First Chapter of Warrior-Woman: The Forging Of The Legend

© Mary Ann Steele 1993

Down the formidable length of the corridor fronting the locks, the dead outnumbered the living.  Contorted bodies sprawled singly, or lay across others: mortal foes intertwined in a final, grim embrace.  Black-clad, still forms littered the deck in far greater plenitude than did those shrouded in dull slate blue.  Pools of crimson glistened wetly.  Smears of the same gaudy hue accented the uniform drabness of the walls.  A brooding silence hung in sweat-tainted air lately vibrating with shouts, shrieks, sharp cracks of electronic weaponry, the dull thudding of boots on metal plates, the ringing chime of sword on red-streaked sword.

Feet planted wide apart, lithe body quivering with passion, blue eyes blazing, sword-arm and bright blade splashed with life-blood not her own, Signe glared in regal wrath at the pressure-proof door of the now-airless lock, well aware that the Commander of the Third Columbian Military Corps at this very moment ascended unscathed into the black void of interworld space.  Sharply conflicting emotions warred in the Gaean leader's mind.  Norman still lives ! she raged inwardly.  The instigator of this costly war escaped unhurt—damn his slime-rotted black soul!  But he's in transit back to Columbia—soundly defeated!

We've achieved our foremost goal—driven the invaders off our world, over the broken bodies of these poor bastards Norman abandoned.  Knowing themselves callously sacrificed, his spacer-fighters absolutely refused to surrender—died to give the brute the precious time he needed to battle his way to this lock, board his ship and escape.  Well, our ten-Earthyear-long struggle on the surface just ended, but a new challenge lies ahead.  Norman started this war, but I'll fight it to a finish he and his imperialistic countrymen can't conceive possible!

Two tall figures strode up to stand on either side of the Commander.  As the elder man laid an arm in a purely comradely gesture across Signe's shoulders, bleached blue eyes deeply set in a seamed visage disfigured by an old, slanting, sword-cut scar mirrored the emotions racking the victorious world leader.  As if some momentary flash of mental telepathy united the minds of the two veteran fighters, Signe sensed that Conor's train of thought paralleled her own.  When she turned to meet his glance, he drawled softly, “Too high a price, these gallant fools paid.  Norman should be lying dead on this deck.”

“I agree,” Signe rasped.

“He would be, had these men surrendered,” Morgan acknowledged, won to grudging admiration of intransigent foes bent on extracting a final measure of revenge even as they drew their last rattling breaths.  His fluidly expressive face swiftly changed as he surveyed the carnage.  Contempt flashed across an open, comely countenance spattered with caked gore slowly dissolving in sweat.  Having sheathed a long, rapier-like blade, the younger man ran a hand through a thatch of thick auburn hair in an habitual, unconscious gesture.  “Norman didn't step out of character when he made his exit, that's for damned sure,” he observed acidly.

Circumventing the huddled corpse of a fallen foe, Eric silently studied Signe's expression.  Sensing her acute frustration, sharing it, the Senior Captain sought to master the anger inseparable from the fierce delight engendered by the victory.

His joy outweighing his wrath, Sean wordlessly squeezed Morgan's shoulder, prompting that exhausted warrior to smile with manifest satisfaction at his first cousin.

Behind the five swordsmen whose prowess at wielding those gleaming blades in hand-to-hand combat exceeded that of any of their subordinates, two other members of Signe's core staff now appeared.  Theo and Jassy took no time out in which to gloat over the magnitude of the victory.  The two veteran combatants detached massive electronic handweapons from slings at their waists, pulled off goggles equipped with imagers for aiming the bulky devices, and issued orders to the men and women threading their way through piles of dead, searching for any survivors: friends or foes.  The victory culminating a bitter revolt spanning a decade of Earthyears produced no tumultuous rejoicing.  The victors stoically set about the nerve-wrenching task of clearing the final battleground.

An hour later, two husky Gaean corpsmen strode by their captain bearing the last of the fallen.  Indifferently tailored slate blue uniforms clinging damply to perspiring bodies exuded a pungent aroma, offering Theo tangible evidence that the adjustment of the fabric had long since failed.  Bleak gray eyes followed the pair hustling the black-garbed corpse towards its destination: the refrigerated antechamber where it would lie waiting its turn in a crematorium direly overworked of late.

We ought to hold a brief mass memorial for the Columbian dead , the scholar-turned-warrior reflected, struck of a sudden with overwhelming conviction.  Those Third Corpsmen fought with fanatical valor until the last man fell.  If they granted no mercy, neither did they beg for any.  I'll see that they aren't simply incinerated like non-recyclable offal.

A mind contemplative by nature stilled the impulse prompting an active, compact body to hasten down the deck defiled by rusty smears, and join in the work of clearing barricades from passageways in the habitat below.  The historian in Theo objected, demanding that this moment not pass without comment by an intellect schooled to analyze the significance of epochal changes in human affairs.

Staring unseeing into the distant reaches of the cavernous corridor, the veteran officer recalled the twenty-hour span constituting all the warning of imminent attack afforded the horrified civil leaders of the citizenry scattered over thirty-nine inhabited planetoids within the Gaean Group.  A student of logic applauded the prodigies of organization achieved on Main World after Sigurd and his Council of Ministers deduced that a peace-loving society—one possessing no means of retreat and little of offense—faced invasion by a heavily armed force led by a Columbian military careerist.  That enemy bent on conquest, the Gaean leaders accurately judged to be motivated by a compelling lust for power allied to elemental greed.

The selfless patriot reliving the past thrilled anew to the call to arms issued by Sigurd's daughter.  Pride surged as Theo recalled how swiftly Signe's impassioned appeal rallied the nucleus of a force of fighters around a charismatic athlete who even then possessed amazing skill with a sword: proficiency rare among the Gaean rebels.  Admiration rose uppermost as he visualized the heroic struggle she mounted so as to overcome an all but insuperable disadvantage: the lack of skill at swordsmanship almost universally exhibited by a populace imbued with pacifistic ideals.

We faced enemies who grew up employing the one weapon that Columbian custom traditionally allowed any citizen to wield for the purpose of settling personal quarrels in legally sanctioned duels, the veteran recollected somberly.  That initial deficiency cost us heavily in lives.

His eyes remote, the former professor of history reviewed the factors precipitating the violent conflict now entering a new phase.  From the moment Johann made his landfall in this star-system one hundred fifty-one Earthyears ago, the Columbian majority among his settlers proved themselves treacherous allies to the Gaean contingent, Theo ruminated sadly.  You'd think all factions of the Triple Alliance would have learned something from the wars that devastated Earth's colonies of spacefaring settlers, but no such enlightenment occurred.

Johann—warrior, pirate, visionary, colony-founder—forged that agreement by the sheer force of his personality.  His mercenary spacer-fighters married the sisters and daughters of a creative elite: colonial scientists and engineers far too ruggedly individualistic to feel comfortable rejoining the packed horde of easily led, mindlessly gregarious, bureaucratically controlled humanity indigenous to Earth.  Those two groups of hardy adventurers—ancestors of the present-day Columbians—allied themselves with the first Gaeans: clannish pacifists plentifully endowed with the courage required to join Johann in a venture of incalculable risk.

Three great ships, tethered together, utilized some awesome, hitherto untested power external to themselves, which flung them into a near-light-speed journey that perhaps took them temporarily outside our universe.  That time-dilated Jump landed our forebears in the environs of a giant gaseous planet of a star in the same spectral class as Sol—a star located an unimaginable distance across the galaxy from the birthplace they knew they'd left forever.

You'd think in their sobering, irreversible isolation from the civilization that spawned them, those refugees from a system devastated by two space wars would have gotten along.  But the Columbians never changed that mercenary fighter's mentality, even if Johann rose above it, nor did the Gaeans ever lose their stubborn belief that safety lay not in armament, but in insularity.  When the Columbians sought to appropriate Johann's Flagship, he vanished in his fabulous warship.  Our ancestors left shortly afterward: lifted the Gaea one last time, and made the transit to an aggregation of dense metallic rocks clustered about the second of two stable libration points in Dyson's orbit around the gas giant.

The first Columbians remained entrenched on Johann's original colony-site.  That airless captive asteroid appealed to the leader making his landfall, not only because its density causes its gravity to approach that of Earth, but also because the rock forms one of a pair of binary bodies revolving around the same point in space within the Columbian Group.  The second rock of the pair—the Ice World—provides a priceless abundance of water ice.

The Gaeans, settling upon planetoids located at L-4, thought themselves safe from aggression on the part of their treacherous former allies at L-5.  Well, they erred mightily.  So here we are, those of us who lived to throw Norman off Main World of Gaea: pacifists turned combatants—victors in countless battles waged hand-to-hand through habitats and corridors separated from the vacuum of the void only by the negligible width of steel-plated, water-filled, double hulls.  Chancy, our lives, in the best of times—even during that peaceful pre-war existence we nostalgically recall as idyllic.

The man unwounded, but suffering from a severe case of battle fatigue, absently wiped a sleeve across a brow to which curly brown hair clung damply.  A faint shadow of beard darkened the pale skin of cheeks that had never known the direct light of the distant sun.  Lines of strain temporarily aged the sensitive face so expressive of whatever thoughts animated its owner's intelligent, compassionate mind.  Sorrow, relief, revulsion generated by an innate horror of slaughter, however necessary: all showed on the grave, cleanly chiseled features of the officer in his mid-thirties.  One emotion failed to register.  Theo possessed a nature incapable of harboring virulent hatred, even for so rapacious an enemy as Norman.

On the day following the culminating battle of the surface war, Signe waved her six captains into seats in an office in the habitat that formerly served as Norman's headquarters.  Examining faces nakedly attesting to bone-weariness, the premier warrior saw superimposed over warm, live flesh the ghostly images of men and women sacrificed to insure final victory.  Pride contended with still-raw pain.

We're old hands at the sort of fighting we face now—a disciplined, combat-seasoned force of veterans lacking only one crucial skill, she exulted.   Well, we'll remedy that deficiency in short order .  The voice the rebel leader could pitch to carry above a hand-to-hand battle sent galvanic impulses flashing along nerves sensitized to its nuances.  “Gentlemen, we're going to steal a Columbian ship.”

