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  The commodore of the fourth action group for whom I was waiting arrived on board the Kon-Velete two hours after our landing on Arkon 3. The still-young man with the empty, occasionally dreamy seeming eyes and the expressionless face seemed to consider himself a demigod.

  If he had ever understood anything of modern spaceflight, he seemed to have forgotten it completely by this time. At first I had hated him but then I grew to pity him. His first act was to have a portable simulator device brought on board. I had to put my foot down to keep him from setting up that apparatus for showing crazy light-reflection compositions in the control room. Never will I forget his devastating look and I would remember again and again Rhodan’s ashen face and clenched fists.

  That degenerate servant of a huge computer now commanded the fourth group, a squadron of 17 battleworthy ships.

  He called himself Gailos but I had never heard of his family before. I was ashamed in front of the Terrans who saw in that man so clearly what had become of my people. Yet Gailos evidently belonged to the most active members of the Arkonide race or otherwise the Regent would have never appointed him a commodore.

  For 14 days, standard time, we had to conduct flight manoeuvres in combat-simulating conditions under his command. For the first time we had to press the weapon buttons and fly feint attacks against robot-piloted fleet ships. The results of that were such that here and there Terrans were unwisely breaking out into suppressed and muffled laughter.

  When Rhodan saw just how capable our new commodore was, he had risked that which we had not dared to do for weeks.

  During the hopeless confusion resulting from a badly directed attack, Rhodan abruptly switched on the hytrans system while his men watched in breathless silence. Without a doubt he intended to try a short transition just to see if the new battleship could be depended on. He probably would have later tried to shift the blame for the ‘inadvertent’ transition to Gailos’ shoulders.

  However, it did not come to that. The Kon-Velete could not go into transition at all. The structural field converter had not stirred and the instrument dials had not even lit up. Then we knew just how careful the Robot Regent was!

  Now we were to land on Arkon 3 for the 11th time. The 14th day had passed and we had still found no way of carrying out our actual intentions—simply because we hadn’t been given a vacation.

  Our quarters lay deep under the steel surface of Spaceport A-R-145. When we landed we had to leave the ship immediately and disappear into the depths of the war planet.

  Since the surface of Arkon 3 had become too small with the passage of time, my early forefathers had already begun to hollow the world out. And so the most important control stations, power plants and command centers lay in part up to 6,000 meters beneath the ground. In reality, Arkon 3 was a planetary body honeycombed with millions of holes and tunnels bored through it, a world on which everything existed solely to serve naked purpose.

  At first their stay in the underground cities had been a terrible experience for the Terrans but they finally accepted the inevitable and tried to get some enjoyment out of it despite their prison-like surroundings.

  Even though the environment seemed unnatural and hardly cheerful to my friends, it did not lack a certain amount of interest. Arkon 3 was now prepared for attack from space. Beneath its surface, Rhodan and his men had seen for the first time how a perfectly normal planet could be transformed into a galactic fortress of the first rank.

  We breathed a sigh of relief when Gailos, after making an exhausted-sounding transmission to the commanders of the other ships, ordered the end of the combat exercises and decided to make a landing.

  Reginald Bell, second officer of the Kon-Velete, conspicuously inflated his red checks and threw a glance at our new commodore that made my heart beat faster.

  I looked at him so sharply that he sullenly turned away and balled his broad hands into fists. Bell, after Rhodan probably the man with the most steel-like nerves in the Solar Fleet even though he often tried to conceal the fact, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The failure of the hytrans mechanism had given him as well as other men a shock. Formerly we had still hoped that in case of danger we could disappear into hyperspace with the Kon-Velete.

  Now even that way out was blocked. The Regent would probably unlock the structure converter only when a Dew ship was actually flying into action. It did not seem to trust allies any too far, even when they were Zalites and close neighbors.

  We had long accustomed ourselves to avoiding the making of remarks or even carrying on conversations that could be overheard in the presence of aliens.

  Rhodan himself had urgently warned that robot surveillance was probably taking place.

  If the Robot Brain was so distrustful, thanks to its ancient programming, that it would arrange for hyperengines to be disconnected even during important manoeuvres, then other security measures could be expected as well.

  I was glad that Bell kept a grip on himself. He had most likely been on the point of directing a biting remark at Gailos. Once again Rhodan sat as though frozen in the First Officer’s seat. He seemed to be interested only in the control dials with a direct bearing on the task at hand.

  I watched him unobtrusively until the engine control center called over the videophone. The chief engineer, also a disguised Terran, announced that the consumption of radioactive material at high-relativistic velocity was 6.85% greater than normal.

  I acknowledged the important announcement and looked around at Gailos. The commodore lay comfortably back in his reclining seat, his face showing a bored expression. Sighing, he turned his head as I stood at attention before him, following regulations, and repeated the report.

  The old custom of the Arkonides required me to address him as Your Eminence, the title accorded to the leader of a squadron. He in turn spoke to us in quite familiar fashion and with obvious condescension.

  My blood boiled once more as I saw his puffy face so close to me. During my long wanderings on Earth I had bowed my head before barbarian kings and ignorant nobles whom any Arkonide boy could have humbled with just two or three questions from his general education.

