Silverfleet and Claypool

Eight days later, they were still at New Home. They were training Ginger Grandmaison, for one thing. The colonists watched with pride and anxiety as she took off and landed in Tamra Trull’s partially repaired fighter—they couldn’t see the interesting part, where Stelling and Bell and Cloutier and Stacy Mackenzie flew circles around Ginger and yelled at her when she couldn’t stay in line. Meanwhile, Claypool and Silverfleet, walking along the shore in the misty rain, came to terms with leading their wings off in different directions.

“Adamantine, definitely,” Silverfleet said. “And Three Star, just to see how they’re doing.”

“Yeah,” Claypool agreed. “One of us can do both of those. If we’re going to draw Central’s attention away from New Home, the other one should go somewhere completely different. You know Taraadya?”

“I’ve heard of it. Somewhere on the fringe. Not much shipping that way.”

“Yeah. I saw it on the map. The pirates know it fairly well—they tried to raid it once or twice and got chased off. It’s a couple of jumps away, and it’s a long way from Marelon, and it’s pretty far from Central, but it’s an old colony and it’s never been lost, so to speak. It’s one jump away from a major Central-controlled mining system, that would be Fingale, but the Taraadyans apparently never saluted Central, so it may be fairly safe and yet get attention.”

“You really think they’ll flock to the cause?”

“No,” said Claypool, “but it’s worth putting our case. I mean, White Hand will want to control Taraadya, just because they want to control every human colony. And they should be warned.” They were standing on the beach, at the very edge of the sea, the water lapping at their toes. “You’re going to the Planetoids?”

“Sure. And Three Star. And—oh, what do you think, Colfax?”

“Sure.” They smiled at each other. “Three jumps?”

“More than that,” replied Silverfleet. “Here to Henryopolis, then Adamantine, then Three Star. Okay, forget Colfax. I won’t miss it. Then back to, oh, Yellow Roost I guess, and then here. Five jumps total. How about Taraadya?”

“It’s about 43 light years. So, yeah, two jumps each way. Four. But there’s an uninhabited system almost exactly on the midpoint between here and there.”

“Twenty plus per jump? That’s stretching it just a little.”

“We’re already talking about, what, five jumps for you, that’s maybe two months?”

“I know,” said Silverfleet. “It’s a long time to be out of contact.”

“Just be careful.”

“I know. You too.” They smiled at each other, then they hugged, then they stood, arms around each other, looking out to sea as the tide stole in and the armored worms played around their ankles.

“Ye’ll keep ruth,” called Cathleen Duplaix, as they sipped brandy after a huge dinner on the crisp night before they were to leave.

“Ruth?” Silverfleet repeated.

“Heed, rede, care, counsel with thyself. Thou’st not learnt to speak yet? Hast stayed this fortnight and more with us.”

“How wouldst have us do, an they come here, the Central ships?” asked Harry. “Let Ginger take them on?”

“No, no,” Silverfleet replied. “No, we’re taking Ginger with us for safe keeping.”

“I get to go?”

“You’re with my wing,” said Claypool. “You can be our messenger back and forth, if we need one.”

“We’ve been watching you practice,” Silverfleet explained. “We need to keep you from getting anywhere near a fight. The back of Claypool’s wing should be perfect.”

“I reck not,” Ginger announced. “I’m to go to space! Mother, do you give consent? I would fain have your blessing. Or I won’t go.”

“Oh, go,” said Heather. “Fare safe in space, only return to us betimes.”

“I like not to speak out of turn,” said Harry, “for hereabouts, such earns me hard blows in sooth, but thou hast not given answer.”

“Harry,” replied Silverfleet, “we’ll try to make sure they don’t come here, but if they do, we’ll be on their heels, unless we’re badly outmaneuvered, or we’re all just hot piles of dust in space. So if they come, try to keep the ships hidden, and if they land, try to act innocent. Act like you’ve been here five hundred years and you’ve forgotten all about technology.”

“What about the weather satellite?” Stelling asked.

“Oh. The weather satellite. Well, you didn’t carve your initials in it, did you, Mona? I mean, could they tell you worked on it?”

“Sandra might, if she looked closely. No, I didn’t carve my initials on it. They’ll know it was fixed pretty recently—they’d have to look fairly close to see that, though.”

“It’ll have to do. We’re not taking it down. On the outside, it certainly looks primitive. Look, we’ll be back in two months at the most. My crew’s going out three jumps, then coming back. Claypool’s wing will go to Taraadya—that’s what, two jumps, and if that goes well, or if it’s too boring, they’ll go to Fingale, it’s a mining system a jump past Taraadya and it’s got a Central base. So, if the Goddess has no other plans for us—”

“The Goddess?” repeated Ross Grenville. “Ye worship a Goddess?”

“Halyn doesn’t worship anything,” Elan Klee explained. “But every pilot needs someone to pray to every now and then, whether it works or not.”

The next day, thirteen fighters assembled on the beach and took off. It was nine twenty-four hour days since they had destroyed a scout party of Central fighters, and they had felt comfortable enough not to have two ships on patrol for a few hours, and now they accelerated across an empty system.

