Twenty-five years before, Lucky Starr's parents had been destroyed during a pirate raid on the Terrestrial Empire. Now Lucky was a man, and an officer of the Council of Science. His ship was heavily armed, the pirates were at hand, and the time for sweet blaster vengeance was near!

Slowly Lucky adjusted the cross-hairs of the ship's awesome energy bank. It was a pirate, no doubt! It was a thin, graceful vessel. It had an alien look about it, too.

Sirian design, thought Lucky. Was it such a ship that his father and mother had watched on the last day of their lives?