By W. J. MATTHEWS

Tiny suns set in rare metals, crystals of fire that mocked Terra's diamonds and pearls as lusterless pebbles and pale glass, the ancient treasure left behind the same time-worn trail of sudden blood and stiffening corpses!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

For a long minute the big man did not speak, rocking gently on his heels, hands clasped behind his broad back. The dim glow of the atomics in the corridor cast shadowy bars of gold and sable across his cold face, picked glints of steel and silver from his heavy gunbelt and saffron uniform. The only sound was the gentle tinkle of leg-irons as the prisoner lounging on the cell-bench idly swung his crossed leg, returning the heavier man's reptilian stare with a detached, infuriating coolness.

It moved him to break his silent regard. The thick voice rasped in the dim-lit cell.

"You know why I am here, Kurland?"

The black-bearded outlaw shrugged, a glitter of white teeth splintering his calm stare.

"Were you other than Gion, Marward of Jupiter, I should know. As it is, I do not."

Gion's hard lips smiled briefly at the iron compliment.

"I rate you higher than you think, Kurland. I should have come farther still to see you hanged at dawn."

The outlaw shrugged. "I might say the same, had I had your luck."

The big man nodded, his eyes never leaving Kurland. The sharp brows over his enormous eyes lay straight and commanding, and there were lines about his tight mouth Kurland had never seen. Slowly, softly, Gion went on, rocking easily on his booted heels.

"Suppose, came dawn, you did not hang, Kurland?"

The swinging leg halted, the big body tensed in its chains. Then slowly Kurland eased back against the cold stone wall, a thin, mocking smile playing across his face.

"You should know me better, Gion. I am not for sale, even at such a price. Nor my comrades."

Cold pride flashed in Marward's eyes. "I buy no man's loyalty," he retorted. "Were yours for sale, I should not be here, nor would you. I offer a supposition, nothing more."

Kurland rose, a powerful, black-clad figure imposing even in torn uniform and clinking chains. He stared fiercely at the heavy sub-ruler of the outer Jovian plains, the iron-souled tyrant who had broken and suborned Earthly sway until much of the giant planet lay supine and trembling before him.

"You have not come to taunt me, nor play with suppositions, Marward. Why not be plain?"

"I shall be plain enough," promised Gion, dropping a hand upon the heavy butt of his silver-mounted glare-pistol. Kurland's teeth flashed in the gloom. There was magic still in his flaming name.

"You know the Jewels of Orion?"

"I have heard of them."

"They have vanished."

The outlaw shrugged, half a laugh breaking through his beard. "My regrets, Marward. I had no hand in it."

Gion bared his teeth wolfishly. "I did."

Bland astonishment swept Kurland's face. Then, slowly, a grim smile thrust aside his wonder.

"Forgive my start, Marward. You have stolen so much."

Fiercely Gion brushed aside the cold insult. He stepped back, his face in shadow. The prison cell was electric with his vibrant hate. "You will have it, will you, Kurland? I came to make an offer."

"Go on," said the outlaw, immobile.

"I am not loved, here on Jupiter," said Gion. "I usurp the authority of greater men. I intrigue, I plot. I conquer and steal, if you will. It requires gold. A fortune." He paused, watching the outlaw. "An agent on Venus flashed me word that the Jewels of Orion, crown jewels of a vanished race on some forgotten planet beyond the stars, were to be shipped once more to Betelgoran. A hundred fortunes, Kurland. I gave orders and he shipped as passenger, with the consigned jewels."

"And then?" Kurland's eyes burned through the gloom.

"The Plutonian crashed somewhere ten million miles out in space," said Gion slowly. "My agent. He died with her, and with her people. But he sent the coordinates through even as she went down on some uncharted asteroid. I know where the hulk lies piled, an iron coffin for the Orion jewels."

Kurland's glare was deadly. "Make your offer, vulture."

"Go and bring me the jewels."

Kurland flung back his head, a sudden roar of laughter in his muscled throat. The chains clashed on wrist and ankle as he flung derision in the other's paling face.

"You send a wolf on a jackal's errand, Marward! You think I would return, or venture one lean hungry mile on such a rat's voyage to help you on your way, you whom I have fought these many months, you who broke and exiled me, you who made me outlaw and today must hang me for it?" His scorn rasped bitingly in the prison cell, but Gion of Jupiter was not moved by the love or hate of men. He nodded to the tiny barred window.

