Silverfleet and Claypool
Chapter 3: Black Rock

They were watched but not followed—they had done enough damage to the Central fighters to put off pursuit. Then the universe blurred and lightspeed drive had its curious effect and then their craft turned over to deceleration and then, after minutes or years, the vibrating solitude began to evaporate. What was that pattern in the sensors, just before the stars emerged from the mist of hyperspace?

Then she was down to 25% of lightspeed, and the system began to appear, and Silverfleet was taken by surprise by the surge in her heart when she picked up Suzane Claypool decelerating a kilometer away to her right.

They were alone in the system. Two brilliant stars, a red giant and a medium yellow, a hundred light-hours apart; a dozen planets of significant size, nine circling the yellow star, three around the red giant, including the largest of the lot, an enormous gas planet with brilliant bands of cloud and breathtaking rings; a flat, glittering belt of rubble where tidal forces had wrecked the innermost remaining planet of the red giant; comets, asteroids and debris of all descriptions, following peculiar orbits among the gravitational swamps created by the two stars and the huge planet; and hundreds of moons, icy, rocky, volcanic, big and perfectly round, small and lopsided, flat, rubbly, mountainous, and some nearly cut in half by fissures and giant craters—but nowhere in all this matter was any sign that humans had ever been here. Nor was there any reason for them to have been. There was no significant concentration of valuable minerals, no planet or moon harbored anything like a breathable atmosphere, and all the observable water was deep-frozen ice.

“Wake up,” Silverfleet called to Claypool. “This is it.”

“Doesn’t look like there’s much for restaurants.”

“No, it doesn’t. Let’s head for the—what do you think, red giant or medium yellow?”

“I don’t know,” Claypool replied. “Maybe that big planet. It’s got a lot of interesting moons. The radiation’s pretty low on the outer ones.”

“Too bad,” said Silverfleet. “The inner moons are usually the most interesting. Look at the one with the—is that a volcano? No, two—hey, it’s got a whole line of volcanos.”

“It’s got volcanos because it’s being torn apart by tidal forces,” said Claypool. “It’s gonna have radiation out the ying yang.”

“Well, how about that black rock moon? It’s out a ways from the planet, and it’s got fissures to hide in.”

“Black rock moon?” Claypool received the coordinates and they turned their ships toward the gas giant. “Game of chess while we fly, Halyn?”

“I don’t play much,” said Silverfleet.

“Me either,” Claypool replied, punching up a game to share over their communicators as they flew along fifty meters apart. “You can be white.”

Four calendar days later, they were coming into orbit around the black rock moon, with the gas planet looming before them. They had played several dozen games of chess: Silverfleet had won two games and drawn three more. They had also sent their scout drones, one apiece, on a tour of the system. Like the fighters that hosted them, the scout drones were powered by the light they collected from the nearest available sun and stored in their tiny, capacious batteries. They were the size, shape and mass of guitar picks and could fly independently for as long as they had stored energy, which meant, in the absence of sunlight, about ten hours of sustained acceleration at five hundred gees, and a similar stretch of deceleration, which put their top speed at about one third of the speed of light. Now Claypool’s drone was looking behind all the rocks that orbited the red giant, and Silverfleet’s had the more arduous task of checking the planets, moons and asteroids of the medium yellow. The two women headed for the black moon.

“Low albedo,” said Silverfleet as they coasted a few kilometers above thesurface. “It’s as dark as charcoal. It’s mostly rock with some water ice. Plenty of craters, but there’s been some resurfacing too. The tidal force of the planet must be pretty strong even at this range—see the grooves? Cracks where the whole moon was pulled hard by the red giant’s gravity. I wonder— sometimes there’s actually some liquid water way down under all the rock, kept warm by the tidal forces.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Claypool.

“There. In that groove.” She dove down into a valley a few dozen meters wide. It narrowed and deepened and turned into a tunnel under a pile of rubble. Claypool followed Silverfleet into the tunnel, where they slowed and turned aside. Silverfleet landed in a flat space under an overhang, and Vanessa’s grippers took hold of the moon. She climbed out as Claypool glided in beside her. There was no light except for the skin lamps of the fighters.

“These rocks,” Silverfleet explained, setting her hand-held detector among some gravel, “contain a good bit of ice and some oxygen. I wonder if we can seal off this cave.”

