Young Winteroud Sole and Detective Hammerstein have traced No-deal Depaulo to a series of crimes against the Star System and the Royal Family at Caldris. Their search has led them to the Galactic Core, where Marauders, Piracy, and a grim underworld surrounds their suspect... They were waiting for us when we dropped out of hyperspace, I could sense them then, a dirty little swarm, and sickeningly the most frightening thing was they had once been human. Klaxons hammered my ears and my empathic senses were then overwhelmed-the strange Marauders minds, with their ugly snake eye stares hammering my mind, then the sudden tussle of twenty hard core air men their adrenaline and training kicking in with a slam. "This is not a drill!" Coco-butter Parsons howled but the air men's boots were already banging steel, half of them at their guns. We were sitting ducks and there were a dozen Marauder ships, easy. Particle beam fire slashed away at our ship, the KanaaFutura. The Marauders doubtless had never seen a Caldris Royal Navy warship here at the Galactic Core, even through their snake infected minds I could sense a huge wave of surprise come back as we took their fire and the mighty KanaaFutura rose through the maelstrom of ionized particles and maligned atomic clouds her guns announcing payback. Nobody missed and the Marauder shielding, magnetized ore layered over their giant ramjets, began to strip away in a fireworks show such that the demonic, snaky victimizers were revealed for the devil they were, squealing and riding fire with the hellish super-massive black hole and its light-years of swirling accretion disk as their background. Still, no one stopped firing on either side and we rode the streams in a twirling death volley of destruction. Hammerstein, impossibly, was cursing and longing for a gun port...