Silverfleet and Claypool
Chapter 17: Central and back

“Miranda,” said Fiona Rigan, with a mix of distaste and excitement. “It’s been a while.”

“We all came here for training,” said Silverfleet. “Back in the day. I heard they stopped using it. They’re getting soft with their recruits.”

Dalsandro, Klee, Cloutier, Claypool, Rigan and Silverfleet sat around in the mess hall of the old base on Miranda, the strange little moon of the seventh planet of the Central system. The base was empty and had been empty for most of the last ten years, but its life support was running, set on low. It could have supported a few hundred of Central’s ten billion people, and in more comfort than the median-income Centralite enjoyed on the Home Planet.

“I got the message off,” said Julie Dalsandro, sucking on a food tube. “We’re transmitting our data right now. I’ve got the security on standby. We have the run of the place.”

“We’re three light hours out,” said Fiona. “We’ll know in six hours if Central’s any more sensible than Alcen. Any bets?”

“Well,” said Klee, “the White Hand councils are one for three right now.”

“It’s not worth betting,” said Silverfleet.

“So,” asked Cloutier, “can we get the replicators working?”

Fiona and Silverfleet smiled at each other. “You wouldn’t want to eat anything that came out of those replicators,” said Dalsandro. “Even when they were working perfectly, my fighter’s food is better.”

“I’ll take your word,” Cloutier replied. “How many of you guys actually lived here?”

“Well,” replied Silverfleet, “everyone who trained at the Academy. The Big Academy, that is. Me, Fiona, Julie, Carin maybe?”

“Carin would’ve missed it,” said Dalsandro. “They stopped using Miranda a couple of years before she would’ve been to the Academy. Mine was the last class out here. What a privilege. They hadn’t been fixing things up—they knew they were going off-system the next year. And—you notice? It’s a lot cleaner now than it was when we were here.”

“I first fell in love with another pilot here,” said Fiona.

“It must have been before the White Hand took over,” said Dalsandro.

“It would’ve been just before they took over,” said Silverfleet. “Like they could really outlaw that. What was her name? Indel? Inwell?”

“Indel,” Fiona replied. “Indel Yat. You knew her?”

“My last year in the Academy was your first year, wasn’t it? The first-years always seemed to choose up partners that first week. Then you go into battle—”

“And the love of your life is blown to little bits,” said Fiona. “And she was eventually, though we’d broken up long before. It didn’t help. I was in that battle. So were you, Halyn.”

“Did I blow her up?”

“I don’t think so. I think Dasha Elkainen did. It was at Taraadya.”

“What? Taraadya? Goddess. She survived all those years after the Academy, and then she happened to get posted on your fleet headed to Taraadya?”

“And she ended up on the wrong side,” Cloutier added.

“It was my fault,” said Fiona. “I specifically requested Indel on my wing. She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, but she was a good pilot. Good pilots die. Not as often as bad pilots, but good pilots die.”

“I’ve always known that,” said Suzane Claypool, who was staring at a display of the system.

“That’s why it matters to you that you have a cause.”

“I’ve never understood how you can do without one, Fiona. You or Halyn or Del—what makes you able to go back into battle?”

“My commander is my cause,” said Dalsandro.

“I know that,” said Claypool, “and I respect that.”

“Not wanting to die works for me,” said Del.

“But you could run.”

“I did run,” said Silverfleet. “I always ran if I wasn’t sure I could win. Then I ran into you, and it all changed.”

“That thing came,” said Claypool, “and it all changed.”

“No. No, we were all following you all that time. Myrrh and Stacy and Mona all went eagerly into Taraadya and died, months before we knew about that thing. Myrrh was here, too. I can still see her. We were out here on our first training tour—drunk on her ass right where you’re sitting, Elan. We fight. It’s what we do. It’s what we were taught. But for all those years, I had no soul, just my pride. Then I fell in with you, Suz, and it seems like I’ve been fighting for something ever since.”

“It doesn’t make it okay for you to die,” said Claypool.

“But I would,” said Silverfleet. “It’s scary. I would die for you, Suzane.” Cloutier nodded.