You might know , the Senior Captain groused inwardly.  Twenty-four hours after she watched Norman's fleeing vessels fade into nothingness on the screens in this very cabin, Signe's planning a raid.  Sorrowful shades of our multitudinous dead, girl, take a day or two to savor your victory!  Rest up!

Although no hint of the master swordsman's disapprobation showed on his face, Signe intuitively divined her oldest captain's thoughts.  “Eric, there's nowhere to go from the pinnacle we've reached, but down, if we keep our boots firmly planted on this rock,” she reminded him levelly.  “We can't afford that luxury.  This hard-won peace will prove short-lived, if we sit back in smug complacency.  We're going up—contest the Columbians' supremacy in interworld space.”

She reads minds.  Mine, at any rate .  Eric managed a wry smile even as his gut knotted.

“Twenty-four hours of peace.  I enjoyed this brief spell of knowing I won't need to gear up for tomorrow's battle, but I'm damned well certain that this state of affairs won't last.  You're right, Signe.  It's time we went mobile in the void!”  With a fluid gesture of a hand, Morgan punctuated that boldly unqualified acceptance of a daunting order.

“Peace, hell.  All we've won is a pause that lets us catch our breath.  Until we match Columbia in fighting power across interworld space, we'll remain as tempting a target for invasion in the eyes of any power-crazed Columbian as we were for Norman.”  Conor made that assertion adamantly, consciously forcing from the screen of his inner awareness a vivid portrait rising unsummoned, of the beloved wife who fell dead of a lethal electronic pulse as she fought at his side a scant five weeks earlier.

“To fly…take them on in the void!  I'm ready.”

As ready to fight them on any ground—against whatever daunting odds—as you've been since you joined at sixteen, Sean.

Noting that Signe's face at that moment plainly revealed her thoughts, her youngest captain smiled warmly at the Commander, his response generating an upwelling of pride in the woman silently commending a warrior she honored.

To fly.  Could I learn what that feat will require, and then force myself unflinchingly to target manned vessels armed with Earth-built weaponry?  Learning to fight hand-to-hand—to kill—took a toll on my emotional balance, Theo acknowledged, nowise afflicted by self-delusion.  But I mastered the art.  Signe's right.  Sitting back complacently now will lose us everything our best and bravest died to gain.  The struggle isn't over.  I can't quit until we achieve a peace that will last beyond our lifetimes.   As that conclusion grew inescapable, the scholarly Captain's steadfast gray eyes conveyed a mute but welcome message to his superior.

“Whatever it takes to finish what we started, I'm ready to tackle,” Jassy growled, no abstruse ethical considerations troubling his stalwart soul.  Jaw jutting, bulldog face creased into a black frown, the man renowned as much for his expertise at electronics as for his prowess in battle spoke his thought with characteristic bluntness.  “Damned if I can see how we'll fly the ship we steal, though.  Surely you don't plan to trust your life to a tamed Columbian captain, do you, Signe?”

“Hardly,” the Commander retorted vehemently.  “We'll learn to operate a ship.  I've spent the bulk of what little free time I managed to gain over the past six Earthyears, studying the theoretical aspects of navigation.  The sequences for lifting a vessel and making a transit are for the most part automatic.  The calculations an operator needs to insert into those programs, I've learned to perform.  I've developed strategies for augmenting that basic knowledge: strategies I'll implement myself.  The problem confronting us now is that of acquiring a ship.  A prize, this one will be: one of the original twenty-four carried to this system from Earth.  A vessel armed with the irreproducible weaponry.”

An impulsive exclamation burst from Morgan.  “What a coup that would be!”

Signe's got her plan of attack laid out to the last detail , Eric conceded glumly.  She'll lead the cream of her warriors on this fearsomely dangerous strike.  We could lose the highest echelon of our military leadership if her venture fails.  Signe, don't cast away all we've gained at so heavy a cost!  Your life especially.  Our world can't afford to lose you…

Imperious blue eyes raked the man whose thoughts the war-leader seemed unerringly able to read.  “Vacillation constitutes the main danger now, Eric.  This opportunist who seized autocratic power over Columbia two Earthyears ago still has his hands full, dealing with the other four military commanders he outmaneuvered.  I don't intend to give Arlen the least advantage while he finishes consolidating his power, so he can turn his full attention to us.  We'll waste no time before taking to space.”

“No one will ever accuse you of vacillating, Signe.”

The smile the Gaean leader flashed her senior officer transfigured the oval face framed by startling silvery hair, softening faint lines etched by sorrow, pain, loss of valued comrades, and conscious acceptance of the consequences of brutally difficult decisions forcefully rendered.  Signe looked older than her thirty Earthyears.  Emotional trauma engendered by fighting in the forefront of countless assaults as sanguinary as this last, indelibly imprinted her intensely alive, vibrantly expressive, resolutely determined, singularly arresting countenance.

Eric smiled back.  For a brief instant, a likeness sprang into being: an uncanny resemblance between the still-young woman so oddly crowned in silver, and her golden-haired, blue-eyed kinsman, a phenomenal swordsman whose graceful body displayed youthful vigor despite his sixty-six Earthyears.

Signe now issued two key men a ringing challenge.  “The Columbians know Norman stripped Gaea of ships, so they're still brazenly working the mine on Penn's Rock they refuse to relinquish—as if the metals Norman systematically plundered all over Gaea weren't loot enough.  Unmanned drones once routinely made the transit between that mine and Main World.  One of those carriers survives here.  Jassy, you'll reinstall the remote-controlling hardware Penn's grandson hid.  Conor, you'll refit the vehicle so that a twelve-member assault force can ride the outfit to the mine.  One of Third Corps' first-class vessels periodically descends there.  We'll seize that ship.”

Conor eyed his superior reflectively even as he nodded.  “I expect I'll be able to rig something.  Won't be any pleasurable jaunt, the trip we take in it, though.”  Nor any cinch, what you plan on pulling off, he qualified his assent mentally.

A soul-searing vision rose unbidden.  The utilitarian cabin faded.  Consumed with grief, heedless of his own life, Conor again charged towards the enemy force thrown back upon the barricade from which Ione's slayer had aimed the fatal pulse.  A wicked blade pierced flesh.  Yanking bloody steel free with strength amplified by his rage and his pain, the bereaved husband glimpsed terror in eyes that dulled as the dying foe dropped to be trod under boots that raced onwards.  Amid a yelling press of combatants, the Gaean maddened by blood-lust cut, slashed, thrust, hacked, and shouldered his way towards the burly, black-clad Columbian he targeted.

Unaware that he shouted, the attacker whose distinctively scarred face projected incandescent wrath leaped up the side of the barricade, left hand clawing at the packed debris, right still wielding the now-crimson sword.  A warrior-captain universally feared by men themselves redoubtable fighters rose to his full imposing height atop the pile, even as his adversary slipped out of the sling holding the device now wholly discharged, to brandish the heavy weapon like a club.  Maneuvering with consummate skill on the treacherous surface, the avenger drove thirty centimeters of steel into the guts of the foe that had felled his wife.  Surrounded by antagonists, he fought on with undiminished, deadly effect: killed, and killed again.

“We'll ride home in style, Conor.”  That confident prediction of Signe's jolted the veteran back to the present, and elicited one of the surviving spouse's rare smiles.

Heartened by that response, the Commander outlined her plan.  “Forty men staff the mine.  Ten will be occupied far below the surface.  Ten more will be asleep.  Twenty others will either be doing administrative tasks or relaxing on their off-time.  We'll dock during the spacers' main sleep-shift.  Their captain inspects goods consigned to a cargo ship that arrives once a fourweek, and transports precious metals Norman evidently refuses to trust to the cargo spacers.  This captain—always the same one—docks four days before the cargo ship descends, and leaves the day after it lifts.  The Columbians know we possess neither ships nor navigational skills.  They won't expect a strike.”

Conor's index finger absently traced the sword-cut scar furrowing a face seamed as much by cumulative personal loss as by age.  “Those carriers dock in slips adjacent to the habitat.  Won't the men manning the boards pick us up on their scanning screens?”

“Not after we spray the drone with a microlayer of Gaeanite.”

Comprehension, blended with shock, flashed across six faces.  Forgetting to signal that he wished to comment, Sean blurted out, “That would cost a fortune!”

No stickler for protocol when engaged in a discussion such as this, Signe failed even to notice the lack of the requisite gesture of the hand.  “In normal times, it would, Sean.  However, I've persuaded heads of patriotic mining families to donate a hoard of Gaeanite worth several fortunes, to the cause.  Your family, Sean—Morgan's father, and your own—proved especially generous.  From their distant rock, they're organizing and financing a crew of former employees living here on Main World, who'll apply a microlayer of the mineral by vacuum vapor deposition.  That coating will absorb all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation illuminating the drone, thereby rendering the vehicle undetectable on scanning screens.  Our plasma exhaust will show on multispectral screens, as well as on the vid, but since the former are time-delayed by ten minutes, and no crew monitoring the traffic in the space over a base ever glances at the vid, I'm confident that we'll descend undetected.  Jassy, you'll be able to prevent the carrier's contact with the slip from giving notice to the men manning the boards at the mine, will you not?”

“I'll rig a way.”

His imagination fired by Signe's visualization, Morgan chortled, “The Columbians won't know where we dropped from!”

Theo again recalled the past.  “We owe a major debt to those patriots who died rather than let the smallest sample of the alloy fall into Norman's hands, during ten Earthyears of occupation,” he reminded his comrades, shuddering at the thought of what course history would have taken had Norman ever discovered the strategic value of the rare substance, scoured the Group in a murderous quest for hidden hoards, and rendered his military ships undetectable.

We do indeed , Sean agreed feelingly, if silently, recalling the summary execution of a well-loved cousin who, knowing that interrogation under truth compeller would force him to reveal where he hid the treasure in his keeping, had set off a detonation of blasting gel, thereby obliterating a considerable quantity of the precious mineral even as the invaders bent on pillage stormed into the mining facility owned by his family.

Frowning, Sean directed a question at Signe, while resting his eyes on Jassy.  “How do we avoid dying when the drone enters the fields that protect the hull of the habitat from the impacts of meteoroids?”

In response to Signe's gesture, the expert offered a welcome reassurance.  “The drones emit a signal that deactivates the fields in the slips and surrounding area upon their approach.”

“Will we find a pressurized route leading to the occupied part of the complex?”