“Listen up, everyone,” Claypool called. “The Commander has something to say.”

“Yes,” said Silverfleet. “We’re going up against a big enemy, folks. The time may come when the supreme sacrifice is required of any of us, but not on this mission—our goal is to distract them from going back to New Home. So, be seen, hit the easy targets and get out to the next system. No heroism, no sacrifices. And your wing commander is your master, when you’re out in space, so when she says poop, you ask what color. Got it?”

“Yes, commander!”

“All right. In a minute, we’ll head off on separate paths, but we’ll be able to communicate for a while. Let’s keep the talk to a minimum, and only on secure channel. We never know when they might have a listening probe in the system. Silverfleet, out.” She checked her display: there was utter silence out there, from the thirteen ships and from the universe, as their acceleration passed 2% of lightspeed. She hit a few buttons, and Claypool’s face appeared on a secure channel. Claypool looked up, saw Silverfleet, and smiled.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” said Silverfleet. “I just wanted to—take care of yourself, okay?”

“Okay. You too.”

Henryopolis was inhabited by more than ghosts when Silverfleet returned. There was a patrol fighter zipping about the system looking behind rocks, an eyes-and-ears satellite in orbit above the lone planet, and a cruiser clearly visible, even at a range of ten light hours, parked in the grand plaza.

“Sending course,” called Cloutier, Silverfleet’s second. She passed on to the wing the path that Silverfleet had given her on their way out of New Home, the one corresponding to the situation “Small Enemy,” as opposed to “Large Enemy” or “Empty System.” The wing began a long turn to the right at 25% of lightspeed. Thirty hours later, a quarter-turn around the system from where they had originally entered, the six fighters began a long, slow, hard-decelerating turn back toward the star.

The patrolling fighter noticed them as they decelerated out of their turn, and it thought it would quietly slip out of the system. Silverfleet and her five friends cut its escape route and herded it back toward the planet, where it was joined in space by three more fighters and the cruiser. They turned at bay to confront their attackers. Meanwhile, a probe fled the system with word for whatever Central base there might be in the Adamantine Planetoids.

“Do you want one of us to chase it down?” asked Cloutier. “It wouldn’t take any more skill than the least of us has.”

“Let it go,” said Silverfleet. “Let it warn Fiona, or whomever. That’s the whole point.”

Then they spent most of the next two days heading straight for the cruiser and its little wing. There was no dance and dodge—the cruiser’s maneuverability was no match for a wing of fighters. It had a lot more firepower, of course, but that would only matter against an inexperienced fighter pilot. None of them was that. Not that it kept Silverfleet, who was keenly aware of a lack of Claypool by her side, from harassing her second with one doubt after another.

“I’ll take the cruiser,” she said, and the fifth time she said it, Cloutier replied that she had heard her the first four times. “Well, we need to know what we’re doing,” Silverfleet defended herself.

“Halyn, we know. We’re pros here, even if we’re all former pirates. You trained me, remember? And Myrrh was at the academy with you.”

“Okay. All right. But what about Jana? Is she going to know what to do?”

“She should be able to handle it,” said Cloutier. “Do you want to speak with her yourself?”

“I just don’t want to lose anybody. We should be able to do this without any losses.”

“Commander, you can’t guarantee anything. I’m sure we’ll all be careful. Why don’t you put it into your pre-fight speech?”

Silverfleet sighed. She didn’t want to tell them anything that would hamper their fight. But how good were these fighters, anyway? Were they just guards at a remote outpost, or were they picked by Fiona precisely to have a chance against superior numbers? And who knew when the next Silverfleet—or even the next Selkirk—would pop up?

There were still twelve hours to wait. After a minute, she called Cloutier. “Del?”

“Yes, commander?”

“Game of chess?”

Silverfleet relaxed by beating up on most of her wing at chess, but for the last four hours of their braking lunge toward Henryopolis, she was a nervous wreck. She was long accustomed to a lack of room for pacing, but she had become unaccustomed to a lack of Suzane Claypool. The light hours slipped to light minutes, then light seconds, then thousands of kilometers, and Silverfleet called out, “Gamma, gamma. Make it count. Good hunting, ladies!” The four opposing fighters spread out in a square ten kilometers in front of the cruiser, which began to lay down fire to aim the attackers into predictable lanes.

One of the invaders suddenly shot forward out of the gamma formation. Before any of the Central fighters could cut her off, the blitzer was past them, a stream of photon shots slicing across the cruiser. Its shell was heavily damaged, and though it took no disabling hit, its gunners were distracted, going cross-eyed as they tried to target the fly in their face. Behind them, Cloutier took one shot to destroy the fighter leader, Stelling and Bell combined to blow up the second, and Jana Crown and Myrrh Melville bottled up the other two fighters. One went dead in space, then the other, as the cruiser tried to turn and follow its irritant.

Silverfleet threw herself into her trademark gut-scrambling 160-gee turn twenty kilometers away. She put numerous holes in the cruiser on her way back, but it still didn’t blow. Then she silently screeched to a halt a scant hundred meters from her enemy and danced there while she hailed them with a terse but heartfelt “Surrender, you morons.” The cruiser captain chose evasive maneuver combined with fire on all targets, and Silverfleet calmly put a photon blast into the drive section. The cruiser exploded, scattering the particles of its crew to the solar wind.