“Halyn. Del. Don’t even say that. My goddess. It’s bad enough that you’re going in to Central, and I’m staying here all alone. You have to come back.”

“Oh, Suz,” said Silverfleet, and opened her mouth to say more.

There was a long beep from the comm on the wall. Dalsandro went to it and hit a few keys. “It’s from someone on the Council.”

“How?” asked Fiona. “Our message hasn’t even passed Saturn yet.”

“Hello?” came a voice from the wall. “Greetings and welcome to the Central system. This is the acting secretary of the Supreme Council of the White Hand, to Commander Silverfleet and Commander Rigan. I’m told you’re likely to stop at Miranda to negotiate, and I thought it would be useful to save the time of transmission. We want you here on Luna, with your data, and we’ll give you anything you want in return. We need you so badly now that when this is all over you should be able to enjoy a life of luxury and indolence in any system you choose. We have platinum, we have new fighters and we have positions high up in Starfleet. No one over you. You want it sworn? We’ll swear it out and publish it all. You know a Council Member can’t swear to a lie. So why don’t you come in? You don’t have to bring all your fighters, or you can if you want. Maybe you want to leave, ah, Renna Ringstrom, in some hiding place, or bring her here, or she can just stay out of the way at Miranda. We don’t care about her. I’m told it might be a concern, and I have authorization to give you all guarantees of safety, even, ah, Renna Ringstrom. Especially her. So, um, call me from on your way in, just reply on this line, it’s quite secure. Believe me, I’ll be anxiously waiting.”

The message shut itself off. The women looked at each other.

“Do we trust them even a little bit?” asked Cloutier.

“Haven’t you been listening, you old pirate?” Fiona replied. “The Council never lies. If they don’t like you, they just send out a fleet to blow you away.”

“They’d do anything to get Claypool, though,” said Klee. “Are we still calling her Claypool?”

“Yes,” said Claypool, “I find it a much more comforting moniker. If you don’t mind.”

“You make the call,” said Klee. “But I’m sure you agree with me, right, Suzane? They’ll happily use us to help the effort, and get her in a cell at the same time.”

“Yeah,” said Cloutier. “They’ll promise us anything.”

“How do we even know this guy’s the Council Secretary?” asked Klee.

“Acting secretary,” Cloutier pointed out. “We don’t know what’s going on down there. Maybe the Council can’t agree. Maybe he’s a committee of one.”

“The message bore the Secretary’s seal,” said Dalsandro. “It’s authentic.”

“I’d do what he’s doing,” said Silverfleet. “I’d call right up and make a bunch of promises.”

“He’ll be bound to uphold them,” said Dalsandro. “Not to say that the whole Council would be. I suppose they could claim it wasn’t ever officially decided.”

“The Councils work by consensus,” said Klee. “Any one of them could conceivably veto anything we were promised.”

“Well, what do you want, then?” asked Fiona, pulling at her short red hair. “Did we come here to help, or just to get out of the way?”

“We came here to help,” said Cloutier. “But not to walk blindly into a trap.” She turned, and they all turned, and looked at Claypool, who sat with a hand on Silverfleet’s flask.

“We have to trust them,” she said. “Halyn, Fiona, you’ll have to go in. I’ll stay here. They don’t have a fighter that can catch up with Renna.”

“All right,” said Silverfleet. “The Empress has spoken. Fiona, Dalsandro, me, Cloutier, Klee, five’s plenty. We have at most a week to do what we can here before we have to get back to Alcen and try and stop the Thing. Let’s get going.”

The five fighters hurtled inwards along an ancient road in space, recapitulating in reverse the journey taken by the first pilotless probes sent by humanity to report back on the rest of the universe. In eight hours they were passing the orbit of the ringed giant that was Central’s second largest and second most famous planet; in another three, they were inside the orbit of the largest planet and close enough to communicate with the Starfleet base on one of its moons.

“Callisto base, this is Fiona Rigan. We are headed for Luna, and we have safe passage from the Secretary of the White Hand Council. How do you read our status?”

