Silverfleet and Claypool

“I still can hardly contain myself,” said Silverfleet. She was walking with Suzane Claypool on a planetoid in the white dwarf system they called Between. They had set up a cave base, Silverfleet and Cloutier and Claypool’s freed wing, and behind them in the twenty-meter-wide chamber, Cloutier, Vya de Har, Stacy Mackenzie, Meena Melville, and Elan and Conna snoozed in various arrangements. Outside the cave, their eight fighters gathered photons shed by the miserly little star. The wing commanders looked back at the tidy little base and then turned to continue their hike. “When you opened a channel—you totally had me fooled.”

“They’d disguised the ships,” replied Claypool. “They must’ve done it when they captured us. I suppose they didn’t want Central to figure out where we were. Maybe the Empress decided to let us go on a whim, when she’d had it up to here with Central—but she must’ve had it in mind all along. They really didn’t treat us too badly. No dirt floors, for one thing—it was actually very clean. They didn’t need to torture us any—just being stuck there was plenty.”

“When I thought we were going to have to leave Taraadya without you,” said Silverfleet, “that was the worst. Ask Del—I, uh, didn’t deal too well with not having you with me.” They glanced at each other. Silverfleet was briefly overwhelmed again by Claypool’s nearness, the glint of starlight on her pointy nose, the glint in her steely eyes, the shadow all around inside and outside that vac suit. Silverfleet looked off toward the jagged horizon. “If we’re going to be fighting, rather than maneuvering,” she said, “we’ll want all twelve of us together anyway. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

“You’re counting Ginger? And who?”

“Well, Tilla, didn’t I tell you? And Paula, except her fighter needs work. She’s more of a freighter pilot than a fighter. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Yes, you did, I forgot. So much news to absorb—after a month in that windowless hotel suite on Taraadya. Wow. So sad about Dr. Frederik.”

“Yes. It’s rough out here on the fringe—no place for menfolk. Remember Gaston? He seemed to be doing okay so far, anyway.”

“Yes. How’s Cloutier?”

“Oh, she’s a rock. She was the perfect second, back at Taraadya. I would’ve gotten myself taken out and shot, if it hadn’t been for her.”

“And what about Taraadya? Is Central going to come after them?”

“Not if they think Alal’s still got you. Not if they know what’s good for them.” She rolled her eyes. “I can’t count on that with Admiral Birdbrain. But Taraadya’s got a big fleet, and they’re not particularly strategic, and Central still doesn’t know where we really are. We have to keep raiding from Golden Eye.”

“And we can spend every other month strolling the beaches of New Home,” said Claypool.

Silverfleet grinned. “I hope they’re keeping a look-alike Suzane Claypool in the brig. So how much warning did you have that they were going to let you go?”

“About one second. It was just like when they captured us. We go into the Empress’s chamber, and then she says, ‘Put them in a cell’ and that was it. We couldn’t very well fight—there must have been a hundred guards. Not that we didn’t think about fighting afterward. It was our primary subject of conversation. And then they came and told us we were leaving. We had no idea you were there. I thought any minute they’d turn me over to Fiona.”

“Not Fiona,” said Silverfleet. “Even they can’t trust her. So they’d painted your ships?”

“Yes. I don’t like the color scheme. The deep blue was much nicer.”

“Black shows dirt,” Silverfleet agreed. “Oh, stars, Suz. I still don’t believe you’re here.” And to emphasize the point, she hugged Claypool tight, vac suit to vac suit.

Ten hours later, the eight fighters took off from the planetoid and sped past the white dwarf, aimed for the medium-sized point of light that was the star of New Home. Seven hours after that, they passed 25% of lightspeed, and the last vestiges of the logical universe faded from their bewildered sensors, and they began to disappear to one another. A hundred and ten hours after that, they began to reappear, and soon afterward the awesome view of New Home began to form.

“It’s as big as I’ve seen it,” was the first thing Cloutier sent to Silverfleet. They could still see the crystalline apparition, even as the stars in ordinary space were appearing around them.

“Yes. It’s past us, though. Don’t you think?”

“Sure. I guess. Where’s it going?”

“Halyn,” came Elan Klee’s voice. “We have company.”

Within another hour it was clear. Three cruisers had come down to 20% and were coasting in, still about six light hours out. Two light hours in front of those, a dozen fighters were decelerating hard—about ten times as sharply as the cruisers—and were just now down to 20% as well, just outside one of New Home’s more populous asteroid belts. Far off, seven fighters had just launched from the fourth planet.

“Pull close,” Silverfleet sent over the comm. In a minute, all eight fighters were within a few dozen meters, though they covered 70,000 kilometers each second. “That’s Myrrh and company, getting ready to defend New Home. They’ve got such famous pilots as Ginger Grandmaison and Tilla Pool. Even Paula must be flying, for Pete’s sake. On the other side, those twelve are probably pretty good—but they don’t include Fiona. The cruisers probably have some fighters—I think the T39 cruiser carries three, usually. They’ll be those driveless bay fighters, so they’ll be a bit harder to hit but they don’t have the zip and their pilots will be second rate. So let’s see—we have eight here, seven there, and they have three cruisers and probably twenty-one fighters. Twenty-one plus three against fifteen plus zero.”

“We don’t even have these guys outnumbered,” Stacy Mackenzie said of the cruisers and their hidden bay fighters. “What are Myrrh and the rest going to do against twelve of Central’s best?”

