Then a thin, snow-haired figure approached their window in the starlight. It was old Stilicho, Keene, moving slowly.
"Did you bring Lana back?” Thorn cried.
The old man's cracked voice was unsteady and choking with emotion as, he answered.
"No, we didn't.” His accents became shrill and wild. “We were only a few hours behind Cheerly's ship. We could see it in our ‘scopes and were sure to overtake him. And then he was joined by a force of fifty League cruisers, as an escort.
"He must have had secret arrangements with them cruisers to be waiting for him, damn him!” Stilicho continued. “We only had twenty ships. I wanted to keep after them anyway, and fight it out, but Brun Abo and the rest said it would be suicide."
Stilicho's old voice broke. “I guess they were right, maybe. Getting ourselves all killed wouldn't have saved Lana. Nothing can save her now — and I don't want to live any more, with the lass gone."
Tremulous tears were glistening on the old Martian's starlit face. He wiped them with a quivering hand.
Thorn felt a cold, ghastly shock from what he had heard. Blind emotion surged in him. And then the instinct to fight back, to persevere, rose to dominate him.
"Are you going to give up Lana for dead?” he demanded fiercely of the old man outside. “Are you just going weep like a woman for her, or are you going to do something?"
"What can I do?” Stilicho quavered. “I'd give my life for the lass, but there's nobody can save her now. She's in Haskell Trask's dungeons on Saturn, by now, and a thousand men couldn't get her out of there."