Silverfleet and Claypool

When Silverfleet’s sensors cleared, she saw three fighters before her—Myrrh, Elan and Conna. Within an hour, the other four came out of the sensory cloud of hyperspace and began communicating on their usual subject.

“It’s crystalline,” said Cloutier. “But it’s not a crystal.”

“I tried to record my readings,” said Elan Klee, “but it’s like it’s not there, to my sensors. That’s why I wonder if it’s not just a ghost pattern.”

“You can record ghost patterns,” Myrrh pointed out. “I think it’s something that’s hidden on purpose.”

“But what?” asked Silverfleet. “And why can we see it only when we’re decelerating?”

“I could see it,” said Cloutier, “even as the stars were starting to show up, this time. That hasn’t happened before.”

“It’s actually kind of beautiful,” said Claypool.

“Well, so’s this system,” Silverfleet said, drawing their attention back to the visual feast before them. On main screen it was a big spot of light, with assorted smaller, reflected spots of light around it, each spot captioned by the computer, thus: “2. Molten. Diam 6483 km Orbit 68.3 mil km,” and near each spot of light there was a closeup. Around a fairly large and bright star flew a dozen planets of significant size, including seven gas giants, four with easily visible ring systems; there were moons and asteroids and comets galore; and the fourth planet out from the star was a green and blue pebble with flecks of white, a cloud-speckled bit of turquoise floating in the black of space. “Look at it,” she said, not as a command but in simple awe. And they did.

“Introduced life,” Claypool read out. “All around the equatorial belt. Water, lots of it. The side toward us is at least 90% water. Lots of clouds—water vapor clouds. Air—spectrography shows nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide. There’s volcanism, too, see that? One volcano emitting smoke and material. Oh, wait a minute—hey, there’s a colony.”

“Of course there is,” replied Silverfleet. “Someone had to introduce life. Let’s just hope it’s not Colfax all over again.”

“Scanning,” said Claypool. “Yes. Colony on that big island. Not much for tech signals. Some agriculture. Did you see that satellite?”

“Is it a starbase of some sort?” asked Stelling.

“No,” replied Claypool. “No, it’s like some sort of—well, weather satellite or something.”

“How many people?” asked Myrrh. “And how long have they been here?”

“No idea.”

“Um, Commander,” put in Kristin Bell. “That’s okay out here, right? We can call you that?”

“Yeah. Sure. What?”

“I’m charting an asteroid.”

“There’s lots of those.”

“Well, this one’s on course to hit that planet.”

“What? The fourth planet?”

“Yep. The one with the colony. See?” Bell punched a few keys and the asteroid was pointed out on everyone’s displays. They could see its orbit’s long ellipse curving in to meet the planet’s course as they both swung about the star. “It’s freakin’ huge. It’s 1,453 km long. And it’s headed for a direct impact.”

“Oh, man,” said Silverfleet. “The planet’s only nine thousand kilometers diameter. It’s going to blast them. There may not even be a planet there.”

“I make the collision in 83 days,” said Claypool. “I bet they don’t have any idea.”

“I’m sure they don’t. They can’t even hope to see it yet, and they have no reason to look. From the state of their satellite technology, I’d guess they won’t know it’s coming until it hits. It wouldn’t help if they did.”

“It’ll bust that planet in two,” said Elan. “There’s not a chance anyone will survive. There might be ten or fifteen little planets in that orbit three months from now.”

“We’ve got to do something,” said Claypool.

“Of course we do. I don’t believe in fate, but we did just happen to come here three months before that rock was going to extinguish all life on the planet. Let’s land on it and give it a push.”

Sixty hours later, the eight fighters cruised in over the huge asteroid. Its gravity was enough to make it almost perfectly round, and coming in over it they could see its surface was largely dirty ice. It had mountains and rifts and craters, and one vast crater where something might have come close to doing to the asteroid what it was on course to do to the fourth planet.

“I bet it was knocked from orbit around one of the big planets,” said Silverfleet. “It looks more like a moon than an asteroid. Man, it’s like a game of football out here. Life’s rough in such a crowded system. All right, let’s get in formation. You have your landing spots.”

“Say, Halyn,” said Klee, “if you want to do more than just push it out of the way, I calculate that sixty-two hours of pushing on the coordinates I’m sending will put this thing in a trajectory that will eventually round out to a circular orbit. It’ll be just another planet.”

“Let’s see that trajectory,” said Silverfleet. “Ah. Nice work. It should fit quite nicely between planets four and five, and that orbit does seem stable. A place for everyone and everyone in their place, right, ladies? Okay, let’s go in.”

They landed in formation, hooked down, and then set their engines at full output and climbed out for a walk. For the next sixty-two hours the eight women, in their vac suits, hiked on the surface, sat around a small crater talking, napped on the ice, went back to their ships for snacks and lay on their backs watching the field of galaxies over two million light years away.

“Where was it, exactly?” asked Cloutier. “There?”

“I saw it framed right between that one and that one,” replied Bell, pointing.

“Is it a thing, do you think?” asked Stelling. “I mean, something that’s really there and we can only see it when we’re doing relativistic speeds? Or is it an illusion?”

“Ah, the eternal questions,” said Myrrh. “Should we be seeing the cruiser pretty soon?”

“Four or five more days,” replied Silverfleet. “Worried about Meena?”

“Yeah, with all those hot-blooded pirate chicks. What’ll become of my innocent little girl?”

“Any little girl of yours,” said Cloutier, “couldn’t possibly be very innocent. She was learning the pirates’ ways by the time she was walking.”

“They grow up so fast,” said Silverfleet. “Shall we talk about something else?”

“Like where we’re going?” put in Conna. They all looked at her. “Well, look out there,” she said, indicating the wide black sky. The left half was full of the stars of the galaxy, too many to count, and behind them were more stars, so many that their light blurred together like a thin film of milk spilled across the night. The right half was seemingly empty of stars, and far more distant galaxies tried to fill the void, though in their thousands, the spirals and ellipticals and irregulars could not cover the blackness of infinite distance. Conna was looking to the left. “I wonder which one is Marelon.”

“It wouldn’t be very conspicuous at this range,” said Elan Klee. “I wonder which one is Veldar? Or Central?”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Conna.

“You want to know,” Silverfleet judged, “whether there’s anything we can do for your home world. But not only don’t we know what’s going on down there, we don’t know how close Central is behind us. And we don’t have any idea if any of these women who joined us from the pirates have any interest in going on a crusade to free Marelon. I’m not sure I have any.”

“Hell, I’ll go,” said Bell.

“I’d have to think about it,” said Myrrh. “I may be too old for that sort of thing.”

“Oh, bull,” said Cloutier, “you’re what, fifty or something? You have another fifty years before you start losing your edge. Selkirk was a hundred and five when she died, and that was in battle, and that was by accident.”

“Was she really?” replied Silverfleet. “She looked about thirty.”

“You met Selkirk?” said Bell.

“Someday,” Myrrh told Bell and Stelling, “people will say, ‘You met Silverfleet?’”

“Oh, puh-leeze,” Silverfleet said. “Can we possibly find a subject I’m comfortable with?”

“Halyn,” said Conna, “I really need to go back to Marelon. Sometime, I mean.”