It took about ten minutes for the transmission to reach the station, and it would take ten minutes more for a reply. It was an hour after that before the reply actually came in. “Uh, Commander Rigan,” came a female voice from the station on Callisto, “I’m, uh, authorized to direct you to Luna. What? Oh, right. Um, I’m supposed to tell you that you have been granted safe passage. Yeah, your whole wing. The, uh, order comes from the, uh, acting secretary and the high admiral. So, uh, welcome to Central.”

“Is there any point in asking her to clarify?” asked Fiona. “We’ll be in Luna orbit in twelve more hours. It might take the people on Callisto twelve hours just to figure out how to read their orders.”

“Yes,” agreed Silverfleet. “Let’s go to the Moon. Del, Elan? Never been to Central?”

“Never,” both replied, and Cloutier added, “It’d be the blue one?”

“Yes,” said Fiona. “People from there call it Earth.”

In another eight hours they were passing the orbit of the outermost terrestrial planet, which was on the other side of the sun at the moment. They began to pick up escaped transmissions. Central firmly regulated use of telecommunication channels under normal conditions, but these were not normal conditions. There were revolts in a dozen places, and shrill cries from security forces, and clashes between neighboring communities, and even a reappearance of the old superstitions. The religious, or those who thought themselves so, were especially loquacious in their illicit broadcasts, each prophet having his or her personal interpretation of the Crystal Thing. Even what name they used for it was subject for debate: the White Hand still called it the “alien craft”, while Crystal Beast, Angel of Light and Avatar of the Destroyer were all used by others. It was here to avenge the deaths of the White Hand’s victims, or to exact the wages of the sin of pride, or to move the galaxy on in the cycle of death and rebirth, stayed for centuries by Central’s expansion—or it was apolitical, the intervention of God on behalf of some mystic’s personal vision. Many were those who understood why it had come, and they fought each other and the dwindling security forces, and the ocean of the masses rolled against the sand castle of authority.

Halfway between Callisto and Luna, Fiona picked up, and relayed to Silverfleet, an audio feed from Earth. “Starfleet has been placed in charge of security on all of the planet, under the jurisdiction of the Acting Secretary,” said a man’s voice. “We are in control. The White Hand Council has recessed. Local security forces are required to make contact with Starfleet for their orders. We must expedite the extension of authority in the present crisis, in order to be able to begin preparing for the greater crisis to come. There are reportedly still pockets of resistance from the uprisings yesterday in Asia, Africa and Europe. Reports of security sectors taking their own decisions have been exaggerated. However, it is vital that all sectors report to Starfleet. Repeat, we are in control.” It went on for fifteen minutes in the voice of an exasperated parent.

“Great,” said Cloutier. “Every time he said ‘We are in control,’ my estimation of how well they were in control dropped by half.”

“There’s obviously been fighting,” Silverfleet said. “Let’s just hope the struggle hasn’t shifted to Luna.”

But on the single, brilliant rock of a moon one and a third light-seconds away from Earth, the lives of scientists went on. “We’ve been working on your data for ten hours now,” said the white-jacketed male physicist a little later in the video comm from Luna. “Needless to say we have a lot of questions. Why don’t you send answers to as many as you can? The questions are in a text file included under this message. We can’t wait to talk to you face to face. As you may well imagine, no one’s yet seen it and made it back to old Earth to tell the tale. You guys are the first. But that video from, uh, Talis, it’s pretty, uh, informative.” He wiped his forehead. “It’s pretty bad. Well, we might have a few ideas by the time you get here, but hey, if you have any ideas, don’t be shy, okay? Um, okay. I guess that’s all for now. Get back to me. We have coffee on. Wang, out.”

“Did he actually say Wang Out?” Klee asked. Dalsandro giggled.

“Well, be that as it may,” said Silverfleet, “they’re certainly friendly.”

The same went for the officers left in charge of what was being called “local Earth defense”. They were obviously not the cream of the crop from Academy days. They were managing the situation by the book, using the chapter entitled “Alien spacecraft attack Earth”. But they were under orders from the Acting Secretary to exploit the expertise of the five women from the fringe, and that meant an unhindered landing outside a glass and metal installation in the middle of a dusty plain, and three scientists and a lieutenant commander glad-handing them on the other side of the airlock, and then a quick meal in the commissary with the director of the Luna Institute before going to work.