  I had smiled over the pompous customs of these people and nevertheless bowed my head to mouth the same empty phrases to other men, always fully conscious of my own boundless superiority. It had not bothered me to be treated one time as a slave and another with ludicrous contempt as a disreputable character of low caste.

  But now things were different! It seemed hardly possible to me that I could be standing before a man of my race whose sole concern in life was insuring his personal well-being and chattering in the Crystal Planet’s palaces about incomprehensible ‘works of art’. The least important soldier aboard my former flagship was worth more than a hundred parasites of Gailos’ type.

  I repeated my report concerning the too high consumption of radioactive material.

  “We’ll have our stores replenished,” the commodore said sleepily.

  “Your Eminence, we won’t have that option if we’re sent to the front.”

  His forehead wrinkled. Again I heard the very deep sigh. “All right, all right Ighur, I’m sure we’ll be lucky. Has too much really been consumed? But what I really want to say is this: have the microtapes with Askor’s new masterwork that I ordered come in yet?”

  “No, Your Eminence.”

  “Disgraceful,” Gailos grumbled, and his thin, transparent hands clutched the seat-arms. “I shall have to complain. By the way, it smells badly here in the control room. Where is that odor coming from? I shan’t tolerate it another moment.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, trying to retain my self-control. If only my old teacher Tarth had been here to see this! He too had been an Arkonide—but what an Arkonide!

  “That is the normal smell of a control room, Your Eminence. The many machines, the warm-running vidscreens and the heated insulation have their own typical odor.”

  “Disgusting, simply disgusting. Help me up.”
r />   He stretched out his hand and I pulled him out of the reclining seat. Standing in front of me, he seemed thinner and even more fragile, although he was my height. He rubbed his left wrist angrily.

  “It seems to me that they don’t know how to treat Arkonides on Zalit!” he said with a trace of sharpness. I looked down at his arm, which I had only very gently grasped.

  “I beg your forgiveness, Your Eminence.”

  He sized me up in quickly subsiding anger. Then, with a gesture of condescension, he turned to go. Without looking around, he strutted out. The two heavy combat robots, specially detailed to serve as the commodore’s bodyguards, followed him out. Not another word was said about the important radioactive material problem.

  The Zalite at the antigrav control device looked at me pale with terror. The man next to him repressed a grin but he was a Terran. Characters were so different on board this battleship

  I swung wordlessly into the commander’s seat at the main controls and called the machine room. When I told him about the problem of replenishing our fuel at the front and what Gailos had said about it, the chief engineer’s eyes went wide but he retained his composure and simply nodded.

  Meanwhile, the fourth battlecruiser group sped on towards Arkon 3. Just before the landing, Rhodan switched on the automatic enlarger for the outside cameras.

  Sections of the planet’s surface appeared on the sector vidscreens. However we saw only gigantic spaceports and unmistakable complexes of buildings so close together there was hardly any space between them. The War World was a single, solid city in which no plant grew and no clear brook relieved the eye.

  Arkon 3 was a desolate wasteland of steel and technology beyond any comparison. If the planet were cut off from its supply lines, the stores of raw materials for the mammoth factories would be exhausted within four weeks at the most. Knowledge of that fact had in early times led again and again to blockades but even that could not defeat the Great Imperium. I still remember well the convoys we had sent out at the time of the Nopoleter Uprising, defending Arkon’s lifelines. Our enemies had never succeeded in effectively closing the system off for even an hour.

  Now that was no longer at all possible. About 28,000 light-years away, a non-Arkonide enemy threatened the humanoid races of the galaxy. The Regent had used the situation to send all the rebels against the might of the Imperium to the front.

  That impressed unit of former opponents was reason enough for Perry Rhodan to undertake a move against the Regent at this time.

  But what had we really accomplished? We had risked our life so we might be allowed to practice manoeuvres with one of the Robot Brain’s battleships. If Bell had had his way, we would have overpowered the 50 authentic Zalites and tried to destroy the energy dome over the Regent with the Kon-Velete’s weapons.

  It had taken some time and the help of some appropriate examples to convince him that not even 10,000 battleships manned by topnotch crews could have done that.

  Now Bell looked longingly once more at the shining vidscreens. The many spaceports swarmed with fighting ships of all kinds. Arkon’s production was running at full speed.

  Since Commodore Gailos was no longer making himself heard from, I took over command of the small squadron. I turned on the hypercom system and checked the automatic fine-tuning of our group frequency just as relay station AR-145 called.

  This was an auxiliary system of the great Brain. Each port of Arkon 3 possessed such a subordinate computer which passed on to the local commander the orders and decisions of lesser importance.

  The deep-red triangular pattern appeared on the vidscreen. I leaped up and stood at attention in accordance with protocol. Now spoke the Imperium’s actual ruler!

  “Capt. Ighur, Regent,” I announced.

  The Robot Brain’s substation avoided asking about the commodore. Evidently it knew very well what Arkonides of his sort tended to do.

  “Squadron order 12345,” rang the unmodulated voice from the large loudspeakers of the special receiver. The red triangular pattern, the symbol for relay station A-R-145, remained on the vidscreen.

