"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on them." "Yes, Captain." Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy. It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!" As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of the alien fleet. Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war. * * * * * Like a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air, the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its right to conquest. Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed. The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers. Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that chanced to connect. Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the violence of new atoms being created from old. But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing, wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly. The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours. They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands of her Captain and crew that kept the _Cleopatra_ alive....