“I’m going with her,” said Elan Klee. “I’m not from there, but I swore to defend the place. They didn’t make you or Claypool swear.”

“We swore,” said Claypool.

Silverfleet gave her a long look. “I guess we did, sort of.” She looked out at the planet before them, a tiny orb in the black expanse, nestled in their view between three far-distant spiral galaxies. “Oh, Suz, how many planets do we have to save? I guess it’s as good a thing as any to die for.” She sighed. “But my heart’s not in it.”

“Where is your heart, then?” Claypool challenged her.

Silverfleet gave her a long silent look. “Now how the hell would I know that?” she said. She sighed again. “All I want is to stop running and live somewhere. Can’t we go save Black Rock?”

“It’d be a good place to start,” said Elan Klee.

“I can’t wait to see this Black Rock,” said Cloutier. “You guys make it sound like paradise.”

“No,” said Silverfleet, “it wasn’t paradise, it definitely wasn’t paradise, but you have to give it this, it was home.” She sighed again, and they lay back and looked up at the sky as the galaxies chased the stars from the middle of the field. Presently they all were gazing at the planet before them, still a tiny bluish blob in their visors.

“Have we really been sitting here long enough for that planet to come up to mid-sky?” asked Cloutier.

“No,” said Silverfleet, “but the fighters are having an effect. Now we’re starting to look back on the planet as the asteroid is pushed out of its course.”

“Well,” said Myrrh, “we can’t say we haven’t saved anyone—we’ve saved the asses of a whole lot of people we don’t know.”

“How many, I wonder?” asked Claypool. “I suppose it’s about time to go find out.”

“We could leave them alone,” suggested Myrrh, “and just be anonymous benefactors.”

“We will be anyway,” said Silverfleet. “They probably won’t have any idea of what we’re doing for them. And why should they? I don’t need them to think they owe me. Besides, what if it is New Colfax?” She stood up.

“We can’t tell them we saved their planet?” asked Bell.

“All I’m saying is they won’t have any reason to believe us. I mean, what would you say? Oh, and keep a hand on the old stunners, okay? It’d be highly ironic if we saved their asses and they repaid us by throwing us in a cell with a dirt floor.”

As the new planet circled out to take its place in the system, the eight fighters headed into orbit around the turquoise world they had rescued from it. They took up an orbit about ten times higher than that of the single artificial satellite—there were two rather puny moons as well—and waited for the cruiser probe to appear. After about eight hours of chess and chit-chat and mapping of the planet, they received a call from their lagging comrades.

“Silverfleet, come in,” came Stacy Mackenzie’s voice. “The Lost Lamb is here. We see you in orbit around Planet Four. Please give us orders.”

“Lost Lamb,” Silverfleet sent back. “Listen up. We’ve found a colony on this planet. We haven’t made contact yet. We’re landing, but we’ll leave two fighters in patrol orbit. Why don’t you come in and take up an orbit as soon as you can, and contact us? If we don’t reply, then there’s some skullduggery. But we just saved them from an asteroid collision, so we’re hoping they’ll be friendly. See you in a few days.” With the touch of a key, the message headed off on its twelve-hour journey across the system. “All right, gang, let’s land. Who wants first patrol?”

“I’ll do it,” said Cloutier.

“Oh, sure, me too,” said Kris Bell.

“Okay. Good. Make sure that between the two of you, you have line of sight to every point on the perimeter of the system. Someone will relieve you in six hours. So, landing spot?”

Beach, big island,” replied Elan Klee. “One of the settlements is near there. I’m sending the coordinates.”

“I can see it from here,” replied Stelling.

“So let’s go,” said Silverfleet. “Del, Kris, be careful.”

“You too,” called Cloutier. As the two pirates pulled up out of orbit and separated, the other six fighters dropped into the atmosphere and drew together in landing formation.

Half an hour later, they were on the beach a few hundred meters from where the fishing boats of the colony bobbed in the waves of the purple sea. They popped their hatches and climbed out, checked the air one more time and pulled off their helmets. It was warm but not hot, and a light wind blew in off the water.

“Salt air,” said Claypool. “Reminds me of Enderra.”

“The air’s very pure,” put in Elan Klee. “Some rare salts in the water, but nothing nasty. Hmm. Interesting sea critters. Look.”

They gathered around a tidal pool. There were little fish and shrimp and barnacles among the grey-green mosses, and small wading birds and crabs and flies dipped in and out of the water, but there were also armored worms and one-legged swimmers and submerged mats of pink and purple plant matter. On land, all the life they could see was of Central origin: trees, birds, mosses, lichens, grasses, mosquitoes.

“Brace yourselves,” said Claypool, swatting one. “Here come the locals. On Colfax, everything was fine until we opened our big mouths.” They turned to watch the cautious approach of a dozen or so people, half of them children.

“We couldn’t have said anything that would have made a difference,” Silverfleet pointed out. “Okay, everyone, nothing, nothing about that asteroid. But you do the talking, Suz. No, I’m serious. Let’s pretend Suzane’s the boss, okay? They may prefer to think that one of us really is the commander.”

“Why not you?” asked Stelling.

“Because I was the one who put my foot furthest into my mouth on Colfax.”

“That’s not true,” said Claypool. “I had mine pretty far up there. And like you said—”

“We bid ye greetings,” said an old man with a polite voice, a cloud-like beard and a monastic robe. Around him were several women in peasant dresses, two shirtless young men in kilts and a half dozen children in clothing ranging from nothing to tunics and shorts. “Do ye cam from space?”

“Uh, yes, we do. My name is Suzane Claypool.” She held out her hand. He looked at it with a doubtful smile, then shook it. They looked into each other’s eyes, both still a bit suspicious. She added, “We come in peace, by the way.”

“Ah. Tis well to say so. I’m called Harry Grenville.” He grinned at the other colonists. “We cam in peace too.” They stood there shaking hands for another ten seconds, and broke off clumsily. “Well, then,” said Harry Grenville, “cam ye hence, out o’ the sun’s glare, for there’s ale awaits, and there be tales to tell.”

“Tales? Oh. Our tales. Yes.”

“Aye,” he said. “Ye be from Old Home, methinks? But hold, I say, we shall hear all anon. Will ye be our guests?”

“Of course we will.” Claypool turned and surveyed her comrades, who were both dubious and eager. “Shall we go have some ale? Sure we will. Lead on, um, sir.”

Harry Grenville led on, to the village by the beach, a few hundred stone houses along streets running back from the sea, and a hall at the center of town where the colonists gathered to hear tales from afar. Now forty or fifty people had come in from the fields or off the boats to look at and listen to the six tiny women in vac suits who had fallen out of the sky on this partly cloudy day on the edge of the galaxy.

“I’m Suzane Claypool,” Claypool reiterated, “and this is Halyn Silverfleet, and that’s Myrrh, Myrrh Melville, and Mona Stelling, and Elan, Elan Klee, and that’s Conna, um, Marais.”

“And each o’ ye flies by yerself?” asked Harry Grenville.

“Yes, we’re, you know, fighter pilots.”

“Marry,” said the old woman who set out their mugs of young ale, “your craft seem as little as me finger. Fare they at speeds relativistic?”