“It’s not much of a cave,” Claypool replied. “Maybe just pull out the tents and connect up.”

“I suppose.” Silverfleet was checking her readout. “Yep. Water, oxygen, nitrogen. Methane too, but we can vent that. We don’t want a stinky tent, do we?”

“That would be no.” They set about pulling the membranes of their “tents” from the fighters and zipping them together. They moved the resulting enclosure back into the recesses of the overhang, where the rock could combine with the insulating properties of the membrane. Then they gathered a few dozen kilos of rock and fed them into the fighters’ recycling units, which had been feeding both of them their own excretions as good food and clean water for the twelve days since they had left the Marelon starbase. The rocks were divided into four parts by the recyclers: air, pumped into the combined tent; water, replacing the “old” water of the ships’ systems, the excess poured off into contaminated blocks of ice; gravel, dumped on the ground where it came from; and methane and a few other gases, released to condense as snow and drift away.

An hour after landing, the two women entered the little tent through its minuscule plastic airlock. It was already warming under the influence of the two ships’ generators, and the air was as sweet as anything they had ever tasted.

“This is great,” said Claypool. “I’ve never actually used mine before. How about cushions? I take it we’re going to sleep in this.”

“Oh, definitely. I love Vanessa, but I do like to stretch my legs when I lie down. Your seat cushions pull out.”

Claypool leaned through the plastic tunnel that connected the tent to her fighter, of which it was, in fact, the inner skin. She pulled at her cushions, managed to extract them, and unfolded them into an ersatz mattress that was her exact height and width. “So,” she said, “aren’t you ever afraid that something will punch a hole in the tent while we sleep?”

“What, a space rat? A tiny meteor that ricochets into the cave? The probability is less than the chance of Vanessa suddenly exploding.” They laid their beds side by side and snapped them together. “Of course, we keep the vac suits close by.”

“Even though you say it can’t possibly happen.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So why not sleep in our vac suits?”

“You must be joking,” said Silverfleet, unzipping. “I’ve been wearing this since, well, since before the battle. I mean, it’s self-cleaning and all, but—!”

“So you don’t mind if I—?” She unzipped her vac suit and started to shirk it off. “Just so we know there’s nothing improper going on.”

“Commander, second,” said Silverfleet, pulling her legs out. They sat on their cushions, two naked little women. “All professional.”

“Something about having the vacuum so close by would keep down the hormones anyway,” said Claypool.

“That’s always been my experience,” said Silverfleet, pulling out her flask.

There was just exactly room on the tent’s floor, stuck between the two fighters inside the overhang, for the two women to lie side by side, their arms brushing: the first time either of them had touched another human’s skin since they had climbed into their fighters in the Marelon starbase. Many hours later they woke, warm in the cold universe, wrapped in the darkness of the cave, the only humans within twenty light years.

They got to know the black rock moon quite well over the ensuing days. It was about two thousand kilometers in diameter, a jumble of pieces that had been several times rearranged by the tidal forces of the nearby giant planet. Its own gravity was just barely noticeable. It didn’t have liquid water in any detectable amounts, even buried hundreds of kilometers deep, but its surface topography was truly startling. There were spires hundreds of meters high, cracks kilometers deep, impossibly angled mountains, plains scoured flat and pitted, lakes of water ice as hard as steel, smears of oxides and a substrate of shiny black stone. The neighborhood was even more eye-catching.

“It’s quite a view,” said Silverfleet, as she and Claypool sat in their vac suits at the top of a five kilometer cliff. They were watching the red giant set behind the nearby gas planet, staining the bands of clouds that swirled along the planet’s latitudes. Two little moons stood out against the disappearing star, and another showed black against the luminous dark pink of the planet’s equatorial band. Far to their left, bathed in darkness, a nearby moon could be made out. Their visors allowed them to see smudges where plumes from eruptions had cast ash across the pale and sulfurous surface. A wide delicate ring glittered in a rainbow of colors behind the moons, in front of the planet’s clouds. Behind it all, the starry field hung in the blackness of night, off-balance: on one side, now to their right, the stars thinned out and gave way to the light of distant galaxies filtered by intergalactic dust.

