s."

Narth did so, taking his time as though it was something of little
importance. "There will be no maneuvers. They'll blast the stern and
destroy your drive immediately upon attack."

He fastened the last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted
unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much
disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on
Athena, hasn't it?"

"Not exactly," Humbolt replied. "Our plans are a little broader in scope
than that. There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the
shops ten days from now. We'll turn control of Athena over to the humans
there, of course, then we'll take the three cruisers and the battleship
back by way of Ragnarok. There we'll pick up all the Ragnarok men who
are neither too old nor too young and go on to Earth. They will be given
training en route in the handling of ships. We expect to find no
difficulty in breaking through the Gern lines around Earth and then,
with the addition of the Earth ships, we can easily capture all the Gern
ships in the solar system."

"'Easily'!" Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. "Were you
actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal
Gern officers who have made a career of space warfare?"

"We'll far exceed them," he said. "A space battle is one of trying to
keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to
break through its blaster shields at that point. And at the same time
try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same
thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty
gravities or more but the acceleration limitator is the safeguard that
prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or
into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew.

"We from Ragnarok are accustomed to a one point five gravity and can
withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other
race from a one gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that
fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser
disconnected."

_"Disconnected?"_ Narth's contemptuous regard vanished in frantic
consternation. "You fool--you don't know what that means--_you'll move
the acceleration lever too far and kill us all!_"

The red dot flicked on the viewscreen, trembled, and was suddenly a
gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control