Meeting Conor's sternly interrogatory glance squarely, Signe unhesitatingly stated the wholly valid concern that she knew prompted the query.  “That worries me, I'll freely admit.  If we blunder suited into an ambush, twelve aspiring spacer-fighters will die before they can offer even a token resistance.”

“Exactly my point,” Conor stated evenly.

“We'll die of suffocation before we arrive at our destination, if we vomit in the helmets of our pressure suits during the ride,” Eric interjected bluntly, considering that danger to be the worst facing them.

“We'll dose ourselves with the pills that prevent motion-sickness,” Signe countered.

“Those didn't do much for me when I made the transit to Columbia thirty Earthyears ago, nor did I fare any better on the return voyage.”  That epic journey rose vividly in the objector's memory, producing a grimace.

“I could pressurize the drone,” Conor offered musingly.  “Build into it three cabins from those lifeboats we disabled just before Norman escaped.  We could fly suited—don the helmets before leaving the carrier—but once we enter the mine…”  Two parallel creases furrowing the scarred warrior's forehead deepened further.

“I hardly expect that Norman's crews altered any of the life-support systems,” Signe declared, her brisk rebuttal producing nods of agreement from three of the officers listening intently.  “The entire habitat will most likely contain breathable air.  We'll shed our suits as soon as we enter the complex.  The Columbians won't be expecting any attack, so we shouldn't encounter a welcoming party.”

“If one shows up, we'll get caught—literally—with our pants down,” Conor retorted tartly, no whit loath to speak his mind to the Commander who routinely solicited the opinions of her staff-members before launching any direly hazardous strike.

Signe's silvery laugh, supportive rather than derisive, warmed her captains without lessening their reservations in the least degree.  “I'm afraid that's a risk we'll need to run,” the strategist declared stoutly.  “Four of us will pack military handweapons—eight will stay unencumbered to fight with swords.  We'll keep our battle-plan flexible.  Timing will be crucial.”

“Will we be able to fly that outfit back here if we're forced to retreat?”

“Only if one of us stays behind to throw the switch on the control panel,” the mechanical expert informed his comrade grimly.

His question prompted by curiosity, not fear, Morgan shrugged as he voiced the thought simultaneously striking his five peers.  “Retreat won't be an option, so we'll fight the harder for knowing that we've got to claw our way aboard that ship.”  Chancing to meet Theo's eyes, he added sardonically, “Providing we can reach a target defended by the whole forty-man garrison, plus a crew of twelve crack spacer-fighters.”

“You give a fight all you've got, whatever the chances of winning,” Theo countered, his impulsive commendation conveying admiration wholly unmixed with envy of a man younger than himself—a man whom the fighter-by-necessity perceived as designed by nature to be a warrior-adventurer.

“Stealth added to the advantage conferred by the element of surprise might well balance odds that seem at first glance damned poor,” Conor observed thoughtfully.

“Plus a healthy dose of luck,” Sean added equably, no whit unnerved by the danger he would shortly face.

“We'll aim for readiness a day before the targeted vessel is due to descend, Conor,” Signe declared, her tone signaling an end to the period of discussion.  “Whatever assistance you require, commandeer.  Morgan and Sean, you'll lend a hand with the crew your family provides.  Our assault force will consist of the seven of us, plus Yuri, Malcolm, Jess, Teeny, and Madelyn.”

“Gaean spacers,” Sean breathed.  “We'll make the snatch.  We can't afford not to.”  Youthful, handsome features bearing a strong resemblance to Morgan's projected wholehearted acceptance of the need to run a formidable risk.

Consciously exerting the full power of an indomitable will, Eric banished the insidious doubts still plaguing him.  “We'll do our damnedest,” he vouchsafed calmly.

When have you ever done otherwise? Signe silently commended the man she unerringly judged to be still not wholly convinced of the feasibility of her plan.

The day came when Signe's assault team lay harnessed into couches, four people to each of three cabins installed by Conor inside the drone.  Of the twelve men and women, Eric alone guessed accurately just how stressful this lift in a vessel not designed to accommodate the sensitivity of human stomachs, musculature, or delicate mechanisms of the inner ear, would prove.  Ordeal, this flight will be , he warned his alter ego glumly.  I hope to hell this ancient outfit holds together under the strains of the lift!

Lying tautly within the rigid, fluid-filled cocoon equipped with a breathing regulator—standard gear designed to mitigate the effects of accelerating out of the gravity wells of planetoids so dense that the mass of the largest approached that of Earth—Signe gripped the exterior of the harness with one hand, and a glass-cloth bag providing insurance against disaster with the other.  Her eyes fixed upon the clock installed by the meticulous mechanical genius, the Commander counted down the final, seemingly endless seconds until the time set for launch.

Amid a shuddering visible throughout the fabric of the cramped cabin, and a silence the more eerie for the magnitude of the brutal force slamming harnessed bodies downwards into the couches, the ungainly vehicle soared into the void.

Finding the physical effects worse than she expected, Signe fought a devastating onslaught of nausea.  The same pressure that assaulted her magnificent physique acted on the fluid in the harness, enabling her finely conditioned body to maintain the flow of blood to her brain, even as the regulator assisted her to breathe.  The athlete's digestive arrangements shrieked protest as the first rigor ended.  Weightless now, she readied herself to face new trauma.

That came in the guise of a series of yawing motions that the passengers within the carrier experienced as harrowing sideways thrusts.  Endeavoring to conquer savagely increased interior stress, the landsman wholly unused to violent changes in motion felt her head drop, and her body tilt, as the drone abruptly changed direction.  Assailed by uncontrollable nausea, she retched violently into the self-sealing glass-cloth bag clutched in one hand.

Sean succumbed to the power of suggestion produced by the Commander's surrender.  Eric lay spent, having been overcome before the drone completed the liftoff.  On the other side of Eric, Teeny, a husky, carrot-haired, female Amazon, her spectacularly homely face contorted into a grimace of disgust, listened, sniffed the overpoweringly pungent aroma, and vomited noisily into her own receptacle.

Johann's ghost, you've no self-control left, woman, the Spartan-souled leader castigated her alter ego as she sealed her brimming bag.  Am I glad we didn't wear the helmets—and that I didn't deposit this ghastly offering in mine, hanging there like an upturned basin off the neck-ring of this suit!   Exerting all the strength of a will fully as indomitable as Eric's, she strove to control her still-queasy stomach.

A seemingly interminable period of weightlessness followed, as the drone now in free flight sped towards its destination.  Veteran combatants forced adrenaline-charged bodies to rest, in anticipation of action to come.  Even as she did likewise, the Commander methodically reviewed certain knowledge painstakingly acquired against the arrival of this day.  Emerging from a state of intense concentration, she glanced at the clock.  Death and damnation, we're about to descend!  Hang on, woman.  Hang on!

The violent motion mercifully ceased.  Pale and hollow-eyed, Signe threw off the top half of her harness, and lurched unsteadily to her feet.  Rising shakily, Sean managed a wry grin.  The woman fighting an attack of dry heaves flashed him a wan smile before tipping her helmet over her head.  Cautiously, each of the pair checked the seal of the other's helmet and gloves, as did Eric and Teeny.  Four raiders activated the life-support packs integral to the cumbersome suits.

Preceding her subordinates, the leader emerged into the hard vacuum of the slip.  The drone doesn't seal to a lock, she noted as she climbed awkwardly through the pressure-proof door to exit the makeshift lock rigged by her mechanically adept captain between the last cabin and the hatch leading out of the cavernous cargo bay.  Conor figured it right.  Remote-controlled robots must have unloaded these blasted outfits.  What if we fail to gain access to the habitat?  Damn!  There's got to be an entry!  The miners surely made repairs at times!

Suppressing the bone-chilling fears assailing her, the daring risk-taker stalked down the slanting walkway.  Ghostly light shed by the splendid turquoise planet dominating the star-strewn black vault of space reflected eerily off the huge bloated form of the drone.  Pale radiance illumined the metal deck traversed by the warrior patently conscious of bucking long odds.

Intent on gaining entry, Signe cast no entranced glance at the dark, rocky surface of the planetoid: rugged terrain that stretched away on three sides.  A landscape pitted with craters born of random acts of cosmic violence failed to capture any fraction of her attention.  The eyes behind the faceplate of the helmet minutely scrutinized the metallic hull-plates of the habitat rising steeply, directly ahead of the suited leader.

There's a lock.  Hopefully, the door's not barred from within—ahh.   The touch of a gloved finger on a switch set the heavy panel swinging open, to reveal utter blackness.  Did they shut off the power? the Commander asked herself in dismay.  No.  The outer door wouldn't have opened in that case.  The lighting malfunctioned, perhaps, due to no one's ever venturing into this part of the complex.

Twelve silver-suited forms crowded into the cramped enclosure.  Hands groped along the walls.  Producing a pocket-torch, Signe located the panel.  Is this a trap? she wondered uneasily as the door behind the raiders sealed, and the lock filled with air.  I'll sweat blood until we shed these suits!

Armed with a massive electronic handweapon suspended in a sling at his waist, Jassy positioned himself next to Theo, who bore another.  Teeny and Yuri, similarly armed, ranged themselves alongside the two men standing in the forefront of a space all knew might form the point of aim of a patrol staging an ambush.

Gear for action, woman.  The inner door swung open, revealing a loading dock that stretched away empty.  A thin film of dust lay undisturbed on the metal deck, and shrouded massive machinery.  Dim, harsh light radiated from fixtures set into hull-plates curving high overhead, reflecting unevenly from smudged deck-plates and grimy metal walls.  The door to the cubicle housing the controls for lifting the drones stood ajar.  No footprint sullied the dust carpeting its threshold: an accumulation testifying to Earthyears of neglect.

Twelve tense intruders breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Holding up a hand in a gesture of warning, Conor detached a meter from a ring on the front of his suit, and tested the air pressure.  Reassured, he boldly removed his helmet, and inhaled deeply.  At his nod, eleven fellow raiders shed helmets and gloves.  Eight men turned their backs upon four women, and prearranged pairs assisted each other out of the pressure suits, emerging stark naked to don slate blue uniforms packed in bags snapped to rings integral to the suits.

Strong hands buckled belts from which hung carriers holding long, rapier-like, sheathed swords.