“Incredible,” said Claypool. “Incredible.”

“It’s why I became a pilot,” said Silverfleet.

“The beauty of the stars?”

“Yes. Exactly. On Bela—well, the night sky, it’s just breathtaking. From our planet, it’s the fourth one out, we can easily see the stripes and rings around the fifth planet when it’s on our side of the sun. And there’s the Bela Nebula taking up about thirty degrees of the sky.”

“It’s beautiful,” Claypool agreed. “I’ve seen pictures. I’m sure they don’t do it justice.”

“Of course not. Then I got to see it from the moon base. I was a little girl when my mother took me up there. I’ll never forget—looking down on our planet, the place where everyone I knew had spent their whole lives, this big old world, and seeing it was just a little ball in space like a soccer ball waiting to be kicked. Do they play soccer on Enderra?”

“What? I guess so. I never did.”

“And then they took me to the far side and I got to look out in space, and the nebula was just draped out there across the stars. I tried to reach out to touch it. It must’ve been just centimeters out of my reach.”

“And you went right off and signed up?”

“Well, I was six years old, I think. But I scored high on tests and when I was ten I was put into prelim pilot training. I was going to fly the big freighters. I had pictures of them up—the old AM 634, the big H5 hauler—I was really into it. Can you imagine? Me, flying a freighter?”

“Things worked out a little differently,” said Claypool.

“When I was thirteen they called me in and they just destroyed my entire dream. I wasn’t going to be in the freighter corps. I was going to fly those teeny tiny little fighters. I said no way. They said, then you can go back home and help your mom run the restaurant. They knew I wouldn’t call their bluff. And about a month later, there were life-size posters of fighters on my walls. I got an autographed picture of Selene Selkirk.”

“Selkirk! Did you meet her?”

“She patted me on the head. I didn’t wash my hair for a week. The Central Fleet was passing through Bela trying to keep the peace on our side of the zone. Then she went off to fight the rebels on Ticeti, or Veldar, or someplace.”

“She got killed, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Silverfleet, “when I was sixteen. At Vega: they said her thrust malfunctioned during a pirate fight. So much happened that year. I think for about a week I was in utter despair. Then I knew—I was going to be as good as her.”

“And so it came to pass?” asked Claypool.

“I guess. But I didn’t turn into Selkirk. I’ve never signed an autograph. I doubt I’ve inspired any thirteen-year-olds. She was dashing and daring and swashbuckling. I’m a lot more cautious.” She sensed doubt from Claypool. “I think I am,” Silverfleet went on. “I think that’s why I stay alive.”

“You stay alive because you’re good, Halyn,” Claypool replied. “And you just seem to—decide you’re going to win, and you do. How do you do that?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“So what else happened when you were sixteen?”

“Oh,” said Silverfleet, “there was Mora.”

“Oh, Mora, was it?”

“Yes. She was about five centimeters too tall to be a fighter, but she looked great in the uniform. She had long brown hair and long legs and the greenest eyes and—I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. And then she took off the uniform. Oh, Suz.”

“First love’s like that,” said Claypool.

“But we outgrew each other. She’s probably flying those big freighters. I went to Central and trained in the outer reaches, and then I was in the First Fleet, and by the time I was twenty I’d lost two ships. I guess I’d already killed about ten. I’ll have to check my log. They liked my work, so I got the newest G220 off the line. And that was Vanessa. The next place we went was Alcen, and that was the last time I fought on the side of Central.”

They sat silent for a time. Claypool said, “It’s just so beautiful. And to think—”

“We might be the first humans to see it. I know. How did you come to be a fighter, Suzane? How did you come to be here?”

“Oh. Oh, they recruited me, just like you. I mean, on Enderra. I mean, I must have always been good at things like that. I loved bumper cars. I always did great on the tests. The reaction tests. The eye tests. I kick butt on academics too. I can calculate under time pressure like no one else. So they, yeah, they recruited me. I was trained as a fighter pilot.”

“On Enderra.”

“They were independent for a long time before I moved there, and suddenly there was this Central fleet coming. Maybe you were with them.”

“Nope. I didn’t get to Enderra until a couple of years ago, and that was as a tourist.”

