Hideout

When a man has a price on his head he runs for his life. And if he's finally cornered he may have only one door left open to him—Time!
Cap'n Cutlass! Earth merchantman three points starboard, oblique ecliptic eight degrees. Estimate speed 400,000, Marsbound. Your orders, sir?
Robbin Cutlass was angry. He wouldn't let this one go by. Not even with a million credits on his head. But damn it, one ship and one crew couldn't fight the whole Tri-Planet Entente Space Patrol alone. But that was how it had to be.
Track her down! He switched over to all-stations. All hands read this. Gunners to stations, oblique ecliptic eight, Earth reading three starboard, two torpedoes across her bow and stand alert to blow her! Boarders don your suits, man lock stations and stand by. Drive-room cut in your Raven converters, jet minus 177 ecliptic acute 3-5-2 and hold her steady as she blasts. Now wait.
He checked in his own radar screen as a matter of routine.
Twenty years ago when his father had given orders from this same control room things hadn't been like this. You knew, when the Vulture and a section of her fleet closed in to make the kill that nobody had the guts to try to stop you. Sure, Jeremy Cutlass had been a tough old duck—but even he wouldn't have been able to hold the fifty-ship buccaneer fleet together after the Patrol had gotten fully organized. Robbin remembered how it had been when he died—the whole fleet had hovered in double-echelon to each side of the Vulture , the faded sun-glow from Pluto glimmering shadow-like from its long, slender hulls—right at the very edge of the total darkness of Deep Space itself. And then the body of Jeremy Cutlass had been committed to the deep of Infinity.
Those were the days when a man had friends—and now, all that Jeremy Cutlass had had, scattered as they'd been from one end of the Universe to the other—were either dead or sweating out their last days in the penal colonies of Earth or Mars. All except for old Doc Raven—and he'd be under lock and key too if the Vulture hadn't been able to carry out Jeremy's dying command—to rescue him from the penal colony of Mars, regardless of the cost. The cost had been the last eleven ships of the fleet.