“About face,” Signe commanded, when the women finished dressing.  Frowning in concentration, she stood tautly still, orienting herself spatially so as to retain an accurate sense of direction.  At her nod, the others hastily concealed the suits behind ponderous equipment.

Succumbing to curiosity, Sean slipped into the cubicle to view the gear used to lift the drones.  His eyes widened as he beheld a faded but legible map of the entire complex stenciled on the wall.

“Signe!  Cast an eye!” he exhorted in delight.

“Shades of the ancients!”

Twenty minutes later, Jassy glided on noiseless, booted feet into a dimly lit barrack crowded with metal bunks.  Planting himself in a strategic position, he stood, legs apart, eyes pitiless behind the goggles equipped with an imager for aiming the massive electronic weapon.  The red dot of the tracer illuminated the chest of one of ten miners awakened by a strident command chillingly couched in a heavy Gaean accent.  Madelyn's sword-point pricked the neck of a man lying rigidly still.  Red drops welled up to bead the hollow of the Columbian's throat.

“Make a single movement, and we'll wipe half of you before it's completed!” Jassy barked. That ominous warning produced the desired effect.

In the cabin across the corridor, Yuri, flanked by Jess and Malcolm, held the tracer of a second electronic weapon centered on one of seven dumbfounded occupants of the dining hall.  In an open area beyond those sites, Teeny aimed a third such device at the entrance to the elevators leading to the lower levels of the mine.

Conor stood nearby, selectively damaging the machinery that operated the commodious, wire-enclosed cages, so as to strand the current shift of ten workers below the surface of the planetoid.  Theo guarded the corridor leading to the military base.  In the communications cabin, Eric, blade in hand, kept a sharp eye on the board.  Morgan and Sean each held at sword-point one of the two officers in charge of the mining operation.  In the adjoining office, Signe confronted a hard-bitten spacer.

Rage consumed the Columbian Lieutenant confronting the enemy he instantly recognized.  Hair of a silvery hue universally betokening an age in excess of an Earthcentury, uncannily framing a face undeniably that of a young woman, flaunted Signe's identity to her foe.  Standing frozen into immobility opposite a lone adversary, the professional soldier gambled against substantial odds.

Possessed of hair-trigger reflexes honed by ten Earthyears of bitter experience gained simultaneously with intensive training in martial arts, the legendary warrior saw her foe's forefinger curl, and caught a glimpse of the blue-black spot marring the fair skin of its tip.  Before the Columbian could achieve the necessary peak of mental effort needed to launch the small but deadly projectile implanted under his skin—a missile that would envelop his captor in a cloud of instantly lethal droplets of nerve-poison—the Gaean leader impaled the attacker on her gleaming blade.

A shriek shivered the air, reverberating off the metal walls.  Eyes blazing, Signe pulled her steel free as her adversary slumped inertly to the deck, to gasp his last, strangled breaths.  In a gesture practical rather than malevolent, the victor wiped her red-stained sword on the tunic of her fallen foe.

Two other Columbians stared past her through the door she slid open, their eyes glued to the dying spacer.  “He tried to use his implant,” the survivor of the encounter hissed.  “Mistake, that.”

As Eric forced one of the pair against the wall, Signe thrust the tip of her gleaming blade against the man's chest.  “Want to avoid joining your cohort on the deck?” she inquired in a tone calculated to intimidate.  The Columbian nodded mutely, seemingly afraid that his voice might not remain steady.  “Man this board,” came the peremptory order.  “Take exceeding care.  Let slip the faintest hint to the spacers handling the board of the military base that something's wrong here, and my captain will instantly skewer you.”

Without speaking a word, the captive thus bluntly adjured seated himself at the panel.  “Leave the vid off if anyone calls you,” Signe instructed.  “Use only the audio.  Tell the base the vid malfunctioned, but your partner has the problem all but solved.”  The Columbian nodded again, glancing uneasily from the silver-haired warrior to the swordsman whose readiness to slay an uncooperative enemy he unerringly divined.  Visibly bracing himself, the thoroughly cowed miner concentrated on handling the complex communications center.

Conor appeared in the doorway.  “That crew below is trapped.  There's a shaft sporting a ladder, but I left my subordinate aiming her handweapon through the hatch, and told the crew that over the intercom.”

“Good.  Take this prisoner to the dining hall.”  Signe indicated the second captive, who remained flattened against a wall, eyeing the sword Sean held leveled at his vitals.  “Bind the miners, and bring the woman who's guarding them back with you.”

Having nodded, Conor strode away, prodding the unresisting head of the mining operation with the tip of his naked blade.  A short time later, he reappeared, followed by Jess.

Continuing to refrain out of old, ingrained habit from revealing the names of her warriors in the presence of enemies, Signe addressed Eric.  “If this man arouses your suspicion in the least way, kill him, and shut down the board.  Let those at the base think it malfunctioned altogether.”  Pointing in turn to Conor, Morgan, Sean, Jess, and Theo, she commanded, “You'll come with me.”  Turning to Eric, she announced, “You're in command here.  We'll raise you at this station after we gain our objective.”  Her crisp voice projected magnificent assurance.

Acting as he always did in a situation such as this, the Senior Captain betrayed no hint of his fear for the woman issuing those orders: the person for whom he cared the most of any alive.  Extending his steel, he allowed the tip to prick the neck of the man sweating at the panel.  “I'd as soon kill you as chance trusting you'll pull this off,” the swordsman confided with ominous softness, spacing his words for emphasis while stating utter truth.

Six raiders melted like wraiths through an untenanted, winding, metal-walled corridor.  Standing poised to thrust aside the heavy metal door leading to the military base, Signe whispered, “Morgan, you and Sean handle the men in the barrack—first door to the right.  Conor, you and Jess target the recreation hall—first left.  Theo, hit communications—second door on the left.  I'll cover the office.”

Two minutes later, Morgan and Sean stood with blades poised to pierce the throats of two spacer-fighters who had lain asleep.  Five others lay rigidly still, obeying their captor's stentorian command that they freeze, or see their two comrades instantly slain.

Simultaneously, Conor and Jess regarded the motionless backs of eleven miners who stood with arms upraised, facing a wall in the recreation hall—men paralyzed by dread after one of their number gasped the name of the one Gaean warrior, other than Signe, whose battle-marked face the enemy long ago managed to match with his eminently feared name.  In the communications cabin, Theo held the red dot of his tracer-beam on one of four spacers standing stiffly erect, their hands held palms-out at shoulder-height.

A rapid search mounted by the Commander uncovered a similar weapon.  That prize she delivered to Conor.  Shortly thereafter, the miners, their hands bound behind them with stout tape, filed into the barrack and dropped to sit cross-legged along a wall.  While the scarred warrior held the red dot of the tracer of the now warmed and ready handweapon on the chest of a burly spacer lying supine beneath the bedcover, Morgan, Sean and Jess thrust sword-tips against the throats of three equally motionless Columbians.

Having collected the sheathed swords hanging from belts slung over the foot of each bunk, Signe retrieved seven pairs of pants from an adjuster in the bathcabin, and tossed the garments onto the beds occupied by the spacers sleeping in the nude in accordance with universal custom.  When she again stood with bared sword in hand, poised to kill, she snapped an order for one man at a time to sit up, don his pants, and lie back down, warning that the slightest resistance would result in instant carnage.

Stifling impotent rage, seven tough spacer-fighters sullenly obeyed the directive.

Leaving Jess to back Conor, the Commander led Morgan and Sean to the communications cabin, where each of the two men grasped one of the Columbian Captain's arms in a grip of iron.

Signe fronted the officer immobilized against the wall.  Appraising eyes studied the trim, compact, supple body, and searched the hard-featured brown face lacking any claim to comeliness.  Deeming the officer intelligent, the shrewd judge of character inferred competence.

“Your name?” she asked.

“Dahl.”

The point of the raider's sword punctured the man's skin, just below his breastbone.  “I need your cooperation, Captain,” she informed her captive, raking him with icy eyes.  “We intend to lift your ship into orbit around this rock, and not a one of us has ever performed that maneuver.  You're going to show us how.”

“Teach you rebels to operate a military ship?  The hell I will!”  Dahl neither flinched nor averted his eyes as he couched that reply in a voice as steady as that of his world's archfoe.

The razor-sharp point sank deeper into unquivering flesh.  A small red stain momentarily wet the black fabric of the Columbian's uniform, before the cloth repelled it, producing a transitory wisp of pink cloud.  Signe's tone dripped menace.  “Are you prepared to die here and now rather than cooperate?”

“Yes.”

Strong fingers tightened on the sword-hilt.  A wrist of iron advanced an infinitesimal distance, causing a wider stain to test the efficacy of the uniform's adjustment.  Backed against the unyielding wall, the Columbian wordlessly conveyed stubborn intransigence to the warrior from whom he expected no quarter.  For a span of seconds in which for him, time stopped, he braced for the thrust that would end his life.

No swift impalement occurred.  Signe stepped back, breaking the contact of gleaming steel with flesh oozing blood.  “A patriot,” she rasped harshly, scathingly, enunciating each word with precise care.  “In Norman's Fleet.”  Her lip curled, but the agate eyes raking her obdurate adversary unmistakably accorded him respect.

Staring unwaveringly into the eyes boring into his, Dahl mastered incipient faintness, even as he cursed what he saw too late as culpable slackness in guarding against even a remote possibility of an attack.  How in hell did these supposedly shipless Gaeans dock?  No image of any sort whatsoever appeared on our scanning screens! he fumed, fighting the fear fogging his brain.

Having seen the miners placed in the custody of those guarding hostages, Signe issued orders to Conor and Sean to march the entire complement of surviving spacers to the ship.  Addressing Morgan, she commanded, “You'll personally escort this captain aboard.”  Turning, she strode off ahead of the warrior obeying that order.

Following in her wake, his arms raised, the muscles of his back involuntarily shrinking as the needle-sharp tip of the redhead's blade jabbed the skin between his shoulder blades, Dahl fought desperately to conquer the despair threatening to erode the self-command he had thus far so creditably maintained.

As Sean and Conor hustled ten glowering spacer-fighters to the inner lock roofed by the docking module of Dahl's vessel, Signe climbed the semicircular grillwork rising upwards to the juncture where the base of the module had sealed itself to the top of the lock when the ship docked.  Knowing full well that the air supporting the lives of all those occupying this enclosure—air supplied from tanks integral to the vessel—could be pumped back into the ship by a foe lurking aboard, the initiator of a hazardous venture felt the hair on the nape of her neck stir.  We'll all die spaced, if I've miscalculated, she conceded grimly, even as she forged ahead.  But this ship carries a crew of twelve, and we've accounted for that number of spacers.