“Oh, that’s a great vacation spot, isn’t it? They needed fighters bad, and I was about sixteen, and, and I’d just lost my dad in a space accident a few years before, so I’d gone to Enderra to live with my aunt and uncle, and I’d been in pilot training, and I was the star of our school’s fencing team, and of course I was tested, and of course my scores were off the chart.”

“So did you win? I remember hearing about several battles at Enderra.”

“Yes. We won both of them. Then they gave up without a fight. I had five kills in two battles, against Central, Halyn, and I wasn’t even twenty yet.”

“And you didn’t fly a fighter till you were sixteen?”

“No. My dad let me take the floater out by myself—does that count? I’ve done a lot of catching up.”

“Well, you’re what, thirty?”

“Thirty-one,” Claypool admitted.

“You’ve caught up. I know people think I’m conceited about my skills, but hey, it’s been about ten battles since I met anyone close to my equal. You, you’re pretty close to being my equal. And you beat me at chess ninety percent of the time. Remind me not to fence with you.”

“Halyn,” said Claypool, “I’m not your equal. No one is. You’re not being conceited.”

“You’re getting closer every time we practice.”

“So,” said Claypool, “how many of them can the two of us take?”

“We’re not taking any of them.” She tried to stare at Claypool, but the other woman was gazing out into the starry field. “We’re staying here,” Silverfleet went on. “Right here on Black Rock. Our own little colony of two.”

They sat there a little longer, and then they walked back to their fighters, which had been sitting behind them absorbing sunlight, and took off. An hour later they were orbiting the nearby volcanic moon, but it didn’t look hospitable, so they flew on. In another hour they were skimming the ice-rink surface of the gas giant’s largest moon, and in another hour they were back at Black Rock, soaring over the pinnacle of a wide crater, then diving into a fissure that seemed to run to the center of the sphere. Silverfleet in front, Claypool in back, they wove identical trails among the clogging boulders until they found their way back to the overhang and reconnected the sagging tent to their fighters. It filled right up with manufactured air. They sat down to a meal of recycled excrement in the form of a nice stew over noodles, then they had some recycled urine in the form of a clear but full-bodied whisky, and then they stretched out side by side in their vac suits.

“So this is home?” asked Claypool.

“Sure,” said Silverfleet. “At least until we think of someplace else. If we’re really going to stay out here, maybe we should look into getting ourselves a permanent cave.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” said Claypool, half rising. “How about those caves along the side of the fissure? A few of them seemed to be about the right depth. I could look on my scan log.”

“Tomorrow,” said Silverfleet, pulling off her helmet and rubbing her eyes.

“Bedtime?”

“Bedtime,” said Silverfleet. They shuffled off their vac suits and fell immediately asleep, naked among the rock and vacuum of a little black moon orbiting a big planet orbiting a fairly typical red giant in an uninhabited double star system on the margin of an arm of a galaxy among a vast field of galaxies. Claypool woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream—and realized that it was always night—and felt Silverfleet next to her, and rolled over against her. Silverfleet half awoke, and felt Claypool move, and then sleep again, and she smiled as she felt Claypool’s heart beating near hers.

Over the next few days (as measured by their clocks) the scout drones returned with no news of life in the system. “Not exactly,” said Silverfleet. “There’s one planet of the medium yellow that seems to be about 90% covered by a centimeter thickness of lichens.”

“That doesn’t sound threatening,” said Claypool.

“Or interesting.”

Meanwhile they picked out a cave, a hole in the wall of the fissure about two meters across and ten deep, which could be sealed with a small amount of labor. They pulled the fighters into the first two meters of the cave, then sealed it with the tents and with a fine cement that Silverfleet coaxed Vanessa into producing from moon rock and water, and at the end of a productive eight hour shift they sat in their vac suits and played chess and drank whisky. They got good and drunk and Silverfleet actually beat Claypool once, and then they talked for an hour, and then they made their bed and fell asleep side by side in their vac suits. They woke with the first hangovers in the history of the system.

