SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE CIGAR.

But Brek Veronar didn't throw it away.  Earth-grown tobacco was precious, here on Ceres.  He took another bite off the end, and pressed the lighter cone again.  This time, imperfectly, the cigar drew - with an acrid, puzzling odor of scorching paper.

Brek Veronar - born William Webster, Earthman - was sitting in his big, well-furnished office, adjoining the arsenal laboratory.  Beyond the perdurite windows, magnified in the crystalline clarity of the asteroid's synthetic atmosphere loomed a row of the immense squat turret forts that guarded the Astrophon base - their mighty twenty-four-inch rifles, coupled to the Veronar autosight, covered with their theoretical range everything within Jupiter's orbit.  A squadron of the fleet lay on the field beyond, seven tremendous dead-black cigar shapes.  Far off, above the rugged red palisades of a second plateau, stood the many-colored domes and towers of Astrophon itself, the Astrarch's capital.

A tall, gaunt man, Brek Veronar wore the bright, close-fitting silks of the Astrarchy.  Dyed to conceal the increasing streaks of gray, his hair was perfumed and curled.  In abrupt contrast to the force of his gray, wide-set eyes, his face was white and smooth from cosmetic treatments.  Only the cigar could have betrayed him as a native of Earth, and Brek Veronar never smoked except here in his own locked laboratory.

He didn't like to be called the Renegade.

Curiously, that whiff of burning paper swept his mind away from the intricate drawing of a new rocket-torpedo gyro-pilot pinned to a board on the desk before him, and back across twenty years of time.  It returned him to the university campus, on the low yellow hills beside the ancient Martian city of Toran - to the fateful day when Bill Webster had renounced allegiance to his native Earth, for the Astrarch.

Tony Grimm and Elora Ronee had both objected.  Tony was the freckled, irresponsible redhead who had come out from Earth with him six years before, on the other of the two annual engineering scholarships.  Elora Ronee was the lovely dark-eyed Martian girl - daughter of the professor of geodesics, and a proud descendant of the first colonists - whom they both loved.

He walked with them, that day, bright afternoon, out from the yellow adobe buildings, across the rolling, stony, ocher-colored desert.  Tony's sunburned, blue-eyed face was grave for once, as he protested.

"You can't do it, Bill.  No Earthman could."

"No use talking," said Bill Webster, shortly.  "The Astrarch wants a military engineer.  His agents offered me twenty thousand eagles a year, with raises and bonuses - ten times what any research scientist could hope to get, back on Earth."

The tanned, vivid face of Elora Ronee looked hurt.  "Bill - what about your own research?" the slender girl cried.  "Your new reaction tube!  You promised you were going to break the Astrarch's monopoly on space transport.  Have you forgotten?"

"The tube was just a dream," Bill Webster told her, "but probably it's the reason he offered the contract to me, and not Tony.  Such jobs don't go begging."

Tony caught his arm.  "You can't turn against your own world, Bill," he insisted.  "You can't give up everything that means anything to an Earthman.  Just remember what the Astrarch is - a superpirate."

Bill Webster's toe kicked up a puff of yellow dust.  "I know history," he said.  "I know that the Astrarchy had its beginnings from the space pirates who established their bases in the asteroids, and gradually turned to commerce instead of raiding."

His voice was injured and defiant.  "But, so far as I'm concerned, the Astrarchy is just as respectable as such planet nations as Earth and Mars and the Jovian Fedetation.  And it's a good deal more wealthy and powerful than any of them."