"Look from the window."

Kurland looked, seeing in the growing pearl of dawn the black and ugly shapes athwart the sky were six gibbets stood ranged along the ramparts of Gion's northern fortress in the Montral foothills.

"You understand," nodded Gion, leaning against the door. "You will return, and with the jewels, or your five young companions will be swinging there to greet you when my men take you, as they took you once before, Kurland."

The outlaw turned, ice-veined, but Gion did not stir.

"I am a prisoner. Judged and doomed. No ship, no crew."

"Escapes have been arranged before."

Kurland surveyed the big man curiously. "Why not go yourself on this golden errand, Marward?"

Gion shrugged. "Leaving my empire to the wolves? You know I dare not, nor trust a lieutenant in my place. This is not a secret for friends or followers."

"I am no friend of yours. You dare trust me?"

"Outlaw, fugitive, renegade ... need I fear you, Kurland?" smiled Gion coolly. "My word against yours."

Kurland nodded slowly. "I see. But should I return with the jewels, what assurance have I that my crew and I do not instantly decorate your gallows yonder?"

"None," admitted Gion. "Reliance upon my word, I imagine, would give you scant comfort, but it is not to my interest to have even the slightest suspicion turned upon me while the jewels are in my possession. Compared to them, you and your arrogant little band are not worth the snapping of a broken twig. Bring me the Orions, Kurland, and your five slip the noose with a day's grace to be beyond my grasp. What more do you require?"

"A ship and my crew to man her," replied Kurland, steadily. "I am your enemy forever, Gion."

Gion smiled, not without malice. "If you will have it so, Kurland. I am a bad enemy."

"You used me once too often, Gion. I was an honest man when first my ships came trading here, too stiff to crawl to your thieving crew, too callow to stomach your vicious thrust to power. Exiled, dishonored, branded, I bear a prouder title than yours, Marward. I am your enemy."

"Serve me, then, and I promise you scant reward," Gion calmly agreed. "Your ship lies in the hangar, beyond the outer towers. Fueled. The chart is marked, your course is set. There are no guards."

Kurland suggestively clanked his chains.

Gion stepped into the corridor, his heavy face set and intent. Drawing his gun, he leveled a short tube with his left hand, focussing it on Kurland's chains through the doorway grill. As the outlaw pulled, links parted like melted cheese in the tinted purple glow.

"There will be reprimands and stern punishments that you were allowed to conceal a dis-tube about your person," explained Gion, holding Kurland motionless with the threat of his leveled gun. "You comprehend. Your companions will be spared, that you be hanged together on your recapture. There will be no questions, no suspicion. On your return, you will place the jewels beneath the seat where you have lain, taking the key you will find there to release your men. Vanish, Kurland. Stay beyond my power. Expect no mercy, for justice shall be no more swift and certain to punish your crimes than I to still your tongue for once and all. You have your warning."

"You make yourself quite plain," agreed the outlaw, hand on hip. "We understand one another, Marward of Jupiter. You shall have your mangy jewels. Nothing else."

Gion laughed contemptuously. "Have you seen them, wolf's-head? What else do I need?"

"Friends, Marward."

"I have an enemy," Gion mocked, vanishing up the dim-lit corridor in a blur of fading saffron. His throaty laugh came thickly back to Kurland as the clicking lock swung the heavy door gently wide.

Kurland was through it instantly, alert for a treacherous blast, darting into the shadows of the poor stone corridor, patched and ragged with broken plaster and creeping moss. Gion had vanished, but he did not dare venture anything in that direction, bearing as he did the lives of all his captive crew. Softly he passed down the empty corridors to the broad upper court overlooking the hillside ramparts.

His broad chest swelled with the fresh breath of freedom, strained though it might be through the rude beams of the new-made gallows he was cheating. The cords along his bearded jaw tightened. His hands found a tiny pill in a slot of his bread belt, pressed it swiftly against the unguarded wood of the gallows. He melted into the shadows of the stairs as a wave of heat and acrid smoke billowed out, engulfing him and hiding him from view. The startled guards in the towers above saw the tall gibbets wreathed in sudden consuming flame even as they stared.

