ruined fort.
Massive walls rambled along the rim of the precipices, studded here and there with square, heavy towers.
It was all of the red volcanic stone characteristic of the Martian desert, all crumbling to slow ruin.
The fortress must date, John Star knew, from the conquest of the weird, silica-armored Martians.
It must have been abandoned a full three centuries ago.
But it was not now deserted.
A sentry met them when they climbed to the gate, a very fat, short, blue-nosed man in Legion uniform, who had been dozing lazily on a bench in the warm sunlight.
He examined Eric Dinar’s documents with a fishy eye.
“Ah, so you’re the relief guard?” he wheezed. “
‘Tis mortal seldom we see a living being, here.
Pass on, inside.
Captain Otan is in his quarters beyond the court.”
Within the crumbling red walls they found a large, open court, surrounded with a gallery, many doors and windows opening upon it.
A tiny fountain played in a little garden of vivid flowers.
Beyond was a tennis court, from which a man and a slender girl vanished hastily as they entered.
John Star’s heart leaped with excitement at sight of the girl.
She must be, he felt immediately certain, keeper of the mysterious AKKA.
She was the girl he had been ordered to guard!
Recalling Major Stell’s warning of desperate, unknown enemies anxious to seize her, John Star had a pang of apprehension.
The old fort was no real defense; it was no more than a dwelling.
There were, he soon found, only eight men to guard her, all told.
They were armed only with hand proton-blast needles.
Truly, secrecy was their only defense.
Secrecy, and the girl’s secret weapon.
If those enemies discovered she was here, and sent a modern, armed ship—
During the day he learned no more.
Eric Ulnar, Vors, and Kimplen remained insolently uncommunicative; the four men left of the old guard were oddly distant, cautious in their talk, unmistakably apprehensive.
They were busy bringing up the supplies from where the Scorpion had landed—provisions, apparently, to last many months.
An hour after dark, John Star was in the individual room he had been assigned, which opened on an ancient court, when he heard a shouted alarm.
“Rockets!
Rockets!
A strange ship is landing!”
Running into the yard, he saw a greenish flare descending athwart the stars; he heard a thin whistling that increased to a screaming bellow, deafeningly loud.
The flame, grown enormous, dropped beyond the east wall; the bellow abruptly ceased.
He felt a sharp tremor underfoot.
“A great ship!” cried the sentry.
“It landed so near it shook the hill.
Its rockets burned green, a thing I never saw before.”
Could it be, John Star wondered, with an odd little pause of his heart, that the girl’s mysterious enemies had learned where she was?
That this ship had come to take her?
Captain Otan, the commander of the tiny garrison, evidently had some such apprehension.
An elderly thin man, very much agitated, he called out all the Legionnaires to station them about the old walls and towers with hand proton guns.
For three hours John Star lay on his stomach, watching a crumbling redoubt.
But nothing happened; at midnight he was dismissed.
The old officer, however, must still have been alarmed over the strange ship’s arrival.