Kurland was through it instantly, alert for a treacherous blast, darting into the shadows of the poor stone corridor, patched and ragged with broken plaster and creeping moss. Gion had vanished, but he did not dare venture anything in that direction, bearing as he did the lives of all his captive crew. Softly he passed down the empty corridors to the broad upper court overlooking the hillside ramparts. His broad chest swelled with the fresh breath of freedom, strained though it might be through the rude beams of the new-made gallows he was cheating. The cords along his bearded jaw tightened. His hands found a tiny pill in a slot of his bread belt, pressed it swiftly against the unguarded wood of the gallows. He melted into the shadows of the stairs as a wave of heat and acrid smoke billowed out, engulfing him and hiding him from view. The startled guards in the towers above saw the tall gibbets wreathed in sudden consuming flame even as they stared. Rushing to the conflagration, none saw the shadowy figure dart through the postern far below and vanish into the rocks fringing the landing ground at the wall's base. A moment later, the deserted hangars erupted flame and boiling smoke, hurtling into the starry Jovian sky the slim black fighter manned once again by Eldon Kurland, outlaw. Gaping, they watched it vanish among the paling stars of dawn. II Heywood, Gion's jackal, moped sullenly about the rocks of the jagged little asteroid, scowling through his vitrine helmet at the tiny figure moving slowly along the crater floor near the distant bones of the wrecked _Plutonian_. The intolerable glare of the naked sun, hidden by the rock's toothed horizon, yet thrust flaming whorls of gold and scarlet above the mountains to hideously outline the ragged ribs of the vessel he had diverted from its course to its death on this uncharted worldlet. A scowl he kept hidden from his companion darkened his handsome, waxen face, and for the hundredth time he muttered imprecations upon his ill-fortune in the moment of triumph. He had not counted on the girl. Allen Heywood depended on nothing save himself, for which his master Gion valued him more highly than any other tool and trusted him not at all. Surreptitiously relaying to the Marward the coordinates of the space-ship on which he had slipped as passenger, Heywood had coldly blown out the stern-tubes with a delayed-action bomb and sent the big ship crashing into the selected uncharted asteroid, thinking nothing of the fifty lives that flared out in the exploding wreckage. More careful of his own, he had simply stepped out an emergency lock in a space-suit a moment before the ship struck, allowing himself to slowly drift with his own momentum and the asteroid's faint gravitational pull. He had landed a mile from the ship perhaps an hour after it crashed, only to find himself confronted by another suited figure, the woman Francinet.