BATTLE for the STARS By ALEXANDER BLADE Kirk had never seen the distant planet called Earth, yet his squadron was now ordered there--to stem the outbreak of a galactic war! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy June 1956 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was well called the Dragon's Throat, thought Kirk. Throat of fire, of burning suns, a cosmic blind-alley into danger! You made your decision. You threw a ship, a hundred men, your officers, your friends, your own Commander's badge you threw them all down on the gamble. But when the stakes were stars.... He said to himself, "The hell with it, we're committed." He said aloud, "Radar?" Joe Garstang, standing on the bridge beside him, answered without turning. "Nothing has been monitored yet. Not _yet_." Kirk's palms itched. If they were running into an ambush, if Orion heavy cruisers were waiting for them, they'd soon know it. There could be ships all around them. Radar wasn't too dependable, in the howling vortices of force-field energy flung out around this jungle of stars. Through the broad bridge-windows--the "windows" that were really scanners cunningly translating faster-than-light probe rays into visual images--there beat upon his face the light of a thousand suns. It was Cluster N-356-44, in the Standard Atlas. It was also hellfire made manifest, to starmen. It was a hive of swarming suns, pale green and violet, white and yellow-gold and smoky red, blazing so fiercely that the eye was robbed of perspective and these stars seemed to crowd and jostle and rub each other. Up against the black backdrop of the firmament they burned, pouring forth the torrents of their life-energy to whirl in terrific cosmic maelstroms. The merchant ships that boldly drove the great darks between ordinary star-worlds would recoil aghast from the navigational perils here. Only a fool--or a cruiser--would go in here. There was a narrow cleft between cliffs of stars, with the flame-shot glow of an immense nebula roofing it. The only possible way into the heart of the cluster, this Dragon's Throat of starman legend. But others had gone in this way. At least, so said the rumors, rumors that had reached the squadron as far away as the Pleiades. Rumors too factual, too alarming, to be ignored.