“Aye, they would,” an even older woman, a very crone in a colorful shawl, interjected while Claypool was deciphering the alewife’s question. “Such craft would like be passing quick t’accelerate. Tis like their mass checks little their progress nigh to lightspeed.”

“Since mass be in a proportion to energy,” a middle-aged woman filled in.

“What?” asked Claypool.

“You’re right,” said Silverfleet. “Such small ships can go to lightspeed without becoming impossibly massive, at least not too impossible too quickly. Your ships aren’t like that?”

“Nay,” said the alewife. “They were vast, beside your’n.”

“They needs must be,” said Harry Grenville. “A hundred score they bore from Earth, these ninety summers since. Now they slumber ’neath the maples, and like as not, never to wake again, as we find this world to well suffice. And ye be the first to arrive in New Home since. Do ye come thence, from the Old Home? How fares the old world?”

“Old Home?” Claypool repeated. “Do you mean, Central?”

“What’s Central?” Harry twisted his face and said, “Do that mean Earth, then?”

“Earth,” said Silverfleet. “Old Home. It makes sense.”

“Tis no news the old names be changed, Harry,” said the alewife, arriving with her own mug. “Here’s to ye wanderers who come from so far.” She raised her cup, and the other adult colonists there all did the same. The pilots lifted their mugs in imitation of their hosts, and tried to imitate them in draining the ale, which was a bit weak but very thick and spicy. A younger woman, visibly the daughter of the alewife, took the responsibility of refilling their cups. “So, ye cam from Central, then?” added the alewife. “Because meseems it must be the old world of our birth.”

“Uh, no,” replied Claypool, “actually we’re running away from Central. There’s twelve of us altogether—there’s a bigger ship coming from lightspeed still. You had how many? You landed how long ago?”

“A hundred score, and ninety summers,” replied the older woman, slowly sitting down in a chair clearly reserved for her.

“That were fifty-two years, as they were counted on Earth,” said Harry.

“Do I tell the tale, Harry Grenville, or dost thou? Mine name is Cathleen,” she told them. “Lieutenant Commander Cathleen Duplaix. I stood second in command on one of our four ships. Know ye, the year here in New Home is less than that on Earth, as is the day by some few hours. Time flies, we say, but life is long.”

“You were original crew?” asked Claypool. “When did you leave? What year?”

“Mother Cath,” said the alewife, “should not we know more of them ere we tell of us?”

“Why?” asked Silverfleet. “Surely you don’t have secrets.”

“We fled from Earth,” Harry explained, “to save our children from tyranny.”

“Do I tell the tale, or thou, old man?” Cathleen asked. “We fled the Theocracy, and we were led by Doctor Andre Ferenc—hast thou read of his work?”

“Uh, no,” Silverfleet replied, looking at the others, all of whom shrugged. “What did he write?”

“Toward a New Home,” said a young man with a wistful look. “Tis no more than our precepts, that the crews followed in voyaging so far and building here.” He deferred to Cathleen, who looked only a little annoyed.

“Matt’s constant in’s studies,” she said. “I knew Dr Ferenc, rest his soul, for he died ere we departed, them he helped us flee slew him. But we shed no tears for that. This colony be his revenge.”

“We fled from tyranny too,” said Claypool. “I guess it goes to show.”

“And either of us can have only the other’s word, until deeds have their say,” the old woman went on, looking reproachfully at the alewife. “Truly, our welcome doth suffer for lack of use. Here have we waited while ninety midsummers and midwinters passed, and at last when there are guests from afar, we sit them down and with barely a cup of ale, we press them to prove they are not our pursuers. When, to say sooth, our pursuers never were, or if they were, are long since perished. Is’t not so?”

“What?”

“I’ll bet you’re right,” said Silverfleet. “I’ll bet your ships don’t even go to lightspeed.”

“We make a quarter or more,” Harry replied as if offended.

“So how long did it take you to get here?”

“Ah,” he said, smiling, “but time too is relative.”

“All well and good,” she replied, “but we fold space, so it’s not so relative for us as it was for you.” She looked Cathleen in the eye. “You and I speak the same language, don’t we? My name’s Halyn Silverfleet. I was born in the year 3316. My guess is that you were born an awful long time before that.”

“Aye,” said Cathleen, a little shaken. “If thy years be like ours—”

“Who knows what the numbers mean,” Silverfleet answered, “but the system hasn’t changed in thousands of years.”

“The years recall to mind the death of a man,” said Harry. “Tales say he strove against those who ruled and was killed for it. We didn’t want the same, so we fled Earth, in the year 2321.”

“Dost thou tell it?” asked Cathleen. “No? Good, then. I was born in the town of Bangor in the year of 2288.”

“2288?” Stelling cut in. “But you said you’d only been here fifty years. Or ninety?”

“Fifty, in our years,” Silverfleet explained. “Look. They had these big ships. Right? How many, did you say?”

“Four,” said Harry, giving Cathleen a challenging look. “Five hundreds of us on each.”

“Right. And they could barely go a quarter of lightspeed before their mass became too great to continue accelerating. They didn’t know how to cross the folds in hyperspace. I read about it when I was in the academy: it was the big hurdle that got jumped, oh, about 2500 or so.” She looked at Cathleen. “So if some later colony ship had had the same idea, they could have made the trip in a few months and been here for centuries when you landed.”

“Wait,” said Stelling. “They were in flight for over a thousand years?”

“It’s over a hundred light years. A hundred and twenty, if I recall correctly. If they averaged 15% of lightspeed, that’d take, oh, 800 years. Suppose there was a stop or two along the way—”

“Aye,” said Cathleen, “we chose ill the first time and came on a planet with poisons in the air and water. From Earth we could not tell. So we had to freeze us all anew and move on—we had fuel for one more flight—and by good fortune it was here we came.”

“Freeze? You used cryogenics?” asked Claypool.

“I was cryoengineer,” Harry explained.

“They’d have to,” said Myrrh. “They weren’t going fast enough to experience any significant time dilation. If they went 99% of lightspeed, even without folding space, the time as it seemed to pass on the ships would have been a lot less than a thousand years, but at 25% max they would have all grown old and died along the way.”

“Aye,” said Harry, “it were little solace to know our great-great-great-and-then-some grandchildren might get someplace.”

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “I suppose it won’t surprise you much to know that cryoengineering is a lost art. We left the system we just left eleven days ago.”

The colonists murmured a little, but no one fainted. “How is it,” asked Harry skeptically, “that ye may pass a hundred and twenty light years in less than a fortnight?”

“No more than twenty light years, actually, and the flying part took about six days,” Silverfleet replied. “We didn’t come straight from Central. Anyway, it turns out that if you can get an object to within a tenth of a percent or so of the speed of light, its amplified mass can be made to fold the space it’s flying through. I mean, space is four dimensional, but you don’t notice it—until you’re doing 99.9%.” She looked around. These rustics were pondering four dimensional space, and it wasn’t utterly defeating them. No, we’re not on Colfax anymore. She went on, “Actually, we left Marelon, Suzane and I, about five months ago. I guess I was last on Central, oh—?” She looked at Claypool, who had no idea. “Ten years back? It wasn’t a straight road.”

“Few roads be straight,” said Cathleen.