“No damage here, commander,” said Cloutier.

“You’re kidding,” replied Silverfleet, slowing up to join the others a hundred kilometers away. “I think I’m five percent down on my shell. Let’s take three hours for shore leave.”

“You did good,” Silverfleet told her wing once they were all sitting around in the plaza below. Only Myrrh was missing—she had taken a shuttle that had been left on the ground to pick up the two surviving Central fighter pilots.

“Just out of curiosity,” asked Cloutier, “why’d you offer surrender?”

“I couldn’t resist. Central starfleet captains are all White Hand these days, and all male, too, right? I knew he wouldn’t surrender. I just had to mock him.”

“I thought you were, like, super cautious,” said Stelling. “That’s what people say. You’d really give them more shots at you just so you could make fun of them?”

Silverfleet smiled, but she thought maybe she was reckless without Claypool to keep an eye on her, without Claypool for her to keep an eye on. “Don’t any of you get any ideas,” she said.

“Not until we get as good as you,” said Bell. “Any plan for Adamantine?”

“Yes. They’ll know we’re coming. They’ll have something planned.”

“So do you have something planned?”

“Sure. Give me a week to think about it.”

Three hours later they were off for the Adamantine Planetoids, leaving two young women from Siri as the new population of Henryopolis. “Thanks, Commander,” they kept saying—they even wanted Silverfleet’s autograph. She also left bits and pieces where the eyes-and-ears satellite had been.

Seven days later they were decelerating into the faint cloud of dust that surrounded the Adamantine Planetoids. Only someone on the lookout for it would have noticed the tiny scout drone that peered out at them from the lee of a boulder, and then fired off a coded photon message toward the hidden receiver on the biggest of the rocks. Silverfleet and her wing seemed preoccupied with minor conversation and games of chess.

When they reached the pit where the two largest rocks were rubbing across one another, they turned slowly and went inside, understandably cautious. But there was no bio-signature, no sign of ships and no power. Ahead, there was one tight corner before they turned into the bay.

The six fighters shot off six guitar pick sized scout drones. These vanished around the corner and were greeted by eight Central fighters opening fire on them. Half a second later, the six fighters came around the corner, their targets already chosen. Half a second after that, six Central fighters were out of commission, three of them with extreme prejudice. The remaining two defenders fired wildly and made ready to surrender, but before they could, they too were disabled by photon shots.

“Damage?” asked Silverfleet two seconds later.

“I lost my damn probe,” called Myrrh.

“Me too,” said Stelling. “We’ll have to pick over the corpses.”

“Other than that?”

“My shell’s at 90%,” said Cloutier. “Hey, it was close range. I’m not used to fighting at fifty meters.”

“You’ll be fine,” Silverfleet assured her. She switched her comm to call to the five enemy pilots who had survived. “All right, you’re our prisoners. Get out of what’s left of your ships and assemble by the airlock. Is that you, Sandra?”

Only a grumble signified the affirmative.

“That was too easy,” laughed Cloutier as the wing’s pilots sat around with the redoubtable Gaston, in Myrrh’s old apartment, passing a pipe and a bottle of whisky. Sandra Chase and four other pirates were back in the brig, their new Central fighters blasted into little pieces in the bay.

“It certainly was,” commented Silverfleet. They gave her a sour look. “All right,” she said, “I apologize. Float me that bottle.” She caught it by the neck and waved it at them. “Here’s to all of you. You’re the best wing I’ve had since way before Marelon—almost as good as Suzane.”

“Oh, bs,” replied Myrrh. Bell said, “Well, thanks! That’s a major compliment.”

“It’s meant to be. And here’s to many more fights where all we get for damage is ten percent off someone’s shell.” She took a sip and passed it.

“Does anyone know how many kills they had?” asked Jana. “I mean, like, I’m trying to keep track, career-wise, but that was confusing.”

“Giselle analyzed the battle,” said Cloutier, “and she counted one for each of us the first round, and the last two split between me and Myrrh and Jana and Bell. So give yourself one and a half kills.”

“Who the heck’s Giselle?” asked Kris Bell.

“It’s her ship,” Silverfleet explained. “Don’t laugh. Some of the greatest pilots of all time gave their ships pet names.”

“I didn’t say a thing. Mine’s called Jessica. How many ships have we knocked out so far on this trip?”

“Twelve plus the cruiser,” replied Silverfleet. “Don’t let’s sprain our arms patting ourselves on the back. That’s the combat starship production per month on Central, and that’s not the only place Central builds starships. We have a lot more to do—all we’re doing now is distracting them from New Home.”

“Did you see it, by the way?” asked Bell. They looked at her suspiciously. “You know. That crystalline thing. It looked further away here than at New Home.”

“Yeah,” Jana agreed, “but it’s coming this way.”

“You think so?”

“So what is it?” Stelling asked Silverfleet.

“I hate to disappoint you, but I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“Well, you got pretty close to it, back at New Home, didn’t you?”

