CHAPTER IAttack from Nowhere
STARS exploded into being on every hand with all the suddenness and violence of catastrophe. The Marintha, battered and scarred, came out of overdrive into normal space with the frantic speed of a bat just streaking out of hell.
A lifeboat blister was gone. There was a swollen streak all along her plating on one side as if something improbable had played upon her briefly and softened the metal so that it bulged from the air-pressure within. One of her atmosphere-fins had been blown jaggedly off and there was a gaping hole in an after-compartment.
Lon Howel saw the great ringed sun off to one side, swimming grandly in space with its attendant family of planets. It was a yellow sun, Sol-type except for the ring telling of some ancient satellite which had blund