“Tell us,” asked the alewife, “how is it with Earth? Did the Theocrats fall?”

“The Theocrats?” replied Claypool.

“Your history, Wing Leader,” said Myrrh. “They ruled Earth for about forty years. They started off as advocates of a religion, but they ended up being their own religion. And then they ended up dead by the millions. No, they’re long gone. It was after that we founded the colonies at Alcen and Siri.” The colonists were silent until Myrrh smiled at them, and repeated, “They’re long gone. Look at us—most of us don’t even remember they ever were.”

The nearest locals whooped and shouted and beamed at one another; the news spread outward and a circle of whoops and shouts and merriment slowly radiated outward. Old Cathleen got up and did a little dance. “More ale!” cried the alewife to her daughter. “And let’s kill a pig or two! Now we have reason to feast!”

“But wait,” said Claypool, “it’s not so great. There’s the White Hand.”

“Theocrats come and go,” said Myrrh, “and when one set’s gone, there’s always another bunch waiting in the wings.”

“Aye,” said Cathleen, “tis the way of it, but yet we must needs toast the fall of our own enemies, before we open our eyes to new foes.” The six pilots could think of no reason to object.

A couple of hours later, as the pale, brilliant sun was dropping toward the sea, and as Stelling and Myrrh were ascending through the atmosphere to change places with Cloutier and Bell, a small throng walked along the beach behind Silverfleet and Cathleen: there were Claypool and Klee and Marais and there were Cathleen’s daughter, Margery, who had served them beer, and her children, and twenty or thirty other residents of the village.

“You call this place New Home?” asked Silverfleet.

“And wherefore should we not?”

“Oh, no, I think it’s a great name,” Silverfleet answered, looking around. On her left rolled the purple sea and the sun fell coloring bars of cloud at the world’s edge, and on the right a volcanic mountain rose above a band of pine atop a broad line of oak and maple. “And the village, the town, is New Haven?”

“Indeed. Does it confuse thee?”

“And you’ve been here fifty years?”

“Fifty-two,” said Cathleen. “We were two thousands, and now, thanks be to the workings of the flesh and the harvests and the fruit of the forest and the sea, we be thrice that. Margery is my daughter, she that made the ale we had at lunch—my only one to live, but thank the Sun, she had five of her own, three girls and two boys.”

“So you’ve had a hard time of it?”

“Aye, that’s sooth. We spread the seeds, and the fathers of the fish, but it was long ere the land gave back. We held debate, we did, the captains and officers, of whether to wake all our company or only the few of us to labor until there were food enough for all. And I held it cruel to leave so many asleep, and we unfroze all, and I have often regretted it. The four captains be all in the grave, and Doctor Ferenc who guided us was already long dead, and many others who had too little to eat and fell victim to weakness and ill. But all’s well that ends well—our humble world has paid us back at last, and now that only a few of us have memory of the old Earth, it seems we have been granted what we so long desired, our own place to live as we would.”

Silverfleet thought of the asteroid turned away eighty-three days from hitting this planet. Then she thought of the Central fleet searching the region, and she wondered if she hadn’t drawn an even bigger asteroid to threaten New Home. What would the White Hand want to do with a colony marooned from an earlier time, and positioned so symbolically on the edge of the galaxy? “It’s what we want, too,” she said. “We also flee tyrants, I think we told you. But—but I should tell you also, they have pursued us, and they may indeed come here.”

“Well, then,” said Cathleen without a second thought, “we shall fight them together.”

You don’t know what you’re saying, Silverfleet wanted to tell her, but instead she said, “We’ll defend you. I promise it. And we’ll try to help you any way we can. You grow enough food?”

“Enough.”

“You have enough energy?”

“Mmm, no, never like it was. We tap the thermal vents, we have solar panels, we yet have diverse o’ the ships’ systems, for we tore them apart on debarkation, but we want no burning for fuel, for the Earth we left was sooty with smoke of centuries of such labor.”

“Well, that’s improved. It’s been up and down, those ten centuries you were flying. Things improve, and Central becomes more important to the other colonies. Then they deteriorate, and the colonies keep their distance from Central. The air’s not that great on Central, the water’s pretty bad. But they did solve the soot problem.”

“And how did they that?”

“Do you wonder how our fighters are powered?”

“Aye, that I do. They seem too small to hold a power plant or sufficient battery.”

“Yes and no. We have batteries that take up a cubic centimeter of space, and we fill them with the energy of the stars. Right now, on the beach, our ships are powering up again—it’ll take, oh, a day or two and they’ll be full up with enough energy to fly to another star and back. Maybe we could build such a power source for you. Not that you necessarily need the power.”

“Oh, we shall find use for all the watts ye folk give us,” replied Cathleen. “We’ve done well these past twenty years—it was bad at first, thou wist, so near we were to starving—but we will need more food, more land, and we’ll soon crave to be more efficient, which in truth we need not be now with so few of us. How eatest thou, in thy time in space? Is there room for sandwiches?”

Silverfleet laughed. “No. No sandwiches. No, our life support systems recycle our waste products into food and drink. It’s not too bad, but when we’re flying we literally do all our moving about inside the ships for a week or more at a time, and we’re fed, you know, wavers and liquid from a tube. The ships even exercise us, stimulating our muscles as we fly. When we’re landed somewhere, we can recharge with new material that, uh, hasn’t already been inside us. We can get our life support systems to make food that we can eat, even whiskey to drink.”

“Whiskey?”

“You know, ethanol mixed with water, you flavor it a little and it’s whiskey. It’s about the easiest thing for the, um, replicators to make.”

“Such things were dreamt of in our day. But our day be this day, as we have lived so long. If we had these—replicators?—we might dispense with fishing and pigging, and that alone would improve the odor of New Haven town three or four-fold.”

“Yes,” said Silverfleet. She thought of eating pig or fish, and saw in her mind slabs of hairy, bony cartilage and filets consisting primarily of scales. Her mother ran a restaurant, but she didn’t think there were any fishermen on Bela, and the farmers all raised corn and beans and wheat and potatoes. Of course, in the feast a few hours ago, there had been something oddly chewy in the stew. She pushed away the suspicion that something alive was crawling about in her stomach. “But I can’t promise,” she cautioned, “that we’ll get you anything quickly. None of us happens to be a dietary engineer or a power plant designer. We pretty much know how to fly and fix our ships.”

“But thou wouldst roll up the sleeves and do what can be done,” Cathleen added for her. “Nay, fright not. I too was like thee, when I woke in this system and made landfall and came out into this blessed sunlight. I had never got dirt under my fingernails, but I did, I did.”

“And all the plants and animals were brought on the ships?”

“Frozen, aye, like all of us. Not a germ came that was not frozen, we had needs be sure of that or we would have came as rotten a vessel as thou mayst imagine. But there was life in the sea, thou wist, the pink algae and the worms and some fishy things. They all get along most wonderfully now, the beasts of the sea we brought and the beasts that were here, they pass one another without a look. They be carbon-based, but they have other amino acids. Alas, I’m no biochemist, our last very biochemist died the year after we cam.”

“Well, it seems stable, this strange little ecosystem you have. How far do your introduced flora and fauna range?”