“Claypool did. She said it looked alive. Something like that.” She looked around at the others, and they were smiling quizzically at her. “Well, it wasn’t an asteroid or a nebula or a comet, or a mirage. Claypool said it looked a lot like a jellyfish—I thought so too, like those ones on Bela, in the deep waters, with the glowing cells on their tentacles. But I don’t suppose it was a space jellyfish.”

“Why not?” asked Bell.

“For one thing, it was huge—at least I think it was. For another—well, how would a jellyfish work out in space, anyway? Look, it was the best analogy I could think of. It didn’t really look that much like a jellyfish. And—and, I don’t know, I think it came from one of those galaxies.”

“So where to next?” asked Cloutier.

“Three Star Station,” said Silverfleet. She felt unexpectedly glad to change the subject. “Just to see. Then we’ll head home.”

They pulled up the star charts on the pirates’ astrometrics computer and made careful note, on the pirates’ astrometrics computers, of an uninhabited system within a jump of Three Star, Adamantine Planetoids and Yellow Roost—but not within a jump of New Home. They gave it a name—Golden Eye, for it had a single bright yellow star and very little else, only a few small rocky planetoids and almost no debris. They computed courses from Golden Eye to all the major sites, Three Star, Colfax, Henryopolis, Yellow Roost, even Marelon and the Central mining system of Fingale. Myrrh and Bell thought of all sorts of cryptic notes to leave on the computer relating to Golden Eye. The system was real; their notes about it, on the base computer, were pure fiction.

“Emphasize how well-hidden it is,” said Cloutier.

“Oh,” said Bell, “I put in this whole thing about cryptographic protocols and stuff. And hinting about what could happen if you don’t send the right codes.”

“And remember,” said Silverfleet, “we’re not even there most of the time, because we’re off doing derring do. So they shouldn’t be surprised if we’re not there.”

Then they plotted a course for Three Star Station. Silverfleet cast a wondering glance at where Taraadya was marked, a long jump away in the direction of Fingale.

Then, leaving the five pirates in a cell with only the basic replicators to feed them, and leaving Gaston to putter around the station, the six raiders pulled out of the bay and headed for the next buoy in their deadly regatta.

“Wow,” said Silverfleet as they coasted down past 20% and her sensors cleared.

“Hey, Commander,” called Kris Bell from forty kilometers away on a parallel path. “Looks like Central’s made themselves at home here.”

“Stay down in the plane of the debris field,” Silverfleet ordered. “Pass it on as the others come into contact.”

Within an hour, all six fighters were gliding in under cover of the thin ring of rock, ice and dust that orbited the three stars. They pulled together as they slowed, and soon they flew within ten kilometers of one another, conferring.

“I counted four cruisers,” said Cloutier. “There must be over a dozen fighters. Central’s getting serious about us—or they’re really interested in Dr Frederik’s research on complex gravitational star systems and the geology of planetoids.”

“I don’t pick up any non-Central ships,” said Myrrh. “Your friends are nowhere to be seen.”

“Well,” Silverfleet summarized, “I don’t think there’s much research going on nowadays. It can’t be a reaction to what we’ve done on this trip—we’ve just about killed off all the messengers. And all Suzane and I did was run away—you wouldn’t think four cruisers would be a typical response to that, would you?”

“They’re afraid of you, Commander,” suggested Jana Crown.

“They should be,” said Cloutier. “They sure respect the hell out of you.”

“No,” judged Silverfleet. “No. It’s not me they’re after.”

“Well, who? Claypool, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Every time we’ve been close enough to them to talk, they’ve offered me a job. You don’t send four cruisers—five, actually, so far—and dozens of fighters to recruit a pilot. And lose them, and send more. But Claypool—well, that just makes no sense. She’s no radical revolutionary firebrance going to raise the outer systems. I mean, she doesn’t like the White Hand, but that wouldn’t merit a major expedition, would it? Anyway—we have more immediate worries. We need to get them to chase us, but we can’t take on any significant number of them, and I’d like to get an idea of what happened to the people who lived here. I kind of liked them.”

“They were nice,” agreed Jana.

“Hey,” Bell suggested, “we’re practically unscathed after destroying what, twelve fighters and a cruiser? Why not take these guys on? They can’t be that good, and we have the—!”

“The Great Silverfleet,” Silverfleet finished. “No, forget it. We are not out to do damage to their fleet, except a little at a time. Our job is to make them think about self-defense, and make them think about Golden Eye, not New Home. Besides, the Great Silverfleet didn’t live to be the Great Silverfleet by taking on superior numbers and firepower.”

“Why don’t we land on some big rock,” offered Stelling, “and get out and take a look at the situation? I have one on my screen, it’s 260 kilometers above the debris ring, fifty-two million kilometers from here—we could cross in the shadow of the debris, then hop the 260 and probably not be noticed. And if we are noticed, it’s still, what, four light hours from the station. We’d have four days before any of those cruisers could make it out here.”

“Which planetoid?” asked Silverfleet. “Oh, that one. I see it—sort of disk shaped, with a dent on the dark side? Ninety kilometers across. Sure. Looks good. Let’s do it.”

