Guantra led Kortha from the stateroom out along the grey deck, toward the gang-plank, saying, "This place has been useful to me. Extremely so. I've found that it paid to spend the money to equip it."
Kortha looked around him, gauging his chances for fight. Men stepped to benches, swung down ladders, with an air of deft sureness. They paid him the insult of inattention. His hands knotted, then relaxed. Suppose he did fight? It would do him no good. Even Kortha could not overcome the entire crew of a battleflier. Not without a weapon.
Guantra motioned him to a tiny monorail car.
"The journey is not far, but we must avoid some—ah—rather terrifying precipices in this. The rail cost fifty lives to install. A misstep above an abyss—"
He shrugged, pressing buttons. The car lurched forward, gathered speed.
"Personally, I think some of them are bottomless. We could take no soundings."
They caught glimpses of black depths to their left as the car slid along on its ribbonlike rail. A string of lights fastened to the cliff cast eerie shadows into the gulf. The car slowed to round a curve.
It halted in a chamber whose walls were sculped with vividly stained statuary. Their colors were faded now, but here and there were spots of red sunset, or blue ocean, or the white of a ship's sail.
Kortha muffled a curse of surprise in his throat.
"I thought you'd like it," Guantra laughed. "That lieutenant of mine found it. He swears it's a lost museum of some very early Martian race. The ones who lorded it when there were oceans on the planet."