“We’ve been left alone quite nicely,” he told the women. “More even than usual, I would say. The Secretary, the High Admiral, they will stay far away. I think they’re afraid of all of you dangerous warriors from the fringe. Which is good, right? Because we have a lot of work to do.”

Work consisted of the five women being split among five teams, and then taking them on, one pilot against a dozen or so scientists, in brutal, grueling briefings. After six hours of guessing, testing, questioning, refining, simulating, and a little yelling and sighing, the scientists all got together to grill the five women as a group. They were in a conference room, full to overflowing with five fighter pilots and sixty-seven scientists and officers. A holographic mockup of the Crystalline Thing hung in the air near Silverfleet.

“You’re sure it’s organic?” asked one of the skeptics.

“Of course it’s organic, you dolt,” the director replied. “It’s digesting the organic materials only. We’re not here to play stupid semantic games. It acts like a life form, so even if it’s some sort of big ship or robot, we might as well think of it as a life form.”

“You say explosives had some sort of chipping effect?” asked Dr Fryda Holst, the genius on the team Silverfleet was with. “Clearly our best bet is to put some form of explosive into it, but not through those mouths—I’d bet there’s some sort of effect going on, or some of the things it ate would have exploded.”

“Are you sure those things were eggs?” asked another young woman.

“No, not really,” said Silverfleet. “It’s just sort of, you know, suggestive.”

“It sure is,” said the distinguished exobiologist, a woman of two hundred or so. “I admit we haven’t done a peer-reviewed experiment on it, but given the circumstances I think we owe it to everyone just to look at that organ down there, where it is and what it seems to contain, and admit that it looks an awful lot like this thing is spawning.”

“And it’s going to spawn here,” said Mar Wang, the thin little physicist who had contacted them in space. Everyone looked at him aghast, even though the nearby planet boasted a 99% majority of people who were sure that the target of the thing’s progress through the galactic arm was the blue orb of Central-3. “Well,” he said, “it stands to reason. As Commander Silverfleet pointed out in one of her log entries, it’s taken an almost direct line toward Central. Beyond us is Siri, which is hardly even terraformed. Earth is the most organic planet we know of. And if the Beastie has a taste for human, well, how about ten billion? It made a nice meal of ninety million at Talis. Again, Commander, boy, that video from Talis sure was, um, informative. What could it do with ten billion? Except lay its eggs here.”

“We can’t assume they’re eggs, Mar,” a skeptic rejoined.

“We can’t assume its target is Central, either,” said another. “It might have enough on its plate, um, so to speak, with Alcen.”

“And you picked up ‘Beastie’ from the report,” said a third skeptic. “That’s their bias. I’m not assuming it’s an animal—I’m assuming it’s not an animal. After all, it lives in space and flies between stars. Animals I know don’t do those things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the director. “Whether or not it’s spawning, whether or not it’s a Beastie, the fact is, if it comes here, there’s going to be a lot less overpopulation when it’s done. And if it stays at Alcen, that’s great for us, but I guess the folks at Alcen would appreciate some help. So? Anything?”

“We can work on the blast thing,” said Fryda Holst.

“I’m thinking, computational infection,” said the young man who led Fiona’s group.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” said Fiona. “We have no idea even how its nervous system, or whatever you want to call it, its data transfer system if you like, we have no idea how it even works.”

“Look, do you have any better ideas?”

“No. Okay. Let’s do computational infection.”

The other three groups lined up behind enhanced radiation beams, shell-dissolving compounds and cutting with heavy metal edged or pointed weapons. Silverfleet and Fiona and Dalsandro were actively suspending disbelief—Dalsandro’s group was the one pledged to edged weapons—so Klee and Cloutier exchanged tired looks and held their tongues. Then they all returned to work, while the Director slipped into his office to listen to the audio from Earth.

