Battle Beyond the Stars

Sador, chief of the Malmoris and a fearsome galactic bandit, approaches the little planet Akir like a conqueror to make a colony out of it. Under the threat of the Stellar Converter, a supremely destructive weapon able to reduce a planet into ashes, he forces the inoffensive people that live in peace on the planet to deliver unto him their next season's crops.

The threat is real. Akirians gather and decide to employ mercenaries to protect them from the tyrant. Shad, a young man determined not to let his people being reduced to slavery, flies off in the only spaceship still on the planet, controlled by a computer with a female voice called Nell. After having escaped Sador's spacecraft, Shad flies off to the Galactic Hand, a region of space where he will be able to meet a "Doctor Hephaestus" to ask him for assistance...