Rushing to the conflagration, none saw the shadowy figure dart through the postern far below and vanish into the rocks fringing the landing ground at the wall's base. A moment later, the deserted hangars erupted flame and boiling smoke, hurtling into the starry Jovian sky the slim black fighter manned once again by Eldon Kurland, outlaw. Gaping, they watched it vanish among the paling stars of dawn.

II

Heywood, Gion's jackal, moped sullenly about the rocks of the jagged little asteroid, scowling through his vitrine helmet at the tiny figure moving slowly along the crater floor near the distant bones of the wrecked Plutonian. The intolerable glare of the naked sun, hidden by the rock's toothed horizon, yet thrust flaming whorls of gold and scarlet above the mountains to hideously outline the ragged ribs of the vessel he had diverted from its course to its death on this uncharted worldlet.

A scowl he kept hidden from his companion darkened his handsome, waxen face, and for the hundredth time he muttered imprecations upon his ill-fortune in the moment of triumph. He had not counted on the girl.

Allen Heywood depended on nothing save himself, for which his master Gion valued him more highly than any other tool and trusted him not at all. Surreptitiously relaying to the Marward the coordinates of the space-ship on which he had slipped as passenger, Heywood had coldly blown out the stern-tubes with a delayed-action bomb and sent the big ship crashing into the selected uncharted asteroid, thinking nothing of the fifty lives that flared out in the exploding wreckage. More careful of his own, he had simply stepped out an emergency lock in a space-suit a moment before the ship struck, allowing himself to slowly drift with his own momentum and the asteroid's faint gravitational pull. He had landed a mile from the ship perhaps an hour after it crashed, only to find himself confronted by another suited figure, the woman Francinet.

Shaken by the encounter, he realized she had no suspicion of the part he had played, or that the crash had been less than accidental. She had herself been saved by the merest freak, having been clad in a space-suit for a photograph-minded acquaintance. When the ship split, she had been shot upward through a rent in the hull, drifting slowly down as had he. They were hopelessly marooned.

The ship was ruined, if not completely destroyed. Heywood pushed aside the horrible steel-hard blobs of red which had been human beings with no apparent qualms, nor troubled himself that it had been he who had slain them all as surely as with gun or knife. With the bows crushed shapeless by the headlong smash into the asteroid and the stem blown wide by its own thermoblast bombs, nothing was left them but a length or two of warped and twisted main cabin hardly capable of retaining the Earth atmosphere still flowing through the tiny purifier engines he had seen to preserving. Cleaning out the unrecognizable dead, he rigged up a rough shelter for them. They had occupied it by now for over a week.

He kicked again at a rock, watching it spiral slowly up and over a crevasse in slow-motion. The jewels were still intact, hidden in the ship's safe. He had not risked her discovering him tampering with either, nor the safer course of destroying her as he had her companions. There was no assurance that another ship than Gion's rescuing craft might not discover them first.

That Gion would send a ship for him he believed with implicit faith, tempered by the knowledge that it would be the loot and not the thief that the powerful Marward coveted. He had no illusions concerning Gion, and so had survived. Thus, as he glanced skyward to see a tiny star moving perceptibly across the blazing night of interspatial glory, Allen Heywood flattened himself behind a huge rock quite as promptly as from the devil himself.

A blaster slid into his hand. The green eyes were intent.

The little ship was coming down.

The long blue glare paled across the unwinking stars and a red column of fire poured viciously from Kurland's ship, whitening to a rigid arc lancing into the broken rocks below. Eyes intent, the outlaw bent forward over his keys, searching the ragged terrain as he braked his easy dive. Then his firm lips thinned, cruelly hard in the thick beard masking his copper face. The broken ribs of the lost space-ship thrust up against the sun, half-hidden in the shadows of a stoney ledge.

Kurland shut off his drive, thrusting in breakers and snapping down his forward beams. The eight-man ship he had made known and feared through all the distant Jovian system drifted easily through the empty sky, feeling its way on walking tractor beams. The star-shine glinted on the black lines and heavy armament, hesitating to further lighten the dark menace of the craft.

A green beam lanced into a nearby crag, splitting it from top to bottom, and toppling it in soundless ruin across the crater floor. Nothing stirred about the silent wreck.

Lightly the ship touched the crater floor, rocking gently on its beams. A broad figure in black swung down and moved swiftly across the rock toward the broken hulk of the Plutonian. Heywood softly drifted into the shadows, floating easily from hollow to hollow, following.