“Range?” Cathleen looked at her a moment, then thought a moment. “Oh. All across this island, and several more too, and around them in the shallows, but not generally around the world. There still be islands of barren rock, and in the far seas the old creatures still hold domain. They be not good to eat, I think, though in truth I cannot say I’ve given them much chance.”

“And all the people live here?”

“There be three villages on this island, and the isles in the wind have two more, but half or more of our folk live here in New Haven.”

“The island is what, a couple of hundred kilometers across?”

“Aye, but we wish not to cover it in city, as was Earth when we were there.”

“How many would you like?”

Cathleen stopped and looked down—bent old lady that she was, she still stood five centimeters taller than Silverfleet. “We have not voted that,” she said, “but methinks we’d find room for another dozen fine young wenches such as thee.” They turned again, and Cathleen put a hand on Silverfleet’s arm. “There,” she said, “we wish to be not so populous that we don’t see such things as that.”

Before them, a bay cut back across the beach, and Silverfleet could see the path curving back along it. There was a little wooden bridge along the shore where it came near the cliffs of the island’s high ground, and ten meters back from it a veil of waterfall fell into a tiny pond, from which a pretty stream flowed out under the bridge and into the boundless sea. A deer stepped out from the trees, glanced at the little throng a hundred meters from her, and bent to drink as the setting sun gilded her brown fur and cast glinting gems across the cascade behind her.

That night, Silverfleet and Claypool lay side by side on the beach as a moon hung above them, pulling the tides up to cover their legs. Cloutier and Klee were holding forth among the villagers, having ale poured down their throats by Margery, being fed slabs of roasted meat by the young women and being questioned by Cathleen and Harry. Half a kilometer away, the only sound was the breeze and the lapping of waves.

“It’s perfect,” said Claypool.

“It certainly isn’t Colfax, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.” After a few moments, she said, “The White Hand. They’ll come here.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to have happen. I’m sorry we ever found this place. It should remain hidden. Oh, before, if we lost, it was just us, just our little lives and our little hopes. But here—we’ve drawn their attention to this place, and they’d never let it be.”

“The White Hand would make a big point of bringing a colony like this into the fold. They would be so into it. They’d get their public relations people out here right away. Rearranging everything. They’d replace every single colonist with someone brought new from Central, just to get it right. They could freaking rewrite history. Oh, they’d love it.”

“It’s just what these people ran away from. Oh, Suz—to think of all those centuries their ships were flying, and then to land and start a new colony on the edge of the galaxy, and everything’s so—perfect. And fifty years later, they’ve settled in, they’ve got children and grandchildren, and then to have their whole dream ruined, and all because of us. The White Hand would never have bothered to come this far out if we hadn’t drawn their eyes to it.”

“We couldn’t have done otherwise. Colfax led to Three Star, which led straight to Adamantine, which led to Yellow Roost, and by that time we were in sight of New Home. Hey. Maybe we’ve been led here, just for this, do you think it could be? The Goddess?”

“The Goddess never did anything for me but give me orgasms. For which I give her fulsome thanks.”

“Halyn, I found you, you found me. What an amazing chance was that! You, verily the heir to Selkirk, and I—!” She stopped on a dime. “And we found the others,” she went on. “We’ve been given this chance. We were running without a place to stop and defend, and we’ve been given a place. Did you hear Cathleen talking? About accepting us? ‘Methinks we’d find room for a dozen wenches such as thee’? Halyn, this is it. We can’t go any further. We have to stand and defend this ground.”

Silverfleet sighed. She was silent for a minute. “I did promise them,” she muttered. Then she groaned and got up. “Well,” she said, “stand and defend this ground we will. Standing comes first. So get up and let’s go get some sleep.”

The next morning Elan Klee woke them, in the hut they’d been given by the beach, in time to see the dawn. That wasn’t the occasion. “Stacy’s ready to land,” she said, “she wants to know if you have any special directions.”

“Can she fit it on the beach, do you think?”

“Sure, over there,” Elan judged, waving at a flat expanse of gravelly sand about twenty meters wide and a meter above sea level. Silverfleet looked up: there was a fat little moon high above, and the other moon was on the other side of the world, so, yes, it was high tide. “We definitely want to keep her away from the village,” Elan went on.

“You think Stacy’s that promiscuous?” Silverfleet whispered.

“Ha. Maybe. No, I meant, she hasn’t landed anything that big on a planet before, that I know of.”

“Oh. Pish! That ship’s a cream puff. It’s a hundred meters from the town—if that’s not safe enough, I don’t know what she’s doing flying starships. Tell her to bring it in there.”

And twenty minutes later, cream puff or no, the cruiser probe dropped with minimal violence and embedded itself half a meter into the sand. Then there were hugs and kisses and jokes, half the hugs being between Meena and her mother.

“All right,” said Silverfleet to the crowd. There were at least five hundred villagers gathered, and at least a hundred of them could hear her voice. “We’re all here, for once, so let me introduce everyone before Suzane and I go back up for our patrols. You know me, I’m Halyn Silverfleet. This is Suzane Claypool, and the mouthy blonde is Delilah Cloutier, and the pudgy old-timer is Myrrh Melville. That’s her daughter Meena next to her, and then the redhead’s Stacy Mackenzie, and the brunette who’s looking so serious is Jana Crown, and the little blonde next to her is Vya de Har. Got that so far?”

“Thou wilt set it all down on paper, surely?” asked a young man, surveying the dozen fighter pilots in their almost-identical vac suits.

“Paper?”

“Paper,” said Myrrh. “They write on it. You know, records.”

“Oh, of course. Paper. Well, over here, this is Elan Klee, the best fighter pilot ever to come from the Veldar mining operation, and next to her is Conna Marais, the best fighter pilot ever to come from the ranks of Marelon farm wives, and the blonde with the silly grin is Kristin Bell, and next to her is Mona Stelling—we call those two the Sleepy Pirates.”

“Be all ye fighter pilots women?” asked Harry Grenville.

“Yes,” Cloutier replied, “well, 99% anyway, and all the good ones, like Halyn. Most men can’t even fit into the modern fighters.”

“And they can’t take as much acceleration as we can,” added Kris Bell.

“And we have better manual dexterity,” put in Mona Stelling.

“And women folk are smarter, too,” said Cathleen. “Everyone knows that.” Harry and his son, a man of fifty who looked just like his dad, both rolled their eyes but didn’t say a thing.

Silverfleet and Claypool took their turn on patrol that day. Silverfleet flew out past the redirected asteroid to do an orbit of the next planet out, a red globe of medium stature with an atmosphere thick with blowing sand, while Claypool accelerated the other direction, whipped around the white sun and came out decelerating with all her little ship’s might to keep from overshooting the planet. They passed Klee and Crown coming to take their place, exchanged greetings and a few suggestions and landed in a cloud that seemed to have settled on the town.

Silverfleet climbed out. Gravity always made her feel old, and now it was combined with a steady, heavy rain. She shut the hatch behind her before Vanessa turned into a puddle, and turned to trudge toward shelter.

“Hoo-woo!” cried Claypool, slamming her hatch. “What a rush!”

“Suz! Where’s your vac suit?”