Rising through the hole in the base of the elevator spanning the width of the docking module, the woman gambling her own life as well as those of comrades and foes stepped warily onto the deck ringing the circular aperture.  “Send up five men,” she called down to Conor.  “If any resists, run him through.”

Five sullen, barefooted hostages clad only in pants climbed through the opening onto the elevator platform ahead of Sean, to stand with arms held high as Signe touched the switch, setting the conveyance swiftly rising to the top of the dark well.  Exquisitely aware that two master swordsmen could kill or maim all of them if they attacked their captors barehanded, they made no such attempt.

Mounting the short ladder, the Gaean leader rose, naked sword in hand, through the hatch into the bridge of the ship.  As she watched, poised to kill, Sean bound with stout tape the wrists the captives reluctantly thrust out at Signe's command.

No enemy materialized.  Leaving Sean to guard the five Columbians ordered to lie prone on the deck, Signe turned to her left, and advanced across the width of the bridge, passing between the command center composed of four couches fronting an imposing conglomerate of screens and other electronic gear, and the rear wall lined with lockers.  Her every sense on hair-trigger alert, she entered the narrow corridor stretching away in front of her, and halted at the first of two doors: a sliding panel distinguished by a numeral: three.  Having thrust the door aside without exposing her body to any enemy who might be lurking within, she entered the cabin, and crossed that cramped space featuring two bunks.

Exhibiting equal caution, she proceeded through the bathcabin, and locked from the outside the door leading from that facility to Cabin Four.  A swift but thorough search of Cabin Three resulted in confiscation of an array of swords and knives.  Satisfied that no weapons remained, the Commander imprisoned the first contingent of hostages in quarters designed to accommodate only two crewmen.

Dahl came to a halt within the cylindrical expanse of the inner lock.  Turning, he faced the Gaean raider whose height exceeded his own, whose right hand held a gleaming blade leveled at his captive's chest, and whose glinting green eyes actively sought to detect the slightest hint of resistance sufficient to justify a thrust through his charge's vitals.  Tales of Signe's ruddy-haired captain's exploits swirled through a mind frantically searching for a way out of a situation guaranteed not only to wreck a cherished career, but also to initiate appalling consequences to Columbia.  Poised to demand his guard's name, the prisoner heard a curt order to mount the semicircular grillwork giving access to the elevator.

Fatalistically, Dahl shrugged.  I won't live to pass on the news even if I do manage to tag Signe's thrice-damned redhead with a name familiar to us! he railed as smoldering anger flared into hot rage.  His nerves quivering, the Columbian preceded his guard through the hatch.  Turning, he fronted his captors, while managing to preserve an impassive expression.

“Search Cabin One for weapons, and lock the door leading to Two,” Signe commanded.  Refusing to allow the unfamiliar complexity of the bridge upon which she stood to daunt her, she issued that directive to Sean in a tone breathing serene assurance.  As the recipient of the order strode away to her right, and entered a corridor the twin of the one leading to the quarters on the opposite side of the bridge, thoughts cascaded through the rebel leader's consciousness, momentarily freezing her statuesque body into immobility.

Aware at some subliminal level that Earthmen dead twenty thousand of their planet's years crafted this durable artifact, Signe succumbed to an overmastering accession of awe.  This prize I so covet rode to this star-system clamped to the hull of the Gaea, the Columbia, or Johann's Flagship , she marveled.  Standing motionless, the martial descendant of galactic pioneers swept a calculating glance over the complex array of navigational and communications equipment forming the dominant feature of the bridge: the board from which those on duty operated the vessel.  Fascinated, she surveyed the four couches facing the board, the walls lined with lockers, and the inner plates of the hull curving across the upper reaches of the bridge.

The hatch overhead caught and held her attention.  Mentally the raider visualized the exterior of the ship, a sight she had seen only on video screens: the sole method by which members of her civilization could view their inhospitable universe, unless they exited the windowless, water-filled double hulls of ships or habitats to stare into fearsome infinity through a faceplate, while trusting vulnerable respiring bodies to the fragile armor of a pressure suit.

A lofty geometric construct took form in the woman's interior vision: an unimaginably precious warship composed of a horizontal toroidal ring embracing within its circumference a similar but slightly smaller vertical shape, the twinned whole encompassing a spherical volume of empty space.  Those interlocked structures, the larger over one hundred meters in diameter, would have reminded an ancient Earthman of two doughnuts intersecting at right angles.  The imposing sight offered the viewer the sense that the austerely simple main framework rested delicately, improbably, upon the slender column of the docking module.  That latter component rose vertically from the rim of the lock that matched its diameter, bearing the far grander body of the vessel on its top, like Atlas standing erect under the weight of a world.

A down-curving, graceful heat shield protected the hull above and the module below its creamy sweep, from the inconceivable heat of water exploding into plasma when the propulsive system activated.  A collar of burnished mirror encircled the docking module at a distance, angled so as to reflect incredibly powerful laser beams issuing from generators rimming the outer edge of the horizontal torus.  That concentrated might of intense light the mirror redirected upward and inward, to heat the ring of orifices girdling the top of the module: openings from which direly costly water fuel spewed with reckless prodigality to provide thrust.  Designed to lift off airless planetoids and ply the hard vacuum of space, the vessel requiring no aerodynamic shape sported none.

That brief, intense visualization of her priceless acquisition faded.  Pressing a switch on the arm of the second helm couch, Signe watched as the board slid upwards, and the seat upholstered in leather-like fabric assumed the position used during launch.  A touch on another switch set the flaccid harness integral to the couch, filling with fluid.

At her nod, Morgan thrust Dahl down into the contoured hollow.  Crossing her victim's arms, she bound each of his hands to the opposite forearm with sticky glass tape.  Deftly, she fastened the top half of the harness over the man's torso and legs, exquisitely aware of the hatred mirrored in the obsidian eyes raking her person.

At the Commander's order, Conor escorted his five captives onto the bridge, where he assisted Signe and Morgan to confine them in Cabin One.  Standing in the corridor affording access to that half of the living quarters, the leader following a preconceived plan targeted Conor and Sean with a forefinger.  “You'll back those ashore, who guard the hostages,” she informed the pair in a tone pitched so as to prevent Dahl's overhearing her words.  Indicating Morgan and Theo, she announced, “You two will man the board in the military base.”

She means to lift—without any of us aboard!   Flayed by that unnerving certainty, Morgan shot the woman for whom he felt more than comradely concern a glance of frowning disapproval.  The forbidding scowl his wordless reproach engendered prompted him to respond by shrugging his broad shoulders directly in Signe's sight.  He nonetheless obeyed her order.  Striding out onto the bridge, he dropped through the hatch in the wake of the others.

Signe seated herself in the first helm couch.  The insertion of an invention of Jassy's into a port on the board allowed her to bypass the feature requiring the operator to key in the startup-code to activate the ship's systems.  Reclining, the interloper drew the top half of the harness over her, and fastened the cocoon encasing her from feet to chest.  The directory of the functions available rose on a screen.  Accessing those supplying certain data, she studied the display, ignoring Dahl the while.

Video screens showed the space outside the hull as the human eye would perceive the view.  Graphic displays depicted a stylized image of the vessel resting upon the lock.  After launch, the neophyte knew, the progress of the ship along its programmed flight path would appear on those screens.  Boldly, she scrolled through the program for lifting the ship.

Dahl lay watching his world's archfoe, the fear convulsing his gut twitching not one muscle of his lean, brown, tough face.

At length, Signe turned merciless eyes on her captive.  “I've altered the circumstances, Dahl,” she asserted levelly, each word stabbing like a knife into the man's vitals.  “The choice you make now will affect ten of your people, not merely yourself.  That may cause you to reconsider your decision.  I'll accept any instruction you offer me.  If you give me none, I'll do the best I can with the theoretical knowledge I've acquired.”

“If you crash this ship against the lock, you'll destroy ship and station, and kill your complement of veteran captains,” Dahl observed evenly.

Admiration generated a fleeting, sarcastic smile.  “Along with forty miners and all ten of your surviving spacers—men whose lives you value.”  Intuitively, the Gaean sensed the fear underlying the Columbian's hard-held control.  Her incisive voice shaded into a calculatedly reasoned tone as she observed, “Dahl, if each one of you in turn made the sacrifice you stood ready to make back there, that collective response wouldn't have kept us out of space.  One way or another, we'll achieve mobility in the void.  If you decide to cooperate, you'll save at least eleven Columbian lives, and all you'll give us is time.  Think about that.”  Having raked with a penetrating glance the trussed Captain bleakly digesting her words, Signe turned her full attention to performing certain necessary computations.

Dahl strained suddenly against the tape.  An adrenaline rush lent strength born of desperation to muscular arms and wrists—strength inadequate to enable him to breach the bonds.  Giving up the effort, he mastered himself.  Stony-faced, he watched his enemy painstakingly calculate, feed the results into the program, and check her work against a similar sequence stored in the ship's databank.

Noting a disparity, Signe frowned.  Keeping his voice steady, Dahl explained how to correct the error.  The usurper accepted the advice gravely, as if she expected it to be offered.  Having recalculated, she entered new figures.  Her mentor continued to coach her.  At length, satisfied that the program would lift the vessel safely into a low orbit around the planetoid, the Gaean reached for the control governing the propulsive system.

A sharp objection from her captive jangled nerves strung to fever pitch.

“Signe, wait,” Dahl barked.  “Your hostages are crammed five to a cabin featuring only two harness-equipped bunks.  Let me warn my spacers what to expect.”  They face trauma you could have spared them, had you taken the time to allow them to use eight bunks and two of the couches out here, the dispossessed Captain fumed inwardly.  You have to know that much!

Shades of my ancestors, I thought only of securing them, the woman intensely focused on her self-imposed task chided herself.  Well, those superbly trained spacers won't suffer any harm.  Damned if I'll put myself out to show compassion to brutes themselves incapable of pity.  Wordlessly, she switched on the intercommunication system long enough to allow her captive to address the hostages.

