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.
It had been worth it, yes. Not just because the conniving old toad was probably the best scientist Mars had ever produced, but because—
The intercom squealed frantically even as Cutlass saw what was happening in his own screen.
"Cap'n Cutlass! It's a trap, sir! I'm tracking Patrol ships from all points—"
There were at least 200 of them.
Even the Raven drive couldn't keep the Vulture from slewing, losing some of her precious speed as Cutlass tapped out an unprecedented ecliptic-deviation and trajectory-variation pattern on the master control console.
A screen generator whined its overload as the Patrol ships got the Vulture's range and pounded her with everything they had. This time, they were too many—and too fast.
"Run!" Cutlass howled to the drive-room. "Godammit, run!"
His eyes were hot and wet with the rage that rasped in his voice. No Cutlass that had ever buccaneered Space for four generations had ever given that command. But now the notorious Vulture, last of her kind in the Solar System, finally was forced to take to her jets or be torpedoed to cosmic dust like all the rest.