Sidewinder Precision Pro

[Malacandra]

(Glad you're enjoying it. Onwards!)

Strange customs can sometimes be troublesome.

I didn’t know what a piano was, but I heard the music coming from inside the house and guessed I could follow it through easily enough, and I found Lachlan standing by a black wooden box that I could have climbed into, and Eilidh sat in front of it working its control panel or whatever you call it. It was a long white board that ran the width of the box, divided into sections a bit thicker than my thumb and with black studs above it in irregular groups. How Eilidh knew what to do with them was more than I could say, since they weren’t labelled or anything, but the sounds the box was making were recognisably musical even though they weren’t like any music I knew.

“Good afternoon,” I said, with an apologetic look for interrupting. “I wasn’t told if I should call you Lachlan or Young Macrae, but your father would like to see you, please.”

He bowed, a little stiffly, which made me wonder if I’d got the forms wrong, but I guess a summons from The Macrae counted higher than staying and correcting me, and he left me with Eilidh Campbell. She carried on playing for a few moments before turning and favouring me with a look, though by no means a friendly one.

“Do you shoot?” she asked.

“For a living, since you ask – although I’m not sure you mean with a ship’s laser. I’ve tried out a gun or two and did all right with them.”

Her perfect eyebrow tilted slightly. “Just so. You’re from space, then?”

“Yes,” I answered, guessing that it might be as well not to argue over the wording. “Does it show?”

“You’re plainly no Macrae or even a Scot, I can see that much,” Eilidh said. “How about fencing? Have you ever used a sword?”

I shook my head for no, and she said, “Very well, space girl. Then let me warn you that if I catch you making eyes at Young Macrae, I shall be in duty bound to call you out, and as it’s a love matter I should be entitled to call for the weapons of my choice – and I’d be obliged to pink you at the very least.”

It seemed wisest to bite my lip on the flip retort that sprang to mind, and instead I said, “Thank you for the warning, but I only just arrived, I’ve never seen Lachlan - ”

Her hiss would have done Maussa proud, and I hastily amended, “due apologies, never seen the Young Macrae before in my life and I’ve no ambitions there, I can promise you that.”

She seemed to weigh up my reply for a moment or several, before giving me a nod and holding her hand out. “So that’s understood, then, and I think we will do very well together. You said you shoot?”

“I have used guns – shot and bullet both, during my training,” I said.

“There’s a shoot planned for tomorrow. You should come,” Eilidh said.

I supposed that meant we were friends after all, and after playing me another tune or two on the piano, Eilidh undertook to walk me round the grounds a bit. There were huge tents going up all around the grounds, and someone busily marking out what seemed to be a sports arena – the first I’d seen other than on a viewscreen in a bar – as well as livestock being driven into pens and some of them being slaughtered. I was used to the sight of a meat animal being put to the axe, but it came as a slight surprise to see that Eilidh took it in her stride as well.

Whatever a Macrae clan gathering might look like, it was plain there were going to be a lot of people present. Macrae hadn’t mentioned how many clans there were or how many visitors to expect from Gerete, but the preparations looked like they were expecting thousands, maybe tens of thousands.

After a long tour of the grounds, Eilidh escorted me back to the house, and I found myself inspecting the art treasures in the entrance hall once again. There was a display of ancient weapons, including several swords similar to the one Macrae was now wearing, but also a great many unusual objects from all over the galactic cluster. Nothing from Qudira, naturally; our culture didn’t inspire us to make many beautiful things, much less anything an outworlder would pay good money for.

The pictures entranced me. I looked closely at them to see what they were made of and ended up no wiser, but they showed – I supposed – many generations of Macraes in their finery, and whoever had worked the pictures had very cleverly captured something vital about each of them.

One in particular caught my eye. She was, maybe, somewhere between my age and Eilidh’s; I didn’t think she could be very much older. But she had an air of grace and authority about her that didn’t seem to belong on such a young woman, and I seemed to notice that rather than simply the fact that she was a very beautiful woman. For whatever reason, her picture was set aside from the others, in a little alcove with a pair of tall candles for light.

I would have liked to ask Eilidh about her, but she’d gone her way, and I looked around to see if there was anyone to ask. As it happened Donald Hamilton was just passing through, and he very kindly interrupted his business to help me.

“I see you’ve noticed our Lady,” he said.

“She’s like a queen,” I breathed. “Will she be at the gathering?”

Hamilton shook his head gravely. “Only in spirit. Just six months after this was painted, she visited The Macrae on Gerete. Her transport was attached on her return to this system, and there were no survivors. Which explains adequately why The Macrae hates space pirates so.”

[Malacandra]

When Eilidh said there was a shoot planned, she meant that she was in charge of it.

That, I guess, showed me how high she stood in Macrae society given that she was a Campbell girl herself – which is underselling her, since I found out she was The Campbell’s eldest daughter. The Scots pass over any daughters in favour of sons when it comes to inheriting property and titles, but that doesn’t make the girls any kind of meek milk-and-water little misses, by any means, and from the manner in which she was politely but firmly ordering the Macrae staff around, it was plain she had had plenty of practice.

