They got the great silver ship's hatches pried open, finally, and dragged Shane out by his heels. They dumped him on his face in the gravel and cinders of the ramp like a pole-axed huecco . He wasn't a particularly big man, as men came out here in the spaceways. But there was a spare, hard quality to his close-knit body, and the old scars that marked him told of forgotten battles, bitter fights to the death with no quarter asked or given. Strange suns had burnt him dark as a Malya . Mercury's bl

The walls and floor and ceiling and door of Shane's windowless cell all had the cold green glitter of pure telonium. So did the handcuffs and leg-irons that shackled him. But the bare metal cot hinged to one wall was of steel. Telonium rated harder than steel, seventeen point seven times harder. Its tensile strength figured nine times greater. Even so, it took Shane most of the night to tear loose one of the cot's cross-straps, using the locking lug of the leg-irons as combination pry-bar and cu

"Now!" Shane clipped. The slave girl screamed—shrilly, piercingly. Shane poised, the cross-strap mace drawn back and ready. A dim whisper of running feet echoed from the corridor outside. The lock clicked sharply. The door burst open. Light-gun already drawn, the Thorian guard lunged into the cell. Shane swung the steel. The Thorian's eyes flicked to the Earthman in the same instant. Desperately, he tried to halt his headlong plunge—to throw himself sidewise, out of the way. He moved too late. T

The doors were protected by rigid barriers of projected force, and the light-pistol burned out before Shane had quite finished cutting through the wall. But he had taken a long knife from the dead Pervod in the third guard-car. He finished the job with it. So, finally, they were inside, crawling through an ever-murkier blackness while the silence hammered at them like a living thing. And then, suddenly, out of the ebon stillness, a voice said: "Welcome, Earthman!" A man's voice, this; or at leas

This room was large, and luxuriously furnished with the treasures of a score of satellites and planets. Here were rich tapestries from Orlon, a thousand blinding years in the making. Here, a table from Rhea, aglitter with the inlays of the spider men, delicate as the traceries of frost. Great borvne crystals from the pits of Neptune had been transformed into lamps, their cold fire blazing like the play of sun on glacial ice. A priceless Grecian vase from Earth, older almost than time itself, cre

They were singing in the dungeons—a wild Chonya song that had echoed down through the reckless years since that fateful day when the first great raider ship blasted off from the asteroids across the void: "My whole crew?" Shane asked tonelessly. One of the Martian falas of the escort nodded. "Then why bother with me? They can tell you as much about the ship as I." The fala shrugged. But a Pervod snarled: "The fools will do nothing without your orders—not even tell us which are the technicians. W

Now they were hurtling through the utter blackness that was space, away from the bleak moon that had been their prison. To port, Jupiter loomed monstrous, overwhelming, its great Red Spot weirdly aglow with seas of flaming hydrogen that seethed and boiled amid gigantic ice-cliffs carved from frozen gases. On the other side, Ganymede and Callisto swung slowly in their orbits; and beyond them, dwarfed by them, tiny Jupiter IX raced through the sky in the counter direction. A navigator said: "The p

"This is the place," the Chonya said. "This is where the silver woman came." Shane studied the structure. It was a house—a sort of fortress-dwelling in the ancient Fantay style, set a hundred feet from its nearest neighbor. Even in the semi-darkness of the early Martian night it looked old, mouldering old. Light from Phobos and Deimos, the tiny moons that raced across the sky overhead, glinted on the bosses that studded the great iridium-alloy door, and the weathered walls of lyndyse stone rose

This was Amara's great arena. The oval pit was full twenty feet deep and floored with sand ... sand that here and there was churned and trodden, stained dark brown with men's life blood. Above the pit, seats rose into the star-flecked night in steep-banked tiers. Those seats were full, now—packed from pit to rim with the savage, dark-faced Malya breed, a blood-lusting horde whose cries for slaughter rose in great, swelling waves like the screams of primeval beasts. In the forefront, ringing the

"Here Is Life!" the vendor cried. "Fresh life from new planets! Young slaves, with the hot blood surging through their veins! And all yours—yours for the asking, going for the price you set yourselves!" He struck a note on a silver gong. "Look at this next wench—a warm and vibrant thing, my friends, throbbing with life and spirit! What am I offered for her?" The woman on the block was Venusian, a weary, fading creature with the sucking tube and ear-stalks of the Transmi . Her eyes were veined wi

They stood there thus for a long, taut, echoing moment. Then Kyrsis said: "You leave me no choice, Earthman. I see I must tell you Gadar's secret." " Gadar—? " Her lips twitched. "Yes, Earthman. Gadar, the dark star—the star hurled into your solar system from across the void: cold, bleak, barren, uninhabited Gadar." "You mean that you—your people—are of Gadar?" The silver woman nodded. "Yes. When our star cooled, in the course of that endless voyage across the void, we had no choice but to burro

They were coming now—a horde of great silver ships that lanced through the void like streaks of light, hurtling down on Gadar. The slim, sleek Chonya craft were with them, too ... the dull black Malya flyers; and Shane knew that his other calls had gotten through—that the worlds and the asteroids were uniting against slavery and death and chaos. A siren blasted shrill alarm. Quos Reggar's renegades swarmed onto the ramp, racing for their ships to take up the challenge. The light of battle shone

They picked up the trail in the asteroid belt, in the wreckage of a gutted town. It led to Horla, then, and from there to the burning sands of Mercury's barren wastes, and then back out to the moons of Saturn. But always Reggar was a jump ahead, and always there was blood and death and pillage. Once, on Juno, Shane thought he had him. But Reggar blasted off as the Earthman ramped in, and they lost the trail in the outer asteroids. And then, one night, Shane came to Titan. As always, there was de