Kurland stood silent, looking up at the gigantic ruin, majestic even in its awful desolation, and the look upon his face was not good to see. There were no deeper hells than those for wreckers, no fate too grim for one who callously snapped the bright, thin thread of life reaching out from Earth to all the Solar planets and their hundred circling satellites. The Marward of Jupiter would buy an empire with this tangled pile of riven steel. He should find the bargain dear.

There was no need to seek airlocks in the Plutonian's side. Three were visible, ripped and gaping, and there were a score of torn holes twenty feet and more in width broken through the shell where the vessel had plowed her way into the rocks. Clothes instruments, furniture, books, and a hundred intimate possessions lay crumpled to view in the gutted cabins or scattered wide across the shining plain. For a moment Kurland looked at a headless doll, then moved forward, his face a deadly mask.

Swiftly he climbed, mounting the broken stone and twisted metal that led him to a greater gash leading into an inner saloon. He forced his way through the debris, then straightened, looking about him curiously.

Furniture and drapes lay crushed, torn, heaped against the broken forward bulkheads, but nowhere could he see the dead who must have died here by the tens and by the score. There was no blood upon the walls, for blood exposed to the instant void of interstellar space crystallized in the very bodies of the injured, but in the debris at the foot of the muralled bulkhead many tiny marbles of dreadful scarlet rolled and tinkled silently as he searched.

He moved forward, passing through the shattered bulkheads where open swinging doors gave acute evidence of the unexpectedness of the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the ship. Ruin and destruction were everywhere, but nowhere a trace of the bodies he knew had exploded into scarlet dust as the biting death of space lanced its deadly vacuum into the rending vessel. There could be only one answer, and it brought his gun into his hand as he moved warily through the corridors.

His search ended in the open, metal-sprayed bowl which had been the forward pilot cabin, for here, piled hideously in red tangles, the rigid blots whose life-blood had rolled beneath his feet in bright pellets as he walked lay sprawled in horrible disfigurement. There were no longer anything at all. Simply color, encompassed in torn and broken clothing.

Whiter than the fleshless bone displayed before him, Kurland thrust to the swinging door, welding it shut in one impulsive burst of his blaster. No man should see what lay beyond. Shaking with a terrible anger, Kurland strode furiously back the broken ship, gun in hand, and flung his curses on ahead. He opened nothing, but shot doors and panels from their hinges as he advanced, eyes glaring for the faintest sign of movement. Only the man who had planned and executed this horror could have survived it.

Midway in his stride the outlaw halted, gun lifted. The pilot light over the central chambers glowed softly. There was atmosphere within. Kurland snarled, closed his gloved hand on the twisted lever. He jerked and the battered door swung open, revealing a rough airlock improvised from the usual intercommunicating chamber. He darted in, snapping the door behind him. Air sighed into the chamber as he drew another rude lever down from the box nailed to the bulkhead.

Removing his vitrine helmet, Kurland holstered his gun and thrust open the inner lock. The air was clean and fresh, Earth-crisp. The room was battered, but not structurally damaged, and the furnishings were neatly in place. There were signs that other chambers had been looted to furnish this one, and Kurland smiled mirthlessly. He silently moved across the thick blue rug.

The room beyond was a sleeping cabin, with male attire in the slotted racks. The stamp of occupancy lay everywhere in the worn, neat articles stamped with a golden H. The other room of the suite had been fitted with heat tubes for warmth and cooking, and were piled high with salvaged foodstuffs.

Continuing, Kurland found a broken passage beyond this kitchen, leading deeper into the shop's waist, but cut off from the first suite by locked doors. The outlaw grinned wickedly and, reversing the charge silently burned the doors from their slides. There was no sound, no vibration as he laid them against the wall. Gion had not hunted him for nothing.

The room beyond was deep in rugs, the panelled walls well-hung with costly paintings. A recorder was singing beyond a brocaded drape, and Kurland could hear footsteps moving lightly across the padded floor. With one swift bound he was across the anteroom, ripping the drapery from its flimsy hangings, and stood upon the threshold of the inner room, a black, terrible figure looming in the warped doorway like the angel of Death. His voice rang softly through the sudden frozen silence as he faced the survivor.

"My apologies. I underestimated Gion."