“You're in no extreme danger,” Dahl ended his communication.  Not yet, anyway, the Columbian mentally qualified that reassurance delivered in a crisp, calm voice.  Damn this daring bitch!

Resolutely, Signe pulled the lever that caused the air to be withdrawn from the lock, activated the mechanism that would, at the proper time, allow release of the clamps holding ship to lock, and initiated the lift sequence.  The ensuing surge of nausea she dominated by forcing herself to concentrate on the job at hand.  A slight disorientation added to her distress, as her gaze shifted from the forward video screen, in which unwinking stars seemed to flow in stately grandeur across an immense blackness, to the panel displaying the rear view.

Fascinated, the Gaean watched the planetoid drop rapidly away, faintly visible as a black shape obscuring a shifting panoramic sprawl of other star-veiled black deeps.  The giant turquoise planet, which the barren rock orbited, hung in majestic splendor, evoking wonder in the beholder seeing it for the first time on the huge, exceptionally high-resolution screens integral to the board of an Earth-built military ship.

Swiveling her eyes to the graphic display, she followed the ship's progress along the spiral trajectory, noting the colorful depiction of the programmed orbit.  Gamely, she sought to interpret the rapidly changing figures projected to the right of that screen—to no avail.  Fervently hoping that those numbers indicated no problem needing manual correction, she stole a glance at her captive, and satisfied herself that he monitored data foreign to her understanding.

Excitement mounted as Signe watched the ship's trajectory merge into the projected orbit on the graphic display.  When the downward force pressing her into the couch vanished, she touched the switch that set the vertical torus rotating within its protective sheath.  Stoically, she ignored the violent protest from her stomach as a powerful sideways thrust racked her tense body.  That discomfort vanished after the angular speed reached a uniform rate, producing a sense that the occupants of the vessel once again possessed weight.

An audible sigh of relief escaped the usurper.  I have to admire this captain's guts, she silently admitted.   Well, he'll need them, in short order.  Turning, she studied her tight-lipped captive, the inflexibility of her determination obvious to him.  Projecting supreme assurance, she demanded to be shown how to enter a call-code that would enable those manning the board on the station to initiate the programmed sequence so that the vessel would descend and dock automatically.

His pulse racing, Dahl weighed that order.  Is this accursed slut insuring against my refusing to show her how to dock?  Should I try to keep her stranded here in orbit until Norman sends a ship?  Some hotheaded captain who'd willingly sacrifice an Earth-armed vessel to annihilate Signe—not to mention a discredited rival officer who failed abysmally in his duty?  That's an option…no.  No way.  The damned whore would forge ahead regardless, and most likely make some egregious error that'd end with the ship's crashing into the station, killing fifty-one men instead of eleven.  So do it, spacer.  Keeping his voice even, the Columbian coached his captor, who programmed a descent sequence, and entered a call-code known only to herself and Dahl.

That task completed, Signe raised her couch and that of her mentor.  Unfastening her harness, she gained her feet.  A vague uneasiness forced itself on her awareness, and troubled her splendid physique.  Recalling that certain physical effects inevitably took a toll on Earth-evolved bodies when their owners sought to function within man-made rotating systems, the novice ignored the disturbing sensations.

Startled, apprehensive, chafing at his helplessness, Dahl watched his foe warily as she freed him of his harness.  Acting with speed generated by the imminence of achieving a cherished goal, Signe strapped her captive's taped forearms against his chest, bound his feet together, and refastened the stiff fabric around him.

What in hell is this demented wretch doing? Dahl railed in impotent fury.  She can't intend…  Suffering shades of the hordes of Earth, she's insane!  She'll kill all of us!

Seating herself, the apprentice snapped an order into the intercommunication system.  “Signe here.  Prepare for weightlessness.”  As her hand pressed the button that stopped the rotation of the torus, she stoically endured the ensuing sideways thrust.  When that passed, she freed the Columbian's trussed body from the protective gear.  Determinedly, she propelled herself and him upwards to the hatch leading to the lock of a lifeboat.

When the hatch-cover sprang open in response to a touch on a switch integral to an inner plate of the hull, she floated her burden into the lock.  Having closed the cover behind her, she opened the one ahead of her, and rose through the docking module of the lifeboat moored to its lock on the hull of the mothership, tugging the taut form of her captive.

Strong hands thrust Dahl's immobilized person into the inflated bottom half of the harness integral to one of the four couches crowding the cramped interior of the small craft.  After slashing the bonds on his ankles, Signe fastened the glowering occupant into the cocoon of fluid-filled fabric.

Driven by determination bordering on the fanatical, the usurper strapped herself into the next couch, and surveyed her surroundings.  In front of the seats permanently contoured so as to allow the occupants' bodies to recline with knees bent and shoulders slightly raised, no window loomed.  Screens offered the operator the sole means of seeing where the craft headed.  Below those screens, various meters, panels, and other equipment stretched in daunting array.  Controls for manual operation fronted each couch, within easy reach.

The woman's action confirmed the unwilling instructor's worst suspicions.  Aghast, he exclaimed hoarsely, “Signe, you can't mean to try to fly a lifeboat!  The ship, yes.  Its guidance and navigational system is fully automatic—controls the vessel, once you program the sequence.  This boat requires some manual operations!  You have to be trained—practice on simulations, and then with an instructor!  What you plan is suicidal!”

Eyes gone glacial regarded the man offering that vehement objection.  “Not suicidal, Dahl,” Signe declared evenly.  “Desperate, I'll grant you, but not the other.  I'll do all in my power to assure that I live through the attempt.”

“You and I alone know the call-code!  If we're killed, you'll leave ten men stranded in orbit!”

“I checked the inventory.  Your spacers won't suffer from hunger before a ship arrives.  Its crewmen can dock a lifeboat on the empty lock, and take them off.”

“If you employ too great a thrust off, you'll slow the mothership's velocity,” Dahl snarled, barely controlling his rage.  “It'll drop to a lower orbit—speed up!  Activating the call-code afterwards will result in a crash!”

“Then you'd better figure on offering me some intensive instruction before I undock.”

Frantically, the irate Columbian struggled to retain his self-control, his hard-bitten face contorted not only by wrath, but by the fear he lacked the power at this point in time to conceal.  Maintaining his grip on himself, he rasped, “I can probably talk you off the ship without a disaster.  I'll try my damnedest.  I can also make certain that you program a trajectory correctly, but the final phase of docking on the lock on the station must be done manually.  You have to be trained, Signe!  Trained to handle the controls with automatic ease!  You'll be denied the time to think out what to do!  Make one mistake, and I won't be able to talk fast enough to instruct you how to correct your error before both of us die spaced—our boat blown, and perhaps the station as well!  Unfasten my arms, at least.  Let me back you!”

The derisive laughter provoked by that suggestion jarred the protester badly.  “No, Dahl, I won't do that,” the usurper declared adamantly.  “With only his own life to consider, a man possessing your capacity for self-sacrifice might engineer a crash just to kill me.  I'll chance dying while trying to learn, but I won't make you a free gift of my death.  So plan a quick course of instruction—one highly comprehensive.  Once I've learned what I need to know, I'll bring the ship down with no delay.  My word on that.”

Hearing finality in the assured voice, Dahl forced himself to take two deep, slow breaths, and concentrate on doing what he saw as an impossible task.  Stifling all emotion, he put his trainee through a grueling practice drill, until he felt certain that the hands grasping stick and throttle would respond automatically to situations perceived by a mind able to decide in a split second what movement the highly maneuverable boat needed to make.  The accursed bitch learns fast, the Captain used to instructing recruits grudgingly conceded.  Damn her to slow rot!

Focusing the full power of a keen intelligence on her self-imposed, chancy task, coached by the foe whose inner turmoil she sensed, but ignored, Signe programmed a sequence designed to send the small vessel into a trajectory that would spiral it downwards, to the vicinity of the lock on the station.  Intent on her captive's words, she heard him emphasize that during the last hundred meters of that descent, the program would cease to be fully automatic.  Storing his concise admonitions in a capacious memory, she prepared for an ordeal.  Her face a mask of calm, she listened as Dahl catalogued the disasters that would result from various mistakes she could easily make.  Far from faltering, she hardened her resolve to extract all possible value from a unique, non-reproducible opportunity.

Signe switched on the power.  Dahl watched as the vault of space—blackness emblazoned with myriads of resplendent stars, bisected by the semicircular curve of the vertical torus of the mothership—took form on the top half of the left video screen.  Swiveling his head, he fixed his eyes on the dual scanning screens, one of which presented the same view in graphic form.  The second double screen portrayed the bottom curve of the vertical torus upon which their craft rested.

Methodically, the pinioned spacer offered precise instruction that he desperately hoped would enable a novice daring to the point of blind fanaticism to lift the lifeboat with requisite gentleness off the lock.  Calmly, he warned her to avoid crashing into the vertical torus as she maneuvered the boat through the limited space encompassed by the twin constructs, so as to emerge in close proximity to the vessel orbiting the planetoid.

“Once we clear the mothership, we'll be flying in formation with it—moving along the same orbital path with the same velocity.  From that position, our programmed descent trajectory will begin automatically, at the optimum time.  We'll program that sequence before we lift,” Dahl stated in a voice held commendably level.

Signe carried out the task, needing only a few minor corrections from the tutor whose respect for his captor took a quantum leap.  “Not bad, your grasp of theory,” he commended her noncommittally.  “Did someone teach you?”

“I learned on my own—studied for Earthyears, using texts accessed from our world's bank.”

Shades of the slain!   Staring in wonder, Dahl shook his head, as admiration contended with gut-knotting fear.  His anger he kept rigorously confined below the plane of his consciousness.  His voice steady, he cautioned against the fatal error of giving the small craft too much thrust.  Searchingly, he stared into the face plainly projecting an inflexible resolve to succeed or perish in the attempt.

Sweat channeled down the captive's forehead to sting his eye.  Unable to alleviate the discomfort, he blinked repeatedly, prompting his trainee to withdraw a square of cloth from a pocket, and wipe his face.  His mouth compressed into a tight line, he passed no comment.  “Withdraw the air from the lock, activate the thrust, and lift us off,” he ordered, the knot in his gut like stone.

