Captain Horgan adjusted his thick spectacles and checked the trembling navigational dials of his cargo freighter.
He was a cautious, mild-mannered merchant from Planet #14, hauling eighty tons of dried beans, salt fish, and pickled cabbage through Asteroid Pass #52.
For twenty years, flying through the Crimson Asteroid Belt had been a recurring nightmare that gave him chronic stomach ulcers. Every merchant knew that entering this sector meant paying off at least three different pirate syndicates, or ending up drifting in an airless escape pod while raiders stripped your hull to bare girders.
Beside him, his young nephew and co-pilot, Jerry, was staring at the radar with wide, terrified eyes.
Suddenly, the proximity klaxons screamed like wounded boars.
Twenty heavily armed pirate corsairs, bristling with jagged red iron spikes and heavy plasma cannons, surged out of hidden asteroid craters.
They executed a lightning-fast pincers maneuver, completely surrounding Horgan’s sluggish freighter.
Horgan’s face turned as white as powdered chalk. His hands shook so violently that his brass prayer beads slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the deck plates.