“They’ll have to take care of themselves,” said Cloutier. “Do you think we can’t take the cruisers?”

“Oh, we can take them,” Stacy replied. “We could take twice that many.”

“I’m not wishing for any more,” said Silverfleet. “We have one big advantage, besides the fact that you guys are the best wing in the galaxy.”

“These cruisers don’t know we’re here,” Cloutier filled in.

“Nobody does. That’s our chance. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”

Forty hours later, the captains of the cruisers had a rude awakening. They detected approaching fighters at about 50,000 kilometers—about ten seconds leeway. The hindmost cruiser was taken quickly by the devil, in the form of Halyn Silverfleet, who hit it square in the drive section and pulled out of the way as it exploded soundlessly. Its three hastily launched bay fighters hardly got their bearings before Claypool, Cloutier and Meena Melville took them out. Claypool’s was luckiest, blowing up in a flash. The other two were stuck, hurtling through space in dead ships at 10% of lightspeed relative to the system, wrapped in darkness fifty hours from the faintest hope of rescue.

The second and third cruisers managed to open fire, and Vya de Har and Stacy Mackenzie both took significant damage to their shells before they got a bead on their cruiser and began to belabor it mercilessly. Its three fighters headed for them, but Elan Klee and Conna Marais took them on, and it was still three on two when their mother ship blew. Then Vya and Stacy turned to encircle the three Central fighters. These bravely stood and fought (having no other choice) and were gunned down one by one.

The best pilots among the bay fighters were in the foremost cruiser, and they emerged in perfect formation, their targets already chosen: two enemy fighters coming in too close together, too far ahead of the rest of the pirate attack. The leader put her target circle on the one on the left, then fired. The one on the left was gone. It was now a hundred meters below its previous position, and from there Silverfleet carved up the floor of the lead bay fighter. The other two Central fighters tried to fall back into the shadow of their cruiser, which was laying down some serious fire around the pair of attackers. Claypool chased the two fighters around the cruiser, dodging its shots until she was too close to be targeted. Meanwhile Silverfleet hung behind the cruiser, dismantling the ship’s systems, and in another five seconds its firing ceased. Its drive system went down, then its sensors, and after half a minute of picking and cutting, the ship was dead in space, its life support hanging on by emergency power.

Claypool reappeared around the cruiser. “Scratch two more fighters,” she reported.

“This one’s our captive,” said Silverfleet. “We’ll let it float while we go take care of the advance party. We can come back for them.”

“Commander,” called Elan Klee, “we have some shell damage, but we’re all ready to go.”

“Okay,” replied Claypool, “let’s not hang about.”

Things had not gone so well for New Home’s last line of defense. Of the seven defenders, Paula had been shot down and managed to crash in the ocean, and Myrrh, Tilla, Ginger and Jana were all floating in orbit, completely disabled. In return, Myrrh had disabled one fighter and Bell another, and Ginger had put some hurt on a third. Bell and Stelling were lurking about the two little moons, trying to draw the Central fighters into their own game, a low-level rock race. The Central pilots were content to fire off missiles to chase the two ex-pirates around until they got tired and made a mistake.

“Hang on, we’re coming,” was the message they got from Silverfleet—just as the ten remaining Central fighters began to assemble to pull out of the system. They still had even numbers against the remaining defenders of New Home, but they all knew who their opponents were. Bell and Stelling cautiously emerged from their refuges as the invaders pulled away, and in another eight hours they were shadowing the fleeing fighters at 20% of lightspeed. In a few more hours, the ten Central fighters would begin to vanish from the system.

But Silverfleet’s geometry was superior to theirs, and before they could get out, her group caught up. Silverfleet, Claypool and Cloutier burst into the ragged wing and began blowing them up in line. Silverfleet dodged a burst of fire and took out the first, Claypool blew up the second, Cloutier the third, and then the other seven formed up for defense. They matched up well enough, but someone had to fight Silverfleet and Claypool, and in five seconds there were only five Central fighters, then three. Jana Crown caught her foe trying to roll to get under her, and then there were two, attacking Vya and Stacy as they tried to fight their way out of the trap. Stacy’s shell went down, then her power system went out, and Vya, bearing the brunt, began to take heavy damage.

Then the last two fighters blew up, and through the dust they left flew Bell and Stelling. The Second Battle of New Home was over.

It was more than a week before all fifteen of the pilots who had defended New Home could gather in the Hall of New Home town. It had taken two days for the wing to get back from the edge of the system, and four more days before Del Cloutier, Mona Stelling and Tilla Pool could take the light free trader out to pick up the disabled cruiser. They towed it back, and then, in orbit, with a half dozen burly New Homers with stunners in their hands, they let themselves in through the freight hatch of Bessie and the auxiliary hatch of the T39. Inside they found five of the crew of eight still alive—the other three, including the captain, had been willingly escorted out the airlock without suits. They had been White Hand initiates and this was all a bit too much for them and no one within twenty light years, including the remaining cruiser crew, mourned their loss. The captain had ordered the ship blown up, but the five crew who wanted to survive had stopped her, and she and the other two accepted the consequences.

Meanwhile, fishing boats had found Paula Pool in her floating fighter, guided by the weather satellite, which had passed through the battle unchallenged. Her fighter would never sail the seas of space again, and even its parts offered little for salvage. The rest of the disabled defenders, along with five Central fighters, were brought to the surface by the free trader and fixed over the course of a couple of weeks’ labor.

“Ye’ve done it,” said Cathleen, and Harry said, “We readied us for the sky’s fall.”