  Rhodan pressed the switch for the automatic recorder. Squadron orders had to be on file in the ship’s records.

  “Ready to record, Regent,” I announced.

  “Training manoeuvres have come to an end. The fourth battlecruiser squadron will remove to Spaceport A-3 and remain in the dockyards for 60 hours. The crew will leave the ship; a furlough of 50 hours will be allowed. The areas approved for Zalites may be entered and observed. The orders of the robot officers are to be carried out.”

  I made an effort not to let my rapidly surging hope show. “Commodore Gailos has not been heard from, Regent. Shall I take over the squadron for the time being?”

  “Granted. His Eminence is resting. Over and out.”

  The identification symbol faded from the screen. Relay station A-R-145 had switched off.

  I decided not to look around in triumph. My joy was probably premature, too, although this was the first furlough we had been given since going aboard the Kon-Velete. It could mean everything or nothing at all.

  The commanders of the other 16 units had listened in on the squadron order. They readily accepted my command over them.

  We advanced into Arkon’s thick atmosphere, passed the atmospheric defense stations and at a height of 80 kilometers our ship was taken over by the remote control of command station A-3. A commander was not allowed to ever make a landing on his own: a further security provision on the part of the Robot Brain.

  As the responsibility for the ship was thus taken from my shoulders, I noticed the tense expression on Rhodan’s face. His shoulders were slightly drawn back, looking to me as though he were about to make a leap.

  While the outside microphones were broadcasting into the control room the whistling and howling of the tortured air molecules ravaged by our rapid descent, he turned his head. His eyes had that frozen look that indicated considerable inner excitement.

  I raised my eyebrows questioningly but he said nothing. Bell had also become disquiet. The telepath John Marshall looked over at us attentively. He seemed to sense that Rhodan’s thoughts had grown hectic

  I motioned barely perceptibly at the shining vidscreen of the special receiver. It would not have been a good idea to have said anything incriminating during the remote control landing. Command station A-3 was unquestionably listening in.

  I waited impatiently for the noise of the landing legs striking the ground, which always sounded as though the entire ship were being shaken apart.

  After just five minutes the red lamps lit up. The telescopic legs had been automatically extended. With a last roar of the equatorial rim engines, the Kon-Velete set down.

  Rhodan’s bearing had not changed, only now a puzzling smile played at his lips. From then on I suspected that he had noticed something that had escaped me. But what could it have been?

  The final systems check took us about 15 minutes. Station after station announced itself shut down. At last even the emergency power unit, which in case of disaster would supply power to the control room and which had been running at a zero setting, died away and silence settled over the steel colossus named Kon-Velete.

  I stood up from my seat and stepped before the vidscreens. Command station A-3 used bright green wave lines as its identification symbol.

  “Capt. Ighur, Regent,” I reported. “Ship ready for entering the dockyards.”

  The station replied at once: “The Zalite crew will disembark. Personal weapons may not be taken along. Over and out.”

  That was all I was told in the typically brief message. Naturally a robot squad was probably already waiting outside to escort us beneath the surface.

  Discharging the crew was the concern of the First Officer. Rhodan went into action at once, although I had the feeling it was only with difficulty that he could tear himself out of his pondering.

  I listened for a moment to his excessively loud orders, then called Com
modore Gailos over the videophone. The busy signal lit up on the direct connection vidscreen. Evidently Gailos did not feel it worth his time to support the Regent’s command by taking any action himself.

  Besides, I considered, a squadron leader did not have to be concerned with such things. It was the commander’s business to see to order in his ship.

  Hoarsely, Bell shouted: “Attention!” Saluting only briefly, I stepped through the rear hatchway where my personal servant-robot was already waiting. I instructed it to pack up my few belongings so that they could later be brought to our as yet unknown quarters.

  At the entrance to the central axial lift, a sentry squad commanded by Lt. David Stern was waiting. The young officer’s face was pale and growing more so.

  I passed him closely and as I did, he quickly whispered: “Gailos has already gone, sir. I’m worried because of our special equipment. If we aren’t allowed to take any personal weapons along—isn’t it possible that we’ll be searched again? Maybe they’ll want to make sure the order is being carried out?”

  I glanced swiftly at the nearest videophone camera. The glistening lens system could possibly be in operation. It was said that when a ship landed on Arkon 3, the walls grew eyes and ears.

  I began with a conscientious inspection of the lift’s antigrav controls. Loudly and grumblingly I complained that the control board’s coverplate was not tightly screwed on.

  During this decoy manoeuvre I whispered a few words to Stern. It would have been dangerous to have said any more aboard the battleship. “Have your men removed the things from their hiding places again?”

  “Right after the order to land. We’re carrying everything on us. Sir, if we’re searched…” He was quiet then and his face grew even paler. The three other men of the watch looked at me with burning eyes. For my part, I felt that the decision was coming closer with giant steps.

  “Wait here for Rhodan,” I said lowly. “Tell him your apprehensions, too. I’ll see what I can do about any eventual searching. The mutants should disperse among the men so that they can intervene everywhere if they have to. Be quiet now.”