“I left it in there. The rain feels so good, doesn’t it?” Silverfleet just stared at her. “Well, did you see it? No, of course you didn’t, Halyn, you were taking pictures of red rocks. Weren’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Suz, it’s my thing. Quite the planet, that one. Big storms. Lots of heat in that atmosphere, but no water vapor. It’s collected a bunch of tiny little moons, too—like, a dozen between a kilometer and ten kilometers. I’m guessing they’re the remains of a comet. Maybe it—wait a minute, what did you see?”

“It was so beautiful,” said Claypool, flinging drips of water as she waved her hands. “The—the thing, you know, that thing.”

“What?” Silverfleet pulled off her helmet as if it would help her hearing. “What, you saw it on your way around the sun?”

“It’s directional, and it’s more than just some sort of acceleration effect, and it’s coming closer. I hit 35% there for a while, you know. So here’s the sun on one side, this wall of light, and on the other side, out against the galaxies, there it is. The crystal thing.”

“Directional? How do you mean?”

“As I went around the sun, it was in front of me, then off to the side, then behind. So—it’s in a particular place. It’s not some dream image. And it was so beautiful, Halyn! It was like—like some of those tiny sea creatures that glow in the night. You have those on Bela?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Lines of little lights and spirals of little lights, and like limbs and webs and wings and—but I couldn’t get readings from it. It wasn’t there, but it was there. I saw it!”

“Uh, yeah, and what I saw was, like, these red dust storms, and they were really cool, and there were some cool rocks in orbit, and—oh, never mind. Shall we go inside?”

“Do we have to?”

Silverfleet looked at her friend, naked in the twilight, rain dripping from her, with the biggest smile Silverfleet had ever seen on her face. “No, I guess not,” said Silverfleet, unzipping her vac suit. “Or go for a swim among the armored worms?”

“We didn’t offend any, um, local customs, did we?” Claypool asked Harry’s son Ross half an hour later, as she and Silverfleet sat in the great hall of the village wrapped in towels. He was tending the fire, and before answering he sat down facing them, near his mug of ale.

“Nay,” he said, “though in sooth tis not common to see young ladies dancing sans clothing out in the pouring rain. It seemeth passing pleasant.”

“So don’t stop on your account, eh, Ross?” said Silverfleet. “Young, huh? Thanks!”

“So, how was the trip around the sun?” asked Vya, ladling a mug of ale from the cask.

“I saw it again,” Claypool replied. “The crystal thing. I saw it really clearly this time.”

“She got up to 35%,” Silverfleet explained.

“We got a great look at it,” said Vya. “On the cruiser. I’ve been meaning for you to come look at the sensor logs—I think we got its picture!”

“What? How? No one’s managed to get any sensor data on it at all.”

“I know. Actually Jana got it to work. But you know, that cruiser has a lot more delicate equipment than we have on our G220’s. I mean, it’s made to do stuff like that.”

“So? What is it?”

Vya looked at Claypool, then back at Silverfleet. “Well, I have no idea. It looks like some kind of weird—I don’t know. Crystal or something, except that it sort of—twirls. Spirals. I mean, you saw it, right?”

“Yes, but—well, only for a few moments at a time. Suz just got a good long look at it. She thinks it looks like a jellyfish. Or a crystal.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. I can see that. I’d go with jellyfish.”

“So, any idea what it is?”

Vya looked back and forth between them uncomfortably, then shrugged and said, “I have no clue. Why don’t you come look?”

“All right,” said Silverfleet, rising.

Ross Grenville caught her eye. “Is it something—wicked, that this way comes?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” she answered, then changed her mind. “We have no idea. Maybe it’s wicked and it doesn’t come this way, or maybe it comes this way but it’s not wicked, or—well, take your pick. You want to see?”

“Methinks you should summon Mother Cathleen.”

The next morning, Silverfleet and Claypool and Vya de Har and Elan Klee had porridge and tea for breakfast with Cathleen and Harry and Ross and Ross’s wife Heather Grandmaison and their daughter Ginger Grandmaison. Heather, like Ross, was one of the first children born to the new colony, and like him she was an amused outsider when it came to technology. But Ginger, their youngest at sixteen and the only one of their six children not married, had already decided to become a fighter pilot. In this she was like two score other teenagers of the town, not all of them girls, but Ginger’s case benefitted from the fact that in size and eyesight, at least, she was qualified. Of course there was no ship for her nor did it seem likely there would ever be one. Silverfleet and Cathleen hoped to exploit such ambitions to inspire a general interest in technological development among the maturing third generation of New Homers—the second generation had pretty much done its job of working the land and the sea and having lots of babies. But build fighters on New Home? It was little more likely than on Black Rock.

After breakfast the group adjourned to the bridge and the cargo hold of the cruiser probe to observe Jana’s data.

“I know not what it is, but tis a sweet sight,” was Harry’s opinion, as he gazed upon the changing views on the big screen in the hold.

“Aye,” agreed Ginger Grandmaison, entranced.

“So what’s all the structure mean?” asked Silverfleet, sitting in the pilot seat. “I mean, I congratulate you guys, but it’s just a permanent version of the glimpses we had before—are we any closer to knowing what it is?”

“We don’t even know where it is,” put in Elan Klee.

“Well,” said Vya defensively from the engineer’s station, “it’s out there, isn’t it? I mean, away from the galactic arm. Out in empty space.”

“But it’s getting closer,” said Claypool, in the science seat on the bridge. “I was sure of it.”

“Comes it here, dost thou consider?” asked Cathleen. She had been accorded the combat station, whose controls she scanned as if she might just figure them out, but she didn’t touch a thing. “And with what intent?”

“I’m not convinced it is anywhere,” said Silverfleet.

“Oh, come on, Halyn,” Elan Klee said over her shoulder, “look, you can even see it’s at a slightly different angle in these two views. See? It’s seen from a different direction, by a few degrees.”

“Thou seest aright,” Cathleen agreed. “Tis different, by a few degrees.”

“Thou canst see that?” asked Harry.

“I am not so aged as some might think, but a thousand years and some.”

“Maybe it’s turning,” Silverfleet suggested.

“Then it’s moving, in any case,” replied Elan. “And it’s somewhere.”

“We have to know more,” said Claypool. “There’s nothing like this in the records. The Lamb’s computer is as mystified as we are.”

“The Lamb’s computer?” Elan repeated.

“Thank Stacy for that,” said Vya. “It’s what we started calling the ship—the Lost Lamb.”

“So, again, might it be coming here?” asked Cathleen.

“We’ve no more idea than you do,” said Claypool. “You’re a starfarer. What do you think?”

“Tis a pretty thing, that’s sure. But so are many kinds of snake.”

“Oh, that’s well said.” Claypool looked at Silverfleet in a way that was becoming very familiar to Silverfleet. “Halyn,” she said, “we have to know what it is. If it’s somewhere—”

“We have to go there,” Silverfleet finished, “just to see what it really is.”