“You tore up a perfectly good Central starfleet,” said Myrrh. “Even though it outnumbered you. You cut through those cruisers like a knife through cheese.” She demonstrated, on a chunk of the excellent soft white cheese of New Home.

“My friends,” said Ross Grenville, “let us raise our mugs to Commander Halyn Silverfleet!” Before she could stop them, several hundred of the folk of New Home had drained pints of ale. Before she could get their attention, another citizen of New Home distracted her.

“Commander,” said a little woman with mousy hair and a peasant dress, “I’d like to personally thank you for saving my hiney.”

“And you would be?” asked Silverfleet, puzzled by her lack of accent.

“I would be Trull, Tamra Trull,” said the woman. “You don’t remember? You trained me back on Marelon.”

“Ohh! You look so—different. You want to fly again?”

“Different? Well, part of it is the dress, and I am slightly pregnant too. I’ll tell you, for a while I wasn’t so happy to be stranded on the ground, but there was about a day there when we knew about those guys from Central and we didn’t know you were behind them, and I started thinking what they’d do with me, especially as I’m, well, pregnant. I doubt they’d find my explanations compelling. They’d just assume I’d turned coat.”

“And you have, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes. So, anyway, thanks, Ginger can keep my ship.”

“Silverfleet! Silverfleet!” several others were shouting. She looked around in frustration, then climbed up on a table, stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled.

“Okay, one thing,” she shouted in her deepest voice. “I didn’t beat Central’s fleet. We beat Central’s fleet. Even Ginger got some shots in, and it was Ginger who told me I had to go get Suzane and her wing out of jail on Taraadya—if it weren’t for her, there’s no way we’d have won. And Suzane, I think, got as many kills as I did up there—didn’t you? Word of advice. Never, ever get on the wrong side of her photon guns—she has a mean streak wider than she is. And Del, oh, without Del I’d have gotten myself in some serious doo-doo on Taraadya. All these ex-pirates, and Elan and Conna and Tilla and Paula and Ginger—this is the best group of fighter pilots in the known universe. And New Home—don’t forget, if we hadn’t found you, Central wouldn’t have either. But we did find you, and you gave us something to fight for.”

“That and the fact that there’s nowhere else to go beyond New Home,” Cloutier put in.

“That’s right. This is where we make our stand.”

“What do we do with the cruiser?” asked Kris Bell. “And the crew?”

“We’re even now settling the crew,” said old Jeff Friend, the mayor of Farplace. “Along with them ye brang back from them Central fighters. Miss Trull’s making netminders of them.”

“I dibs the cruiser,” said Paula Pool.

“No fair,” said Mona Stelling. “I’m doing my part of the fixing. Besides, she’s already got Bessie.”

“The T39,” said Silverfleet, “is system defense. There’s no point in our taking it with us if we want to go raid Central—it’d slow us down. But you, Mona Stelling, are coming with us if we go, in your fighter. So yes, I’m afraid Paula gets the cruiser. We need what, four gunners and an engineer?”

“And a drive officer and a navigator,” said Paula.

“It’s gone to lightspeed for the last time, I think, so it doesn’t need either of those. So, four gunners and an engineer, and we’ll have openings for what, five fighter trainees? So,” Silverfleet went on, looking at Cathleen Duplaix, “any way we can find volunteers?” Cathleen only smiled as fifty of New Home’s youth jumped up and started shouting and waving. “All right, all right,” shouted Silverfleet. “Well, it’ll take time. But finally, maybe, just maybe, we have time.”

Nothing had happened to change their minds on that score in the next two weeks. Then the universe found New Home again on a sunny day. Silverfleet and Claypool had taken the morning to fly their fighters to Waterfall, an aptly named village of four hundred on its own volcanic island, its soundscape dominated by the roar of a 250-meter cascade. It had been raining at Waterfall, a third of the way around the planet from New Haven, for a couple of days, and the just-emerged sun glinted off a a family of tall falls above a noisy cloud of mist as they landed in the town plaza.

They toured the town and its farms with about four hundred of the town’s most elite citizens, then they sat in the plaza and sipped heavy ale and tried to answer questions, and then they were allowed to walk up the beach by themselves in the afternoon. They stopped on the far side of the island to skinny dip in a lagoon, fell asleep in a shady spot, then woke up gradually on their backs in the sand.

“We’re going to have to defend the place again,” said Claypool.

“Oh, yes. And the fact that we really kicked butt last time only means they’ll send more.”

“So how are we going to pound them next time?”

“Oh, we’ll think of something. We pound them one more time real good and we’ll never hear from them again.”

“You think?”

“Sure,” said Silverfleet. “The White Hand will declare victory and leave a nice margin around us. They’re fanatical, but they’re not stupid and they’re not supposed to be defeated. They’re not supposed to get pounded. After we beat them at Alcen, they went into a shell for a couple of years.”

“They came out of their shell after you’d moved on, and then they conquered Alcen and put the whole ruling family in front of a firing squad. Then they took the lessons they’d learned and started applying them to the rest of the zone.”

“So what do you want? We should take our fourteen fighters and a beat-up cruiser and liberate Marelon?”

“We’ll have to fight them, that’s all I’m saying.”

Silverfleet fixed her with calculating eyes. “Suzane,” she said, “when I was at Taraadya, I was talking to Fiona and—well, why is Central so interested in you, anyway?”

“I’m sure I have no idea.”

