ss court-martial system of Mekin would take over.

There was one problem, however, for the Mekinese skippers. When they
engaged a ship from Kandar, they died. Still, no ship left the scene of
the battle to report defeat.

It was absolute and complete. It was not only a defeat. It was
annihilation. The Mekinese fleet was destroyed to the last ship, even to
the armed transports carrying bureaucrats and police to set up a new
government on Kandar. Those ships which dared not run away without a
token fight, discovered the fleet of Kandar wasn't fighting a token
battle. It had started out to be just that, but somehow the plans had
changed when the fighting started. For the aggressors, it was disaster.

When his fleet reassembled, King Humphrey issued a general order to all
ships. He read it in person, his voice strained and dead and hopeless.

"_I have to express my admiration for the men of my fleet_," he said
drearily. "_An unexampled victory over unexampled odds is not only in
keeping with the best traditions of the armed forces of Kandar, but
raises those traditions to the highest possible level of valor and
devotion. If it were not that in winning this victory we have doomed our
home world to destruction, I would be as happy as I am, reluctantly,
proud...._"

_Part Two_

Chapter 5

Nobody had ever found any use for the Glamis solar system. There was a
sun of highly irregular variability. There were two planets, of which
the one farther out might have been useful for colonization except that
it was subject to extreme changes of climate as its undependable sun
burned brightly or dimly. The nearer planet was so close to its primary
that it had long ceased to rotate. One hemisphere, forever in sunshine,
remained in a low, red heat. Its night hemisphere, in perpetual
darkness, had radiated away its heat until there were mountains of
frozen atmosphere piled above what should have been a mineral surface.
It was a matter of record that a hundred standard years before, a ship
had landed there and mined oxygen-containing snow, which its air
apparatus was able to refine so the crew could breathe while they
finished some rather improbable repairs and could go on to more
hospitable worlds.

The farther-out planet was sometimes a place of green vegetation and
sprawling seas, and sometimes of humid jungles with most of its oceans
turned to a cloud-bank of impenetrable thickness. Also, sometimes, it
was frozen w