They kept strict silence as the six fighters flitted closer to the planetoid, because there were at least four patrol fighters abroad in the system, but their vigilance and silence did not prepare them for the emergence of two fighters from the crater that occupied most of the dark side, just as they were checking out the landing spots. One was a G211, a bit out of date but in excellent condition and with weapons charged. The other was older, a 202 or 203, and Silverfleet wasn’t sure it had weapons. Before any further misunderstandings could occur, she made contact.

“Tilla, is that you? Who’s in the antique—Paula, I guess?”

“Silverfleet!” came Paula’s voice. “Yes, of course it’s us. Who else would it be? Are you finally here to save us?”

“Let’s land and talk,” said Silverfleet.

A few minutes later, eight women were crowded in among freight containers in the cargo bay of Paula’s free trader. The ship was hidden in the depths of a crack where the crater nearly cut the big rock in half. “Paula and Tilla Pool,” said Silverfleet, “you remember Jana Crown and Del Cloutier. And these are Kris Bell, and Myrrh Melville, who went to the academy with me, and Mona Stelling. They’re all reformed pirates.”

“Where’s Claypool?” asked Tilla. Her face clouded over. “She didn’t—?”

“We’re trying to be as many places at once as we can,” explained Silverfleet. “She’s got the rest of our ships off on another mission. But what happened to you guys? Where’s Dr Frederik?”

“They killed him,” said Tilla.

“What? No!” Silverfleet and Crown replied. “No, no, no,” Cloutier added.

“He stood up to them when they first got here,” Tilla explained, “and they shot him.”

“It was just after the new year,” Paula explained. “I was coming back from Colfax on a supply run. I left there oh, 6/12 or 7/12, and there were some Central ships there, but they didn’t hassle me. I get here, and they’ve taken over the base.”

“How did you manage to hide the free trader?”

“Tilla was already here, hiding in the crater. She was waiting for me to show up. After that, it was luck, and good piloting, if I do say so myself. I would’ve been taken if they’d spotted me—old Bessie’s a bit too slow to take on fighters. But now I’m stuck here. My antique fighter doesn’t even have a working combat system. It doesn’t even have a full drive system. It’s just my escape pod.”

“So what were you going to do?” asked Cloutier. “Ram us?”

“Yeah, I know. I know. What else could I do? I couldn’t have gotten Bessie out of the crack before you would have taken me out, much less get to lightspeed. Of course we had no idea who you were—you look just like pirates.”

“We are pirates, I guess,” said Silverfleet.

“Never say that,” Cloutier corrected her. “We’re freedom fighters. So, were you going to try to get to lightspeed?”

“Sure,” said Paula. “Well, that old fighter stores about enough energy to get to 50% and back. So we’d be in the next system in oh, about forty years.”

“So what was your plan?” asked Cloutier. “Stay here?”

“I wanted Tilla to run, but she’s too good a daughter. I don’t know. Maybe you guys can fix up a decent engine for my fighter?”

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “first let’s have a look at the situation.”

Half an hour later, all eight were out on the rock, hiking toward the edge of daylight. The planetoid was shaped like a dented coin, the convex side facing directly into the mixed light of the three suns. It was about eight kilometers to the nearest spot on the terminator, the edge of night, but everyone felt the need of exercise.

“I’ve studied this one quite a bit,” Paula told them as they walked, their boots grabbing and releasing the brittle surface with every step. “It’s more than half water ice—that’s the only reason it survived intact when that crater was formed. Even so, the cracks go all the way through—we probably could have crawled to daylight straight through, but this is a lot quicker.”

“Safer, too, I suppose,” replied Silverfleet, who had long since learned to trust her boots. Just in case, they were roped together, and it mattered, twice in their three hour hike, when clamps failed to hold first Jana, then Myrrh to the surface.

“I’m getting too old for this,” said Myrrh as they reeled her in, and Cloutier replied by slapping her on the back and saying, “You can’t be too old for this. You’re my age.”

When they began to creep around the grooved and pitted edge of the disk, and the three stars came into view, they all went quiet. Paula led them to a tiny, half-broken crater, where they could lie—the eight of them, supine, filled its basin—and look out at the universe.

“Four cruisers,” said Bell. “See for yourself.” She handed her viewer to Cloutier.

“I can see them with just the visor’s magnification,” said Stelling. “They’re standard-issue gunboats. I guess those are armored merchants docked by them.”

“Two of them,” said Bell. “I knew a guy who flew those.”

“Ten, twelve—I count fourteen fighters,” said Cloutier, “counting the four on patrol.”

“There must be more in the cruisers,” said Stelling.

“It’s Central’s usual full task force,” said Silverfleet. “Three to six cruisers, some marines on freighters, three or four wings of fighters. They’re occupying Three Star because it’s got a good view of the region. And a nice defense system, thanks to us.”

“We put it together,” Cloutier replied, “we can take it apart. If that’s okay with you, Paula.”

“Oh, it’s fine with me.”

“No,” said Silverfleet. “We aren’t attacking the station. No way. Forget it.”

“Well,” Paula asked, “what are you guys trying to do? I mean, if you didn’t know Central was here, why’d you come?”

“We suspected.”