She had some complimentary things to say about how I handled a shotgun before we were done, with a large bag to be sent down to the house for the enjoyment of the many guests, and she was no slouch herself in that department either. If Young Macrae and she were serious – as seemed to be the case – he was getting himself an all-action girl as far as I could see.

By the time we were returning and the beaters were being paid off and given their pick of the game to take home, there were already a great many people arriving. I’d noticed a number of aircraft descending on the “loch” (as Macrae called it) during the course of the day, and they were much bigger than the one I’d arrived on. Some more seemed to have been touching down further away, too, still within a long day’s walk, and each group, I noticed, led by a piper.

“Aye,” Macrae confirmed when I caught up with him later, “that’s part of the deal for the off-worlders. Many of ‘em haven’t seen a real piper in their lives, and being landed in the Highlands and having one of their own to march ‘em down to the gathering is the real start of the holiday for ‘em. Most o’ the flying boats aren’t mine, by the way; we charter from each other, the various families, when it’s festival time, aye, and from the southerners too. It all works out fair in the end.”

When the gathering took off in earnest, with so many thousands of people assembled I couldn’t properly guess at it, and the pipers by now mustering well over a hundred, Macrae took the platform, for he had an announcement for the crowd.

“Here before you all,” he called out, “duly representative of Clan Macrae, it is my duty and my joy to announce to you the betrothal of Young Macrae and The Campbell’s Daughter, and may their union be long and filled with happiness.”

When the cheering died down, Macrae continued, “In recognition of my son’s manhood, I declare to you that he and his betrothed are now the Lord and Lady of this gathering, and I step aside to bid him take his place!”

More cheers, and the young couple dressed in their finery took centre stage and were ceremonially seated together; but while I was watching the festivities, Macrae slipped up to me and said, “Join me in the carriage. We’ve business of our own with a few friends.”

I was surprised to find that the carriage already contained a transparent tank big enough to hold a man, though what it actually held was by far the biggest lobster I had ever seen, a deep indigo hued monster with bulging eyes that peered at me with disconcerting awareness. “Meet Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson – not his real name, of course. Hugh’s name isn’t pronounceable, and I don’t just mean by humans. He talks by changing his colour, and the name’s one he picked out of a list. Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson, let me introduce Marilee.”

The commset in the lobster’s tank shimmered barely noticeably, and the lobster himself changed colour momentarily in response. “Marilee is nearly as ugly as you. Which pronoun is appropriate?”

“No manners,” Macrae commented. “Which is a mere statement of fact. Hugh’s a Bierlese indigene, and they have trouble even understanding why humans would not want to say the first thing on their mind. Take comfort it’s not meant for insult. Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson, Marilee is a female of my species.”

“Understood. Are you breeding with her?”

Macrae snorted and said “Let’s think ourselves fortunate that the translator said ‘breeding with’. Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson, I am not. Marilee is present because she is a spaceship pilot who shoots pirates.”

“Good,” said the lobster. “Pirates should be shot. All pirates should be shot.”

The floatplane waiting for us looked like the one I’d arrived in, but if the same pilot had flown it in, she had gone off-duty. Andy and Gordon were still there, though, and set to work to hoist Hugh’s tank aboard, while the lobster’s translator was unemotionally telling them what a pair of bumbling incompetents they were. Macrae didn’t so much as crack a smile, but when they were done he handed each of them a purse of silver.

“There’ll be no more traffic through today in either direction,” he said. “Ye’d better be enjoying the gathering.”

Macrae fiddled with the controls for a minute or two before take-off – balancing the weight of Hugh’s tank by flooding the forward compartments of the floats, he said, although I got lost as to why this was necessary – and soon we were skimming low above the ground.

“We’ve not far to go,” he said, “at least by air. Too bad ye’re missing the gathering, but duty before pleasure – and ye’ll enjoy what I have planned instead or I miss my guess.”

In less than a quarter of an hour I found myself looking down into a low wide valley between gently-sloping hills. There was a lake below with a flying boat moored near one bank, and at the last minute as we descended I suddenly noticed a double row of spacecraft lined up in a long field. They were the craft Macrae had shown me at Diedar – twenty of them!

[Malacandra]

I couldn’t think why I hadn’t spotted the ships on the approach.

Macrae answered that question without prompting. “Reactive camouflage. Sensors in the belly pick up the colour and texture of the ground below, and the hull texture changes to mimic it. Power drain is minimal. Out in space ye’ll mainly fade to black, but if you’re in close to an asteroid your albedo will change to match the rock’s. Might well buy you precious time especially if you’re close enough in to the asteroid that your mass trace overlaps it.”

“Nice,” I said. “What’re these ships called? I don’t remember you telling me.”

“Claymore,” he said. “Which is Scots for ‘dirty great sword’, though again, as with ‘of that ilk’, the greybeards are still arguing as to the correct and authentic usage from antiquity. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a darned fine name for a ship and I’m faintly surprised no-one’s ever used it before.”

While he was explaining this, Macrae taxied the aircraft to the shore where it sat, rocking gently on the water, while someone rowed out from the bank and made it fast to a mooring. There was a bigger boat already on the way out with a small crane on the foredeck, which they used to transfer Hugh’s tank across while Macrae leapt nimbly onto the after deck and held his hand out to me.

