uld have been out, cold--but, to the
amazement of the observers, it kept on fighting with scarcely lessened
power! Three more of the frightful space-bombs had to be exploded in
it--it had to be reduced to junk--before its terrible rays went out; Not
a man in that great fleet had even an inkling of the truth; that those
great vessels, those terrible engines of destruction, did not contain a
single living creature: that they were manned and fought by automatons;
robots controlled by keen-eyed, space-hardened veterans inside the
planetoid so distant by means of tight, interference-proof communicator
beams!

But they were to receive an inkling of it. As ship after ship of the
pirate fleet was blown to pieces, Roger realized that his navy was
beaten, and forthwith all his surviving vessels darted toward the apex
of the cone, where the heaviest battleships were stationed. There each
hurled itself upon a Triplanetary warship, crashing to its own
destruction, but in that destruction insuring the loss of one of the
heaviest vessels of the enemy. Thus passed the _Fearless_, and twenty of
the finest space-ships of the fleet as well. But the ranking officer
assumed command, the war-cone was re-formed, and, yawning maw to the
fore, the great formation shot toward the pirate stronghold, now near at
hand. It again launched its stupendous cylinder of annihilation, but
even as the mighty defensive screens of the planetoid flared into
incandescently furious defense, the battle was interrupted and pirates
and Triplanetarians learned alike that they were not alone in the ether.

Space became suffused with a redly impenetrable opacity, and through
that indescribable pall there came reaching huge arms of force
incredible; writhing, coruscating beams of power which glowed a baleful,
although almost imperceptible, red. A vessel of unheard-of armament and
power, hailing from a distant solar system of the Galaxy, had come to
rest in that space. For months her commander had been investigating sun
after sun in quest of one precious substance. Now his detectors had
found it; and, feeling neither fear of Triplanetarian weapons nor
reluctance to sacrifice those thousands of Triplanetarian lives, he was
about to take it!

CHAPTER IV

Within the Red Veil

Nevia, the home planet of the marauding space-ship, would have appeared
peculiar indeed to Terrestrial senses. High in the deep red heavens a
fervent blue sun poured down its flood of