Slowly he turned to confront Captain Meevo of the Defense Squadron—Meevo of whom he had thought but seconds past.
"Yes, sir. What does this mean? Where are the men?"
Meevo's thin, haughty face twisted cruelly. "The men have been taken care of; and this means that the old regime is going out; that a new race shall rule all of this system when the Legion returns from Sirius!"
"A new race?"
"Yes. Mine, the Vrons, true blood of Alpha Centauri—"
Frederix could sense again the mystic alien strength of this man who had joined the Legion years ago during the Liberation; that subtle magnetism at which he had so often wondered, which kept him now from plunging recklessly into that leveled weapon.
"And just how do you propose doing this?"
"First, internal revolt, the rekindling of the old fires of worldly and national prejudice by a few well-ordered murders and the wholesale destruction of the spacestations. Even now my good friend Manuel Onupari has a ship waiting in Calidao, waiting to be loaded with seedrona from Jethe's munitions plant which will blast every station on Earth. Tomorrow night we will put that ship into its orbit.
"But you shall only see the beginning here, Frederix. Now be so kind as to go out to the control turret."
Slowly the young ordnance engineer turned and walked out through the glassite tunnel to the turret overlooking the fortress. His heart was hammering madly and his slender hands nervously clenching and unclenching. He forced himself to speak: