Silverfleet and Claypool

The starbase was quite up-to-date, for the periphery of human colonization. The system was at the outskirts of a thin, ten-light-year-long region of rocky ice called the Marelon Belt, a source of metals for this side of the colonized zone. The zone itself was a 120 light year wide sphere that contained the systems in which the humans had settled who had evolved from slime on the blue-green third planet of the Central Solar System. Slow-moving and yet expensive, the transports that carried trade among the systems had to maximize the value of the mass they hauled, so Marelon only sent out rare raw materials like platinum and gold, and machine parts made from them. The trade that returned was manufactured goods, and the easiest of these to transport were fighters. They were looking at six of them, in mint condition, in the fighter bay of the starbase, to add to the four on patrol and the two scarred veterans that had carried Claypool and Silverfleet to Marelon.

“Take your pick, ladies,” said Col. Lethwait Randell, blinking and fidgeting. “All the latest technology. Of course we’re training our own people—”

“But you need us,” said Silverfleet. “Of course you do. Your own people have never flown in combat. And Central just overran Talis, so you’re guessing you’re next. And hiring us is cheaper than paying the back taxes.”

“It’s not just the back taxes,” Randell replied. “The White Hand controls all government appointments on all its colonies. Their, um, severance package isn’t so favorable either—they don’t like to have people around who think they know how the government is run. It’d be goodbye everything we have—democracy, freedom of speech—”

“Your privileges,” Silverfleet inserted.

“Sure. Our privileges. And we’ll pay you anything—literally anything, Commander! Anything we have that you could possibly ask for we’ll give you. I’m serious. Starting with the newest ships—just four months ago we started rolling these out! Take your pick!”

“No thanks. I have my ship Vanessa. You understand, a pilot gets bonded to her fighter. But you’ll fix it up, of course, it’s got some holes in it.”

“Of course! Both! What else?”

“We’ll tell you when we see something we want. But it’s definitely Central you’re planning on defending yourself against?”

“Well,” said Randell, “we see some pirates, of course. But if they hear of Silverfleet—well, I mean, even we’ve heard of Silverfleet.”

“Pirates definitely will have,” said Claypool. “That’s what we were fighting at Talis before—”

“They’re rather a specialty of mine,” Silverfleet explained. “But that won’t deter Central.”

“I guess not,” said Randell. “Anyway, there’s a lot of anxiety down on the planet, with your news. We know the White Hand inspired the civil war on Talis, and then used it as an excuse to invade.”

“Will they do the same thing here, do you think?” asked Claypool.

“No. We have a low population, a lot of rugged individuals. A lot of wealth, too, thanks to the Belt. No, they’ll just invade.” He sighed. “No need to create an excuse.”

“So you’re sure they’re coming?” asked Claypool.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “they’ve already got the marines and the fighters all the way out to Talis. I’ll bet they’re planning on setting up that force as a garrison for the whole region.”

“That’s what we think,” said Randell. “So—will you help?”

“Look. Why should we think you’re going to win this battle, even with the Great Silverfleet and the Great Suzane Claypool on your side? And me—the White Hand doesn’t scare me, they hire fighters just like everyone else does. We’re a rare commodity. So why should I fight for you?”

“Commander,” Randell replied, “we don’t ask you to do a thing because it’s right, we ask you to do it for what you want. You wouldn’t have the leverage to drive a bargain with them.”

“Maybe,” said Claypool. “Personally, I just like to blow up fighters. Video games just aren’t as good as the real thing.”

“Well, that goes for me too,” said Silverfleet. They both looked up across the forty centimeter height difference at Col. Randell, who looked down at them at the same angle at which he might gaze on his ten-year-old daughter. “I’m not guaranteeing a victory,” said Silverfleet. “But if you fight, we’ll fight on your side, and you can dock my pay for every Central fighter less than three I take out.”

“So you just like to fight,” Silverfleet said a few hours later, as she and Claypool sat in Claypool’s quarters in gravity chairs next to a big gravity bed. Silverfleet’s greying brown hair and Claypool’s stringy red hung to their shoulders, free at last from the helmet’s tyranny. They were, as usual, wearing the rest of their vac suits, unzipped from the neck down to a comfortable level a bit above the navel. They sipped a fine local whisky. “You’re not even from Central, you’re from Enderra, right? And neither of us has even been near Marelon before.”

