Keep communications standing by for another message from Giles Habibula, and the vortex gun ready for action.”
Shift and changing shift, the gun crew stood ready about the ponderous weapon.
In every observatory on every racing ship, men searched the dark void amid the stars of the Dragon ahead.
And the communications men waited for further word from Giles Habibula.
But the weary Commander of the Legion, sleeplessly pacing the silent empty luxury of his apartments upon the flagship, restlessly combing his white forelock back with anxious thin hands, received other messages.
They came by visiwave from the System behind— for the hard-driven fleet was already beyond the range of ultrawave communication.
Their import was all of alarm.
The first message came from the captain in charge of the plain-clothes men who had been detailed to shadow the three suspects on the New Moon—Amo Brelekko and John Comaine and Gaspar Hannas. All three had vanished.
“John Comaine mysteriously disappeared from his laboratory, with two of our men on duty outside the only door,” the report stated.
“Gaspar Hannas had locked himself in his empty treasure vault.
His scream for aid was heard by communicator.
When associates opened the vault, he was gone.
Amo Brelekko was removed from the floor of the Diamond Room, as the little gambler Davian had been—and in his place, before the few appalled spectators left on the New Moon to see it, was dropped a decaying human skeleton which has been identified as that of a female android.”
That made little sense to Jay Kalam.
He pondered the implications of it, and then dispatched a message to the captain, asking for further information.
The reply, relayed from Rocky Mountain Base, informed him that this officer had now also vanished.
Km!
Krrr!
Krrr!
The penetrating beat of his emergency signal announced the next message, and he heard the ragged voice of a distraught Legion Intelligence officer reading a note from Lars Eccard, Chairman of the Green Hall Council.
All sixty members of the Council had been threatened with abduction, by the Basilisk.
No ransom was demanded, and no escape was offered—
“Chairman Eccard’s dictation was interrupted at that point,” the shaken voice continued.
“Staff members rushed into his chambers and found him gone.
Reliable reports from subordinate officers already confirm rumors that every member of the Council has disappeared.”
The whole Green Hall—kidnapped!
Staggered by that blow, Jay Kalam slumped heavily behind his desk.
Those sixty men and women had formed the supreme government of the System.
The chosen representatives of the local planetary governments, of capital and labor, of the various professions and sciences—they had all been snatched away.
“Why?”
The tired red eyes of the Commander stared across his great empty desk, at the black bunkhead.
“Why take them?”
With an uncanny promptness that startled him, the beat of his emergency signal answered.
What he heard, when he put the com-municator to his ear, was a rasping whisper, distorted in transmission,
“I’ll tell you why, Commander,” it mocked him.
“I took them because I want the System to know my power.
I want every man on every planet to shudder and grow pale when he thinks of the Basilisk.
I want men to look on me as they once regarded angry gods.
“For I have suffered injuries that must be avenged.
“To establish my new supremacy, I am taking one hundred men and women from the System.
They have been the leaders of the foolish attempt to destroy me, and therefore I can deal with them without compunction.
I shall use them without remorse for the text of a lesson to mankind.
One, out of the hundred, will be allowed to survive and return, to bring that lesson to the rest of mankind.”
An unpleasant chuckle rasped from the instrument.
“One hundred, Commander!” croaked that thin, mad voice.
“You already know the most of them.
Aladoree, the keeper of the peace.
John Star.
Bob Star, and his wife and their child.
A few more of your most conspicuous Legionnaires.