Twelve hours later, Silverfleet found Fiona in a hallway looking out the window, while a speaker nearby muttered the news of the day. Silverfleet looked out, upon a world with no color, only the black of space and the white of stars and the moon they stood on rendered in shades of grey. “It’s pretty,” said Silverfleet. “I’d—”

“Sh,” Fiona replied. Silverfleet listened. A woman’s voice came from the speaker: “There were five hundred thousand in New York today. The security didn’t even show up. But in Montreal there are reports of up to a thousand dead in violent demonstrations. The Front urges everyone to keep their heads. It’s only a matter of time now. The new Front leaders in Capetown have called for calm. In Central Africa and Europe, ethnic and religious fissures have resurfaced. The Front urges everyone to remain calm and work together. We will accomplish nothing by giving in to superstition. The only thing we know is, if this Beast or whatever it is continues to approach, the White Hand and its Starfleet will never succeed in stopping it. We must secure underground refuges, move people to the Moon, find air processing capacity. But we must first change who makes the decisions. The Front calls for demonstrations...”

“It’s falling apart,” said Fiona.

“Good,” Silverfleet replied. “We have a meeting.”

Fiona shrugged, gazed out at the stars, then turned to follow Silverfleet to the conference room. Three of the groups had basically nothing to show for their efforts, and two of the three came right out and admitted as much. Dalsandro’s group made straight-faced calculations of the composition and construction of a saw-blade they believed capable of cutting into the shell of the thing, and the speed and pressure necessary, the amount of power it would consume and the amount of damage it could do in a reasonable unit of time.

“You’d need how many?” asked the director.

“We don’t know much about the internal structure of the thing,” said their chief scientist, a woman of a hundred or so. “But to do sufficient damage, we estimate an hour per cut, ten thousand cuts, so that’s ten thousand hours of sawing. If we had a thousand, ten hours. If we had a hundred, then four days.”

“Of course it’d be eating them as fast as they came at it,” said the distinguished older woman.

“Yes,” said the saw advocate. “We calculated everything we could, but I’m afraid we had to leave the unknowns out of our consideration, or else, to be honest, we might not have bothered.”

“Indeed,” said the director. “A fine job. Dr Holst?”

The genius stood up, flashed a smile and took, from Silverfleet, a tube almost Silverfleet’s size. “We don’t know if it’ll work,” said Fryda Holst, “but if our estimates are correct, a missile big enough will break one of those nodes. Break a few of the right ones, and the Beastie is in bad doo doo.”

“Your language is interesting,” said the director. “How many of these do we need?”

“Each fighter can carry at most ten missiles,” said Silverfleet. “It’ll impede our maneuverability, but we can do it. So if we fix up five fighters, we can take out fifty nodes. I guarantee you it’ll do something to it.”

“Yes,” said Holst. “There are hundreds of millions of nodes, but our study of the videos indicates that a few thousand nodes enter into basically every global process on the beast. We can narrow it down to a hundred or so that seem to act as funnels for all the information, or blood flow, or whatever, that moves any significant distance.”

“We could cut it pretty badly,” said Silverfleet. “And only fighters can get close enough to do the job.”

“So can we make enough of these things?” asked an older man.

“We only need five racks of ten,” said Silverfleet. “We only have five fighters with us. Of course, you could outfit your patrol fighters, all, what, six or eight that didn’t get sent to Alcen. And maybe some of the Alcen fighters will have survived the debacle.”

“You could send the specs to Alcen Starbase when you get there,” said the director. “All right, that seems worthy. Not that it’ll work, but what else is there? Computational infections?” He turned to the last group, Elan Klee’s group. “What about you people?”

“We’ve identified twenty regions of the spectrum where we might be able to pierce the thing’s shell,” the scientist in charge said as she started into her graphics. Elan Klee caught Silverfleet’s and Fiona’s eyes and mouthed, “No way.”

The penetrating ray idea was thoroughly bombarded, but it limped through and got the go-ahead, much to Elan’s chagrin. But the rest of the lunar base went over to making missiles. “The front end contains a small packet of the explosive,” Silverfleet explained to a group of scientists preparing to become assembly workers, “enough to make a crack on contact. We think. The rear part of the shell contains a massive charge to break open the node from inside. The rest of it is propulsion and padding.”

“Padding?”

“We need to blow the front explosive to open a hole, then go inside, then blow the back one,” Silverfleet explained. “It’ll take a lot of buffer to keep it from blowing up all at once.”

