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. Two screen generators went to hell and plastered the control room with jagged shards of smoking metal. There was a searing pain in Cutlass' shoulder, and blood trickled the length of his arm and along his fingers as he flipped the ship's inter-teleco switches. Just a glance told him they'd gotten through the screens--the jagged, gaping holes in the _Vulture's_ ripped flanks told him he didn't have a gunner or a radarman left alive. Damn them _damn them_.... He choked on the acrid fumes of the burnt-out screen generators as he fumbled painfully into a space-suit. Old Doc had bragged to him once that a man could travel the system end to end and back in a Raven-built suit--with a certain amount of pirates' luck, of course. Well, the Patrol wasn't to have Robbin Cutlass alive-- He was less than five thousand miles out when he saw the _Vulture_ die. It was a Viking's death--a great mass of blinding white flame which seemed to rip Space wide open for a silent, coruscating second--and then there was the cold darkness of any grave. Pluto glimmered eerily a hundred million miles ahead of him. And somewhere, a half-light-year beyond, was Doc's old freighter. Doc, with his well hidden laboratory, circling away the last years of his life in the quiet solitude of Deep Space--all that was left. * * * * * Barrel-chested and heavy-browed like his father, Robbin Cutlass stood there, his space-suit crumpled in a heap at his feet, and looked about him. Doc had explained it to him, but he still was not sure he understood.