Silverfleet and Claypool

The two fighters decelerated out of hyperspace and into the mundane universe, but this time there was no sense of being on the edge of a region defined by orbits and influences. There was just the blue star before them. Around it circled a thin band of dust and ice and rock. Halyn Silverfleet and Suzane Claypool were down to 25% of lightspeed when the static dissipated and they found themselves flying parallel paths twenty kilometers apart, engulfed in the black emptiness that crowded in around the brilliant young star. They pulled to within fifty meters and opened a quiet channel.

“Hey, Suzane, you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Do we land somewhere?”

“We should. We at least need to refill our batteries. For once we have no damage to repair.”

“Ohh,” groaned Claypool. “That Milton. I hope he starves out there waiting for them to rescue him. ‘People on Marelon care about you.’ ‘We were worried you might have taken damage.’ And to think that I actually dated that man. Ohhh!”

“You dated Milton? What was that like?”

“Well, um, I wouldn’t call him a hot prospect or anything, but I didn’t peg him as a liar. Not that it wasn’t, you know, obvious when it came down to it.”

“How about ‘This isn’t about fighting’?” Silverfleet added. “Well, I guess he was wrong about that. To think that after training with us all that time, that little dick could possibly underestimate us. You were perfect, Suz.”

“I was! I couldn’t believe it. One shot for each of us, one kill for each of us. But I was only up against Milton. You were perfect, Commander. Of course. I wonder who the other pilot was?”

“Probably another of those Marelon fighters. Central’s testing them, I suppose. We may never know. It hardly matters. What counts is that they attacked us—and failed.”

“What counts,” said Claypool, “is that the White Hand got to some of our best friends. That’s what you have to look out for. They’ll turn almost anyone.”

“Milton was weak,” said Silverfleet. “And if I find out that Elan or Conna or Demetria was in that other fighter, I’ll blast them into a million pieces, even if they’re already dead back there in the Black Rock system. I don’t care if they were under fricking hypnotic control. They shot at us.”

“Oh, I’m not going to argue,” said Claypool. “Even if it wasn’t his fault, it was his fault.”

“And,” added Silverfleet, “you knew they were going to shoot.”

“I had a hunch.”

“I had the same hunch—after you warned me. Queen to queen six, indeed. Pawn takes queen. A four-year-old wouldn’t make that mistake. Much less the Great Claypool.”

“I just figured, if they were monitoring our communication, they wouldn’t recognize it. At worst, they’d think was that I was distracted from the game.”

“And I went ahead and took your queen just to say, let’s do it. You understood?”

“Of course.”

“And how did you know,” asked Silverfleet, “to just take out the ship and leave the pilot? Usually your inclination is toward the really big explosion.”

“Maybe I’m slipping? Well, maybe I didn’t quite hit the sweet spot.”

“And don’t try to squirm out of it,” said Silverfleet. “That game counts.”

They flew on toward the blue star until they were passing above the thickening debris belt and the solar radiation was beginning to worry the sensors. Then they agreed on a piece of rock about twenty kilometers across and landed in a deep crater that faced the star. As the rock spun on an axis that ran through the crater, and the two fighters soaked up the energy of the brash young sun, Claypool and Silverfleet hiked around the side of the rock, their feet kept on the surface by gripping shoes. They lay down in another crater, this one about the size of the two of them together, and watched the stars, and the galaxy-filled gap, swing before them.

“You were right,” said Silverfleet. “They did come after us. We should have left right after we blew up the scout. Then we’d never have met up with Milton.”

“I was starting to think of that cave as our, um, apartment. Just like the one I had back on Talis, a little bigger actually, by the time we were done fixing it up. Home.”

Silverfleet let a brief silence underline the word. She looked at Claypool.“I miss it too,” she said. “As long as we were there we didn’t have to decide where we were going.”

“There,” said Claypool, pointing up at the sky, “that’s the next one, isn’t it?”