“I hadn’t even heard of it,” Claypool admitted, “until we were at Talis. Then when it came up as the rendezvous point on my computer, as I was turning to run.”

“Don’t say run. You did what you could and lived to fight another day. So did I.”

“Then I don’t feel so bad. So. The next battle.”

“All right,” said Silverfleet, “the next battle. Claypool, huh? You’re perfect for my Second: while you drink and party, the thing you want to talk about is tactics.”

Claypool laughed: she had a lovely tinkling laugh. Silverfleet, middle class at heart, caught a whiff of wealth and privilege in the laugh. “I thrill to the fight,” Claypool explained. “The chase. The maneuver. Not a tenth of a second to think. The kill!” She grinned, then frowned. “And I just don’t like the White Hand, Commander.”

“Call me Halyn, please. It’s just us two.”

“Oh. A privilege. Anyway, it’s not saying much that I’d rather be in a starfleet of two with you than a starfleet of two hundred with them.”

“Is there anything specific here? Why you don’t like the White Hand?”

“Well, do you?”

“No, they’re slimy power-greedheads. They can justify anything based on their very stringent principles. Which they apply to everyone, even those that totally disagree with their principles. But I’d work for them, if I absolutely had to. You wouldn’t?”

“I don’t think so,” Claypool replied. “I don’t even want to be in the same orbit as the White Hand. But as you say,” Claypool finished, pausing to down her shot and pour another, “I’d rather be talking about tactics.”

“Great,” said Silverfleet under her breath as the two fighter pilots looked over Marelon’s ten best fighter recruits. “These are the high scorers?” she asked Colonel Randell.

“Yes, they all got over 80 composite, and at least 25 in each area. None is over 55 kilos or 170 centimeters, and they’re all at least 6.5 on spatial intelligence. They were chosen from a pool of fifty thousand, and those were already screened for physical and mental aptitude.”

“Well, we’ll do what we can,” Silverfleet replied, exchanging glances with Claypool. They didn’t need to say aloud that only one of the ten, a dark-skinned Veldari named Elan Klee, met the usual minimum criteria for fighter duty—under 45 kilos, under 160 centimeters and 8.5 on spatial intelligence, along with 99th percentile in dexterity and 99th percentile of the 99th percentile on eyesight. Claypool and Silverfleet were easily the tiniest people in the room, even on the starbase if children were excluded—an identical 152 centimeters, an identical 41 kilos. Whatever their spatial intelligences and manual dexterities had once been, a decade or two of fighter training and multiple battles (over twenty for Silverfleet) had sharpened them into the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile. The same would be true of at least a third of any fighter force that Central might send out to reclaim Marelon. “All right, listen up, ladies,” she called out to the recruits.

Several of them giggled. My goddess, thought Silverfleet, there are men in this group! Short, skinny men, but men indeed! She knew of exactly one reasonably successful male fighter pilot, and last she’d heard was that he was doing courier duty between Eridani and Suleiman because of Silverfleet’s first photon shot at Mahavir four years ago.

“I have just one thing to say, ladies,” she said in her squeakiest, most irritating high voice. “Forty-two kills. Forty-two enemy fighters that squared off against Halyn Silverfleet and one second later found themselves dead, or sitting in the dark waiting to be picked up by the winner. And I’ve lost two fighters and gone dead in space three times, so you can see it’s a dangerous universe out there even for me. So how long do you think you’re going to last, when the Central team shows up and there’s a half dozen fighters as good as me and Claypool?”

The group sobered up—a little. It was still a joke to most of them. This room, after all, contained Marelon’s top six scorers ever on “Battle of Doom”, and every one of them had completed the first three levels of the fighter simulator. They had heard more or less this same speech—spoken by the commander in “Battle of Doom.” She sighed. “All right, since your government has kindly provided you with ships, let’s go see if you can fly them without running into each other or falling into the sun.”

Two hours later, the new class of fighter pilots was drinking hard and a good bit less optimistic. If they had been using live rounds, each of them would have been killed ten times over, and Silverfleet and Claypool would still be unscathed. In the bridge of a planetary cruiser about fifty meters away from the bar where Marelon’s best were forgetting their problems, the two women were going over them with Col. Randell.

