
Marten, a Terran scout pilot, dares a lone slip‑through of the Fourth Quadrant’s hostile Flesso patrols, trusting speed and stealth to keep him invisible. A sudden tractor‑beam snatches his tiny ship, pulling it helplessly into the belly of a hulking alien cruiser, and the silence of the metal hull turns his cockpit into a cage. Trapped with only a dead radio and a hostile crew watching, he must decide whether to wait for torment or to act.
Inside the ship’s dim chambers he comes face‑to‑face with Ghuvekenkh‑Nathor, the fearsome Flesso commander whose snarling visage promises a grim fate. Marten’s dry humor and quick reflexes keep the tension alive as he straps on a pair of heavy‑handed Spaulding cutter‑pistols and eyes a concealed escape hatch that the aliens haven’t anticipated. The stage is set for a tense cat‑and‑mouse game, where a single clever move could turn a prisoner into a runaway.
Language
en
Duration
~19 minutes (18K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2021-04-27
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1927–1987
A prolific mid-century science fiction and fantasy writer, he became especially well known for the Lord Darcy stories, where detective fiction meets an alternate world shaped by magic. He also wrote heavily for the pulp magazines of the 1950s and 1960s and collaborated with other major SF writers.
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