Not two minutes after it was completed, a shell exploded before the prow of the old freighter—a signal to halt. Many burnished Callistan war-craft were approaching.
As Ron cut the power in the propelling gravity plates astern, he looked at Anna. "Well," he drawled, "I guess this is where we stop being free Earthians."
The girl nodded, biting her lip.
Ron switched on the short-wave radio, which, over a limited distance, could function, in spite of the static barrage. Over it came harsh Callistan tones:
"You are blockade runner, perhaps. It is old trick—making ship shiny, like ours. But from very close, we recognize Earthly shape of your hull. Terrestrial resistance on Titan almost finished. Please land outside Leiccsendale."
With so many weapons trained on the unarmed Barbarian, there was little to do but obey orders. Ron guided the ship groundward. But as it came to rest on the charred soil of what had once been an orchard, he turned a control dial on which there were red marks—danger graduations, indicating the limiting point of safety. He turned the dial well past those points. The engines of the ship howled and groaned with a fearful overload for a moment. Then there was a dull, grinding, ripping noise astern, and the crackle and hiss of fire.
When the two Earthians emerged, red flames and black smoke were rising from the crumpled aft-portion of the vessel. The engines had been immersed in vats of oil to insulate their power. And now that oil was blazing. The Barbarian at least would be useless to the enemy, and the secret of its cargo, whether a dangerous secret or not, would be hidden in the ashes and the ruins.
But for Anna Charles and Ron Leiccsen, this was the beginning of slavery. Within a hundred hours of their capture, Callistan heat-rays and shells and heat-bombs had put down the last resistance of the terrestrial colonists. They were all either chattels or dead—those who had not left Titan in time. The colony had possessed enough ships to remove everyone to Earth; but those that had not been used had fallen into Acharian hands.
The captives were herded into their barracks—the few half-ruined farm-buildings which still stood, after the conflict was over. They were put to work repairing damaged sun-towers, re-cultivating desolated fields, and helping the Callistan engineers erect the burnished metal structures which duplicated in architecture the buildings of that distant moon of Jupiter. Rapidly, Mado Achar—New Callisto—was being born. Bizarre cactiform vegetation, from the flowerless mother-world, began to sprout from spores, under the stimulus of the radiations from Bart Mallory's sun-ray towers.