“But what were you planning on doing? You were going to fight them if there were few enough? But if there were few enough, they wouldn’t have been able to take the station.”

“I just wanted to see. Your father surrendered, I take it? Otherwise it would have taken them a lot longer than they’ve had to fix up the damage they’d’ve had to cause.”

“They bombed us first,” Tilla explained. “From way out of our range. We couldn’t keep taking out all their missiles. So we let them dock—they would’ve just taken the station apart. So he told me to hang back in the bay control, and he went and met them, and he started in laying down the law, like not interfering in his work and letting us all come and go as we pleased, and they just shot him.”

“And you got away, through a dozen or two fighters?” asked Cloutier.

“I left that photon artillery you guys put in firing on automatic. That kept them busy for half an hour or so. I don’t think they even knew I’d left.”

“Well, I’m impressed.”

They lay staring out at the inner system for half a minute, and Tilla asked, “So, are we ever going to take them, or what?”

They all looked at Silverfleet. She just stared out at the three stars, and the station, a gleam of reflected light in her visor’s view. If only Claypool were here, she’d answer them. But what do I want? What do I think we should do? She looked back at them all. “What? What am I supposed to say? Do we want to take them? Or do we just want to be left alone?”

“Halyn,” said Myrrh, “I like New Home. Don’t you? I don’t think I’m too old to defend it.”

“And if they’re here,” Cloutier added, “we’ll have to defend it eventually. This is what, thirty light years from New Home?”

“Around forty,” Silverfleet corrected her. “Two jumps, for sure.”

“But one jump from Henryopolis or the Roost. They’ll be back, no matter how well we distract them. Halyn, Central is the enemy. It’s what Claypool would say, and hey, she’s right.”

“She’s right about a lot of things,” said Silverfleet. She looked back at the station. “But we definitely can’t take this fleet on now, here.”

“We can get you out,” Cloutier told Paula. “I feel kind of responsible. I mean, it was the pirates that really lured Central out here—Sandra, our old commander, made a deal with them, and of course if they wanted to visit us they were bound to visit you, and which would you rather have as a base, this place or the Planetoids?”

“No, no,” Paula replied. “No, Del. Your part in all this has been completely honorable. At least once you stopped attacking us.”

“Thank Suzane Claypool for that,” Cloutier replied. “I was the only one of three that she didn’t completely blow up. No, look. We’ll fix up that engine of yours—”

“We’ll do more than that,” Silverfleet offered. “We’ll get you and Bessie both out of here. We could use a freighter back at New Home.”

Two hours later they were back in Bessie’s hold, and Silverfleet was holding forth. Strategically she never knew quite what to do, but when she talked tactics, everyone listened. “Tilla, you’re riding shotgun for Paula and Bessie. Wait till the wing’s been gone three hours. By then, we should have pulled in the patrol fighters along with anyone on alert at the station. They won’t have anyone left to go after you. But if we don’t attract all four patrol fighters, or at least all the ones on this side of the system, and at least six fighters from the station, you guys have to stay put. We can always go further in and get more attention. In the end, they have to concentrate on us, because we can cause them damage, and you can’t. Of course we’re not actually going to attack the station, and we’ll only get in a fight if we absolutely have to.” She looked at her wing pilots. “I know I can trust all five of you guys. No hotheads here.”

Cloutier grinned and surveyed the other four. “Nope, but we’ll follow you in if you go.”

“No. We can’t afford to fight them, because if even one of you so much as loses a power converter, you’ll have to be left here. At Henryopolis or the Planetoids we could stay and fix up, but not here, not even by limping back to this rock, not with a bunch of cruisers and fighters after us.”

“So where are we to go?” asked Paula.

“I’ll show you.” She turned to the freight control console and punched up astrometrics. “There. Golden Eye. Never heard of it? Well, it’s our secret base. How secret is it?”

“So secret,” Myrrh filled in, “that we haven’t even been there.”

“So you head to Golden Eye, but when you get down to, oh, 15% of lightspeed, bank and head for here. That’s New Home.”

“Ah,” said Paula. “The promised land.”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed when you see it, but, yeah, we think it’s pretty neat. We like it enough to want to protect it. The colony’s only been there fifty years, but they left Central about a thousand years ago, back when it took that long to get anywhere. They were running away from the—the Theocrats, I think. They sound a lot like the White Hand.”

“I remember them from my history class,” said Paula.

“So you can imagine,” Silverfleet went on, “what the White Hand would do if they found out about New Home.”

“They’d probably love them,” Paula replied. “They’d love them to death. They really dig heroes of colonization—they think our highest goal is to colonize the universe.”

“That is exactly how we figure it.” She caught her breath, then said, “Hey, what will they make of the Crystal Thing?”

“You think it’s alive?” asked Bell. “And it’s from another galaxy? They’ll freak out.”

“What? Crystal thing? You mean that—thing?” asked Paula. “That thing I see as I’m coming into Three Star from Colfax? It’s coming from somewhere? I guess that would explain why I never see it when I’m going the other way.”

“You don’t? Of course you don’t,” replied Cloutier. “We haven’t seen it much either, this trip. We haven’t been facing the right way! I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I wonder where it’s going,” said Bell.