It was easy to lose track of what was day and what was night—the light of the red giant didn’t penetrate the depths of the fissure. Then they would come out onto the surface, climbing or hiking in the low gravity, or flying their ships, and it would be either the forty-hour day or the forty-hour night and in either case the surface of the moon would be black in the greenish glow of the huge planet. Then they would find something to do—there was so much to do, although nothing had to be done. Thus they built a shelf and a couple of chairs and induced the fighters to process rock into strips of cushion that became a new bed, and sheets to go over it, and it wasn’t long before they had glasses and plates and knives and forks, even if the food they ate off of them and the whisky and wine and water they drank was still just their reprocessed excreta. A fighter pilot learned to deal with that.

One morning Silverfleet woke up in Claypool’s arms and glanced reflexively at her watch. It was 0900 somewhere—she wasn’t sure where. Maybe it was the real time in the largest city on Central—nine in the morning. It had been an awfully long time since she had been anywhere with a twenty-four hour day. Still, time ruled her life, and for a moment she felt impatient that her arm was trapped, however lightly, under whoever it was she was sleeping with.

The next moment, another veil of memory peeled away and she knew Suzane Claypool, and knew what they had been through together. She lay on her side, and Claypool lay on her back, Silverfleet’s right arm under her waist, Claypool’s left arm under and around Silverfleet’s shoulders, a little light spilling out of the fighters upon them. In the low gravity, they could sprawl all over each other and not wake up crushed. Silverfleet leaned back to look at the watch again, attached to the wrist of her vac suit lying nearby, and then cuddled up in Claypool’s arms thinking, 28-7-3355? What was it, 7-7 when we got here? Or was that when we moved into the cave? Three weeks? Could it be?

She dozed off again in the warm halo around Suzane. An hour later she awoke, Claypool clutching her and murmuring. “What is it? What is it?” asked Silverfleet.

“What?” asked Claypool back, as she came awake. “Oh. I was having—a dream.”

“A nightmare?”

“Yes,” said Claypool, “nothing unusual really.” She shook out her red hair. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Was I in your dream?” asked Silverfleet. “You were in mine. I dreamt that we were flying, you and I, but we were flying down the halls of my old high school on Bela. We landed but I couldn’t get out because I only had my helmet on, I’d forgotten my vac suit.”

“No,” said Claypool with a little smile, “no, happily, you weren’t in my dream.”

“Suzane, wasn’t it 7-7 when we moved up to the cave?”

“What? I don’t remember. I remember it was 2-7 when we landed by that overhang.”

“Do you believe it’s 28-7 now?”

“Is it?” She smiled her lazy smile from under her unkempt red bangs. “We’ve kept busy. Of course time flies.” Then like the sun setting on an airless world, her smile vanished. She sat up. “We have to send out the scouts. We should go for a scout ourselves, Halyn. It’s been weeks.”

“What? Oh. I suppose you’re right. But what could have crept up on us? Besides three weeks, that is?”

“Who knows? You did that curve thing to avoid pursuit, but by now they could’ve figured out which way we went.”

“Why would they?” Silverfleet challenged her. “Why should they follow us? I don’t get it.”

“Oh,” said Claypool, “I mean, who knows? Just to be on the safe side.”

“It’s your dream, Suzane. You still think you’re being chased. Well, I wasn’t in your dream. You said that. There’s no one chasing us. Why would they?”

“Lots of reasons,” Claypool replied. “One is, you’re the best fighter in the—in everywhere, Halyn. They fear you. They should.”

“Why? Because I’m going to take up arms against the White Hand? Like they’d have much to fear from me.”

“You could become a pirate. We both could. They would fear that.”

“And do what, raid Marelon? Just the two of us?” But Claypool was already putting on her vac suit, and Silverfleet found herself doing the same, even as she looked back at the bed with a sigh. An hour later they were off the surface and using energy from the red giant to escape the grip of the gas planet.

“Drones off,” said Silverfleet, as their guitar-pick sized scouts curved away to sweep the system again. “Back to Black Rock? Or shall we explore a bit?”

“We could explore,” replied Claypool. “You pick.”

“All right. Then let’s land on the outer planet. It’s almost in line with us right now, and it looks sort of interesting.”

Twenty hours later they had put most of the red giant’s realm behind them. They had raced up to a quarter of the speed of light, accelerating at three hundred gravities, which, if their ships had been old fashioned space capsules, or even the current generation of freighters, would have squeezed the juice out of them like oranges. Then they had coasted for eight hours, then switched to decelerate at the same rate. Now they were braking hard, and Claypool was ahead of Silverfleet, gliding in to use the gravity of the approaching planet as a further brake. It was a big chunk of rock, bigger than most of the rocky planets they’d seen in their travels and much chunkier than a planet that size normally would be, and several more chunks were in orbit.