But just then they heard running feet on the hard-packed sand of the upper beach, and they sat up as two teenage boys and a teenage girl of Waterfall, in bathing suits, came around the trees that edged the lagoon. “Commanders! Commanders!” they shouted. “There’s a ship in the system!”

Within an hour, Silverfleet and Claypool had joined Stelling and Ginger Grandmaison in space. But the ship was only a fighter, and within a few more hours they were sure it wasn’t just the first of many to appear: it was alone. Its transponder identified it as Taraadyan, and when they were within six light hours of one another its pilot identified herself as Dasha Elkainen.

“What are you doing here?” they asked, and ten hours later the reply came in.

“Commander Silverfleet,” Elkainen said, “we need you. Central is massing ships at Fingale. We expect them to move against Taraadya. We know not why. But they outnumber us. We need your help.”

“They’ve figured out that you’re not holding Claypool anymore,” Silverfleet called back. “We will join you and go meet the others in orbit.” Then she sent word back to the planet to call up all the fighters as well as the light free trader and the trainees.

“They have eight cruisers and two battleships,” said Dasha Elkainen once everyone was assembled in Bessie’s cargo hold. “It is exactly twice our fleet. I was scouting Fingale on a guess, after their task force left Taraadya. I saw two dozen fighters—I would guess there are twice that, counting bay fighters.”

“Maybe even a planetary cruiser or two in the battleships’ holds,” said Claypool.

“You’re sure they’re coming to Taraadya?” asked Paula Pool.

“It’s the only colonized system within a jump from Fingale that’s not already controlled by Central,” Elkainen explained. “Perchance they’re on their way here. If so, their route lies through Taraadya.”

“They can’t have heard of the battle here yet,” Stacy pointed out. “It was barely two weeks ago. By their trajectory, those guys came from Three Star by way of Henryopolis. Three Star won’t expect news for two weeks at least, more like three, and Fingale’s what, three jumps beyond that.”

“Why would they cause trouble for Taraadya?” asked Vya de Har. “It’s not like you guys are their worst enemies. I mean, granted, you let us go, but you took us prisoner in the first place.”

“On behalf of the Empress,” said Elkainen, “I apologize again. We were trying to maintain our neutrality. They wanted us to hand over Commander Claypool, so our compromise was to hold her ourselves. You were not mistreated, except for the loss of freedom.”

“Yeah, that’s all,” Elan Klee put in. “And now you hope that we have such happy memories that we’ll want to come right back and defend the place.”

“Or give you another chance,” said Vya, “to hand Claypool over and buy your own freedom.”

“I don’t like it,” Myrrh agreed. “They can surely fight their own battles. Their crews are all older than any of us—they used to take our pirate raiders apart like they were dissecting a specimen. We can go in and mop up anything that gets by them—but why bleed to protect their Empress?”

“We will certainly be overrun without your help,” Elkainen replied. “These are not pirates we fight, but Central’s very best ships, their very best pilots. We would fight to the last, and then an old and proud civilization would be gone forever.”

“You’ll make a deal,” said Elan, “just like you were trying to before Halyn showed up.”

“Commander,” said Elkainen, standing up, “I will go back now. It is clear that you are against this enterprise. I do not blame you. I can say no ill of my Empress, but we did not treat your people well, and now we will pay for it. I only hope that you will survive the onslaught that will certainly come.”

“Wait, wait,” laughed Silverfleet. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“You aren’t going to hold me prisoner, are you?” asked Elkainen. “Not that I could blame you. But you are clearly against this: I can hear from your officers’ voices. The Empress herself ordered me not to come here to ask for help. I can see she was wiser than me, as usual.”

“No, you have it wrong, Commander Elkainen. I am no Empress, and they’re all free to speak their minds. But they’re just blowing off steam. We all know we’re going to help you.”

“What?”

“She’s right,” said Cloutier. “Don’t expect us to like it, but there’s no choice. If we don’t fight there, we’ll surely fight again here.”

“I’m actually looking forward to flying with you, Dasha,” said Claypool. “Isn’t that weird? I’m actually itching for battle. I’ve never itched for a battle.”

“Well,” said Cloutier, “one’s a-comin’.”

“A wise army chooses its battlefield,” said Myrrh. “I’m still troubled, but better there than here—better your planet gets bombed than ours. If only we could arrange to fight at Fingale.”

“It’s too late for that, I’m afraid,” said Elkainen, “indeed I fear we may return and find the battle already over.”

“We’ll take the fight we get,” said Silverfleet. “So the Empress didn’t want you to come? I’d ask if she didn’t just want to keep us away while she negotiated, but I know better.” She looked around at her pilots. “We all know she’ll be an excellent ally, this Empress you have over at T-ville. And yeah, I would be honored to fight beside you.” She looked at Claypool. “So you want to fight.”

“I do, yes,” said Claypool with a pretty little smile. “We’ll pull Alal’s ass out of the fire,” she said to Elkainen. “Because I know she won’t try that same crap again.”

Silverfleet smiled at Dasha Elkainen and said, “You see? Now our Empress has spoken.”

Silverfleet had wanted to leave Tilla and Ginger behind with Paula and the new trainees, but it was pointed out that, little experience as they’d had fighting, both were already well-traveled pilots, and it was also pointed out, by Tilla and Ginger, that they would follow anyway, so in the end only Paula’s new cruiser, the New Home Defender, and its New Home crew, and five patched-up Central fighters flown by four teenage New Home girls and one boy, would remain to guard the system.