“There’s not much we can do about it,” he said, sipping whisky from a gold flask, then passing to Silverfleet. “If Central wants to come here, then you’ll be our only experienced pilots. Unless you can think of a way to go get some of your friends. And yet we have these ten fighters, and we might as well put someone in them.”

“How about the planetary cruisers?” asked Claypool.

“We have two combat-trained crews. They haven’t had any experience either, except for the captains—Chenang was a pilot for an armored merchant, so he’s been in battle, and Palin was drive officer on a freighter that survived a pirate attack. But the third cruiser has a freighter crew. It’s all we could get.”

“Maybe Central will leave you alone,” said Silverfleet. “Just don’t let them find out you make whisky like this. They’d outlaw it immediately and seize the supply for the White Hand Council.”

“But if they’re in Talis,” Randell went on, “then it’s only a matter of time before they come to Marelon. They’ll want our minerals. Not to mention our freedom.”

“We have what we have, Halyn,” said Claypool. “We’re two jumps or more from the nearest colonized system that they don’t control. That Klee’s pretty good.”

“So, Colonel,” Silverfleet asked, “what do you do if we lose? Surrender?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

“Working in the slave mines might not be that bad,” said Claypool.

“Oh, he’s no slave miner,” said Silverfleet. “He’s more of a slave bureaucrat.”

“The horrors,” said Randell. “And what about you? If you lose?”

Silverfleet was about to answer, but Claypool answered first: “Three choices. We win; I get killed; or we lose so bad that there’s no hope of fighting on, and I head for the Outer Reaches.”

“So,” said the youngest of the recruits, a redheaded girl of seventeen named Bredu, “what do you think of our chances?”

“Fine,” said Silverfleet, “if they give us another five years to train.” She and Bredu and Claypool were lying in the tall grasses on a hill overlooking a spectacular waterfall. Bredu’s family farmed land near here, and she had lured the veteran fighters down for a picnic.

“So you think we’re going to win?” asked Bredu.

“We have a chance,” said Silverfleet. She didn’t think much of Bredu’s conversation, but raise her manual dexterity a tiny bit and the girl had the talent to make a great fighter. If only we can win that first battle, she thought. And the second, and...

“Alpha, alpha!” shouted Silverfleet. Claypool swung out perfectly, with some of her wing behind her, and Silverfleet, followed in good precision by Bredu and the boy Milton, swung the other way, leaving the three planetary cruisers a clean shot, except for the four or five dallying fighters in their way. “Damn it!” she shouted. “Get with it, you morons! Do you want to die right away, or survive at least five seconds into the battle? Form up again!”

Four hours later, nearly all of them had nearly perfected maneuvers alpha, beta and epsilon, though gamma and delta were still a bit too rough for them and the other twelve Silverfleet had planned were out of the question. They formed up into two squadrons again, Silverfleet’s with Bredu as second and Claypool’s with Klee as second, and turned to battle one another, one planetary cruiser on each side, with the third cruiser practicing station patrol. Both Silverfleet and Claypool found themselves, as the tiny ships raced together, thinking of their first training battles and how nervous they had been. But they weren’t nervous now, or not for the same reason.

Claypool’s wing spread out and started into maneuver beta, while Silverfleet held her line in front of her cruiser an extra ten seconds and then shouted, “Delta! Five, four, three, two! Delta, now!” Her wing immediately dispersed. She found herself alone in front of the mass of Claypool’s fighters. They broke formation to go at her four on one.

Five seconds and four shots later, Silverfleet found herself speeding into Claypool’s cruiser. Its simulated shots were zipping past her, but she was in the groove. Even though they moved at the speed of light in vacuum, she was sure she was dodging them. Perhaps she telepathically sensed the shooters’ minds as they shot—she didn’t know or care how it happened. She passed through short range to close to point blank, then planted her photon flag on the planetary cruiser’s nose.

She whipped around as her computer told her that all her victims were dead in space. There was one enemy fighter left, and it was dealing repeated blows to the other planetary cruiser. Four, five, six hits, and then it exploded in a simulated way—and Silverfleet and Claypool turned to face each other, the only ones left.

“Shall we call it a day?” called Silverfleet.

“I hate to fight you, Halyn,” said Claypool, “but I guess we need the practice.”

“I do, Suz,” Silverfleet replied. “Let’s give them a show.”