There was much other business more urgent, and it was three of New Home’s twenty hour days before Claypool and Silverfleet made ready to go have a look. In the meantime, Cathleen gathered the elders of the five towns of New Home—the one called New Haven had about half the planet’s six thousand people, with the others diminishing in proportion to the distance from the big city. The elders met and inspected Claypool and Silverfleet, who were recognized for what they were, the dual leaders of the fighter pilots. Cloutier and Bell made the rounds of the other four villages just to show everyone what space fliers looked like nowadays, and meanwhile most of the pilots took the opportunity to adopt local clothing. Peasant dresses replaced vac suits—most of the pilots hadn’t worn anything other than their vac suits in many months—and more than one teenage girl of New Home was caught trying on a carelessly stored suit. The younger pilots dispensed with their suits completely and strolled nude. Silverfleet kept hers on, while Claypool found comfort and style in a dress made of a local fibre called “cotton”.

There was one item of business that hadn’t been apparent until Mona Stelling, in Silverfleet’s presence, happened to ask about the colony’s one satellite.

“Oh, aye,” explained Ted Pingree, one of the elders of New Haven, “tis a weather station indeed. Once it warned our fish boats of coming storms, but tis burnt out these twenty years. We fain would have it up again.” He looked at Silverfleet. “Canst thou—?”

“Sure we canst,” said Stelling. “I mean—well, Commander, I mean, I think maybe Bell and I could go up and—?”

“Fix it? What’s wrong with it?” asked Silverfleet.

“Has a burnt out power core,” said Pingree. “Canst thou really—?”

“Oh, aye,” said Stelling. “I mean, I think so. I mean, we can probably rig up something. We fixed up a power system on the Adamantine Planetoids, and at Yellow Roost. Can we try?” They both looked at Silverfleet.

“Sure,” Silverfleet replied. “Knock yourselves out.” And that very night, Stelling and Bell took off, space-walked for ten of the next twelve hours, and returned just as the first news of a tropical depression forming two hundred kilometers to the west arrived at the dusty console in a closet in the hall, whose antique power supply had been replaced with a line to Cloutier’s fighter.

On the evening of their fourth day on New Home, Claypool and Silverfleet and Elan Klee and Conna Marais went to their fighters, trailed by fifty or so locals and several of their comrades. Elan and Conna were just taking up patrol duty, replacing Jana and Meena, but Claypool and Silverfleet had a different itinerary.

“Never mind about us,” said Silverfleet to Klee. “You two, let’s get a little more serious about patrol duty. I want one of you out on the edge of the system, doing at least 20%. The other should stay very close to the planet, and if Central shows up, or anyone else for that matter, you get down into the atmosphere. I want us to be able to hide—maybe they won’t be able to detect any tech signs at all.”

“Halyn, that’s ridiculous,” said Elan Klee. “They’ll pick up the cruiser even under all the atmosphere. And then there’s the weather satellite. We can’t ditch it, after Kris and Mona just went to all the trouble of fixing it.”

“It’s geosynchronous. They’d have to come around the planet to see it. Don’t argue. As soon as you get into that ship—”

“I know. You’re the commander. Okay, fine, I’ll do the edge of the system, okay, Conna?”

“Yes, that’s best,” said Conna. “But be careful, partner,” she added, patting Klee on the rear. She smiled at Claypool and Silverfleet. “You too, okay?”

“Oh, we’ll be very careful,” replied Silverfleet. “We’re just going for a look.”

And so they looked. They flew straight out past the star at full acceleration, straight at the next group of galaxies, the nearest of which was two million light years distant. With the skill of long practice, they pulled their ships dangerously close—within centimeters of one another—and played chess while their sensors lost track of the galaxies ahead, of the sun behind, of anything beyond a meter or two.

And just as their screens went blank, there it was.

Two hours later, they had made a grand curve in the folds of hyperspace—its physical position in three dimensions might have been described as somewhere outside the orbit of the stormy red planet—and turned back, hauled in part by the gravity of the sun. They had begun decelerating on course to return to the planet, and they had already hashed and rehashed what they had seen.

“It’s definitely in hyperspace,” said Silverfleet, “and it’s definitely moving, and it’s definitely massive. Is there anything else we can say for sure about it?”

“It’s beautiful,” Claypool replied. “And it’s not just some rock hurtling through space. It’s got something guiding it—some intelligence, I mean, or intelligences. It’s accelerating, but I’m pretty sure it was decelerating before, so it’s changed its course in the past fifty hours.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anything in hyperspace before. I guess it’s not going to New Home. It’s decided not to stop here—I guess.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Why could we see it? We could barely pick up each other’s ships at a range of five centimeters. Why was it so clear? It can’t have been that close to us.”

“Well, that’s a good question,” said Silverfleet. “Add it to the list—at the top is, what is it, and then why and how is it going wherever it’s going, and where is it going, that’s the, oh, fourth question—so how can we see it is down there in fifth. Maybe we’ll get an answer to some of them someday. Meanwhile—15%. We’re on course. Pick up nav marks: lesser moon, weather satellite, yep, we’re right on course.”

“Halyn.”

“What? Oh. Oh my goddess.”

Four tiny ships came screeching out of hyperspace on the far side of the system, decelerating at full. Conna, caught out in space at low speed, darted behind the planet.

“Lost Lamb,” Silverfleet sent on a narrow beam, “call Conna in orbit. Central is here. Four ships. They see her. Tell her to head for them at full accel. Pass through them, get off a couple of shots and then curve around. We’ll follow. Get Cloutier in orbit, but out of sight. Everyone else, stay on the ground and be ready.” She sent along her sensor log to indicate where the fighters were. Some hours later, they saw the result of their communication: Conna whipped around the planet and out into space, the surge from her engine visible on the high-end sensors, which would only happen at what the pilots called 110% acceleration. A few minutes later, Cloutier’s ship showed up on the sun side of the planet.

Now Claypool and Silverfleet, a few meters apart, hurtled toward the incoming ships. Yes, four, only four—now one of them was bending away. “It’s turning to run,” said Claypool. “They’re not making the same mistake that Milton and Trull made.”

“There’s no way we can catch it,” said Silverfleet. “Where the heck’s Elan? I hope she’s not already a pile of debris.”

“Conna would’ve seen,” Claypool replied. “She’ll send us something.”

A few hours later, Conna’s message reached them, traveling through space only four times as fast as her ship: “Following orders. Wish me luck. Elan’s on long-range. She may not even know they’re here. I’m doing 110%, Commander. We’ll all get one shot, max. You’ll have to pick up the pieces.” They heard her fiddling with her navigation, then: “Wish me luck, and good luck yourself. What did you say at Marelon? Good hunting.”

“Happy hunting, ladies,” Silverfleet said to herself. Then they were in darkness hurtling toward the curving path predicted for their foes—at this distance, they would see each maneuver seven hours after it happened. They could split the difference among various approaches, but Silverfleet preferred to guess.

A day and a half passed, and the distances shrank, and they saw Conna’s blip approach and merge with the invaders’. Then they separated—Conna Marais had gone right through them, with a brief exchange of incivilities, and come out the other side intact.

“Woo-hoo!” cried Claypool. “She did it! I read shell damage, but she’ll be fine. One of the invaders has shell damage too. Good one, Conna!”

“We’ll have to take all three,” said Silverfleet.

“We can call out Cloutier.”

“I want them to know as little about us as possible—besides, we could never coordinate. She’d hit them hours after we did. Days, maybe. No, if they get to the planet, she and the others can take them together, and they’re not going to get to the planet except through us.”

“You’re the commander.”