Fifteen fighters went forth: Silverfleet’s wing, including Ginger, and Claypool’s wing, with Tilla, and Dasha Elkainen. They left New Home without going back down to the planet to say farewell, but they had to pause for twelve hours at their base in the white dwarf system of Between while their fighters filled their batteries back up in the dim light of the star. They couldn’t afford to go into Taraadya with batteries near empty.

Silverfleet woke from a dream-filled sleep and couldn’t fall asleep again. Instead she gazed on Suzane Claypool’s untroubled face in the extremely dim light from the single lantern they had placed near the airlock at the cave’s blocked entrance.

A shadow crossed the light. She heard the airlock open and shut. She got up and put on her vac suit. She slipped through the improvised airlock. Outside, the dusty craters of the planetoid were bathed in a dim moonlight that was actually the direct light of the white dwarf. The black sky was packed with stars—except in one direction, where only a few lights stood before the hordes of galaxies, gleaming oceans of suns so remote that even the space-bending fighters that lay about on the ground would take thousands of years to reach the nearest. Among the few nearby stars that challenged the distant galaxies, one small yellow beacon gleamed in Silverfleet’s eye: New Home.

There was someone among the fighters. Her heart leapt. One of the hatches opened, then shut. The figure went a little way away and fiddled with her vac suit. Then it sat down on a rock. When Silverfleet bounded over to her, the figure was somehow smoking a tiny cigarette inside her helmet.

“Myrrh! I should have known.”

“I couldn’t sleep. You must’ve heard me go out the airlock.”

“Yes. Well, I woke up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep either.”

“The troubled mind of a commander before a battle,” said Myrrh. “Finally I can say I know what you mean. Of course, when I had seven against a dozen fighters with three cruisers behind them, I figured we’d all be wiped out, so I wasn’t troubled by the question of who I was sending to die.”

“But you are now.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She sucked her tiny reefer down to just paper, then she deftly pulled it onto her tongue to put it out, and swallowed it. “Halyn,” she said, “even with the Taraadyans and us together, we’re way outnumbered.”

“Myrrh, we don’t have any choice. We have to fight there, or we’ll fight the same fleet, reinforced, at New Home.”

“Halyn, I’m not arguing. I’m just saying.” She turned away and for a few seconds they looked at New Home. “Some of us are going to die.”

“I know. All of us, maybe.” She shook her head. “I used to think things like that—back before I was twenty. But look, as long as we hold the field at the end, most of the people that get knocked out will be alive and we can get them back to Taraadya and—so all we have to do is win.”

“Yeah,” said Myrrh.

They sat side by side, in silence, for a while, then they returned to the cave to slip back into bed, to toss and turn a few more hours before they left Between behind and headed for Taraadya.

The crystalline thing loomed, perfectly resolved, on Silverfleet’s left. It might have been a meter away, or a hundred light years. She could not escape the feeling that it was moving away, but it was closer, or slower, or something. Even once the stars began to settle down as she slowed, it was still there for a while.

Then the system began to show, and she breathed a sigh of relief. The star, the big planet, the other planets, the moons, the big moon where the city twinkled on the side facing its giant mother world. All was calm, beyond the chatter starting to spring up, on quiet channels, among the fighters appearing around her.

Then her heart sank. A fleet, arrayed for battle, moved out from the orbit of the moon: the Taraadyan starfleet of a battleship, four cruisers and two dozen fighters. Before them, separated by a few light hours, was another fleet, transponders shut off, indeed twice the number of the defenders. Behind them were ten troopships and sixteen armored freighters.

“May they fall cursed in the pit of death!” was Dasha Elkainen’s response. “The faithless mongrels! They did nothing but spy us out and gather as many as they were sure would destroy us.”

“They must’ve been gathering beforehand,” said Claypool. “They couldn’t have had this big a fleet just sitting around on this side of the zone. They would’ve been planning a second strike in our sector, and they must have scouted out your system as a way through.”

“And while they were here,” put in Cloutier, “they thought they might as well take the place over. Very efficient.”

“We’ll be on them before they can do anything on the ground,” said Silverfleet. “Calm yourself, Dasha. You being there wouldn’t have changed the outcome. You did the right thing coming to get us—fifteen fighters behind the fleet will make more of a difference than one more fighter with the fleet would have.”

“I wish we could hurry,” said Dasha.

“We can. Ladies, we’re 7.5 light hours away from the big planet. At 20%, we need ten hours to decelerate. So instead we will accelerate at full for ten hours, then decelerate at full to the rendezvous point, above the big moon on the outside of its orbit in thirty hours. Here come the coordinates. Now spread out and try to catch a nap.”

So they began to accelerate again, and the stars began to blur, and just as the fleets before them came within an hour’s range of one another, they disappeared into the sensors’ murk.

When the system reappeared around them, there were not two fleets, but one, and it seemed as if an awful cancellation had occurred, for there was now one battleship, three cruisers, and thirty-two fighters, all belonging to Central. Behind them, the troopships and freighters still sailed in, among the wreckage of a two thirds majority of the ships that had engaged a few hours before.

Silverfleet didn’t have to tell anyone to maintain silence. The invaders found out that she was there only six hours before they met her, a mere million kilometers above the moon.

“Silverfleet,” came the communication from the lead Central fighter, “you can’t mean to take us on. You’ll be destroyed. Is this what you want—an end like Selkirk’s?”

“Shut up, Fiona,” Silverfleet sent back. “We’d all rather be us than you. Why don’t you turn back, or do you relish the thought of giving your life for the White Hand?”