“I wonder what it is,” said Stelling. “I mean, it’s not like any of us has any idea.”

“Well,” said Silverfleet, standing, “we won’t figure anything out here. Let’s worry about getting Bessie’s butt out of the system. Maybe we can tweak that engine a little, and maybe Del can rebuild your fighter’s engine too, just in case. And before we do that we have to do some partying.”

A couple of days later, six fighters shot out of the shadow of the planetoid. Soon they were up to 5% of lightspeed, gently curving in toward the three stars. There was a patrol fighter out in this quadrant of the system, and from a billion kilometers away it turned to follow them. Communications were sent and not responded to. The patrol in the next quadrant turned to join the pursuit, and two more altered course in the next few hours as it became clear the raiders were headed for the station.

Six hours after the six fighters had left the rock, they had four ships pursuing them, but the station’s garrison was sitting tight—so Silverfleet sent out new orders. The wing screeched to a halt (over the course of an hour and a half). The four patrol fighters found it was all they could do to keep from catching up with their over-strong quarry. The hunters, as the saying goes, became the hunted, and soon it was clear that they would be caught and destroyed—and everyone on the station guessed by now that one of those raiders was The Great Silverfleet. Ten more fighters were scrambled, along with two cruisers. Silverfleet turned her wing around again and pulled back, it seemed, toward an easily defensible patch of orbiting rocks. The Central fighters came on, ready to tackle their bold enemy with the support of two cruisers’ worth of missiles and photon artillery.

Every one of Silverfleet’s wing was watching the edge of the system, where, unmarked by the Central commander, one huge blip was slinking to lightspeed in the direction of a system unnamed on any computer on Three Star Station, but well documented on the Adamantine Planetoids’ computer, the one the pirates had used. Once they were sure that Bessie was safely out of reach, the wing began to accelerate on the same path, and in another four hours they were blinking off the sensors of their pursuers, who were, for the most part, turning back to resume their patrols.

Five days after losing sight of the Three Star system, the wing arrived for the first time at their secret lair, Golden Eye. “It’s gorgeous,” said Stelling.

“The system?” asked Cloutier. “There’s not much to see.” There wasn’t. Golden Eye consisted of one large and bright star and a few planetoids. Not enough material was left unswept up by the sun to form a decent-sized planet.

“No, the Thing. You saw it?”

“Of course. Sure. It was pretty. Commander, did you think it was closer?”

“I thought so,” said Silverfleet. “Maybe it’s going to hit Three Star. Are we all here?”

“All present and accounted for,” said Cloutier. “Bell and Myrrh just called in.”

“Oh, yeah. I make them out.” The last two blips were still condensing out of the static. “All right,” Silverfleet went on, “what looks like the most likely place for a rebel hideout?”

The unanimous choice was a planetoid of ice mixed with chunks of rock, almost a thousand kilometers in diameter. It looked exactly like a snowball that had been melted and refrozen with pebbles mixed in. It gleamed in the golden eye of the star five hundred million kilometers away, which partly melted the surface at the point of noon on the equator, while the poles remained in double digits above absolute zero.

Near the south pole a particularly large pebble jutted a kilometer out of the ice, and its base was pitted with caves. Now, after six hours of setting up, fiddling and applying elbow grease, there was an airtight ice wall across the opening of one deep cave, a clear plastic door from Vanessa’s replicator, a healthy atmosphere inside and an assortment of shelves, chairs, beds, blankets, dishes, glassware, knives, forks and spoons.

The interior was subdivided by fabricated walls into a living room and five little bedrooms, and in one of them, Halyn Silverfleet lay in a bed next to Del Cloutier.

“You miss her,” said Cloutier.

“Well, yeah,” replied Silverfleet. “You’re all I could ask for in a second but—well, it’s hard to believe I didn’t even know her two years ago. It feels weird. I felt really concerned going into battle without Suzane.”

“She saved my worthless life,” Cloutier replied. “Then I got to know her. I’d do anything she said. Of course I’d do anything you said. But it’s different.” She turned her head to look at Silverfleet a meter away. “Hey, she’ll be fine.”

“I know,” said Silverfleet. She shook her head. “All right. Enough of that talk. We did a good job here—I’m quite surprised at you pirates. You guys worked pretty hard.”

“Hey, we just fixed up the Planetoids a year ago. But we party hard too. As per your orders.”

“Yes. I daresay the place looks believably like a rebel base. It’s the best we could do in twelve hours.” She rolled over into Cloutier’s comforting arms in the light gravity and closed her eyes. “Now all we have to do is sleep eight hours, and fly for a jump, maybe two, and—”

“And then we can get back to smoking dope and skinny dipping on New Home.”

The next morning—or eight hours later, at any rate—the six fighters took off for Yellow Roost. “I can’t wait to see the old homestead,” said Kris Bell. “But remember—you can drink the water, but don’t breathe the air.”