“If you say so.”

They circled slowly, their sensors feeling for the edge and their trigger fingers itchy. Seconds ticked by, and then Silverfleet opened up, firing and twisting and diving along a devious curve. But when she got where she was going, her enemy had tumbled out of the way and was almost turned to zap her. They wrestled in space, a kilometer apart, rolling like children fighting in the dirt, firing any time they were within ten degrees of their targets, diving and darting away from each other’s shots. Silverfleet started to get nervous—was Claypool really this good, or am I getting slow? She felt Claypool’s confidence growing as the seconds ticked by, felt it as a physical threat.

Then Claypool made a mistake, a tiny one, and a second later, Silverfleet was the only survivor.

They had a conference afterward at which there was a lot of shouting and threatening done by the two veterans, and then they had a party. The Marelon pilots split into two groups—the younger ones and the males, who drank as fast as they could and then started making out, and the older ones, including Klee and a farm wife named Conna, who peppered Silverfleet and Claypool with questions for hours. Some of them even took notes.

“They’re not going to be ready,” said Claypool later, back in her quarters. “It’s going to be a slaughter.”

“They’ll be ready,” said Silverfleet. “Conna will be ready. Klee will be. Bredu—”

“She’s in love with you,” said Claypool.

“Is she? Well, she can get a do-it-yourself book. I was done falling in love with other pilots the day my fourth second got blown up.”

“Are you for real? You don’t—?”

“Suz, I don’t even have sex anymore. Who needs it?”

“Well,” said Claypool.

“But as to their survival,” Silverfleet went on, “I think they’ll surprise you. Oh, most of them stink up the vacuum of space right now, but I think they’ll take out a few of the enemy. You and I will have to get the rest—any problem with that?”

“No, of course not. But—”

“But let’s do a quick scout after we get some sleep. Okay?”

So they did. The Marelon system was a scattering of rock and ice circling a little ball of fire, but a million suns burned pinholes in the black of night as the two fighters shot out toward the Oort cloud. Silverfleet’s breath was actually taken away as she surveyed the starry field—at Talis she had noticed a thinning of the stars above the orbital plane of the system, but here it was much more obvious. Marelon was close to the margin of the Orion Arm, the piece of galaxy that contained all the colonized systems, and now it seemed as if Silverfleet and Claypool swam toward open water.

“Halyn,” came Claypool’s voice from a kilometer away as they flew in parallel lines toward the edge of the system and of the starry crowd, “what’s up there? I only see distant galaxies.”

“There are a few stars. See? There’s one 23 degrees by 77, it’s, what, 22 light years. Double star. Red giant, yellow medium.”

“Oh. Oh yes. I pick up a few planets. I wonder if anything lives there.”

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “it’s obviously not colonized, or we’d know. There’s another, twenty light years at 335 by 103. There’s one, twenty-five light years. There are a few.”

“It’s so clear out here! No dust, no gas. Just those few stars and those galaxies, all those galaxies. I wonder what it’s like in that one. Lovely spiral.”

“Probably much like this galaxy,” said Silverfleet, “or so different we couldn’t comprehend it. Or survive it. There are galaxies where the central black hole puts out so much radiation it would kill anything that lived in the entire galaxy.”

“Maybe life would adapt.”

“Maybe. I suppose. But we wouldn’t survive anywhere like that. But we don’t have to worry about it, since we’re never going to any of those. The next one, M31, it’s what, two million light years away? And a whole lot of nothing in between.”

“It’s so beautiful,” Claypool said with a sigh of loss.

“Time to break off for patrol,” said Silverfleet. “Hey, Suz, fly safe, I’ll see you at that snowball on the other side.”

Then they turned away from each other and swept across the margin of the system, six light hours from the tiny sun. It had taken them two days to get here, since they weren’t accelerating toward lightspeed, only to a mere 30% of lightspeed. At this rate, it would be three days before they met at the far side of the system, but, traveling, as it were, on the edge of the phase transition into hyperspace, they would be able to sense the distortions of an approaching fleet. Their senses of the undistorted system around them became distorted, so it was a lonely journey in a confused night. But Silverfleet was far better at this sort of scouting than any unpiloted drone, and she assumed Claypool was at least nearly as good. She hoped Claypool was as good at dealing with the loneliness.