No further communications flew between the fleets, although much was said among them. Two cruisers and eight fighters fell back to defend the troopships, and the rest of the fighters fanned out in front of the battleship and the remaining cruiser. The battleship fired off thousands of tiny missiles at the oncoming fighters.

“Maximum evade,” Cloutier called out to Silverfleet’s wing, and Elan Klee echoed her. A few minutes before they would be in range of the enemy, they came to the first wave of missiles. A few shots flared as the pilots took out the missiles in front of them and then tried to dodge the ones that were left. Silverfleet, Claypool, Cloutier and Myrrh were old hands at this and picked missiles off their comrades like lice off a child, but several of the younger pirates took hits. Tilla lost her shell but flew on. They had survived the first wave.

They also survived the second wave, which seemed thinner, but a minute in front of the enemy fighters they encountered the final and thickest wave of missiles. Tilla was saved by Ginger, who lost part of her shell to three missiles. There were hits all up and down the line, and first Vya de Har, then Conna Marais were disabled. “Damn it to hell!” was all Conna could say as her ship went cold in space, but at least she was alive. A moment later, a bright light showed the end of a fighter and pilot, and it was only afterward that they had time to recognize the death in battle of Stacy Mackenzie, the smart redhead who was a little too tall to fly a fighter.

Twelve fighters came into range of the enemy: Silverfleet’s seven, four of Claypool’s, and Dasha Elkainen. Fifteen seconds before contact, Silverfleet called out, “Dasha, you’re with Claypool! Zeta! Zeta! Good hunting, ladies!”

The two wings began laying down fire while dodging the channeling fire of the two big ships. Silverfleet had a moment to recognize the beauty of their formation, and then a foe loomed before her, and then two more behind. Her enemy was skilled and cautious and dangerous—it could only be Fiona—and she had a tactic as well, for the other two fighters kept behind her while peppering Silverfleet with their shots. She turned her whole mind to evading, except for one little part of one retina, which kept track of one spot in space, and when one of the lurking fighters happened to occupy that space, a burst of photons shot across the twenty kilometers that separated them. The ship went dead, and now there were only two foes. Fiona did not panic, and the other fighter was more cautious, but now Silverfleet couldn’t quite be pinned down anymore, and she picked her way into Fiona’s lap. From a kilometer apart, they dodged each other, and after ten seconds the other fighter tried to get behind Silverfleet. This necessitated coming out into the open, and she was toast. A second later, Fiona’s shell was gone, and her hull took damage, and she broke off and fell back.

Silverfleet looked around. Of her twelve, only six remained, though there were many living pilots in dead ships of both sides. Claypool was butchering her way through three of the enemy, Cloutier held off two more, Myrrh had just dispatched her own but had a missile problem, Dasha was taking on two bay fighters near the cruiser, and Elan Klee had four around her, no, three. In another second, Claypool turned to take the pressure off her. Silverfleet turned toward Myrrh just as two more Central fighters moved in to take advantage of the old pirate’s distress.

Silverfleet pushed Vanessa to a hundred and fifty gees. But before she could cross the thirty kilometers that separated them, the two attackers and the little cloud of missiles boxed Myrrh in and in a moment she was gone, her ship gone in a flash and left as dust in space. The fighters turned to the rest of the battle.

Silverfleet was a kilometer away. The first fighter took a hit in the nose and went dead, its pilot dead with a hole straight through her heart. Silverfleet turned at 155 gees and met the second fighter, which went over completely to evasive maneuver. Silverfleet followed her patiently for a whole five seconds, and when the victim made the mistake of continuing a spiral turn instead of lurching backwards out of it, Silverfleet cut the curve off and put a burst of light right where the other fighter was about to be. It blew up, Myrrh was avenged, and Silverfleet turned to fight on.

They were five, and their foes were none, except for the battleship and its escort of fighters. Dasha had just finished off the fighters protecting the cruiser, which was now dead in space and still being pelted with blasts from her guns. “Dasha, break off,” called Silverfleet. “Everyone, form up by Dasha’s cruiser.”

“Commander,” came the communication from the cruiser, “we surrender.”

“If you’re serious, abandon ship now,” she called back. Then she switched back to quiet channel. Dasha, Elan, Suzane and Del, none the worse for wear, waited in the shadow of the hulk. “Four fighters and the battleship. Then the troopships. Keep your heads and keep track of your enemies and we’ll actually win.”

“Win,” the others chorused back.

“Transmitting attack pattern. Call it—omega. Let’s hunt, ladies.”

They came around the cruiser and into the teeth of a wave of missiles. Then they dodged back and the missiles began to slam into the dead cruiser, which exploded, leaving eight crew in vac suits. The five fighters tore through the dust. The four bay fighters were no match, though Cloutier fell victim to a lucky shot and got a hole in her thrust manifold.

The battleship, with ten gunners on its bridge along with a pilot, a co-pilot and a navigator, had Silverfleet in its face. Before they could do anything about her, she was too close to target. She poured fire into the massive ship—at this range she hardly had to aim—and alongside the photon burst came less energetic photons, in the service of a communicator bearing demands for surrender. They were ignored, and more missiles were launched to clear her out of their face. A second later the bridge exploded. The rest of the battleship went dark and sat there in space, the refuge of the three crew members whose duties had been elsewhere.

Dasha was already after the troopships. “Let them go,” called Cloutier.

