"Gun deck!"

A feminine voice replied.

"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes."

"Yes, sir!" the woman rapped out.

"Radar!"

"Right here, Skipper!"

"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on them."

"Yes, Captain."

Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy. It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!"

As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of the alien fleet.

Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.

Like a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air, the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its right to conquest.

Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed. The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a white 

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