They played chess and talked about the stars until their speeds became relativistic enough to interrupt sensors and communications. Then they flew in solitary silence and darkness for five days, and then they were decelerating, and there it was, the crystalline thing, shining and pulsing and just on the edge of being real. Then it was gone, and their sensors opened up, and before them was the red giant at the heart of the Yellow Roost system. The two outer gas planets appeared, then the third planet with its gardens and its ruins and its enigmatic doom, then the two inner worlds, gleaming with heat in the glare of the star. Then Silverfleet’s five companions appeared around her, and then—and then a single ship, a fighter, circling the star, gathering energy. It was the fighter that Tamra Trull had flown on her last mission, scouting New Home for Central’s task force, and now it was piloted by New Home’s child, Ginger Grandmaison.

Four hours later, Ginger’s voice reached across the system to Silverfleet’s comm. “Commander, they’re all prisoners. They were taken at Taraadya. Commander Claypool and Elan and the others. The Taraadyans captured them all.” She took a breath and continued. “They went thither for she thought to make pact with Taraadya’s queen, but they were met by fighters of Taraadya and led in, and they told me not and—and then Central came, and then, and then I had to flee, and here I have waited this fortnight—and,” and she stopped again and gathered herself and said, “And I should make report to thee in full, Commander. Where?” The message ended, and another followed it by five seconds: “Please respond, Commander.”

“We’ll meet on the largest moon of the third planet,” Silverfleet sent back.

“So,” said Silverfleet, once the seven fighters had all landed on the chunky little moon, “they’re prisoners in Taraadya. How? Why?”

“I know not. I know not.” Ginger stood up suddenly and flew two meters off the ground. The ex-pirates grabbed her feet and pulled her back down.

“It’s okay,” said Myrrh. “Halyn, she’s never been in space before. Now she goes on her first mission, and she sees the rest of her wing get captured and only she escapes, and she flies alone to the rendezvous and waits here—all alone. I mean, think about it. She gets here and suddenly she’s like completely alone. There wasn’t anyone within ten light years.”

“It was a huge jump, too,” said Cloutier. “What, twenty-seven light years? That’s kind of dangerous.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Silverfleet.

“Since, oh, since 16/1,” Ginger replied.

“Goddess, you’ve been here waiting for us for two weeks plus! Why didn’t you just go back to New Home?”

“I don’t know.”

“She just didn’t want to miss another connection,” said Cloutier. “It’s scary, trying to make a rendezvous. Besides, Claypool would’ve told her about when to expect us here.”

“Aye,” said Ginger. “She did tell me. She did tell me all, save that she’d come not back from that planet.”

“Why did she even go in?” asked Cloutier. “Central weren’t there, were they?”

“Nay. At first, only the Taraadyan fleet. There were many ships. Tis all one, for she came not back, none of them did. She thought herself a diplomat—‘We’ll speak with the Empress,’ she said, or whate’er they call their ruler. She told me to stay hid at the system’s edge, whilst they flew in. Then they were, what sayst thou, escorted down to the planet by them black fighters, those Taraadyan fighters.”

“It’s so Suzane,” said Silverfleet. “She hoped to gain an ally, so she took a chance. Except that she didn’t think she was taking a chance, she probably thought it was a sure thing. The same thing happened on Colfax, though this time she didn’t have the handicap of my big mouth.” She looked at Ginger. “Suzane sent you no word?”

“Nay. No word at all. So I tarried, long after per her orders I was to be on my way. But a Central fleet did come betimes—methinks a week on, after they had left me. Methinks the Taraadyans saw me, out at the system’s edge, for a patrol came my way, and put me in mind of my duty.”

“Still you were here far ahead of us. No, you did well. You did very well. You can go back to New Home with your head held high.” She looked at Cloutier and Myrrh.

“Halyn,” said Myrrh, “we don’t even know if—!”

“No, we don’t.”

“Maybe she’s fine,” suggested Kris Bell. “Maybe she was having too good a time to call.” Silverfleet gave her a look.

“Halyn,” said Cloutier, “we have to go see, don’t we?”

“No. Not all of us. I have to go.”

“Halyn, you can’t go alone.” She held Silverfleet’s gaze, her hard blue eyes glaring through the visors. She grinned. “You have to at least take your second. It’s my prerogative. You know the ancient rules.”

“All right,” said Silverfleet. “You take your duty seriously, for a pirate.” She stood up. “All right,” she told the others, “this is hard news but it’s war. And we can’t leave New Home undefended—so everyone’s going back there but us two. Del and I will go to Taraadya and see what there is to see.”

“She went in on her own,” Myrrh pointed out. “There was no fight, right?” Ginger shook her head. “She’s certainly just captured,” Myrrh went on, “and you know full well she would never have allowed herself to be captured by Central.”

“Those Taraadyans are tough,” said Stelling, “We tried to raid them a couple times.”

“We should all go,” Bell tried.

“No,” said Silverfleet, “you should go back and prepare the defense of the capital. Because if Claypool’s gone, with her whole wing, and if something happens to me and Del, then you five, plus Tilla and Paula, will be all there is to keep New Home safe. Myrrh, you’re in charge, of course.”

“Yes, commander.”

“And I don’t plan on coming back without Suzane,” Silverfleet added. She abruptly turned and strode to Vanessa, with Cloutier on her heels. In minutes they were accelerating into the blackness.