“No,” said Claypool, turning to follow. Elan went with her. Silverfleet turned back to join Cloutier.

“Thanks for staying,” said Cloutier, “but I’ll be fine.”

“Not if she gets you,” said Silverfleet, hopping over her disabled chum and facing the fighter that had come out from the wreckage. They exchanged shots and maneuvers, and in a few seconds Silverfleet was sure it was Fiona she faced. So she stopped in space and dodged Fiona’s shots while she rattled off a communication, one she guessed her enemy would never bother to reply to. “Why fight?” she asked. “You ran away before. That was sensible. Now all you can do is give up.”

But Fiona paused in her attack to send a reply: “I ran away, I’m back, and we’re going to settle this once and for all.”

“Then look out behind you,” Silverfleet responded. A moment later, Fiona was dead in space, victim of a shot to the computer core from the slowed but sure Del Cloutier.

Then they began to comb the wreckage, and found many of their own alive in their dark ships. They found Kris Bell in hers—weeping, for a few kilometers away there was a patch of dust where Mona Stelling had fallen before the guns of the battleship.

The cruisers had a choice: they could prepare to fight, knowing that the enemy that approached had cut their biggest ships to pieces, or they could flee if they fled immediately with their faster pursuers still light hours away. The sixteen armored freighters, always conservative, were already near the murk of lightspeed. The cruisers fled, and the troopships fled with them, and three fighters shadowed their flight.

Claypool and Klee and Elkainen caught up quickly but held off the attack while the cruisers’ bay fighters were holding the rearguard, but, being bay fighters, these lacked the battery energy to accelerate on full for very long and after a few hours they had to return to their bays in the cruisers. By now, the ships were up to a whopping 8% of lightspeed. The pursuing fighters had a little talk amongst themselves, then hopped past the two cruisers and began picking apart the drive sections of the ten defenseless troopships. One by one, they fell dead and began to coast.

Sixty hours later, a trio of Taraadyan freighters came out to tow the hulks back, with their 150 marines apiece squatting in the darkness of their barracks. By then, fifty-two other Central prisoners had already been gathered and sat in cells carved from the rock of the moon. Far above them, in the Imperial hall, the heroes of the battle were given their due.

“To Halyn Silverfleet, Suzane Claypool, Delilah Cloutier and Elan Klee, of the Starfleet of the Republic of New Home,” the chamberlain intoned, “the Great Star of the Empress of Taraadya, the highest honor the Empress can bestow.”

They knelt, an unusual experience for Silverfleet in many ways, and the Empress Alal put the medallions on them. “Rise, knights of Taraadya,” she said, and they rose and examined the fine heavy pieces of jewelry they had earned.

“I’m keeping this one,” Silverfleet whispered to Cloutier.

“Commander Dasha Elkainen,” the chamberlain called out. Elkainen, who wore a plain vac suit like Silverfleet’s without sign of rank, stepped up.

“Commander,” said the Empress, “I reprimand you before your officers and your people for failing to appear for battle. You are hereby stripped of rank and dismissed from the starfleet. Now kneel.”

She knelt. “To Dasha Elkainen,” the chamberlain said, “the Great Star of the Empress of Taraadya, the highest honor the Empress can bestow.”

“My friends,” said the Empress, “we give to you the new commander of the fighters of the Taraadyan Starfleet, Captain Dasha Elkainen. The Empress will not forget that you were right and she was wrong: it is fitting that you should be punished with this responsibility. Rise, knight of Taraadya.”

Dasha Elkainen strode over to stand by Silverfleet, and then gave Silverfleet and Cloutier a quick smile of awe, with tears in her eyes.

“Kristina Bell, Jana Crown, Ginger Grandmaison, Vya de Har, Meena Melville, Tilla Pool, and Conna Marais,” said the chamberlain, “rise and receive the Star of Valor.” And the seven rose and received the second-highest medal, as, after them, did the thirty surviving members of the Taraadyan starfleet. This took several minutes, and then the Empress and her court resumed their places.

“Stacy Mackenzie,” the chamberlain intoned. There was a silence: she was not there to answer. Silverfleet, who had been getting a bit bored, suddenly pictured Stacy arguing with her, or coming to get them out of the cell in the Planetoids, or making a smart remark. “Myrrh Melville,” said the chamberlain. Again, there was no answer. “Mona Stelling.” Again, no answer.

And then the chamberlain read off the names of eighteen Taraadyans dead, pausing ritually to give each one the chance to answer from beyond death.

“So, Commander,” said the Empress Alal once she sat down to eat and they all sat down too: Silverfleet and Dasha Elkainen and Suzane Claypool and Del Cloutier and Elan Klee and the Taraadyan Minister of Defense and the Prince and the Princess. “You will tell me, as the Minister has already, that we will not see Central here again.”

“No,” replied Silverfleet, “no, your highness, I will tell you no such thing. But they will think long before they return.”

“We—your highness,” said Claypool, and the Empress smiled. “We can’t just go back and lick our wounds. They will be back, if we don’t press them.”

“Semeron,” said the Empress, “do you concur? That wasn’t your view before.”

The Minister of State, a thoughtful man of three hundred or so, looked at his Empress’s long, bony, graceful hands, clenched on the table, then up at Claypool’s blue eyes. He nodded. “My lady,” he said, “perhaps I spoke out of hope and not knowledge, for indeed I think that reason is with Commander Claypool.”

“Will it take long to rebuild?” asked Claypool.

