Mayday Orbit / No Man's World

MAYDAY ORBIT by Poul Anderson PLANET OF THE GOLDEN HORDE The squad's eyes registered the girl's blaster even as their chief spoke. Someone yelled. Bourtai fired into the thick of them. Ionic lightning crashed. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry dropped. A bolt sizzled where he had been. He fired, wide-beamed, the energy too diluted to kill even at short range but scorching four men at once. As their screams lifted, he bounced back to his feet, overlapped the fallen frontline, stiff-armed a warrior beyond, and hit the landing.. . This was the beginning of Flandry's hair-raising mission to Altai, one of the neutral planets between the two warring galactic cultures. But it also looked like the end of the adventure, for beyond his escape lay the man-killing frozen wastes of an ultra-polar zone. Cover by Ed Valigursky NO MAN'S WORLD by Kenneth Bulmer VISA FOR AN ENIGMA When John Carter came to the Horakah Cluster, it was in the guise of an interstellar salesman. If anyone there suspected he was more than that, it would mean his instant execution. But Carter's unusual personality made it possible for him to put over the deception and even gain a visa to the forbidden central planet, an arsenal of space war factories. Of course, he had to make some special deals to do it, and those proved his undoing. For he found himself caught there between two menaces: the tyrannical militaristic moguls and a fantastically greater threat from beyond the ends of space. Cover by Em Ershwiller