“Running away is exhausting,” said Silverfleet. “Even if we have spent the last hundred and fifty hours lying down in a weightless chamber.” Silverfleet’s mind skimmed back over all the things they’d done in the Black Rock system. She was especially nostalgic for naps she’d taken in their cave—somehow no bed she’d even known had been as restful, but of course that was due to the gravity. Low, but not quite no gravity—she could feel her bones settling into their proper places, with plenty of space between. Just like now. Oh, how she wanted to take a nice nap right here. Then she thought of Milton and the unpiloted scout. “On the other hand,” she said, “let’s see—it’s 18-8-3355. We shot up Milton on 13-8. So it’ll be at least 25-8 before they get ships out to rescue him. If he’s not dead, he’ll be a lot thinner. So then the best they could do is get here around 30-8 or 1-9.”

“So you’re saying—?”

“We don’t need the tent. Just set your timer for eight hours.”

“It’s no Black Rock,” said Silverfleet eight hours later, as they lay side by side in their vac suits, just waking up, in the same crater, held down by the slightest whiff of gravity. One half of their universe was cold grey ice and rock, and the other half was black vacuum. Their batteries were full of power to overflowing, and they had moved the ships out of the glare of the star’s radiation.

“I feel like we’re on a lift in a big building,” said Claypool. “It’s on the way somewhere, but it looks like it’s standing still.”

“It’s about as interesting as a lift,” Silverfleet added. “But I wonder what we’ll see when we get to the top floor.” She sighed. “I miss my Black Rock. There may not have been any significant amount of life, but it was basically a good system at heart. This one’s just a star with pebbles around it.” She rolled in the near-zero gravity to face Claypool. “I could lie here for another week or two. But I suppose we need to go.”

“Yes,” Claypool agreed. “We don’t want to take any chances.”

“And I suppose there must be someone out here in the boonies who knows how to build a bed,” said Silverfleet.

“All right, your choice,” called Silverfleet twenty-seven hours later, as they unhooked from their twenty-kilometer island. “There’s a medium yellow at 23 degrees by 97 with at least two large planets, fourteen light years away, and a triple star with possible planets at 348 by 77.”

“They’re both away from Central.”

“They’ll both put us at least forty light years from Marelon.”

“So either way they’ll need two jumps. All right,” said Claypool, “the triple sounds cool, but I guess we’re looking for a place with definite planets. Don’t triples usually sort of eat their planets?”

“That’s a fair description,” Silverfleet replied, happy to hold forth. “Three gravities makes it unlikely that orderly orbits can develop. It would be almost certain that a planet would eventually fall into one of the stars. The medium yellow, then. Here’s our course.”

Claypool received and punched in the navigation routine, calculated to bring them into the next system side by side. She pulled up all the available information on their destination. “Looks like a nice enough place,” she said. “Star, two gas globes. There’s got to be rocky planets too. Maybe there’s a lost colony.”

“Human habitation?” Silverfleet replied. “That’s probably too much to ask.”

“We can hope. Running water—is that too much? Oh, how I could use a real bath.”

“Save a tub for me, Suz. And a real bed. Ready?”

“Ready, oh great one. See you over there.” The two ships began accelerating: five gees, then ten, then fifty, until they reached a plateau at a hundred gees. There was an interval of disorienting pressure, and then their ships normalized, fitting a cushion around each pilot. In five minutes they were moving at 150 kilometers per second, fifty meters apart.

“Hey, Commander,” called Claypool, “game of chess?”

Human habitation was not, it turned out, too much to ask. The medium yellow had twelve planets of two thousand kilometers diameter or more, and the fourth one had an atmosphere and water and a few clusters of bright lights on the nightside. There were even a few ships in orbit, along with a set of primitive satellites and a very primitive orbital base. The other planets were a weird assortment—a pink gas giant bigger than the planet that the Black Rock moon orbited, another gas giant with ornately edged stripes and brilliant, powdery rings, a small planet with a surface of solid rock coated by mold, another with volcanoes spewing forth out of seas of lava. The two spacefarers had eyes only for Planet Four.

It had a surface about half covered with one big ocean. It was ice at the poles and it read boiling at the equator and storms bounced back and forth between the two. The day was about fifty hours, though the planet was only about two thirds the size of either Enderra or Bela. There were three natural satellites—two little captured asteroids, tumbling around their adopted mother, and one real moon, a sphere of rock and ice almost half the diameter of the planet.

