Then the feeling left him. The door opened once more, and they stepped out into the hot yellow light of an Ulnese day. Shielding his eyes against the sudden glare, Haral looked about. Above them rose a gigantic crystal bubble, a dozen times as large as the one beneath which Xaymar had lain sleeping. Set high amid craggy grey and green and purple peaks, it thrust up like a beacon, a watch-tower, into the yellow sky. Concentric circular tracks on which were mounted banks of strange, snub-nosed projectors, each set at a different angle, ran round the globe above his head. Control boards, a mass of indicator dials and switches, were set at intervals along the metal-walled, chest-high base. Xaymar touched his arm. "Your trappings, blue man...." He turned to her gesture. There, stacked in a niche beside the shaft up which they'd come, lay his light-lance, his armor, the clothes he'd worn. "Your steed, too...." The woman pointed through the crystal, down the slope. Haral stared. His great blue Mercurian _hwalon_ dragon moved restlessly to and fro in a narrow natural yard bounded on three sides by steep rock walls less than half an Earth mile from them. Two coleoptera stood guard along the open side. Narrow-eyed, Haral turned back to the woman. "But why? What made you bring my gear here, and my _hwalon_?" "Is it not plain?" shrugged Xaymar. "You are a warrior, and I have need of such to lead my beetle hordes to battle." "To battle--?" "My day has come. In a little while I shall reach out and seize all Ulna. You know the ways of the aliens who now hold it, so you shall be in the van of my advancing legions. You'll show them when and where to strike; how best to meet the alien weapons." * * * * * Haral tried to probe the blankness that was her veil; to fathom the mind of this strange woman who hid her beauty behind its jewel-sprayed folds. At last he said: "You've picked the wrong man, Xaymar. I'm a warrior, yes--but not such a fool that I'll try to lead your ground-bound hordes out to battle against space ships. The wars of the void are fought in the air, not down in the muck and mire of a pygmy planetoid. Sark would butcher your beetles from above before they'd marched a mile." Xaymar's lips curved. The clash of cymbals, of swords and shields, was in her laugh. "This one war will be different, blue man! We'll fight to seize and hold the ground till Ulna's taken. Then will be time enough to talk of ships that slash across the void, and battles for planets fought in deep space." "But Sark's fleet--" "Sark will have no fleet!" the woman slashed back fiercely. Her whole body swayed, and even here, in the full light of the blazing yellow sky, her hair showed black as a Martian _koboc's_ sinister hood. "You came here seeking my secret, warrior. I mean that you--" Close at hand, a bell rang shrilly. Xaymar halted in mid-sentence. Whirling, she flicked a switch on the nearest of the control boards.