“Be well, old friend. If you’ve heard me at all…”
It ended.
Daav stared for a moment, then punched the button for the next message.
There was no next message. Days had gone by and Clonak had not followed up.
Daav shifted in his seat, thinking.
Desperate and under the shadow of a pursuing enemy, Clonak had found him. And Clonak had not followed up. Suddenly, it was imperative that Daav be somewhere else.
He flicked forward to the microphone.
“This is L’il Orbit, ground. I think I’ve got the problem fixed now. I’m going to be checking out the whole system in a few minutes. If I get a go, I’ll need you to move me to a hot pad.”
“Hot damn, L’il Orbit, way to go!” The counterman sounded startled, but genuinely pleased. “I’ll get Bugle over there with the tractor in just a couple!”
“Thank you, ground,” Daav said gravely, already reaching for the keyboard.
“Hello,” he typed.
“Go,” said maincomp.
“Complete run: Flight readiness.”
“Working.”
So many years. His brother and sister dead. His son in trouble. The son he wasn’t going to be concerned with after all. And somehow the Juntavas was mixed around it.
Scout Commander. Daav sighed. Scouts were legendary for the trouble they found. The trouble that might attend a Scout Commander did not bear thinking upon.
The ship beeped; lights long dark came green. He touched button after button, longingly. Lovingly.
He could do it. He could.
He had left all those battles behind.
“Ground,” he said into the mike, the Terran words feeling absurdly wide in his throat, “this bird’s in a hurry to try her wings. Everything’s green!”
“Gotcha. We’ll get you over to the hotpad in a few minutes. Bugle’s just got the tractor out of the shed.”
Daav laughed then, and laughed again.
It felt good, just the idea of being in space. Maybe he could talk to some of the pilots he’d been listening to for so long—He grimaced; his back had grabbed.
Right. Easy does it.
And then, recalling the circumstances, he reached to the keyboard once more.
“Hello,” he typed. “Weapons check.”
* * * *
“I’m not a combat pilot, either, Shadia. I think we did as well as might expected!”
The gesture in emphasis was all but lost in the dimness of the emergency lighting.
“I swear to you, Clonak—they’ve murdered my ship and if they haven’t killed me I’m going to take them apart piece by piece, and if they have killed me I’ll haunt every last one of them to…”
The muffled voice went suddenly away and the mustached man raised his hand to signal the separation. The woman shrugged and braced her legs harder against the ship’s interior, bringing her Momson Cloak back in contact with his as they sat side by side on the decking behind the control seats, using the leverage of their legs to hold them in place in the zero-g.
“We bested them,” the man insisted. “We did, Shadia—since the fact that we’re somewhere argues that their ship isn’t anywhere.”
There was a snort of sorts from within the transparent cloak. “I’m familiar with that equation—my instructor learned it from the Caylon herself! But what could they have been thinking to bring a destroyer against a ship likely to Jump? You don’t have to be a Caylon to know that’s…”
Her gesture broke the contact again and the near vacuum of the ship’s interior refused to carry her words.
Shadia leaned back more firmly against Clonak’s shoulder, the slight crinkle sounding from the cloak not quite hiding his sigh, nor the crinkling from his cloak.
She glanced at him and saw him shaking his head, Terran-style.
“Next shift, Shadia, recall us both to put on a headset. As delightful as these contraptions are, I’d like us to be able to converse as if we weren’t halflings in the first throes of puppy-heart.”
She laughed gently, then quite seriously asked, “So you think we’ll have a next shift, at least? No one on our trail?”
He sighed, this time turning to look her full in the face.
“Shadia, my love, I doubt not that all is confusion at Nev’Lorn. The bat is out of the bag, as they say, and I suspect the invaders have found themselves surprised and disadvantaged.”
He nodded into the dimness, eyes now seeing the situation they’d left behind so suddenly when the Department of Interior attacked them.
“The ship most likely to have followed was closing stupidly when last we saw it—closing into your fire as well as the sphere of the Jump effect of the hysteresis of our maneuvers. They would have been with us within moments, I think, if they had come through with us.”
Clonak gestured as expansively as the Cloak allowed.
“Now—what can I say? We’ve come out of Jump alive. If we’re gentle and lucky the ship may get us somewhere useful. Perhaps we’ll even be able to walk about unCloaked ere long; with hard work and sweat much is possible. You will remember to tell people that you’ve seen me sweat and do hard work when this is over, won’t you, Shadia? When our present situation is resolved—then we will consider the best Balance we might bring against these murderers.”
He sighed visibly, used the hand-sign for “back to work,” with a quick undernote of “sweat, sweat, sweat.”
She smiled and signaled “work, work, work” back at him.
Clonak stretched then, unceremoniously lifting himself off the floor and away from Shadia. Steadying his feet against the ceiling of the vessel he brought his face near hers and touched left arm to left arm through the cloaks.
“Shadia, I must give you one more rather difficult set of orders, I’m afraid. I know my orders haven’t done much good for you lately, but I pray you indulge me once more.”
With his other hand he used the Scout hand-talk, signifying a life-or-death situation.
She nodded toward his hand and he closed his eyes a moment.
“If you find that, against chance, we are brought again into the orbit of the Department of the Interior, if they verge on capturing us—you must shoot me in the head.”
He flicked an ankle, floated accurately to the floor again, belying the cultivated image of old fool, and he looked into her startled, wide eyes.
“Just dead isn’t good enough, Shadia; they’ll have medics and ’docs. Do you understand? There must be no chance that they can question me. They cannot know what I know, and they cannot know who else might know it.”
Clonak tugged gently on her elbow, and she uncurled to stand beside him, stretching herself and near matching his height.
His hand-talk made the motion demanding assent; she responded in query, his in denial…and he leaned toward her until cloaks touched again.
“I know, Shadia, neither of us were raised to be combat pilots. It is thrust upon us both as Scouts and as pilots. My melant’i is exceedingly clear in this. I can tell you only one thing right now—and little enough it is to Balance my order, I know.”
Her