It was twenty-six hours later that a message from Claypool, taking eleven hours to cross the system’s breadth between them, proved her right, on the first count at least.

“Fourteen fighters,” Claypool told Randell and the Marelon pilots. “There’s a big blob behind them—could be freighters, the battleship, who knows. The fourteen will be down to 10% of lightspeed in a week, our time, and the blob’s a couple of weeks behind.”

“They may not wait,” said Silverfleet. “Fourteen of their fighters could take the twelve of us plus our two planetary cruisers.”

“Three,” Elan Klee put in.

“Two,” said Randell. “We’re holding the other in reserve.”

“Along with its freighter crew,” said Silverfleet. “They’d only get in our way.”

“Central must know Silverfleet is here,” Bredu offered.

“And Claypool,” said Silverfleet, “though I expect the famous Bredu has escaped their notice.”

“Now that the thing’s really happening,” said Randell, “I think I’d better present your report to the Council. They may have second thoughts about fighting.”

“Against the White Hand?” asked Silverfleet. “I’d think the Council would be dead set against surrender.”

“And that,” Claypool added, “would be White Hand’s only condition.”

“Well, who knows?” replied Randell. “All I’m saying is I should present your report.”

As it turned out, there were negotiations of a sort, as the commander of the Central fighters let her demands be known—the government of Marelon would be replaced with a new oligarchy of White Hand technocrats, and the fighters and cruisers defending Marelon would land on the planet and stay there until arrangements had been made with their pilots.

A separate peace was proposed to Halyn Silverfleet. A few minutes after the ultimatum had been received by Marelon authorities, she got a call through Vanessa’s comm. “Dear Commander Silverfleet,” it began, and went on to list her good points—clever, valiant, highly skilled and respected, each said three or four times with different words. Then: “We would like to offer you a wing command in the reunited starfleet of the United Systems, with pay and honor commensurate with your accomplishments. You would be a valued and respected member of our military, already the strongest among the colonies, and the strongest by far with you as part of our team. We know you would never turn down such an opportunity, and we look forward to working with you soon.”

How nice. She knew without asking, but asked Claypool anyway, whether Claypool had received anything like it. “No,” was the reply. “I don’t rate. They’d be lying to me anyway.”

“Oh, probably not,” replied Silverfleet, “but it doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to be a part of their team, then neither will I. I’m not actually very tempted.”

“Who’s their commander?”

“What? Fiona Rigan. Surprised?”

“No,” said Claypool. “I always liked her, but she’d be the first to go over.”

“I suppose so. She’s also the best of their fighters. And she’s capable of great sincerity when the situation demands it. Suzane.”

“What, Halyn?”

“You know most of the women who fought on our side at Talis would do the same as Fiona. I might have too. Maybe it was the rational thing to do.”

“So why didn’t you do it? Aren’t you rational?”

“I don’t know,” said Silverfleet with a crooked smile. “I suppose I may regret it.”

“Really?”

“No. Not really.”

Ten days passed—fourteen, actually, on the colonized planet, which rotated a bit faster than the standard set by the third planet of the Central System. The Council that ruled Marelon informed the commander for Central that her demands were excessive, and proposed their own solution, which was an exercise in wishful thinking. They wanted to be left alone, but were willing to resume paying reasonable taxes. The surrender of the fighters was out of the question. That was the end of negotiations. The Central wing came on, and the blob began to materialize in Marelon’s Oort cloud: a battleship, five marine transports and eight freighters, along with a half dozen more fighters.

“This is it,” said Silverfleet to the Marelon fighter pilots on the day before the enemy would be within range of attack on the starbase. “We go in in two wings, just as we’ve planned. Elan’s Claypool’s second, Bredu’s mine. I get Chenang’s cruiser behind me, Claypool gets Palin’s cruiser, and the cruisers had better stay out of the way and let us channel the enemy fighters in. Look, they know we aren’t all veterans. They think you guys will go down and then they can have their pick of you for their next fleet and do as they like with the rest. Let’s show them you’ve learned something this past month, shall we?”

“Commander,” asked one of the women, “what if we get captured?”

“If you fought well, they’ll want you to fight for them,” said Silverfleet. “If you don’t, you’ll probably have another career found for you, like mining uranium.”

“Is it true they torture prisoners?” asked another.