Signe obeyed.  Reflexes trained to an unbelievable degree of swiftness by half a lifetime of perfecting skill at swordsmanship and a decade-long, relentless pursuit of excellence at a martial art, served the warrior as well now as in a fight for her life.  Her touch light and sure on the controls, her coordination superb, she lifted the lifeboat, which floated up like a wisp of cloud to hover in the space above the bottom curve of the vertical torus.

“Good.  Throttle to starboard—easy, now.  Keep going.  Farther—slow us!  A bit more—creep, damn it!”

Watch yourself, woman.  Straining eyes fixed themselves on the imposing upward sweep of the vertical torus.  Hands deftly maneuvered the small craft past that obstacle.  Emerging from the confines of the ring, the boat proceeded outwards, passing beyond the larger circumference of the horizontal torus.  The puny artifact surrounded by star-dotted infinitude continued to distance itself from the parent vessel still dominating the view in the screens.

“Far enough.  Stop us.  So.  We're flying in formation with the mothership.  Activate the descent sequence.”

Nothing visibly changed as the novice obeyed.  The navigational system of the small vessel executed the program.  Having locked onto reference stars, the automatic controls oriented the boat, and prepared to initiate the first of several periodic bursts of retrothrust necessary to transfer the small vehicle into the programmed trajectory from an exactly determined, optimum point in the ship's orbit.  Striving to relax, the woman feasted her eyes on the silvery twinned rings stretching the width of the video screens.

Scanning the face vividly reflecting the breathless exhilaration induced by her initial experience of guiding a lifeboat manually, Dahl could detect no hint of fear.  I have to hand it to the bitch , he conceded bitterly.  She's a natural at flying!

At length, Signe felt an invisible hand press her body back into the couch, as the guidance system sent them spiraling down out of orbit.  Raptly, she watched the brown, cratered surface of the planetoid—rugged terrain thrown into sharp relief—grow ever more detailed as they approached.  The terminator between the dark and sunlit hemispheres became visible.  The lifeboat plunged into night-side blackness that in no way affected the view on the scanning screens.  Within minutes, the tiny entity emerged from the shadow to plummet towards the pitted, barren hemisphere bathed in the light of the distant sun.

“Get ready to operate manually,” Dahl warned, his voice hoarse but steady.

Her heart hammering, Signe stared intently at the detailed, graphically depicted image.  The station came into view.  Panels on the board monitored various aspects of their motion.  Their rate of descent gradually slowed, as the retrothrust decelerated the craft.

“This is it—where you take over!” Dahl gasped.  “Throttle us starboard—more!  Aft—slow us!  Easy, now. You can see the lock.  You're drifting to the port side again!  Don't…  That's better.  Slow us almost to a stop.  Slow the descent!  More!  Roll us just—good!  Now, set us down!”

An unvoiced, anguished cry reverberated through the consciousness of the man galled past bearing by his helplessness.  Mind at a white heat of concentration, the neophyte matched the stem-like docking module of the mushroom-shaped lifeboat exactly with the docking site, her heart thudding as the clamps automatically locked the vessel upon contact.

Slumping into his couch, her coach let out a long, ragged sigh that caused Signe to regard him with eyes grown suddenly frigid.  “Too soon to relax, Dahl.  You're not finished giving your lesson,” she informed him levelly.

The captive's body visibly jerked back into rigidity.  “What in hell…”  Biting back the lurid obscenity that threatened to tear out of a throat gone dry as dust, he rasped, “You can't intend…”

Interrupting his protest, his captor stated forcefully, “We're going to rendezvous with the ship, and I'm going to dock us on the lock.”

“Signe, you're mad!  Insane!  That's far harder to do than this!  If you crash against the ship, you'll blow it and us!  And if you simply wipe the lock, killing only us, you'll make it impossible for a boat to dock and take my crewmen off!  They'll starve—slowly and horribly!  You and I alone know the call-code!  And even if your men learn it—use it after our impact alters the orbit—the ship will crash!”

Softening her tone, Signe replied calmly, “I know all that, Dahl.  Your crew won't starve.  I'll give mine the call-code—at least insure your spacers a quick death.  But your men, and you and I, will run the other risks.  Believe me, I don't relish the thought of dying.  I'm taking a calculated chance—placing supreme faith in your cool-headed skill as a teacher.”

Forcing the virulent wrath that again threatened to overwhelm him back into a locked compartment of his brain, Dahl managed to gain a renewed grip on his emotions.  “I'll instruct you,” he agreed icily.  “After you give your men the code.”

Taking no pains to conceal her admiration of her captive's intestinal fortitude, Signe raised the station.  After relaying to Theo the crucial pattern of letters and numbers, she commanded him to fuel the lifeboat.  She then issued both men a blunt order to call the ship down in the event that her attempt to rendezvous with the vessel resulted in the destruction of the lifeboat, but not of the mothership.

“Signe!”  Morgan's voice, vibrant with dismay, grated on Dahl's flayed nerves.

“I intend to succeed!”  Abruptly breaking the contact, the Commander turned obdurate eyes on the fuel gauges.

During the ensuing wait, Dahl endeavored to order chaotic thoughts.  Having managed that feat, he coached his student as she programmed an ascent trajectory designed to place the boat into an orbit below that of the ship.  Watching intently, he noted his pupil's increasing sureness.  Outwardly calm, he offered what advice she needed.  At length, his gut convulsed, his pulse pounding, he ordered the neophyte to activate that sequence.

Thrust down into her couch, Signe sought to calm jittering nerves.  During the ten minutes of the ascent, she forced from her consciousness any thought of the consequences of failure, concentrating solely on reviewing the theoretical aspects of the maneuver she intended to perform without having received the proper training.

Dahl lay studying the resolute, oval face, unable to guess at his enemy's thoughts, aware only that he detected no fear, let alone panic.  Damned if I can fault Signe's courage , the Columbian admitted blackly.  Or her tenacity.  She blasted Norman's ambitions—rot his savage soul.  I have to hand it to her—she's a warrior.  Well, this is it, spacer.  Put your wits to the job.  Ten lives you value, plus your own, ride on your ability to coach the slut.

The invisible hand pressing the Gaean downwards withdrew.  A fullness in her head impinged on her awareness.  Her arms displayed an uncanny tendency to float in front of her face.  We're in free fall, she concluded accurately.  Brace yourself, woman.

Dahl's voice resounded jarringly in ears that caught overtones of strain, but Signe calmly obeyed his commands, striving to make the actuality of what she now did mesh with theoretical knowledge stored in a brain operating at maximum efficiency.  We'll catch up to the mothership while we're occupying this orbit I'm programming, she rejoiced, savoring her accomplishment.  We'll be moving faster.  From there, we'll operate manually so as to intersect with the ship's orbit.   Lines of strain clawed outwards from a wide, full mouth.  Steely blue eyes fastened themselves on the man offering crucial instruction for the manual phase of the rendezvous.  A hand impatiently ran fingers through short-cropped, silvery hair, pushing annoying damp locks back off a high forehead glistening with sweat.

The vessel accelerated, giving the occupants the sensation that they again possessed weight.  That automatic transfer complete, Signe listened as Dahl directed her to access certain new data, and helped her complete the program she initiated.  Eyes riveted to the scanning screen, where the mothership had become visible, she noted the range—their distance from the ship—and the range rate, the rate at which that distance was closing.

“All right—carry on,” Dahl barked.  After issuing final, succinct instructions, he watched his world's archfoe take twelve lives directly, literally, in both of her strong, square-palmed, long-fingered, capable hands.

The ship loomed ever larger in the screen.  Heart palpitating, Signe narrowed her focus to two crucial numbers, seeking to keep the ratio between those fast-changing figures constant even as she utilized lightflash reflexes to operate a machine alien to her experience until this day.  Aware that if she let the closing rate diminish too greatly, and then thrust once more towards the mothership, she risked setting her craft swinging around the huge vessel in an arc, she shuddered as she imagined being forced to choose between committing swift, merciful suicide/murder, and dying of thirst in a boat lacking fuel, adrift in the void.  Slow just a shade…no more.  That's enough…

Obeying a stern injunction hissed into her ear to correct a slight drift to larboard, the silver-haired warrior swiveled her eyes to the video screen, where the mothership steadily grew in width, in height, in depth, in grandeur.  The two rapidly changing figures scorching themselves into her awareness approached zero.

Her mentor's voice took on a shrill edge as he urged, “Keep your eyes on the screen—coast up and stop!  Make sure you don't collide with any part of the ship!”  Cursing inwardly, Dahl held his breath, but all he gasped when Signe flawlessly brought the lifeboat to a halt in the very shadow of the horizontal torus was, “You did it.”

Glittering blue eyes that had alternated constantly between screen and panel, now feasted solely on the spectacular view.  So far, so good, the woman whose pulse raced madly encouraged herself.  I can dock on the lock without disaster.  I've got to!  I can't bear the thought of wasting this priceless experience!

Gathering all his courage, shutting his mounting dread out of his consciousness, Dahl issued new instructions.  “Keep the thrust minimal.  You'll advance over the heat shield, rising rather steeply to lift us over the bottom of the vertical torus and position us over the lock.  You'll be maneuvering in a relatively tight space.  Stay high enough that you avoid scraping our docking module on any part of the ship, but ascend nowhere close to the horizontal torus.  All right—take us in.”

The small vessel, marvelously responsive, handled like an extension of Signe's superbly athletic body.  Easy to overcorrect, she warned herself, her heart fibrillating.  Don't blow this one chance!

Dahl managed to keep his voice from cracking.  “Watch it now.  Rise—keep going.  Your speed's about right.  That's good.  Lift steeply…  That'll do.  Slow just a trifle.  Stay higher than the other two boats.  Up—just right!  Slow us.  More!  All right, set us down.  Easy, now—easy!  Just a bit farther—you're lined up—now!”

The instructor straining against his bonds stared wide-eyed as the docking module settled with no perceptible jarring force onto the lock, and the clamps moored the small craft rigidly to the docking site.  His pulse roared in his ears as he assimilated the astounding fact that the lifeboat once again rode securely upon the bosom of the miraculously undamaged mothership.

With her sleeve, Signe wiped rivulets of sweat from her brow.  Leaning back, she regarded the slumped, drained figure of her mentor, her whole person radiating triumphant joy.

Won to unwilling but profound admiration, Dahl acknowledged gruffly, “Woman, you've got guts.”

“You're a cool hand in a crisis yourself.”  As she offered that accolade, the usurper's handsome face relaxed into a strained, tired, but wholly engaging warm smile.