“Cool,” said Claypool. “It must’ve been disrupted recently. It’s still getting itself rounded out again. Hey, look, isn’t that volcanic?”

“Yes,” said Silverfleet, decelerating hard behind her. “Not many craters. Must’ve taken a big hit in the past million years. Yes. That often creates conditions for renewed volcanism.”

“Halyn? Something wrong?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Suz, there’s something coming out of hyperspace.”

And there it was, an unmanned explorer ship, about half the size of a fighter and full of equipment. No amount of fancy electronics prepared it for Silverfleet and Claypool. It spat out five scout drones, then they blasted it, and then they chased down the scout drones and blew them up as well. Then they turned about and went to pick up their own scouts. They flew side by side fifty meters apart, coasting at sixty thousand kilometers a second, a fifth of the speed of light, and debated.

“Commander,” said Claypool, “you know what this means. We have to leave this system.”

“But Suz, it was alone. And even if it got off a transmission, it won’t get to Marelon for twenty-two years. If it had a companion that turned around and went back, then they could know in a week. But it didn’t. And who is this ‘they’, anyway?”

“Halyn, you know this was from Central. It was marked.”

“Well, so what? Maybe they’re just checking for rogue colonies.”

“Halyn, we’re a rogue colony. And you say they won’t know for twenty years. What’ll they think in two weeks when they haven’t seen their scout return?”

“They’ll assume it ran into mechanical problems. These things aren’t that reliable.”

“They’re just as reliable as fighters! They’ll send a fighter next time!”

“Then we’ll blow her up, Suz.”

“Halyn, whoever she is, when she sees us she’ll just turn around and head for Marelon. And when they come back they’ll have a dozen!”

“We can take a dozen.”

“That’s funny. Wasn’t it you who was telling me we couldn’t fight seven of them by ourselves? You said at least one of us would get killed. Well, look around. What if we got badly damaged here? What would we do? How could we get fixed up? At least at Marelon we were defending something. What in heaven are we defending here?”

Silverfleet didn’t answer. She knew Claypool was right. But she had actually come to think of this as home, though she didn’t really know it until now. They’d gotten out of bed and flown out here and here they still were, sixty hours later, out in the blackness, and she really, really wanted to go back to that bed. “Okay, look, Suzane, why don’t we just head back to Black Rock and hide out? Maybe they’ll come back, maybe they won’t. If they don’t, then we won’t have wasted all the effort we’ve put into this place. If they do, then we hunker down till they leave, and maybe we still get to stay here. They sure aren’t going to hang around and build a colony.”

“But what if they trace us? We can’t erase all our footprints. They’ll know from the debris that we blew up the scout. They’ll look for us. If they find us down in that fissure, we’re done for. And if we make a run for it, they’ll track us. Again.”

“Maybe they won’t come,” was all Silverfleet could say.

But when they had collected their two scouts and returned to the black rock moon and the cave in the fissure, the two of them stripped off their vac suits and threw themselves down on the bed. When they woke up, they didn’t say a thing about the “situation”. Instead, they went for a hike, then they took apart and rebuilt Claypool’s transfer generator, then they tweaked Vanessa’s photon distributors, then they ate, then they got drunk.

Then for a week or so they were sleepers refusing to wake. They adopted a code of silence about almost anything more important or long-term than what to have the ships mold their waste products into for dinner. They didn’t speak of Central, they didn’t speak of Marelon, and they didn’t say a word about how they felt. They didn’t even know how they felt, but for a while the cave, which had been a claustrophobic hovel to them at first, seemed like a childhood home.

But they woke up, eight days later, two hundred and ten hours after the destruction of the scout ship, and looked around their cozy little efficiency apartment, and it was as though it were all transparent. It was just rock, and it wouldn’t hide them from the prying eyes of the next scout. Without saying anything about it—instead, they talked about literature—Claypool and Silverfleet began to pick up and put things away.

