Read "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was on a night a week later that Dal Nara and I said farewell to Hurus Hol, standing on the roof of that same great building on Neptune from which we had started with our fifty cruisers weeks before. We had learned, in that week, how the only survivor of those cruisers, Ship 16, had managed to shake off the pursuing cones in that first fierce attack and had sped back to the Galaxy to give the alarm, of how the mighty Federation fleet had raced through the Galaxy from beyond Antares in answer to that alarm, speeding out toward the approaching dark star and reaching it just in time to save our own ship, and our sun.
The other events of that week, the honors which had been loaded upon us, I shall not attempt to describe. There was little in the solar system which we three could not have had for the asking, but Hurus Hol was content to follow the science that was his life-work, while Dal Nara, after the manner of her sex through all the ages, sought a beauty parlor, and I asked only to continue with our cruiser in the service of the Federation fleet. The solar system was home to us, would always be home to us, but never, I knew, would either of us be able to break away from the fascination of the great fleet's interstellar patrol, the flashing from sun to sun, the long silent hours in cosmic night and stellar glare. We would be star-rovers, she and I, until the end.