“They must have murderous tides,” said Silverfleet.

“They have some murderous storms,” replied Claypool. “Look at all that lightning.”

“They’ve seen us. I see three patrol fighters heading to the—I wouldn’t call it a starbase.”

“No sign of Central,” said Claypool. “Do you think they’re friendly?”

“If not, Suz, I’m sure we can bring down their whole fleet. Those fighters are the old 186’s. For that matter, I’m sure we could bring down their satellite base—it has no defense system whatever. It looks like your typical lost colony.”

“I wonder how long till Central comes here,” said Claypool. “I wonder what the colonists would do. We might be able to finagle a job, a place to stay. Villa on the ocean.”

“We’ll see,” Silverfleet replied. “Let’s go try and talk to the satellite base.”

“Feeter fin atseed. Whare a ye fin?” asked a scratchy voice over the comm.

“Where are we from, did you say?” asked Silverfleet, hovering ten kilometers from the satellite, twenty-four hundred kilometers above the planet. “Did you say ‘outside’? We come in from Marelon, if that means anything to you. Can we dock?”

“Doke? Ay denay no. Them feeter be streenge te oos.” There was some discussion on the satellite end of the communication. After a few minutes, the scratchy voice returned. “Feeter, ye are te arth. Dane es te them bacon twa City Colfax. Aver?”

“What? I didn’t catch any of that.”

“I did,” said Claypool. “It sounds like the old colonists’ dialect on Enderra. They want us to land on the planet—‘te arth’ means ‘to earth’ and it’s the old way of instructing a ship to land. Um, Satellite base, could you tell us again where we’re supposed to land?”

“Falla them bacon,” was the response.

“Bacon?”

“Beacon, I think,” said Silverfleet.

Half an hour later, the two fighters were gliding in for a landing in a field near what looked like an old-fashioned airstrip. “Dig it,” Silverfleet pointed out. “Shuttles.”

“What?” Claypool replied. “Those? They’re so big. How do they get off the ground?”

“Aerodynamics, and lots of hydrocarbon fuel.”

“How barbaric.”

“Everything’s up to date in—what did he say? Colfax City. Look, they’ve got a little crowd. I bet it’s been a while since anyone’s come to visit. Let’s be careful, okay?”

“I don’t see anything that looks like a weapon.”

“Well, there are those, um, farm implements. Have a hand on your stunner. But keep it in your pocket.”

They settled gently to the turf and popped their hatches. A crowd of people inched forward. A dozen or so of their representatives approached the two fighters.

“Will en coom te Colfax,” said an elderly man with a nice smile and a fancy neckerchief. He held out his hand, and the man next to him, presumably his number two man, did likewise.

“Well, thank you,” said Silverfleet, taking the elder’s hand. Beside her, Claypool shook the hand of the second.

There was a terribly loud noise by their heads. They threw themselves on the ground. When they were picked up, the elder’s sweet smile seemed especially happy. The source of the noise was a metal tube with a wooden handle held by a grinning young man. Several more men held the two pilots’ arms behind them.

“An afoor ye ken betray oos te yer boss in them Central,” said the elder, “we’ll a sheer ye ken we Colfaxer can defind us goad. Tak em te keep, boy.”

“Wait, wait,” said Claypool. “We aren’t from Central. We can help you.”

“Oh, ken ye hilp?” asked the elder with a big smile. “Thenk ye we moost yer hilp? Thenk ye te coom heer an gif oos hilp, eh? Thenk we cana do fir oos, is that? Ye coom an till oos wha sha we do? Ay, y’are fin Central, say er nay.”

The two women had a lot more to say and they said it, but no one listened. Instead they were lugged away, stripped of their vac suits and dumped in their undies in a room with a dirt floor and sturdy bars on the windows.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, huddling in a corner, “how are you enjoying your visit to lovely Colfax so far?”

“I’m not,” said Claypool, huddling in another corner. “I’ve changed my mind. Let’s check out that triple star. I mean, you never know, it might have planets, and besides, think of the views!”

“I agree. Let’s definitely go there next time we have the choice. Our tourist credits are not coming back to Colfax on vacation.”

