Hoddan’s knowledge of astrogation was strictly practical. He went over his ship. From a look at it outside he’d guessed that it once had been a yacht. Various touches inside verified that idea. There were two staterooms. All the space was for living and supplies. None was for cargo. He nodded. There was a faint mustiness about it. But there’d been a time when it was some rich man’s pride.

He went back to the control-room to make an estimate. From the pilot’s seat one could see a speck of brightness directly ahead. Infinitesimal dots of brightness appeared swiftly brighter and then darted outward. As they darted they disappeared because their motion became too swift to follow. There were, of course, methods of measuring this phenomenon so that one could get an accurate measure of one’s speed in overdrive. Hoddan had no instrument for the purpose. But he had the feel of things. This was a very fast ship indeed, at full Lawlor thrust.

Presently he went out to the central cabin. His followers had found provisions. There were novelties — hydroponic fruit, for instance — and they’d gloomily stuffed themselves. They were almost resigned, now. Memory of the loot he’d led them to at Ghek’s castle inclined them to be hopeful. But they looked uneasy when he stopped where they were gathered.

“Well?” he said sharply. Thai swallowed.

“We have been companions, Bron Hoddan,” he said unhappily. “We fought together in great battles, two against fifty, and we plundered the slain.”

“True enough,” agreed Hoddan. If Thai wanted to edit his memories of the fighting at the spaceport, that was all right with him. “Now we’re headed for something much better.”

“But what?” asked Thai miserably. “Here we are high above our native world—”

“Oh, no!” said Hoddan. “You couldn’t even pick out its sun, from where we are now!” Thai gulped.

“I do not understand what you want with us,” he protested. “We are not experienced in space! We are simple men…”

“You’re pirates now,” Hoddan told him with a sort of genial bloodthirstiness. “You’ll do what I tell you until we fight. Then you’ll fight well or die. That’s all you need to know!”

He left them. When men are to be led it is rarely wise to discuss policy or tactics with them. Most men work best when they know only what is expected of them. Then they can’t get confused and they do not get ideas of how to do things better.

Hoddan inspected the yacht more carefully. There were still traces of decorative features which had nothing to do with spaceworthiness. But the mere antiquity of the ship made Hoddan hunt more carefully. He found a small compartment packed solidly with supplies. A supply cabinet did not belong where it was. He hauled out stuff to make sure. It was — it had been — a machine shop in miniature. In the early days, before space-phones were long-range devices, a yacht or a ship that went beyond orbital distance was strictly on its own. If there were a breakdown it was strictly of private concern. It had to be repaired by its own, or else. So all early spacecraft carried amazingly complete equipment for repairs. Only liners had been equipped that way in recent generations, and it is almost unheard of for their tool shops to be used.

But there was the remnant of a shop on the yacht that Hoddan was using for his errand to Walden. He’d told the emigrant leaders that he went to ask for charity. He’d just assured his followers that their journey was for piracy. Now…

He began to empty the cubbyhole of all the items that had been packed into it for storage. It had been very ingenious, this miniature repair shop. The lathe was built in with strength-members of the walls as part of its structure. The drill press was recessed. The welding apparatus had its coils and condensers under the floor. The briefest of examinations showed the condensers to be in bad shape, and the coils might be hopeless. But there was good material used in the old days. Hoddan began to have quite unreasonable hopes.

He went back to the control-room to meditate.

He’d had a reasonably sound plan of action for the pirating of a spaceliner, even though he had no weapons mounted on the ship nor anything more deadly than stun-pistols for his reluctant crew. But he considered it likely that he could make the same sort of landing with this yacht that he’d already done with the spaceboat. Which should be enough.

If he waited off Walden until a liner went down to the planet’s great spaceport, he could try it. He would go into a close orbit around Walden which would bring him, very low, over the landing-grid within an hour or so of the liner’s landing. He’d turn the yacht end for end and apply full rocketpower for deceleration. The yacht would drop like a stone into the landing-grid. Everything would happen too quickly for the grid crew to think of clapping a forcefield on it, or for them to manage it if they tried. He’d be aground before they realized it.

The rest was simply fast action. Hoddan and seven Darthians, stun-pistols humming, would tumble out of the yacht and dash for the control-room of the grid. Hoddan would smash the controls. Then they’d rush the landed liner, seize it, shoot down anybody who tried to oppose them, and seal up the ship.

And then they’d take off on the liner’s rockets, which were carried for emergency landing only, but could be used for a single take-off. After one such use they’d be exhausted. And with the grid’s controls smashed, nobody could even try to stop them.

It wasn’t a bad idea. He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the reason for his Darthian crew. Nobody’d expect such a thing to be tried, so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was seized.

Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they’d fight like fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn’t. But if he could keep the spaceyacht also…

He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn’t work, there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he’d get a modern spaceliner and suitable cargo to present to emigrants of Colin.

There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor drive unit formed a forcefield, a stress in space, into which a nearby ship necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of him by a stick. The ship moving into the stressed area moved the stress. The forcefields of a landing-grid were similar. A turning principle was involved, but basically a landing-grid clamped an area of stress around a spaceship, and the ship couldn’t move out of it. When the landing-grid moved the stressed area up or down — why — that was it.

All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an area of space so stressed that its energy content could leak out only very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the surrender of their victims.

Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive unit had been installed long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical ball-lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan’s grandfather had used it for years. It had the advantage that •it could be used inside a gravity field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive installations.