Silverfleet looked at Claypool, whose face betrayed suppressed emotion. “I think it’s fair to say,” said Silverfleet, “that they won’t torture you if you aren’t a threat. But no, the White Hand aren’t nice people.”

“Have you ever beaten them?” asked Milton.

“I did, once,” replied Silverfleet. “I fought for Central when the White Hand first came to power, when they were trying to take back Alcen. But we lost. I was the only one whose ship wasn’t dead at the end. So I joined the Alcen fleet, and when Central tried the next year, we beat them again. They outnumbered us, but they hadn’t put much money into their fighters.”

“Is it true they’re led by a friend of yours?” asked Klee.

“Well, I basically know every veteran fighter pilot in everywhere.”

“Commander,” asked Bredu, “what’s the plan?”

“I won’t know till we’re thirty seconds from battle. So practice them all.”

“Warriors of Marelon,” said the old lady who chaired the System Council, “you go forth this hour to defend your home world from the enemies who would destroy our...” But Silverfleet little heeded what was said. She was looking around the hall, the biggest on the starbase, well-decorated in a military sort of way, and thinking that the one thing she hadn’t yet seen in Marelon was a martial occasion. Now a thousand Marelon militia and starbase workers, got up in their finest, looked on in ordered rows as the Council poured its blessing upon the twelve fighters and the crews of the two planetary cruisers who would defend their oligarchy against Central.

Out there somewhere, fourteen Central fighters came on, speeding across the blackness. Out there, in an hour or two, these fighters would meet those, and in seconds space would be littered with the victims. She glanced across the faces of Bredu and Elan and Milton and their comrades, and they were all suitably serious, and she knew without telepathic powers that they were weighing their value in mental balances where one side was glory and the other side was death.

But many of them, even in defeat, would live. Silverfleet’s eyes rested on Suzane Claypool, tiny with red hair a little longer than regulation. For once, that expressive face was blank. Claypool would not be among the captured. Why? But Silverfleet only knew it was so, and she resolved that Claypool would not be dead at the end of the battle. With a start, she realized what she had just decided, and now it was about herself she wondered.

For just a moment, she considered her own death, or her own humiliating capture. Then she saw again, and she knew that all she had to do was destroy the enemy before it destroyed her, and not take too many chances—all she had to do was let herself go and not think too much during the fight, and she would be all right. She was the veteran’s veteran, and she knew that the magic that had worked before would work again.

And then she thought again of Claypool and wondered how her resolution would affect her in the fight. And then she thought that this was the most complicated collection of ideas and emotions she had carried into a battle in a long time.

Blackness with pinpoints of distant light. A few blurs of far galaxies. Twenty-six ovoids of plastic coming together at thirty kilometers a second.

Silverfleet studied the display and read the arrangement of the enemy. She let the clock tick down to thirty seconds before firing range, and then called out, “Epsilon, epsilon, good hunting, ladies, epsilon, epsilon!” Then she led Bredu and the rest of her wing out and down and up under the left wing of the Central fighters.

Four of them broke off and paired up against the front four of her wing. Her fourth, flown by a middle-aged woman named Conna Marais who had last flown a fighter in battle twenty years ago, lost all systems on the first shot. Bredu and Demetria were embroiled in tight battles with their opponents. Claypool’s wing executed the mirror-image maneuver twenty kilometers away, and had to double back to overtake their foes before the Central fighters could make it to the planetary cruiser. It was all part of the plan. Silverfleet saw all this out of the corner of her eye, as she let her enemy get a bead on her, fix photons and glide in a little closer for a perfect—and then with a spark on the bottom panel, the Central fighter spun out and hurtled from the battlefield, dead in space.

Silverfleet turned to help Bredu. Demetria had just gone down, and the girl was now up against three enemies. She put one of them out of commission as the other two tried to pinch her in space. But as Silverfleet raced toward the fight, another fighter dropped in behind her and began firing.