“We will not do so overnight,” replied Semeron, “but many of the ships are only damaged, and we have many cubic kilometers of space full of available parts.”

“We will rebuild your fighters first,” said the Empress. “But we cannot, I fear, rebuild your lost pilots, who were your own friends and followed you because you chose to help us. Dasha told me that your people did not want to come.”

“Your highness,” said Silverfleet, “there was never any doubt that we’d come. And now that we’ve helped each other so much, we’re that much more on the minds of the White Hand. Oh, they’re going to be thinking about us.”

“That’s why,” Claypool added, “we have to fly far away to attack them. We need their attention diverted to areas we don’t care so much about.”

“Oh, I entirely agree. And if we could spare her,” the Empress went on, “we would send Dasha with you as part payment. But we need her here, reckless or not.”

“Your highness,” said Dasha, “we are as likely as they are to see the enemy next.”

“And the other one,” the Empress said, “Fiona, what will she do? Are you sure it’s wise to send her back? Notice, Commander, that I followed your advice.”

“I noticed, your highness. Your ministers all agree that it is a great honor.”

“She was your opponent the last time you were here as well. Can you trust her?”

Silverfleet and Claypool exchanged glances. “I don’t know,” said Silverfleet. “She’s often been my opponent—but yes, I guess, in a way I trust her. She’s a crack fighter pilot, that’s for sure.”

“She’s no match for you,” said Cloutier. “That’s for damn sure. Um, your highness.”

The same sort of question occurred to Fiona Rigan as well. “I still don’t get it, Halyn,” said Fiona as she and Silverfleet and Cloutier and Fiona’s second, Julie Dalsandro, stood by their two disarmed, partly repaired fighters. “What makes you trust me?”

“The fact that I can always beat you if I have to. I take it I can beat your second, too.”

“Never doubt it, Commander,” said Dalsandro.

“But you must be pretty good, because Fiona wouldn’t leave prison without you.”

“Oh, you know how it is about seconds,” said Fiona. “I’ve had her with me since Memnos, ten years ago. Remember, it wasn’t you who blew me up this time—it was your second, the Great Del Cloutier.” Her smile evaporated. “Look, about trusting me. About getting the Empress to release me. I need to know.”

“Fiona, I went one way and you went another. You sort of became what I would have been if I hadn’t gone over to Alcen, if I’d stayed with Central. I think I know you from the inside. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s an illusion. But I don’t think you like them any more than I did—the Admiral Birdbrains that run Central’s starfleet. The White Hand. You’re so flamboyant. You don’t fool me: you’re a very cautious person. It’s how you live as long as we have, as fighter pilots. Yeah, I think you’re just too careful to come out.”

“Think what you like,” said Fiona without enthusiasm.

“Besides,” said Cloutier, “what a waste it would be, to have the third-best fighter pilot in the universe rotting in a prison.”

Fiona gave her a smirk, gave Silverfleet a long uncertain look, then pulled back her shoulder-length red hair and pulled on her helmet. She climbed into her fighter and flipped the visor open as Dalsandro climbed into the fighter next to her. “Okay,” she said, “I’m supposed to tell them that if they ever build up ships at Fingale again, the Taraadyans will go to Fingale and blast them, and you’ll be there with them.”

“That’s it.”

“Okay,” said Fiona. “See you.” Then the two Central fighters shut hatches, hovered up ten meters and zoomed away, while Silverfleet thought, Not in battle next time, if you’re half as smart as I think you are.

The eleven surviving women from New Home spent almost two weeks at Taraadya, fixing their ships and helping the Taraadyans fix theirs. Then they took their ships and headed back to New Home by way of Between. They returned to find no fleet of fighters or cruisers descending on the innocent planet, only a single cruiser on training flight and Bessie acting as orbital station. Two days later, they dropped out of the sky and landed in formation on the broad beach by the town.

“Silverfleet, welcome!” cried Cathleen Duplaix, running to hug her. Around them, the townspeople were lining up to hug their pilots. Ginger was being hugged by her parents and her brothers and sister, while other teenage girls waited to try to get some of her to rub off on them. Paula and Tilla were hugging. Everyone was hugging.

“Obviously we won,” said Silverfleet when she got Cathleen at arms’ length again.

“We knew it would be never otherwise,” said Harry Grenville, shaking her hand. “Though in sooth such knowledge kept us not from worry.”

“And your count is less than when ye left,” said Cathleen. “We thank the stars Ginger is safe returned, but—”

“Myrrh and Stacy and Mona,” said Silverfleet. “They were killed in the battle. So were many Central and Taraadyan pilots. It was the biggest battle I’ve ever been in.”

“Halyn got what, five?” said Claypool. “Plus the battleship?”

“Oh,” said Silverfleet, “you got a few of your own, Suz. But—”

“But the war be not over,” Harry Grenville filled in. “Not while the Theocrats hold power on Earth—or the White Hand on Central, as the speech be these modern days.”

“No, the war is not over,” said Silverfleet. “But if the Goddess wills, it has moved beyond New Home. Come, girls, there’s ale to drink and tales to tell.”

“We have made a feast for you,” said Heather Grandmaison. “It were only proper.”

“I smell it,” said Cloutier. “Beef, corn, chowder, and—oh, the ale. The ale is worth fighting for all by itself.”

“Oh, was that what thou didst go to war to defend?” asked Cathleen.

“Every one’s got their own reward,” said Silverfleet. “I won’t tell you what mine is. But isn’t ale as good a reason to fight as any?”