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Updated: June 4, 2025
Nearer the sun, on the far side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen. The Isis drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's computations. Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast.
There was a little cloud of vapor which dissipated swiftly. Then there was nothing but two or three specks moving at random, their target lost, their purpose forgotten. The fact of victory was an anticlimax. "All clear," said Bors grimly. The inner-compartment doors opened. The normal sounds of the ship were heard again. Bors began to calculate the data needed for the journey to Garen.
Every atom of the ship's substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles of emptiness that it did not show even as a mist. "A good ship," said Bors grimly. Then he growled. "I wonder if they saw that on Garen and what they thought about it!" He straightened himself. "How did you know we were in trouble?"
The voice from space spoke with intolerable levity. "Come up with your missiles ready! We'll give you ten thousand miles of height. And if you try to duck out in overdrive...." The voice was explicit about what it would do to the Mekinese-occupied areas of Garen if the battleship fled. It came up to fight. It could do nothing else.
They began a long, shallow, screaming descent from the farthest limits of the planet's atmosphere. Out where the sun of Garen was a disk of intolerable brilliance and heat, the battleship bumbled on its way. It would seem that its commander scornfully accepted the Isis's terms of combat and moved contemptuously to the position where his weapons would be most deadly.
He held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight. The speed of the Isis, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point seven lights. Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of Garen.
Gwenlyn remained, listening with interest when the conversation began, and now and then saying something of no great importance. But her presence kept Bors from feeling altogether like a fool. Madame Porvis looked at him with languishing, sentimental eyes. Harms watched him accusingly. Their questions were trivial. Bors told about the landings on Tralee and on Garen.
They use booby-traps as police devices!" It was not reasonable, but Bors could not think of missing a Mekinese warship. The idea of a government using booby-traps to enforce its orders somehow put it beyond forgiveness, and with the government all those who served it willingly. "You'll go to Garen then?" asked Gwenlyn. Bors felt a sharp sting of annoyance.
The trick, of course, was in the timing, and the secret was that Bors knew what he was doing, while those who opposed him did not. Bors had declared himself a pirate on Tralee, and here off Garen he'd claimed the same status. But no Mekinese, as yet, knew why he'd outlawed himself, nor his purpose in challenging a line battleship to fight.
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