Gordon saw less and less chance of that, in the hours that followed. For now the Markab, its velocity at great heights, was rushing ever nearer the Cloud.
That “night” when the ship lights dimmed, he lay in his bunk thinking bitterly that of all men in history he had had the most ironic joke played upon him.
The woman across the cabin loved him, and he loved her. And yet soon a gulf of space and time incredible might forever separate them, and she would always believe him faithless.
Chapter XII. In the Cosmic Cloud
NEXT “morning” they woke to find that the Cloud was colossal now ahead. Its vast blotch loomed across half the firmament, a roiling gloom that reached out angry, ragged arms of shadow like an octopus whose dark tentacles clutched at the whole galaxy.
And the Markab now was being companioned through space by four massive black battleships with the black disk of the League of Dark Worlds marked on their bows. They were so close, and maintained so exactly the same speed, they could be clearly seen.
“We might have known that Shorr Kan would send an escort,” Lianna murmured. She glanced at Gordon. “He thinks that he has the secret of the Disruptor almost in his hands, in your person.”
“Lianna, set your mind at rest on one thing,” Gordon told her. “He'll never get that secret from me.”
“I know you are not traitor to the Em pire,” she said somberly. “But the League scientists are said to be masters of strange tortures. They may force it from you.”
Gordon laughed shortly. “They won't. Shorr Kan is going to find that he had made one bad miscalculation.”
Nearer and nearer the five ships flew toward the Cloud. All the universe ahead was now a black, swirling gloom.
Then, keeping to their tight formation, the squadron plunged into the Cloud.
Darkness swept around the ship. Not a total darkness but a gloomy, shadowy haze that seemed smothering after the blazing glory of open space.
Gordon perceived that the cosmic dust that composed the Cloud was not as dense as he had thought. Its huge extent made it appear an impenetrable darkness from outside. But once inside it, they seemed racing through a vast, unbroken haze.
There were stars in here, suns that were visible only a few parsecs away. They shone wanly through the haze, like smothered bale-fires, uncanny witch-stars.
The Markab and its escort passed comparatively close to some of these starsystems. Gordon glimpsed planets circling in the feeble glow of the smothered suns, worlds shadowed by perpetual twilight.
Homing on secret radar beams, the ships plunged on and on through the Cloud. Yet it was not until next day that deceleration began.
“We must be pretty nearly there,” Gordon said grimly to the woman.
Lianna nodded, and pointed ahead through the window. Far ahead in the shadowy haze burned a dull red, smoldering sun.
“Thallarna,” she murmured. “The capital of the League of Dark Worlds, and the citadel of Shorr Kan.”
Gordon's nerves stretched taut as the following hours of rapid deceleration brought them closer to their destination.
Meteor-hair rattled off the ships. They twisted and changed course frequently. The shrilling of meteor-alarms could be heard each few minutes, as jagged boulders rushed upon them and then vanished in the automatic trip-blast of atomic energy from the ship.
Angry green luminescence that had once been called nebulium edged these stormy, denser regions. But each time they emerged into thinner haze, the sullen red sun of Thallarna glowed bigger ahead.
“The star-system of Thallarna was not idly chosen for their capital,” Lianna said. “Invaders would have a perilous time threading through these stormy mazes to it.”
Gordon felt the sinister aspect of the red sun as the ships swung toward it.
Old, smoldering, sullen crimson, it glowered here in the heart of the vast and gloomy Cloud like an evil, watching eye.
And the single planet that circled it, the planet Thallarna itself, was equally somber. Strange white plains and white forests of fungoid appearance covered much of it. An inky ocean dashed its ebon waves, eerily reflecting the bloody light of the red sun.
The warships sank through the atmosphere toward a titan city. It was black and massive, its gigantic, block-like buildings gathered in harshly geometrical symmetry.
Lianna said and pointed to the huge rows of docks outside the city. Gordon's incredulous eyes beheld a vast beehive of activity, thousands of grim warships docked in long rows, a great activity of cranes and conveyors and men.
“Shorr Kan's fleet makes ready, indeed!” she said. “And this is only one of their naval bases here. The League is far stronger than we dreamed.”
Gordon fought a chilling apprehension. “But Jhal Arn will be calling together all the Empire's forces, too. And he has the Disruptor. If Corbulo can only be prevented from further treachery.”
The ships separated, the four escort battleships remaining above while the Markab sank toward a colossal, cubical black pile.
The cruiser landed in a big court. They glimpsed soldiers running toward it. Cloudmen, pallid-faced inert in dark uniforms.
It was some minutes before the door of their own cabin opened. Thern Eldred stood in it with two alert League officers.
“We have arrived and I learn that Shorr Kan wishes to see you at once,” the Sirian traitor told Gordon. “I beg you to make no resistance, which would be wholly futile and foolish.”
Gordon had had two experiences with the glass paralyzers to convince him of that. He stood, with Lianna's hand in his, and nodded curtly.
“All right. The sooner we get this over with, the better.”
They walked out of the ship, their gravitation-equalizers preventing them from feeling any difference in gravity. The air was freezing and the depressing quality was increased by the murky gloom that was thickening as the red sun set.
Cold, gloomy, shadowed forever by the haze, this world at the heart of the Cloud struck Gordon as a fitting place for the hatching of a plot to rend the galaxy.
“This is Durk Undis, a high officer of the League,” the Sirian was saying. “The Prince Zarth Arn and the Princess Lianna, Durk.”
Durk Undis, the League officer, was a young man. But though he was not unhandsome, his pallid face and deep eyes had a look of fanaticism in them.
He bowed to Gordon and the woman, and gestured toward a doorway.
“Our Commander is waiting,” he said clippedly.
Gordon saw the gleam of triumph in his eye, and in the faces of the other rigid Cloudmen they passed.
He knew they must be exultant, at this capture of one of the Empire's royal family and at the striking down of mighty Arn Abbas.
“This ramp, please,” Durk Undis said, as they entered the building. He could not help adding proudly to Gordon, “You are doubtless surprised at our capital? We have no useless luxuries here.”
Spartan simplicity, an austere bareness, reigned in the gloomy halls of the great building. Here there was none indeed of the luxury and splendor of the great palace at Throon. Uniforms were everywhere. This was the center of a military empire.
They came to a massive door guarded by a file of stalwart, uniformed Cloudmen armed with atom-guns. These stepped aside, and the door opened.
Durk Undis and the Sirian walked on either side of Gordon and Lianna into a forbidding room.
It was even more austere than the rest of the place. A single desk with its row of visors and screens, a hard, uncushioned chair, a window looking out on the black massiveness of Thallarna-these were all.
The man behind the desk rose. He was tall, broad-shouldered, about forty years of age. His black hair was close-clipped, his strong, pallid face sternly set, and his black eyes harsh and keen.