It was Fiona. They knew each other instantly. Silverfleet could almost feel her sneering as Vanessa dropped sideways out of the line of fire. For five seconds Silverfleet kept to the defense, concentrating on maneuver, while Fiona sliced the vacuum with her photon guns. Then Silverfleet let go of the steering and lined up her enemy in the crosshairs. It was perfect—but not quite. She got a hit, but Fiona dodged a critical wound and came out firing. Now it was Silverfleet’s turn to dodge, as red letters burst across her display: “SHELL DAMAGE”. A flesh wound. Again Silverfleet went on the defensive: she was impossible to hit when her mind was on dodging. Then she used both hands to flip completely around and head back at her pursuing foe, straining Vanessa with a hundred gravities of acceleration. Her photon blasts sheared into Fiona’s shell, cutting across the engine section.

But Fiona, stalling, gave up on maneuver and put her all into firing. Now it was all Silverfleet could do to stay ahead of the blasts. One grazed her shell, then another on the other side. It couldn’t go on for long. Silverfleet gritted her teeth and whipped around, then hit the accelerator, and even through the extreme buffering of the fighter she could feel the gees. The crosshairs lined up on her display and she sent one bolt of light into the void—and from twenty kilometers away, with Vanessa flying toward the 50-centimeter-wide target at eight kilometers a second, she hit Fiona’s fighter on the nose. A second later Silverfleet was pulling up, her enemy’s fighter was bursting into a hundred pieces, and Fiona herself was shooting off into space in her vac suit, to fight another day.

An explosion fifty kilometers away was Chenang’s cruiser going up. Nearby, Bredu was surrounded by enemy fighters, and before Silverfleet could do more than turn her direction, she blew up in a way that made it unnecessary to look for parts. More Central fighters gathered among the wreckage of the defenders. There was only one remaining Marelon fighter intact. It was Suzane Claypool.

She was beset by two Central fighters. Silverfleet hurled herself toward the fight, holding her breath. Claypool held on, held on, dancing amid her enemies’ fire but unable to get a shot off. Left to herself, her only hope would be a reckless attack, but she saw Silverfleet and went over to delay. Vanessa came on, moving at twenty kilometers a second after another 110-g acceleration. It was known to be impossible to hit a small target under those conditions. She watched the crosshairs—and let go.

One, two. Silverfleet’s photon took out the first one’s engine, Claypool’s killed the second pilot with a pinhole up through the seat cushion and out the top of the skull. The engineless fighter turned its guns on Claypool, but she easily dodged it as she lined up and blasted the stationary target. It exploded gloriously.

Silverfleet roared to a stop and turned, but by now she was eighty kilometers from where the fight had been. Claypool raced after her, and by the time she caught up, Silverfleet was moving away again. Behind them, the seven remaining Central fighters were taking possession of Palin’s surrendering planetary cruiser. Ten light hours away, the battleship and the troopships and freighters and escort fighters rumbled into the system.

“Commander,” came Claypool’s voice as her fighter fell in beside Vanessa. They flew on at twenty kilometers per second, fifty meters apart. “We have to go back. We have to keep fighting.”

“This battle’s over, Suzane. I’ve got a lot of damage—my shell’s hanging by a thread. You’ve got damage. They’re in control here.”

“I still think we can take them.”

“We can’t, Suz,” replied Silverfleet. Bredu was dead, the sweet and vibrant teenager. Chenang and his whole crew were incinerated. Milton, Elan Klee, Conna, Demetria, Palin’s crew—all dead or captured.

“So what, then? You’re not going to go over, are you?”

“No,” said Silverfleet with a sigh. “No.” She looked out at the diffuse star field before them. There was a star at twenty-two light years. Double: red giant, yellow medium. Possible planets. “There,” she said, sending the angular coordinates to her comrade. “Full acceleration. Right now.”

“But Halyn—!”

“Suzane. I’m only going to say this once. We can’t beat them, there are too many. One of us would die for sure. We can’t surrender, because you won’t. We can’t jump to anywhere among the colonies, because everywhere we could jump to is White Hand occupied. So—the double star. Ready?”

“Are you sure your ship’s going to be all right?”

“She’ll have to be,” said Silverfleet, observing two fighters breaking off from the battleship’s escort to shadow them. “I’m sending over a curve path to avoid detection. The sooner we get out, the harder it’ll be to trace.”

“Received,” came Claypool’s voice. “Ready on your mark.”

“I’ll see you there, Suz,” said Silverfleet. “Goodbye and good luck, Marelon. Let’s go.”

A second later, the two ships were hitting a hundred gees. Within six hours their images had blurred beyond detection. They were gone from Marelon without a trace.