Read "The Cosmic Computer" by H. Beam Piper online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The shooting died down to occasional rattles of small arms, usually followed by yells for quarter. An explosion thundered from across the crater. The _Lester Dawes_ fired her big guns a few times. A machine gun stuttered. A pistol banged, far away. It took two hours before all the pirates had been hunted out of hiding and captured, or killed if found by their former captives, who were accepting no surrender whatever.
Blackie Perales had been one of the latter; he had been found, his clothes in rags and covered with dirt and grease, hiding under a machine in one of the shops back of the dock in which the _Harriet Barne_ was being rebuilt. He had tried to claim that he was one of the pirates' prisoners who had eluded the roundup at the beginning of the battle and had been hiding there since. As soon as the real prisoners saw and recognized him, they had fallen upon him and clubbed, kicked and stamped him out of any resemblance to humanity. At that, what he got was probably only a fraction of what he deserved.