“Okay,” said Claypool, “that was very amusing. What shall we do?”

“Well, let’s see. They have firearms. We have stunners, in our vac suits. Did you think to conceal your stunner in an orifice? No, neither did I. They think we’re from Central, and you’re right, they don’t like Central—that’s doubtless why they’re here. But aside from idealistic rebels and exiled national heroes and the odd top-rank fighter pilot, what sort of person trades the life of the colonized zone for this neolithic existence out on the fringe?”

“Criminals, weirdos, fanatics,” guessed Claypool.

“That’s pretty much my list too. Now their plan for us, it seems to me, involves either quick execution or long imprisonment or possibly marriage.”

“Oh, that sounds palatable. Okay,” said Claypool, “so we escape.”

“Got a plan? I don’t.”

“Oh, let me think about it.”

The afternoon was wearing on when two young men showed up with trays of food. There was bread and porridge and some dirty water. Silverfleet and Claypool were crouching side by side in their underwear. Claypool stood up and flounced over to the door. “Hey, guys,” she said, “why not come on in and get friendly?”

The two young men smirked at each other. “We’ll git frind-lyk,” said one of them, “soon anoof, me gal.” He looked her up and down and licked his lips.

“Let me out!” Claypool yelled, throwing herself at him and hitting him. He picked her up, grinned at her as she kicked at the air, and threw her back toward Silverfleet. The door slammed. “Well,” said Claypool, picking herself up off the dirt floor, “it could have been worse. He could have taken me up on my offer.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that,” said Silverfleet. “What were you going to do then?”

“I don’t know. Slip by him. Get away. Then what? I don’t know.”

“Well,” said Silverfleet, walking over to the food, “you were trying to get out, and I certainly can’t argue with that. But maybe we should put a little more time into the planning phase.”

Silverfleet and Claypool were wearing two new articles of clothing each three hours later when they were taken from their cell to an interrogation room: long grey robes and iron manacles on their ankles. The robe reminded Silverfleet of her bathrobe when she was a girl—unstable, unflattering and uncomfortable. The manacles had chains attached, and, suffice it to say, neither woman had ever worn anything like them. Still, it was better than nothing, and Silverfleet had a brief relapse of confidence in the power of persuasion. “So you see,” she explained to the elder, “you could profit greatly from letting us help you on our own terms.”

“Y’are fin Central an ye wana hilp,” laughed the elder. “Hear tha, ahl? Them fin Central an them wana hilp oos.” The dozen other men in the room laughed.

“Our ships,” said Silverfleet. “You have technology. You could be building ships like ours in a matter of years.”

“Ah, kin we? An ahl we moost is loose ye fin yer sheckle an chain. An gif ye yer feeter bak. Nay, methenk nay.”

“Feeterback,” said Claypool. “Yes! You should give us back our fighters.” She looked at the boss man, then the next man over. They looked at each other and laughed.

“Look,” said Silverfleet, gritting her teeth, “this is stupid. What possible good are you doing for yourselves by holding us?”

“Ohh, stoopid izit? Y’are goad pedlar, y’are. Ye ken will haw te spak te coostumer.”

“We’re not Central, really we’re not,” Claypool pointed out. “We’re running from Central. They want us because we’re a threat to them. And they’re going to be here eventually, you know. They’ll want to take you over just like they took over Marelon and Talis. But we can help you stop them. That’s why they want us.”

“Them’s mooch a body cana till tis truth or nay,” said the elder, “boot we dona troost them as ha raison te lie te oos. Ye maybe them advance guard. Nay?”

Another man whispered in the elder’s ear. “We’re not lying,” Claypool interjected. “And my friend here is the best pilot in human space.”

“Claypool’s not so bad herself,” put in Silverfleet, catching a glint in the elder’s eye.

“They can’t afford to have us at large,” Claypool went on. “We’re a threat to them. That’s how you know you can trust us. That’s how you know we can help you.”

“Ay, a grant tha, a do,” said the elder. “Mayhap we git a penny or two fin them Central fer ye. Ay, a penny or two, an soom a them new sorta feeter. Ay. Tak them, boy, boot tak goad care. Them is worth a penny or three te oos mayhap.”