Having floated her still-immobilized captive to the bridge, the Gaean harnessed him and herself.  Cringing mentally at the thought of what physical trauma six unharnessed spacers would endure throughout the descent, Dahl watched his foe activate the descent sequence that would dock the ship.  At least they're all still alive, he consoled himself, awash in conflicting emotions.

Signe watched on the screens as the prize she coveted settled onto the lock.  For a few seconds, she savored the taste of victory before turning her full attention to the man acutely conscious of his expendability.  Fixing him with a penetrating glance, she admitted forthrightly, “I owe you, Dahl.  I offer you a choice.  Do you prefer to spend whatever duration the hostilities last, interned in Gaea?  Treated decently, but confined—a prisoner of war, possessing a slim chance of being exchanged at some point in time?  Or do you wish me to leave you here when I go, with your spacers and the miners, to face your commander, and endure the consequences of losing this ship to me?  Since Norman's recent defeat will undoubtedly render him even more brutal than he ordinarily is, I think I can assure you that you'd be far safer in my custody.  But you decide.”

Dahl's gut clenched.  That unexpected offer dispelled a black suspicion that his captor might employ the Earth-built weaponry integral to the ship to annihilate the station and slaughter both himself and fifty of his compatriots.  Faced with her options, Norman would do exactly that, he conceded as fear tempered relief.  She's a gallant adversary, damned if she isn't!

Norman will order me spaced, he reflected despairingly.  But spend a dreary span of Earthyears pacing the deck in a Gaean cell, knowing that my career lies in ruins, and my name's reviled in Columbia…  No.  I'll be damned if I'll choose life at that price!   “I'll take my chances with my countrymen, Signe—even though I believe your assurance.”

Admiration suffused the Gaean warrior's striking face.  “Dahl, you're too good a man to waste yourself serving a thrice-accursed mass murderer.  I'd like to offer you a third choice, but I won't insult a patriot I respect by suggesting that he change sides.  I'll tell you frankly, though, that if chance had landed you on ours, I'd have valued you.”

“We aren't all Normans, Signe.”

“Columbia spawns too many like him, and too few like you.”

“The Commander-in-Chief figures on changing that.”

“Give Arlen my compliments, but tell him I think he's got his work cut out for him.”

Smiling grimly as she voiced that final sardonic observation, Signe unfastened her harness, and rose to her feet.  Glancing down at the man projecting no trace of the smoldering hatred she had detected earlier, she intuitively judged him incapable of sullying his personal honor.  “If you'll give me your word not to try anything desperate, heroic and foolhardy, I'll cut that tape and let you walk down out of here,” she promised.  “Otherwise, I'll pack you.”

“You have my word.”

Striding out of the lock beside the captor to whom he had given his parole, Dahl came face to face with the tall, auburn-haired captor whose green eyes had conveyed so chilling a threat when he thrust his enemy into the couch on the ship.  The intent observer read the depth of the relief shining out of those eyes, as the warrior-woman's safe return from her outrageous adventure registered.

Pain lacerated the Columbian's sorely tried soul.  These men would die for Signe! he admitted to himself.  Any one of them.  Gladly!  What would it be like to serve a commander you respected?  She said she'd have valued me.  Damn!  I almost wish she'd run me through.  Better to die like that, than endure what I'll face shortly.  Should I force her to kill me now?  No.  I eliminated that option when I passed my word.

Buoyed by the success of her venture, the war-leader dispatched a squad commanded by Theo to toss the pressure suits into the drone, and send that ungainly vehicle soaring back to Main World of Gaea.  Conor, Yuri and Jassy appropriated gear they coveted from the military base, while Morgan led a detail that stripped the premises of electronic weapons.

Signe left Dahl his sword.  “You might need that,” she observed evenly, pitying a courageous, defeated foe.  Having locked the spacers and miners in the dining hall, the Commander tied her mentor fairly loosely to a chair in the communications cabin.  “My captain has altered the board so you can see what's coming in, but can't broadcast,” she informed him equably.  “It should take you about half an hour to work free.”  For a few seconds, she studied the man's somber face.  Of a sudden, he saw hers break into a vivid, unforgettable, transfiguring smile.  “Thanks for the flying lesson, Dahl.  I wish you luck with your countrymen.”

Three days after Signe's raid, a Columbian military vessel docked at the mine.  No sooner had the board been restored to service, than Norman called the base.  Jaw jutting, the Commander of Third Corps conveyed with venomous clarity to the subordinate preserving an expressionless face, just how he viewed the loss of the Earth-armed ship.  Signe's instructor passed into the custody of his fellow captain, who incarcerated his prisoner in a cabin.  Pacing the deck, Dahl strove to fend off despair.

Twenty-four hours later, the arrival of two spacers interrupted his dour speculations. Fifth Corpsmen, the imprisoned Captain noted in surprise as those uncommunicative individuals marched him to his own former office.  Shock suffused him when he discovered Arlen seated behind the desk.

Dahl knew the Columbian military dictator by sight, but had never rated a formal introduction.  His gut constricted at the notion that he had undoubtedly aroused this man's anger as deeply as he had Norman's.  That supposition generated cold fear, which the disgraced offender sought desperately to hide.

Tall, poised, his every fluid movement emphasizing the elegance conferred by the superb fit of his sleek black uniform, Arlen exhibited supreme self-possession.  Singularly observant blue-green eyes trained to note and interpret nonverbal cues gleaned a wealth of information during a seemingly cursory glance at the prisoner flanked by the two guards.  A mobile, aristocratic face, animated, expressive, but perfectly controlled, reflected the power of the astute mind residing behind the faintly ironic smile.

With supple grace, the Commander-in-Chief rose, walked around the desk, airily waved the guards out, and gestured Dahl into a chair.  Drawing up another, he seated himself facing the culprit sitting stiffly erect, noting the tight set of the man's mouth and the lines of anxiety etched into the swarthy face.

Dahl met squarely the glance leveled at him by the autocratic holder of supreme power over his world.

Having crossed his right ankle over his left knee, Arlen laid both hands over the bent leg encased in a glossy black boot, leaned back with studied ease, and spoke.  His melodious voice fell pleasantly on Dahl's ear, soothing flayed nerves.  “I'd like you to tell me everything that passed between you and Signe,” the military dictator invited rather than commanded.  “Word for word, as well as you can remember the substance of your verbal exchanges.”

“Yes, sir.”  A new onslaught of shock threw the Third Corpsman further off balance.  This man could order me spaced! he expostulated silently, unable to comprehend his superior's motives.  Whatever…  Struggling to marshal scattered wits, he sorted through his recollections, and related all he could remember of the encounter.

When the narrative ended, the autocrat studied Dahl thoughtfully.  At length he inquired, “Did you regard Signe's question as to whether you stood prepared to die to keep her out of space, as a hollow threat?”

“No, sir.  I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that my life was about to end.  She had me completely fooled.”

“Mmm.”  Dahl developed an uncanny certainty that his interlocutor read minds with unerring ease.  “Do you know how she managed to take this military base so completely by surprise?”

“No, sir.”

Succinctly, Arlen explained.  The expressive voice conveyed absolute assurance as the dictator concluded his summary by observing, “Signe wasn't bluffing, Dahl.  She changed her mind in the last nanosecond before killing you.”

“Why would she…”  Abruptly, the prisoner fell silent, berating himself for blurting out a question, rather than confining himself to giving answers.

The interrogator chose to ignore the slip.  “She acted on impulse.  I doubt if she could have told you why, herself, but she obviously admires courage—respects a man capable of making the ultimate sacrifice.  Being inflexibly determined to force someone to function as her instructor, she undoubtedly felt safer with a brave man making a reasoned choice between two appalling courses of action, than with a coward she'd scared into breaking.  No…you'll never shave death any closer than you did at that moment.”  Scrutinizing Dahl's bleak expression, Arlen did indeed read his mind.  “I understand that Norman has reduced your rank, and intends to discipline you with his wonted severity.”

Eyes hard as flint asked no pity.  “I lost a ship armed with Earth-built weaponry, sir.”

So you did, but I'd have sworn that no captain recruited by Norman would ever have refused under those circumstances to accede to Signe's demand.  Your willingness to forfeit your life to benefit Columbia deserves far better than the harsh punishment my shortsighted colleague plans to inflict on you, spacer-captain.

That rapid mental evaluation of the situation caused no perceptible delay in the autocrat's spoken response.  “Signe was right about your giving her only time,” he declared ruminatively.  “She'd have managed what she achieved, sooner or later.  She was right about something else as well.  You are too good a man for Norman.  I could use an aide who keeps a cool head in a crisis.  Your rank would be the equivalent of captain.  Will you accept?”

“Will I…yes, sir!”  Dahl suddenly looked ten Earthyears younger to the shrewd student of human nature keenly aware that he had just forged a bond of no mean magnitude between himself and his new subordinate.  “Thank you, sir!”

“I'll inform your commander of my decision.”  Arlen's eyes briefly hardened in their turn, confirming the watcher's suspicion that the Commander-in-Chief despised Norman.  Intense curiosity drove the next question put to the man giddy with relief.  “Tell me frankly, Dahl: what do you think of Signe?”

The reprieved officer's glance strayed to a point past Arlen's head, as an arresting, commanding, youthful visage eerily framed in silvery hair shimmered in his interior vision.  Exquisitely aware that his interrogator possessed an astonishing ability to detect a prevaricator in the act of lying, Dahl strove to distill his impressions into a terse, baldly accurate statement.

Memories flashed by as if fast-forwarded.  Once more, the cold menace freighting the voice of his world's archfoe chilled his blood.  Exactly as before, he grudgingly admired her courage.  On the screen of his interior vision, he saw the fierce look of joy generated as the raider progressed with cool daring towards a cherished goal.  Racked by fear, chafed by his bonds, he again marveled at hearing her sincere tribute to a defeated adversary even as he maintained his stubborn resolve to decline her gallant offer.  The warmth of the memorable smile constituting her parting salute returned to fill him with a most inexplicable sense of regret.

“I can't help but admire her, sir,” he admitted truthfully, if a shade defensively.  Having voiced that heresy, he added forcefully, “But I regard her as a downright dangerous enemy.”

Arlen smiled grimly.  “My sentiments exactly,” he acknowledged with perfect candor.