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John McBride is stranded on Pluto's mining city of Hell when a desperate spacegram sends him racing home to his pregnant wife, Enid, on a remote station. With every regular ship too slow, his only hope is the battered experimental craft Haywire Queen, a makeshift machine patched together by rough-edged engineers, hard science, and sheer necessity. But the rescue plan turns into something far stranger when the ship's damaged alphatron is repaired and the drive begins doing the impossible: not merely accelerating, but increasing acceleration itself. As Sandra Drake, a sharp-tongued pilot with a suspended license, takes the controls, the Haywire Queen becomes a runaway laboratory in deep space, hurling its crew through punishing G-forces and forcing McBride to turn crisis into equations. What begins as a frantic dash to save Enid evolves into a high-stakes test of a new physical principle that could revolutionize interplanetary travel. Full of technical banter, improvised engineering, and mounting danger, this hard-science adventure pits ingenuity and teamwork against a ship that may be more breakthrough than breakdown. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.