Then the two women were picked up and carried protesting back to their cell.

“Well, what shall we try next?” Silverfleet asked as they sat sweating twenty minutes later. Their return to the cell had been punctuated by a loud storm, and now it was pouring rain outside and seeping through the wall to pool in the middle of the floor. “We tried talking, then we tried seduction, or you did, more or less, and then we tried talking again.”

“How about we outsmart them this time?” Claypool suggested.

“Well, that would be why we’re planning, wouldn’t it?”

“Or we could just overpower the guards.”

“Good thinking. Oh, that it should come to this—life imprisonment on this scummy rock.”

“At least we’re together. We can put our heads together, and come up with a bright idea.”

Ten minutes later they hadn’t come up with a single idea, bright or not. The rain had ended, the pool had shrunk and they were sitting side by side on the dirt floor in the gloom when half a dozen guards appeared. These barged into the room, and the women jumped up.

“Ye be te gu yer divarse way, ye gal,” said the oldest of the guards.

“What?” asked Silverfleet.

“Halyn, they’re separating us. But we have to stay together,” she said earnestly to the guards.

“Ooh, ye tillin oos wha we do agin, ant ye? Wal, we worry wha parilous plan ye be cokin oop hare tagither. So na moor word in it, ye gal. Ye,” he said to Silverfleet, “yer goin soom way off. Boot doont fear, gal. We sill ye te them spacer, is elder’s plan. Them Central. Soo he say na tooch ye boot te loog ye round. Be glad on thar. We boy can thenk fin other way te tooch ye.”

“Oh, you big old bully,” said Silverfleet, as two of the men grabbed her by the arms.

“Cana lease hav a spy a wan a them?” one in front of her asked.

“No, you can’t have a spy,” she replied, pulling free and kicking him in the groin. Then she ducked under his fist and dodged the flailing arms of two more and ran for it, as best she could with an iron manacle around her ankle. She ran straight into the stomach of the biggest one.

“Wal, see here,” he said. “A wee lower, if ye please.”

Silverfleet was bowled over by a noise louder than anything she had heard in years. There was a ruckus, amid which she heard a distinctive clicking sound, and all the men dove for the floor. The leader did not dive fast enough. The amazingly loud sound occurred again, as Suzane Claypool blasted him in the face with the rifle she had grabbed from where one of the distracted guards had dropped it. The poor old man made quite a mess in the cell.

There was another clicking. One of the men looked up and was rewarded with the gun barrel in his face. “How many shots does it hold?” Claypool asked him. “At least three, I guess. Halyn, grab that man’s rifle.” Silverfleet could think of no reason not to, and set about figuring out how to fire it. Claypool went on, “Now your keys. Everyone toss their keys out into the hall.” There was a flailing of arms over backs and a jingling arc of key rings. “Now,” she said, sticking the muzzle into a young man’s smooth and handsome face, “our suits.”

“Joost out in them close-keep. Joost lift, round tha coorner thar. Safe us, please!”

“Closet, you mean? Locked?”

“Small key,” he panted. “Smallest one.”

“Thank you. Finally, a cooperative Colfaxer. Let’s go.”

The women turned to go out. One of the men jumped up to make a run for the door. Silverfleet turned and pulled the trigger, taking off his foot. “I had to see how it worked,” she said, as they went out and locked the door behind them. Silverfleet bent and picked up a set of keys. “Oh, I do hope they have prosthetics on Colfax.”

“Or anesthetics,” replied Claypool, as the victim rolled around on the floor wailing and bleeding. “Or even antibiotics. Closet. Yes. Key?”

“Try this.”

Claypool fitted the key into the lock and the closet door creaked open. “Oh, nice. Things are going right for once. And look—our vac suits!”

“Give me the keys,” said Silverfleet. “I’m ready to lose the ankle weight, aren’t you? Let’s see—this one? Right first time!” With a twist, her manacle fell to the floor. She handed the key to Claypool, who had hers off after only a moment struggling against the metal lock.

“Oh, that feels great. You almost forget you’re in chains until you take them off.”

