The ships rose above the atmosphere, and rose still higher, and the planet Kandar became a gigantic ball which filled an enormous part of the firmament. Then there were cracklings of communicators, and orders flittered through emptiness in scrambled and re-scrambled broadcasts of gibberish which came out as lucid commands in the control-rooms of the ships. Then, first, the point, then the advanced flankers, and then the main fleet, line by line and rank by rank--every ship drove on outward under top-speed solar-system drive.
The last of the four chartered space-liners, come to take refugees away before the Mekinese arrived, saw the disappearance of the ships in the rear of the fleet's formation. The liner was lowered to the ground by the landing-grid. It reported what it had seen. Those who were entitled to depart on it crowded aboard. With the fleet gone, panic began.
Morgan had to spend lavishly to get copies of the news reports that the liner had brought along as a matter of course. He took them back to the _Sylva_, where a frowning man with rings on his fingers read them with dark suspicion. Presently, triumphantly, he dictated predictions of dirty tricks from indications in the news.
Morgan returned to what he'd called the family room of the yacht. He relaxed. Gwenlyn tried to read. She did not succeed. She was excessively nervous.
Bors was not. The fleet re-formed itself well out from Kandar. It made for a rendezvous over a pole of the gas-giant planet which was the fourth planet from Kandar's sun. It was almost, but not quite in line with that yellow star toward the base, from which the Mekinese flotilla would come. The fleet went into a polar orbit around that gigantic planet, which was useless to mankind because its atmosphere was partly gaseous ammonia and partly methane.
The cosmos paid no attention. An unstable sol-type star in Cygnus collapsed abruptly and a number of otherwise promising planets became unfit for human exploitation. In Andromeda, a super-nova flared. The light of its explosion would not reach Kandar for very many thousands of years. The largest comet in the galaxy reached perihelion, and practically outshone the sun it circled. Nobody saw it, because nobody lived there. On a dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable above-water cosmos it had discovered. Suns flamed and spouted flares. Small dark stars became an infinitesimal fraction of a degree colder. There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not supposed to have such things.