Since, she has been the gifted and ruthless leader of the remnants of this interplanetary gang.
Beyond the single picture above, discovered in the records on the planetoid, no description of the android Luroa is available.
Nothing is known of her surviving associates. Officers are warned that this sinister being possesses a mind of phenomenal keenness, that she is pitilessly free of all human scruples, and that her alluring beauty is her most deadly weapon.
She is fully trained in many lines of science, physically more powerful, and far quicker than most men, and skilled in the use of all weapons.
Officers are advised to destroy this being upon identification.
Jay Kalam Commander of the Legion of Space
“A quarter of a million, darling!” Chan Derron whispered.
“And I think you’re worth it—on looks alone!”
The hard grin seamed his dark face again.
“For your own sake, I hope they haven’t got you overestimated as much as they have me.”
He blew the smiling picture an ironic kiss, from his big brown hand, and then bent again to the hooded view-plate of the chart cabinet.
Miles of microfilm, within the instrument, intricate reels and cams and gears, ingenious prisms and lenses, could give a true stereoscopic picture of the System, as it would appear from any point in its stellar vicinity, at any desired telescopic power, at any time within a thousand years.
The integrators could quickly calculate the speediest, safest, or most economical route from any one point to any other.
The big man found the light fleck that was Oberon, outermost satellite of cloudy-green Uranus.
His great hands deftly moved the dials, to bring it into coincidence with the tri-crossed hairs in the view-plate.
He read the destination from the indicators and set it up on the keys.
And then, while the humming mechanism was analysing and re-integrating the many harmonic factors involved in moving the Phantom Atom across a billion miles of space, to a safe landing on that cold and lonely moon, his bronze-glinting eyes went back to the smiling picture on the bulkhead.
“Well, Luroa,” he said slowly,
“I guess it’s going to be good-bye.”
He waved a grave farewell, to her white and mocking loveliness.
“You know, we could have made quite a couple, you and I—if I had just been what the Legion takes me for!”
His bronze head shook, his brown face wistful.
“But my lady, I’m not.
I’m no reckless pirate of the spaceways— unless by dire necessity.
I’m just a plain soldier of the Legion, in incredibly and peculiarly bad luck.
I haven’t got any ‘mysterious and deadly instrumentality.’”
His head lifted a little. His eyes lighted.
His voice softened, confidentially.
“But I’ve one secret, Luroa!”
Smiling again, he pointed at a series of figures on the log-tape beside the hooded glass.
“No secret weapon,” he whispered.
“And nothing like the secret of your life, Luroa.
But it’s enough to mean new hope to me.”
His great head lifted, with a fierce little gesture of pride.
“It means one more chance.”
A moment he looked silently at the smiling picture and the green-eyed loveliness of Luroa looked back, he thought, almost with a mocking comprehension.
“It was like this, my dear,” he said.
“The last time Hal Samdu chased me, I got a hundred million miles ahead of his fleet, running out north.
I got far beyond visual range.
Or beyond the normal range of the mass-detectors.
I was rigging up a new hook-up, trying to find if old Hal was still on the trail, when I found—something else.”
He shook his finger at her.
“Don’t ask me what it is, Luroa.
It’s too far off, with whatever albedo it has, to show even a point in the system’s best telescope.
But the mass is of the order of ten million tons, and the distance approximately ten billion miles, estimated by triangulation.
“Doesn’t matter, what it is.
A chunk of rock, or a projectile from Andromeda.
I’m going out there.
Just one more landing first, at some out-station, to get food and cathode plates.
And then I’m off.