"It's Lana's orders,” reminded John Thorn. “And we Planeteers agreed to take her orders when we were in space."
Thorn looked sunward, and frowned. “Why the devil haven't those tankers run for it? The fools are blundering right on."
The forty tubby tankers that had been laboriously trailing the freighters in space were coming stupidly on the scene of the hold-up, as though unable to realize what was happening. They were now quite close.
Thorn's brain suddenly sounded an alarm, as he stared at the oncoming tankers. His eyes, trained by long naval experience, saw something queer about the lines of those dumpy ships, something—
He leaped to the audio. “Lana, those tankers are disguised naval cruisers!” he yelled. “They're—"
His warning was too late. At the very moment Thorn shouted, the forty “tankers” were unmasking.
Their bulging sides suddenly fell away. Those sides had been only a skin of thin metal plates. Their disappearance exposed the ships, not as tankers, but as sleek, grim-lined naval cruisers with batteries of heavy atomguns all along their sides, and with the four interlaced circles of the League of Cold Worlds on their bows.
Instantly the unmasked League cruisers shot forward. Their rocket-tubes burst fire, and from their batteries hailed a storm of deadly shells that burst in blinding lightning-flares among the startled pirate ships.
* * *
The trap had been perfectly sprung. The League cruisers, lagging behind in the guise of slow tankers, had waited until the pirate ships were hooked onto the freighters by grapples and catwalks, their crews engaged in looting. Then they had thrown off their disguise and leaped in on the Companions’ ships.