Meanwhile, Klee was out shooting at various hard substances thought to approximate the properties of the Crystal Thing’s skin, using various articulations of photon wavelength and spread. “I’m actually into it,” she explained to Silverfleet and Cloutier and Dalsandro during a five-minute break in an observation lounge. “I’ve learned more about making holes in rock since we’ve been here than I ever got from asteroid mining.”

“That’s great,” said Cloutier. “You’re going back to mining after this is over?”

“What else? Farming may be out, at least around here.”

“It might be the big business on Veldar,” replied Cloutier. “I might just go back to Arturo and start a hydro vegetable farm. Think it’ll ever be economically feasible to export veggies?”

“Yeah, you, a farmer,” Silverfleet scoffed. “Come on, you dumb fucking seeds, sprout already! You want me to come in there and get you?”

“Hey,” said Fiona, joining them.

“Hey,” said Silverfleet. Then she looked closer. “Hey, what is it?”

“Listen,” said Fiona. She switched on the speaker on the wall. “Is under control,” a male voice said. Short pause. “And reports of continued unrest,” it continued. “Citizens are urged to stay inside.” Medium-length pause. “Authorities have opened fire in the downtown area. Police are going house to house.” Long static-laced pause. “Urged to stay inside. State security is in control. The list of organizations banned is as follows. The Front, also called the United Front. The followers of Dr. Mikal. The followers of the former White Hand Council. The Pure Resistance. The League. The followers of Smith and Morghainn. Anyone...” The audio descended into static.

“It’s Dublin,” said Fiona. “It’s my home town.” She sighed. “Earth’s falling apart. They’re trying to keep it quiet. The Council hasn’t met or anything. I guess a couple of council members are already at the head of their own religions. The acting secretary is doing everything on his own, but right now all he has under his control is this moon, and a few planetary cruisers. The security guys down on the planet have all gone over the wall. Dublin. It’s under martial law.”

“Oh, and your family’s in the middle of it,” said Dalsandro.

“Fiona, so close to her family?” asked Cloutier.

“You know,” put in Silverfleet, “I haven’t been back to Bela in ten years, but if the Beastie were headed there, I’d drop everything and go protect my mom’s restaurant.”

“It’s not just that,” Fiona went on. “The Council is no more, okay? It’s all over. The White Hand is over. Did you hear it? ‘The former White Hand Council’. Earth—that’s it for them. Without Earth, they are nothing. And with this thing on the way here, and no one able to stop it—they’re over. And there’s nothing to take their place.”

“They’re especially over,” said Klee, “if all their marines and admirals can’t stop it, but a handful of little tiny women can.”

“See any chance of that?” asked Silverfleet.

They had been on Luna for eighty hours, and slept about ten of that. The Director woke up in his chair, turned his head to doze off again, and then sat up at the noise from the next room. He leapt up, the gravity being quite light, and bounded out of his office into the big open lab. The noise was a mix of the sounds of gentle mechanical work and, from the audio, uninterrupted static.

“We were debating whether to wake you,” said Silverfleet.

“What are you doing?” He surveyed their work. All five of their fighters were sitting before him, their egg-like appearance tarnished by a launcher and a rack of missiles that doubled the volume of each ship. “You’re leaving.”

“I tried to talk them out of it,” said Dr. Holst, who belied her words by fiddling with the mounting on Elan Klee’s fighter.

“Look,” said Silverfleet, “you want to save Central. So save it. We’d like to see if we can save Alcen, and we might just have time if we leave right now.”

The Director swallowed, grunted, swallowed again and said, “Look, you go now, when we haven’t done one percent of the development testing we need, those things are more likely to blow you up than the Beastie. You want to have a chance to save something, you stick around and help us finish testing and we’ll save Earth.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Silverfleet replied, “but we have a chance to stop it right where it is. We had to sit by and watch nearly a hundred million die at Talis. And my, um, my partner, well, we have some unfinished business on Alcen.”

“Really?” said the Director. “What would that be?”

“When we came in, the Acting Secretary of the Council told us to write our own ticket. He said we could have literally whatever we wanted. Well, Fiona and I just had the chance to talk to the Acting Secretary on the comm to the starbase. We told him we needed to go now, and we only wanted one thing.”

