We had no notice of their coming until their retro-rockets fired, fifteen minutes away.
I hurried down to meet Ken Star in the lock.
He came out of the capsule with a sling for his right arm and a bandage around his head.
His gray face was streaked with grime.
Yet I thought he bore himself well.
One of his men had both legs broken, and the other was dying of what seemed to be radiation sickness.
At the station hospital, he made the medics do all they could for the injured men before he let them touch him.
Though the medics tried to insist, he refused to go to bed.
His wounds were superficial, and he insisted that he had slept hi the capsule.
Dressed in a uniform of Ketzler’s, with clean sling and bandages, he let me take him up to eat in the mess hall.
A slight, quiet man, somewhat stooped, he looked more scholar than soldier.
Though the medics had washed off the blood and dirt, his face was still seamed with fatigue.
At first I had been vaguely disappointed to find that a son of the legendary John Star could be so small and frail and vulnerable, but I soon began to admire him.
“The rest of the crew left first,” he was saying as we left the elevator.
“They took the larger capsule, with my executive officer in charge.
The three of us tried to keep our attacker entertained, while they got away.”
He shook his head slightly, then froze himself, as if the movement hurt.
“That scheme failed,” he said.
“The capsule was knocked out with what must have been a micro-missile—a tiny projectile fired at a fantastic velocity.”
He was limping a little, and he let me catch his arm to help him board the moving rim walk.
“The same sort of micro-missile made scrap metal of the Quasar Quest.”
His voice was harsh and tired and bitter.
“We had no chance at all—the finest cruiser in the Legion would have had no better chance. ‘ “Not against those missiles!
“We’d see a faint flash many thousand miles away.
The shot would hit us instantly—so hard it excited gamma radiation.
I suppose those projectiles would be weighed in milligrams, but they are unbeatable.
No possible shield could stop them. No possible ship could evade them.
“If you had seen that machine—”
“We did,” I told him.
“By the light of—something.”
“That something was the Quasar Quest.”
His worn face twitched with pain.
“We had just got out of the wreck when they hit it with something else.
Nothing that we could detect.
But the hulk turned incandescent.
Perhaps they were sterilizing it, before they came to pick it up!
Another unbeatable weapon!”
“Commander—” I had to stop and steady my own voice.
“What is this invader?” Sagging wearily in the borrowed uniform, his worn body shrugged.
“If you saw it, Captain, you know as much as I do.”
At the mess hall, he got off the rim-strip with no help.
Though we were early for dinner, we found old Habibula and Lilith already there.
Habibula had an open tin of caviar and two bottles of his pre-cious wine on the table before him.
When the commander saw them, he stopped with a gasp.
“Lil!
Giles!”
He seemed delighted, yet somehow disturbed to see them.
“I thought you’d be waiting for me, back at sector base.”
They were gaping with the same astonishment.
“Ken Star!” old Habibula bellowed.