“Oh, but hey, good shot, Conna. I have to say I didn’t think she could do it.”

“You thought she’d get blown up,” said Claypool.

“I did, yes. Don’t ever tell her that.”

“Of course not. It’s hard enough already, being Commander, sending middle-aged housewives off to their deaths.”

“It’s no picnic.”

Now it was a race—a slow race, and one with a foregone conclusion. The invading three fighters maneuvered in the blind of space, but Silverfleet knew they would make a pass around the planet, and she plotted a relentless course. Ten hours after they had seen Conna’s encounter, they were turning into the same path as their foes, but faster, still 20% of lightspeed. The quarry dodged and wove and finally tried accelerating, but the mathematics was against them. In another hour, Claypool and Silverfleet were within range, closing from behind, and in relativistic terms it was exactly as if they approached one another from opposite directions, at a crawl. All the while, the fourth fighter fled, finally winking off the sensors just as Silverfleet and Claypool exchanged a few last meaningful chess moves.

“E5, E6,” said Silverfleet.

“You sure you want to do that? Okay. G8, G5.”

Shots blazed around them. Claypool was hit in the shell. Silverfleet dipped just as one fighter fired at her, then jumped over another photon blast. Her nearest foe lost her nerve and went into an accelerating turn, covering herself with photon fire. It was an academy sophomore move. Silverfleet took a second to mark her computer core and squeezed off a shot, and the target was dead in space. A flash on her left removed Claypool’s foe from the screen and from sweet life.

The third hit her brakes, as it were, and swung out to charge Claypool, who was handcuffed by the proximity of her new opponent. They stood in space and fired at each other, dodging and dancing on the edge of extinction. Silverfleet’s heart jumped—Claypool’s shell went down. Still she danced, still she fired, as the angel of death reached out with a bundle of photons.

Silverfleet chased her photon shot and arrived at the very spot a second after the third fighter exploded to dust. She heard Claypool breathe again, and it reminded her to breathe too.

“Thanks, Halyn,” called Claypool.

“Okay,” said Silverfleet, “call Lost Lamb, have them come get that dead fighter. Let’s go have a look at the edge.” An hour later, they were turned around again and headed out toward the edge of the system, Cloutier behind them, Conna curving around to return. They could hurry all they pleased, but Elan was out there in the mists of hyperspace, and the fourth fighter had vanished there too. At least they knew where to look: a particular cube of space where the fleeing fighter had gone, and where Elan’s course would apparently take her. They looked and looked.

A flash came from deep space.

It was followed two seconds later by a whoop of exultation in the voice of Elan Klee. An hour and a half later, she was visible, decelerating past 30% again.

“How did you find the other fighter in the blur?” asked Claypool, three days later when they were all sitting around in the Great Hall, eating stew and drinking ale and telling their stories.

“I just followed my nose. She had no idea I was there. No idea.”

“How did you ever do targeting?” asked Jana Crown.

“I just ran the calculation a million times and took the average. Literally. And fired the biggest burst I could come up with.”

“It’s doable,” said Silverfleet. “But no, in case you’re wondering, I’ve never done it. We’d just given that ship up for gone. You know, Selkirk did that, at Vega.”

“Did she really?” asked Elan Klee. “Wow.”

“Yes, Elan, you did a Selkirk move. So, I don’t know what we’re calling our little starfleet, or what our protocols should be, but I think it’s time we had a medal. The New Home Star. We could make it from—any gold, Harry, or diamonds?”

“We have a bit of gold,” said Harry, “marry, half a gram I’d swear, pricked in the seeking of iron. We had need of iron—I wot not what became of the gold.”

“The Iron Star,” suggested Cloutier.

“We could put a bit of shell in middle,” suggested Ross Grenville’s wife Heather Grandmaison.

“We’ll see to it,” said Cathleen. “Us dames o’ the planet will make thee a fine medal. Star, you say?”

“Make two,” said Silverfleet. “Conna only got a hit, but she went one on three and came through intact. She followed orders that could easily have gotten her killed. I guess she learned something fighting the mighty Colfax Starfleet.”

“I guess I did,” said Conna. “But I just remembered what you used to say. Make sure you do this, this and this, and don’t forget to do that, and absolutely, positively do not leave out this other, and when you’re sure you’ve thought of everything, stop thinking, just let go.”

“It was fundamentals,” said Elan Klee. “And you taught us that too.”

“And you saved my life,” said Claypool. “Again.”

“Oh, I did not. You were going to get that fighter. I reacted emotionally.”

“And thou, thou hast saved New Home, I take it,” put in Harry. “Them was Earth, eh? The, what you call, White Hand and Central and all?”

“Oh, yes,” said Silverfleet, “and they would love to get their hands on this colony, with all you innocents from the twenty-fourth century. But it’s not over yet.”

“They know something’s here,” said Claypool.

“Yes. And from now on, we’re going to have to maneuver very carefully.” She looked around at eleven pilots and three score villagers. All the women wore peasant skirts and blouses, but the pilots were distinguishable from the villagers by their lack of height and that look pilots have. “Listen,” she said, “we’re not here. Nobody’s here. We’re not based anywhere. We could hit them wherever. We need to split, send six fighters to one system, six to another, leave the cruiser here, hidden as well as we can. We have to keep moving—hit them when we can, otherwise show our faces and flee somewhere else. We’ll work out paths tomorrow. But the main thing is, we want them to think that this was just a chance encounter, a raid on the raiders. We don’t want them to come back to New Home.”

“Tis our devoutest wish,” said Cathleen. “We’ll help howsoever we can.”

“Is that what Ferenc’s Precepts would have you do?” asked Myrrh.

“Aye,” said Cathleen, “I trow thus be how the good Doctor would have us act, to render help to them who fight tyranny from Earth, who go forth to defend us in space. But were it not so, it would hardly matter, we all wish to give aid regardless of the Precepts.” The pilots looked at her quizzically. All the townspeople were smiling as if there were a joke here known only to them. “His first precept,” Cathleen explained, “was, only obey those precepts that make sense to us, and not any that do not. Put our hearts in the right way and then act as our hearts lead, and I trow that it is thus our hearts would have us do.”

“So what wouldst thou have us do, Silverfleet?” asked Heather Grandmaison.

“Just be what you are,” replied Silverfleet. “We won’t be getting starship production going here for quite a few years.”

“But we do have one new fighter,” put in Stacy. “As soon as it’s repaired. Who gets that?”

“I do!” cried Ginger Grandmaison. The townspeople looked at her with a mix of surprise, irritation, concern and pride.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, looking at her mother Heather, her father Ross and her grandfather Harry, “I don’t know.”

“It’d be the pride of the family,” said Harry.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “it’ll take a long time training. Meanwhile, how’s the new resident of Farplace working out?”

“Miss Tamra Trull is said to have promise as a weaver of fishing nets,” replied Cathleen. “She has crafty fingers, they say. If she be constant in wishing never to fare in space again, she may yet make some children of Farplace an excellent mother.”

“We’ll see,” said Silverfleet. She slouched down in her chair and smiled across them all. “We’ll see. But look, my cup is empty.”

“Can’t have that,” said Margery, hurrying to get the pitcher and refill everyone’s mug.