Then they went out and climbed the cliff and sat for hours watching the glowing planet, the gleaming rings, the turning moons, the slowly turning stars. They lay on their backs and stared up into the black and white sky, and as they did so the moon turned them until they were looking out, instead, through the hole in the stars, the window out of their galaxy and into the rest of space, where swam a thousand more galaxies, whirls of a hundred billion stars—spirals, barred spirals, ellipticals, irregulars, galaxies twisted by black holes, galaxies torn by the passing of other galaxies, exquisitely carved by interactions too complicated to imagine, stretched and curled and bent by bumps and brushes that took hundreds of millions of years to happen.

“We did good,” said Silverfleet. “We can be off in minutes.” Claypool didn’t reply. “I figure we leave the bed and the chairs. And the plates and knives and forks. The sheets. We can make all that stuff again. All we have to take is the tents.”

“Yes,” said Claypool. “We can be out in minutes.” They lay and watched the sky turn. “Well. We should leave now.”

Silverfleet sighed. “All right,” she said. “One more night.”

“Funny. It’s always night.”

“Not true—it’s sunset right now,” said Silverfleet, sitting up and glancing toward where, again, the red giant was disappearing behind the big planet, leaving a gold-red fire on the planet’s curve. “One more eight hours. We can leave the alarm set if you want.”

But they didn’t. They slept side by side, and then they half awoke and rolled over to sleep again. Then Claypool opened her eyes and said, “Well, let’s go.”

They rose and dressed in silence, put away what few items they wanted to burden themselves with, and hugged one last time skin to skin. Then they zipped up, then they unsealed and sucked the tents back into the fighters, and then they got in and took off. In half an hour they were out of the fissure and pulling away from the gravity of the big planet. They watched Black Rock dwindle in their rear screens, and then turned their attention to the stars ahead.

“Nearest one?” asked Claypool.

“Twelve light years,” said Silverfleet. “Blue, in a bit of nebula. No planets, just a belt of debris. Twelve light years beyond that, there’s another system, probably with planets. Or there’s that one to the right, twenty-one light years—big yellow, brown dwarf.”

“Two jumps sounds good to me,” said Claypool. “Let’s head for the blue. They won’t think we’d head there—there’s no place to land.”

“There probably won’t ever be,” replied Silverfleet. “That star’s so hot it won’t last a hundred million years. It’ll be ready to go supernova by the time that debris field condenses into anything. But who cares? It’ll outlive us, and it’s got plenty of light to feed our hungry steeds.”

“Got the coordinates?”

“Here they come.”

“Okay,” said Claypool. “I’ll see you there.”

They were coming up on the medium yellow, coming up on ten percent of lightspeed, when they saw the fighters. Two of them, no more, decelerated into the system sixty degrees to their right. Without a word, Silverfleet and Claypool turned to take them on. If they didn’t, the fighters would have a good chance of tracking their flight, just as they perhaps had done from Marelon to Black Rock. Meanwhile, as they crossed the light-hours of emptiness, Claypool and Silverfleet napped, checked systems and played chess.

An hour before they would meet, the Central fighters made contact. “Silverfleet, Claypool? Are you all right?” came a familiar voice. “We were worried that you’d been damaged when you left Marelon.”

“Milton!” Silverfleet replied over the ten light minutes that separated them. “Are you flying exploratory missions for the White Hand now? I hope the pay is good.”

Fifteen minutes later his reply arrived. “Commander, forget about who’s on what side. We only want to know if you’re all right. People on Marelon care about you. They owe you a lot. I owe you a lot, and I don’t want to see you go into exile when we could put all this behind us. We want to parley. We aren’t at war. This isn’t about fighting.”

“All right,” said Silverfleet, “we have no desire to fight. We’ll parley all you want.”

The four fighters coasted toward each other. Silverfleet and Claypool exchanged no detectable communication except for a few more moves in their interrupted game of chess. They passed within firing range and slowed to meet, still with shields down, still with combat systems in standby.

“Well,” called Silverfleet, “what shall we say?”

“This,” said Milton, as he and his comrade opened fire.

Two seconds later, Silverfleet and Claypool were accelerating toward lightspeed, unscathed, while behind them their victims floated in their vac suits in the neighborhood of twin patches of debris, and prepared for a long wait in an empty system.

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