Captain Trent, who has just been hired to command the space freighter Yarrow, comes from a long line of space captains--and before that sea captains. Swashbuckling seems to be genetically encoded in his family line.
And, by golly, he'll need to buckle quite a few swashes. The Yarrow is going to attempt to reopen trade with a group of planets who have been plagued with space piracy so intense that interplanetary trade has pretty much shut down.
This is the premise of Space Captain, by Murray Leinster. It was first serialized as Killer Ship in the October and December issues of Amazing Stories magazine in 1965, then reprinted as an Ace Double in 1966.
The novel is enormously fun, following along after Captain Trent as he plots for ways to use his unarmed ship to fight armed pirate vessels. The story can be very roughly divided into three acts. Act One has Trent damaging a pirate ship and forcing it to retreat by just ramming it.
Though the Yarrow itself is unarmed, Trent has acquired small arms, explosives and gas bombs for his crew. So Act Two involves luring some pirates aboard a derelict space ship, then ambushing them. The pirate ship itself gets away, but Trent is able to bring a number of prisoners to a nearby planet.
This rare victory against the pirates who have been shutting down the economies of a number of planets brings Trent notoriety. It also generates an attitude that the pirate threat is abating, so a number of merchant ships decide to lift off to sell badly needed goods on other planets at high prices.
No one listens to Trent when he tries to tell them that the danger definitely isn't over. Ships are captured and people (including a young lady Trent had taken a liking to) are taken hostage. The pirates demand a prisoner exchange, threatening to kill ten hostages for any captured pirate who is executed.
That brings us to Act Three. Trent figures out where the pirate base is and takes his ship there. Remember that the Yarrow isn't armed, so a ground assault will be necessary to wipe out the pirates and rescue hostages.
Trent is a great character--a capable man who thinks out problems and comes up with logical plans. He earns his victories, doesn't take any guff from anyone, and is determined to do his job well. When he believes that the pirates have killed someone he felt responsible for, that cold determination is combined with a cold but furious desire for revenge.
Leinster also does a fine job of reminding us of the strangeness and enormity of outer space and gives us a vivid description of the volcano-strewn planet on which the pirates are hiding. This story generates an atmosphere that makes it easy for us to accept that its taking place in deep space and on alien worlds.
There's also a wonderful running gag about a device installed on the Yarrow by its owners--a gadget that is supposed to wreck the engines of nearby pirate ships, but instead keeps blowing up whenever it's switched on. The touchy engineer rebuilds it each time, assuring Trent that this time it'll work for sure.
Space Captain is Space Opera done right, with the reader taken to far-away stars to battle and out-smart ruthless villains. It does not break any new ground in the genre--it simply takes that genre and shows us how to do it right.
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