"So far, so good,” muttered old Stilicho Keene, leaning forward over the bank of firing-keys to gaze with faded eyes. “We're past the outer League patrols. Now if we can only slip through the inner."
"We're in their zone now,” John Thorn warned tautly. “See anything in the ‘scope, Gunner?"
"Not yet,” the big Mercurian rumbled without taking his eyes from the eyepiece.
The Venture moved steadily on through the void, its rockets cut down to a low, soft purr. The aura-chart was dead. They were running blind so their own aura would not cut the aura of any vigilant patrol cruiser and give them away unnecessarily.
Saturn bulked colossal in the star-gemmed vault ahead, an enormous, yellowish sphere encircled by its immense, sweeping white rings. Even from this distance of a few million miles, the mighty rings looked quite solid. The thin black gap between the two outermost rings, Cassini's division, stood out sharp and clear. It was hard to realize that those great, solid seeming white bands were really vast swarms of tiny satellites circling the planet.
Out beyond even the huge rings marched the planet's nine brilliant moons. Titan was a bright little disk far on the other side of the spinning monster world. Tethys and Rhea shone to the left. And Iapetus, a bright white moon almost as large as Mercury, lay close ahead on the right.
"The Saturnian Navy has a big outer base on Iapetus,” warned Thorn. “It'll be alive with cruisers now that the navies of all four League planets are concentrated here."
"I know, but we got to run close to Iapetus if we're going to slip around to the night side of Saturn,” quavered the old Martian pirate.
"Keep at least two million miles out, to clear the auras of the base,” Thorn told him.
The Venture purred on, and the big white moon began to march slowly past on their right. The Planeteers and the old pirate were silent and strained.