Silverfleet and Claypool

The twelve space fighters spent a week maneuvering about the Talis system against the battleship and its two cruisers and fifteen fighter escort, then an hour maneuvering about the ringed gas giant in the fifth orbit, and then ten minutes jockeying for position as they raced together, and then the battle was over in exactly forty-six seconds, and Halyn Silverfleet was speeding away as fast as her craft Vanessa could take her. As the tiny fighter careened toward lightspeed, the pressure of barely survivable acceleration overcame the shock and frustration and even shame of the battle.

After six hours at three hundred gravities, an acceleration tangible even through the densest acceleration buffers invented in humanity’s fifteen hundred years of space flight, Vanessa passed twenty percent of lightspeed. The sensors gave up in the confusion of light from ahead coming too thick and light from behind barely keeping up and something like light sliding in from the cloaked gaps of hyperspace. The trail of her one pursuer, or her one fellow fugitive, vanished, and with it went the Talis system and the galaxy around it.

Silverfleet examined her experience dispassionately and concluded that, as bad as it was, even she couldn’t have done any better. The enemy were Central’s best fighters and two brand new T-39 cruisers in front of one of Central’s big battleships, escorting ten marine transports en route to the Talis civil war. The moron in command of the two Talian planetary cruisers had taken them straight into the battleship, a maneuver that sometimes works on video games but today had served to start the disaster off with a bang. Then Proudfoot had led her wing in behind him, and she’d let herself and her girls be funneled into the battleship’s left broadside line of fire. The rest of the fighters were freelancers like Silverfleet, and only two had followed her into the top flank of the battleship. Both got blown up, of course, but Silverfleet had left the big ship dead in space and turned to find herself arrayed alone against seven of the enemy. Four she had left in her wake, but the T-39s were coming up, and their cannons would pin her down for the surviving fighters to pick apart. She had fled, perhaps the only one to escape. So: I left one battleship dead-in-space, she couldn’t help thinking, four kills, that last one was quite skilled, and I got out with shell gone and hits to the body.

Then for just a moment, Halyn Silverfleet thought of the women in the fighters. How many of them, on both sides, did she know? How many were dead, and how many were crouching in their dead ships waiting to be picked up by the battleship crew or shuttles from the planet? Silverfleet grimaced at the memory of her last defeat—but of course it had been a victory, really, it was only that her own fighter had taken a lucky hit in the first second of the battle, at Seregara, and ejected her before exploding. It was nineteen years ago, but she well remembered: her life support unit didn’t tear out properly and Silverfleet was left floating for two hours bathed in her own pee. At least her friends had won and got to salvage her—otherwise she would have been subjected to imprisonment followed by ransom or hire by her captors. Either one seemed shameful to her—neither was frightening. She knew that some, at least, of her recent friends were now facing the same dual prospect. She knew that some of them had been fighting for the Talis government as a result of a similar choice after the pirate attack that had brought her there three months ago.

She also knew that at least one other fighter was leaving Talis on a path parallel to her own.

Then she lost awareness for a time as Vanessa crested at lightspeed and turned over to deceleration. After half an hour of mindless vibration, Halyn Silverfleet opened her eyes and asked, “What’s our rendezvous again? Marelon?”

“064, 434, –377, Marelon,” said the computer. “Small yellow star, five planets, two belts, two inhabited, neutral oligarchic government.”

“Population?”

“11,864,089 on Marelon-3, terraformed terrestrial T7, normal atmosphere, water oceans, two moons. 89,752 on Marelon-4 alpha moon, terraformed terrestrial T5, normal atmosphere, canyon seas. 15,670 on Starbase Marelon, in Marelon-4 L5 La Grange point.”

“Any fighters?”

“Unknown.”

“Well, we’ll know soon.” She sighed, then ran through the last scans before Vanessa’s sensors had blanked at 15% of lightspeed. Nothing else had followed, but why should it? She reran the last twenty seconds four times to make sure—there was a ghost in a few of the images, an artifact of the dying sensors—but it was nothing following her, it was in the wrong direction, before her as if hanging in hyperspace. Behind her there was only one fighter in pursuit, hardly a threat to the Great Silverfleet. That battleship wasn’t going anywhere for a while, that was for sure. Let it chase her! Halyn Silverfleet could take it with one photon shot. She’d even let them shoot first. She thought of Proudfoot, the moron—and then she thought of Proudfoot’s brave words before the battle, then she thought of her smile—and then of Vanessa, screaming toward the Marelon system, running with the photons as they flashed across hyperspace.

Silverfleet watched her sensors carefully as she fell into the Marelon system, and in the static she thought she saw something that looked exactly like a cartoon doggy from a popular show of her youth on Bela. Then the noise disappeared and the shape of the system formed in her display. There were indeed three, four, five planets, three of them giants; there were two distinct asteroid belts; there was a wide and delicate comet belt outside everything else; there was a starbase with a dozen freighters (not very many), three planetary cruisers and four fighters, two of which were on patrol. That’s probably exactly how many are in shape to fly, she thought, and then her heart chilled as she detected, about thirty degrees to her right along the planetary orbital plane, another ship about to appear from hyperspace.

Five minutes later, as she was darting toward (but still a couple of minutes from) a hiding place behind a kilometer-wide chunk of icy rock, Silverfleet was relieved to decipher that the new entrant was a single, beat-up fighter—and that it was one of her late comrades. She made landing on the chunk and sent a signal to the fighter, which turned and aimed right for her. She wondered a little at her own paranoia.

But then the White Hand had never appealed to her much, and the last time she had worked for them, she’d taken the first opportunity to find other employment. It would be just like them to hold a grudge. Keep your voice down, was all Silverfleet sent, and all that came back was, I will, commander!

Nine hours later the other fighter was hooked down to the chunk on the side facing away from the sun of Marelon, which from here was merely the brightest star in the sky. In spite of vac suit and helmet and lack of gravity, the two pilots were hugging.

“Suzane Claypool,” said Halyn Silverfleet at last. “Proudfoot’s second, forsooth! How’d you get out?”

“I, well, I ran, commander. I had to—I lost combat systems.”

“Then you’re right. You had to. Any kills?”

“Only two, commander.”

“Oh, stop calling me that. Halyn, please. Two kills? If only our comrades had been as competent as you. Even the Great Silverfleet only had four.”

“You notched the big ship,” said Claypool. “And it wasn’t like you had much help.” They gazed out across starry space. “I actually thought we had a chance,” said Claypool. “I guess I overestimated the competence of our comrades.”

“They’re being offered jobs right now,” said Silverfleet.

“White Hand jobs,” said Claypool with a small laugh. “Excuse the wording.”

“I worked for them once,” Silverfleet replied. “They pay.”

“You’re not working for them now,” said Claypool. “You could have surrendered. They’d have paid you again. They’d have paid you plenty.”

“You too,” said Silverfleet. “You had a pretty good audition back there. Tell me you’re tempted to go back and make a deal with the White Hand.”

“No,” said Claypool, gazing out at a distant galaxy just above and to the left of the bright fleck that was Marelon’s sun. “No, I can’t honestly say I’m tempted.”

They walked around a little, their boots clinging to the icy ground, and presently they found themselves back beside their tiny fighters, having made a full circuit of the chunk. It had rotated, and now they could see, in their magnified vision, the starbase that orbited behind Marelon-4.

“What do we do now?” asked Suzane Claypool. “Given that we’re not tempted.”

“I guess we go there,” replied Halyn Silverfleet.