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The teleceiver screen to his right showed a view of the stern of the vessel and Connel could see some of the ground crew slowly rolling away the boarding equipment. Flipping on the switch that opened a circuit to an outside loud-speaker, he bellowed an order for the area to be cleared. The crew scurried back behind the blast deflectors and watched the ship through the thick crystal viewports.

Maintenance was working overtime, but the rest of the crew, with nothing to do, stood around in the recreation rooms, tried to play games, cursed the heat and the dreary dimness through the viewports, and twitched at the boiler-factory racket from the holds.

Aldebaran loomed, then faded in the viewports; another shift jumped them to a star whose human name Bart did not know. Shift followed shift, spaceport followed spaceport, sun followed sun; men lived on most of these worlds, and on each of them a Lhari spaceport rose, alien and arrogant. And on each world men looked at Lhari with resentful eyes, cursing the race who kept the stars for their own.

Out the viewports he could see the dummy fleet in an apparently defensive formation. Its ships were only miles apart, and if they had been fighting ships, every one could have launched missiles at any point of attack from the pattern they constituted. At a hundred miles they could be seen only as specks of reflected sunlight.

Procyon was almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity. Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back buzzing like a frantic cricket.

Angle, strength and Doppler movement were computed to find course and distance. A few minutes of flight were enough to get within range of the far weaker transmitter in the drop-capsule. Homing on this signal was so simple, a human pilot could have done it himself. The shining sphere loomed up, then vanished out of sight of the viewports as the ship rotated to bring the spacelock into line.

After their stop on Antares Seven the largest of the inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was located they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary, and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving the Antares system. As Bart watched Antares growing in the viewports, he felt a variety of emotions.

Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports. Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing's entry into the system was a small captive sun.

Bors almost chanted, while with gestures toward the radar-screen he picked out the objects near which breakout should fall. "Point oh five seconds." The ship went into overdrive and out. It seemed as if the universe dissolved from one appearance to another outside the viewports. "Five, four, three, two, one! Hold fire!"

Far across the field, a slender, needle-nosed ship stood poised on her stabilizer fins ready for flight. She was black except for a red band painted on the hull across the forward section and around the few viewports. It gave her the appearance of a huge laughing insect. Quent eyed the vessel with a practiced eye. "I'll have to soup her up," he commented. "She wouldn't win a foot race now."