V
CHAIN SMELLED DANGER in the silence.

He stood with a half-dozen other Mercs on the battered spaceport in front of their ship.  The hot lemon-colored sunlight poured down and the warm wind whispered around them; there was no other sound.

The massive white marble city beyond the spaceport climbed a slope in tier after tier of ancient-looking buildings.  It was too far away to be heard, and the silence did not bother Chane.  But here on the spaceport it was too quit.  There was no movement at the warehouses and other buildings.  The eight or nine small planetary cruisers near them, four of which had missile-launcher ports in their sides, had no activity around them.

"Just take it easy," said Dilullo.  "Be casual.  It's safer to wait and let them make the first move."

Milner, beside Chane, muttered, "It would be safer still by a damn sight to be wearing our stunners."

Milner was a foul-mouthed, fighty little man whom none of the other Mercs liked much, and who got berths only because of his superlative skill in using and servicing weapons.  Yet Chane had to agree with him.

But Dilullo had been dogmatic about it.  They had to come in to Allubane One - its planet-name was Arkuu - and take its people by surprise, but they mustn't seem to be looking for a fight.

They had managed the surprise all right.  They had homed in on the other side of Arkuu, and then had whipped half around the planet toward this capital city of Yarr without sending any notice of arrival or requesting landing-permission.

Chane had looked down on Arkuu as it rolled rapidly away beneath them, and thought it was not much of a world.

Crimson jungle covered a lot of it.  Here and there, where the land rose into dark mountains, the jungle gave way to forests of deeper red.  Once there was an ocher-colored sea, with tawny rivers snaking into it.

And cities.  Cities of white marble that had been great and gracious once, but now were whelmed by the red tide of the jungle.  Cities with no life stirring in their broken stones, the wrecks of the past, brooding under the topaz sun like old, dead kings whose glory is long forgotten.

Chane felt a sharply heightened sense of the mystery of this far world.  Once its people must have been great indeed, to build such cities and to have gone out and colonized the second planet.  What was it that had made them throw it all away?  What was it that made them set their faces against interstellar travel, so that they made their system into the Closed Worlds?

Then their ship had come over the ridge of a valley and below them was another white city but this one still living, with people and a few ground-cars moving in its streets and some light fixed-wing fliers buzzing in the sky.  With no warning at all, they had landed at the little planetary spaceport.

And now they waited, with Bollard and Kimmel and four others inside the ship just in case, and the sun was hot and nothing was happening.

Dilullo spoke without turning. "I'll do the talking."

A ground-car had emerged from the city and was coming across the spaceport toward them.  It stopped a little way from them and two men got out of it and approached.