“And he said you could go? Wonderful, just wonderful.”

“He had no choice,” said Fiona. “And he was as good as his word.”

“How’s that?”

“Check your messages, Director. The Ringstroms of Alcen have been pardoned.”

“They what?”

“So we’ll be gone in an hour,” said Silverfleet. “We’ll pick up Claypool—also known as Renna Ringstrom—at Miranda. We’ll be back in Alcen in a week. We should just be on time. It’s just too bad no one with the White Hand thought to do this on Midday or Talis. We could’ve spent a month testing. Oh well. Hey, we really appreciate everything you’ve done—you guys have been great.”

“Well, all I can say is, don’t forget who told you it was a stupid idea to go. And good luck.”

“Yes, good luck,” said Fryda Holst. “Let’s hope you’re still alive in two weeks, along with those billions of people.” She stood up, thirty centimeters taller than the fighter pilots. Suddenly she pulled out a little holographic camera. “I guess I’ll go up about fifty points in my daughter’s index, when I tell her I worked alongside the Great Silverfleet.”

“What about the Great Rigan?” asked Silverfleet as Holst got in between them for a selfie.

“Well, thanks,” said Fiona, as the five made room for the scientist in the picture. “That’s got to be worth about half a point in itself.”

They dragged their fighters outside onto the lunar surface, and looked up at the black sky with its blue-white world just rising over the grey-brown dust of the Moon. “Quite the view,” said Cloutier.

“Yeah,” said Fiona, blinking back tears.

“Come on, you old soft-heart. Halyn, we have to get going before Fiona starts blubbering.”

“Sure,” said Silverfleet. “What would you be doing if something came to destroy Arturo?”

“I’d offer to help.”

On their way out of the Central system, they were treated to further reports of the end of intelligent life on Earth. “It has been written,” said one orator, “that our own pride shall undo us. And lo, it is so, for the Beast of God moves against us even now, and there is no hope in running or hiding, for it is written in God’s own book that our world shall be utterly thrown down, yea, even as the Temple was thrown down. And only those who are chosen will live to see the new World of God.” He went on to ask his followers to give up all their worldly goods and join him on a mountain somewhere. Silverfleet rolled her eyes. If this were happening on Bela, everyone would have a nice party and eat way too much and they’d all be sleeping it off when doom came knocking.

“Miranda,” called Fiona when they were halfway back from Luna, “it’s time to go. We’ve got some weapons. These missiles are supposed to be a good bet, but they weigh a lot, so we’re on 120% acceleration. Fortunately it’s only one short jump. I’ll send you our results on photon frequencies—that might work too.”

“Something had better,” replied Suzane Claypool, who was just lifting off from Miranda, still separated by some light-minutes. “I should be with you in ten hours. See you in Alcen.”

Five days later, the six fighters were decelerating into the Alcen system, the dull red dwarf of Proxima nearest to them, and what seemed to be a fourth star far off on the other side was the Crystalline Thing. It looked bloated: it was actually bigger than ever. It had recently left behind the remains of the Dreadnought Humanity, eight battleships, three dozen cruisers, a dozen planetary cruisers and uncounted armored merchants and freighters and troopships and fighters—all that Alcen had originally had on hand, and a couple more besides. It seemed that Admiral Kenney’s little fleet from Midday had arrived, and its combat ships had been thrown into the wreckage. Fighter remains were not a significant portion of the rubble—fighters could be eaten whole.

But there were three little fleets left in the system: a couple of dozen fighters and many freighters, in orbit over the main inhabited planet; the six fighters that had just returned to the system; and an armored merchant, moored just outside the Holey Place. Two fighters were in the last stages of decelerating to join it.

“It’s the NT,” said Cloutier. “That hippie captain has more guts than I thought. And more guts than brains.”

“He’s been picking up our stranded fighters,” said Klee. “Maybe he likes Bell’s work and hopes to add Ro and Meena and Vya.”

“Those two fighters,” said Silverfleet.

“Oh, my goddess,” said Claypool. “It’s Ginger and Tilla.”

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