“You did quite nicely, Suz,” said Silverfleet, putting her legs into her vac suit. “I have to admit, I was getting desperate.”

“Well, me too. Fortunately you distracted them quite nicely. And there were only two rifles.”

“And fortunately you hunted in one of your mysterious prior lives, didn’t you?”

“Of course,” said Claypool. “I practically grew up with a rifle in my hand.”

“And a foil, I’m told,” said Silverfleet. “Not to mention chess pieces. All right, I owe you. Again.” She zipped up her vac suit and found her stunner, which was an unmarked black two centimeter disk about half a centimeter thick, in a pocket. “Well, thank goodness our stunners don’t look like weapons to them. Now we have some crowd control.”

“All right, Commander, next problem.”

“You were calling me Halyn before.”

“All right, Halyn, next problem. We don’t know what they’ve done with our ships.”

“Not much, I’ll bet, with our security on. I have heavy lock on Vanessa. They won’t even be able to move it without some major equipment.”

“Then let’s follow the homing signals,” said Claypool. “Mine has Guard-Lock.”

“Does that work pretty well? Mine’s a do-it-yourself.”

“I’d build my own, but I like this model.”

“You’ll rebuild it over the years. At some point it won’t be a Guard-Lock anymore, it’ll be a Claypool. Are we keeping the weapons? We could just use the stunners.”

“The rifles? Hey, I miss shooting. Too heavy to take into space, though.”

“We’ll have to use them here,” said Silverfleet.

Their homing signals, registered on their helmet displays, led them to the same place—but it was several hours’ walk away through a hot evening in the edge of a sprawling and messy town. They crept around the margin of a military depot, then traversed a long alley in a junk yard, and then sidled down a narrow street in a bad part of town, as if there were any good ones. There were a few ground vehicles out, but the two diminutive pilots managed to stay out of their headlights. There were also people on the street, going about an ancient business.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “women out in public. Pursuing commercial interests, in fact.”

“Probably the commercial interests of their pimps,” said Claypool. “Uh, hi,” she said to a half-clad wench who towered over her. The wench smiled reflexively, looked away, then watched the two women as they walked down the street in their vac suits.

“We’re being followed,” Silverfleet said a minute later.

“Don’t scare me. By whom?”

“Probably friends of these guys in front of us.”

Four men came out of doorways and blocked the women’s way. A half dozen more were behind them. One of the ones in front said something sly that the women couldn’t translate and didn’t need to.

“Just let us pass,” Claypool advised them, waving the gun.

“Got piece, de ye? Wal, we got piece too. One agin many, ye like?” Confident she wouldn’t call his bluff, the men began to close on them.

“Didn’t do so well in that remedial math class, did you?” said Silverfleet. She slung her shotgun over to her left hand, and the four men all flinched. She turned her back on the men before them, pulled her right hand out of her pocket and swept her tiny stunner’s beam across the men behind, who were just within its five meter range. They went down like bowling pins. She turned back to the four men in their way. “So?”

“So,” said the smart one, “tis nice air this night, eh?”

“Good sleeping weather,” agreed Silverfleet, stunning them too. “I hope we don’t need to do that very much. This thing doesn’t hold a charge for poop.”

Half an hour later they were walking through the park where they had landed that very morning. Claypool remarked on how long a day it had been. “The day length is forty-six hours,” Silverfleet reminded her. “We landed twenty-four hours ago.”

“That explains how tired I am.”

“Ssh!” Silverfleet held up a hand. “More men ahead.”

“It didn’t take long for them to decide our ships were a military target,” said Claypool. They were standing in the gloom under a low tree, whose ancestors must have come from Central like every other living thing they had seen on Colfax. Before them was the clear area where they had landed. Five big green trucks had gathered around the two ships, and dozens of men in dark clothes were shining flashlights all around. Some were tapping the ships, others seemed to be prying at them, still others measuring their length, width, height and curvature.

“Too many to shoot,” judged Silverfleet. “Too many to stun, even, I’d guess. We’d be sure to miss one or two.”

“I don’t like the look of their guns,” said Claypool. “A few of those are repeaters. Goddess, it’s like being in a museum—those look like the old M50’s. I got to see one once, but they wouldn’t let me touch it. It was five hundred years old.”

“These look pretty new,” Silverfleet replied. “Damn old technology. Those may look old, but I’ll bet they do the job just fine. And of course there are about a hundred of them out there.”

“What shall we do?” asked Claypool. “Wait for them to get bored?”

Silverfleet stared ahead for a moment, then appraised their immediate surroundings. “It’s a nice enough bush,” she said. “A lot better than that cell.”

“I hate this place,” said Claypool. “I’m not in a mood to wait.” She turned her rifle perpendicular to their line of sight to the ships, and fired. There was a loud report, and then a louder one—as the rusty fuel tank she’d aimed at went up.

The men started running about at random and yelling. It was exactly like an ant hill stirred, except for the noise. But instead of taking the stick out, Claypool put both feet in. She threw the gun in the bushes and took off for her ship. Silverfleet followed. Soon they were running among the men, who didn’t notice them at all. They got to their ships, put their thumbs against the thumb pads and jumped in as the hatches swung open. Silverfleet threw down her rifle. By the time the flashlights were on them again, they were pulling the hatches shut over them.

“Power,” said Silverfleet. Claypool confirmed, over the noise of men pounding on the hulls. “Hover,” said Silverfleet, and in a second the two fighters were shooting up to a height of ten meters. Gunshots were audible around them. “Go,” said Silverfleet, and they zipped off into the night.

“What a nightmare,” said Claypool. “That moon?”

“Yeah—inside that crater looks good. Oh, look. Right there.”

Silverfleet and Claypool turned their fighters upwards. Soon they were out of the atmosphere, bending toward the big moon. Two hours later, they landed beside what appeared to be part of a spacecraft. They pulled their visors shut and popped their hatches.

“A landing base?” asked Claypool.

“Something like that. Yes. Look over there.” Nearby, half hidden in sand, they saw a hatch. Its design was Central, of about six centuries ago. Inside was a functioning airlock, and in about a minute, which was about fifty-nine seconds longer than they were used to, they were inside a room about the size of their former cell. Unlike the cell, this one had fresh air and a comfy-looking bed. There was only the faintest odor of the centuries the place had stood empty.

“This must’ve been from the original colony,” said Silverfleet. “They had more technology then than they do now. They’ve actually regressed.”

“Any whisky?” asked Claypool.

“No, and I’m not trusting anything they eat or drink. Everything tasted foul down there. The air even. That junkyard—did you see the stream flowing out of it? I bet it had all kinds of interesting stuff in it, and I bet it went straight into the drinking water.”

“This air feels good,” said Claypool, peeling away her vac suit. “And there’s water, I bet. Even if it’s five hundred year old recycled pee, it’s better than what’s down on Colfax.”

“No doubt.”

“Hey, look at this! Score! It’s a bath! And there’s room for two!”

“There is a goddess,” Silverfleet replied. “But she sure grants wishes in a roundabout way.”

“Well,” said Silverfleet as they accelerated toward lightspeed, “that was sort of an interesting system. I wonder what their story is? Pity we never had the chance to ask.”

“The moment never did seem quite right, did it?”

“No, it didn’t. Those guys were awfully big.”

“It doesn’t take much to be bigger than you or me,” said Claypool. “Well, where do you think they came from? I mean, Central, obviously, but how, and when?”

“It must’ve been a lost colony. Some colonial corporation, they were always getting out of reach back then. At least five centuries old.”

“Their technology’s gone downhill,” said Claypool.

“They don’t have a lot of extra resources to put into it. But there’s something else. Their culture—the scientific method just doesn’t seem in their nature. They’re clever enough, but they’re not what you would call rationalists.”

“Maybe they were criminals sent into exile,” Claypool suggested. “There were all those Upheavals six and seven centuries back. These guys might have fled Central way back then.”

“They’re way too male-dominated. I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen.”

“Which further retarded their development. Well, we did offer to help.”

“You did,” Silverfleet corrected her. “Did you learn your lesson?”

“No. All right, 5%, time to check heading. Triple star?”

“See you there, Suz. And let’s hope it’s less awful that Colfax.”