On the shore, near the moorings, was a rather smaller house than Macrae’s mansion, but still far bigger than what I’d grown up in. Smoke was curling up from its chimneys and I could see a number of people going in and out. They were all in Macrae clothing – but then, so was I, and I could see one or two who plainly weren’t locals, such as the giant whose skin was a livid crimson and whose head bore a pair of short horns that looked as though they belonged on a bull. I scanned him discreetly with my datapad, which identified him as a native of Gelegeus.

I was itching for a closer look at the Claymores, but it would have to wait for now. Hugh’s tank was transferred to a push-cart that four strong men could manage, and punctuated by the lobster’s constant stream of complaints we all made our way for the house. Inside, there was a large hall laid out for a lecture rather like the ones I’d known as a trainee, with some higher-tech facilities than Ususor could boast of generally. I guessed Macrae must have imported them from Gerete, which was well up to making display screens and the like.

There was a raised dais at the front of the hall, with a lectern to one side. Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson, still complaining at the treatment, was transferred to the dais, while Macrae took his place at the lectern. I looked around for a seat in the hall, and found myself near the Gelegeusian with a more human-looking girl to the other side.

“Are we all here yet?” came Macrae’s amplified voice. Someone else was patched into the system too, as a different voice came over the same speaker.

“One more transport inbound from the spaceport, sir. On finals now.”

“All right. Have out the refreshments while we’re waiting. Make a note of where you’re sitting, ladies and gentlemen, and be ready to go in fifteen minutes.”

That left me barely time to grab a hot drink and another of those Scots biscuits I was fast developing a taste for, and to trade a quick hello with some of my fellows. There was no-one else there that I knew, but I saw a pattern forming with the few I had time to speak to: they were all escort pilots like me. I wondered what exactly Macrae had in mind.

When the last arrivals came in I spared them a quick glance – a young man and a slightly older one, both in Macrae costume, and I looked away again. Then I blinked and looked back.

Terek!

But whatever might have brought him here, I wasn’t to find out for now. Macrae had the lights dimmed and everyone seated, then turned towards the tank and said, “We’re all ready now. Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson, will you begin?” And everyone sat spellbound and listened to a talking lobster.

“You have today’s agenda on your datapads,” he announced. “To begin with I shall discuss the effects of the pirate problem on the galactic economy, together with historically recent trends.

“You should understand that I have been retained by Macrae because of my expertise in a number of fields, including economics and game theory. Additionally, I shall apprise you later of some recent technical developments that will be of great value in the course of action we are proposing today. But first, the economy.”

It was not encouraging to listen to, and Hugh had a great many fact-sheets and graphs to get his point across. The plain fact, as he argued it, was that the galactic economy was a frail creature, and had been for many years, but had suffered a recent downturn. It was now – or so the lobster’s facts and figures seemed to show – nearing the critical point at which piracy was becoming able to grow faster than the economy could support measures to suppress it.

“Or to go to medicine for our metaphor, the infection itself is breaking down the patient’s immune system, which – in my species as well as in yours – is a recipe for a dead patient. True, the disease organism itself will then die; but that will be small comfort to the patient, and the disease itself is deaf to reason.”

As though anything needed to make matters worse, Hugh pointed out what would happen when the economy finally went belly-up. The Navy was already under-funded and over-stretched. Once the Galactic Cooperative couldn’t sustain itself or the Navy any longer, we wouldn’t even get the chance to bootstrap ourselves again. Thargoids would see to that.

[SteveKing]

Nice anticipatory build up - I'm positively quivering

Have you a bit of a Scottish background M? (you're going to tell me you are Scottish aren't you?)

I'm really enjoying the journey of self discovery.

[Malacandra]

(I'm actually about as Scottish as the Dagenham Girl Pipers. On their side, they had an actual Scottish pipey to train them; on my side, I have actually visited the country, which was more than any of the original DGPs ever did before they appeared in public. )

Macrae had something of his own to say.

After Hugh’s encouraging state-of-the-galaxy address, our host took over with a presentation of his own: “Hired Escorts – A Service in Crisis”. He said that what was mostly concerning him was morale:

“And by that you’re not to understand that I’ve got one bad word to say about the courage of the young men and women who are dedicating their lives to seeing that commerce is allowed to take place. Far from it. I’ve seen that at first hand and I have plenty of reliable witnesses to back me up. You and your peers are giving of your all and your bravery is top-quality, believe me.

“But what concerned me to begin with – what concerns me the more I look into it – is that your hope appears to be fading over time. Part of that is no doubt a realistic assessment of your survival chances since the pirates started getting smarter and various organised crime factions started demanding a bigger piece of the pudding. But it’s not just that. You have precious little, what they call esprit de corps, left to you any more. That’s eroded, and it’s been replaced by a kind of hopeless bravado mixed with hedonism and whatever swagger it takes for you to get through another day waiting to die.

“I don’t say that I blame you. Many of us have hit rock bottom where hope’s concerned, and we’ve had to cling to whatever we could find to try to get us through it, and some of us have made it, and some of us have not. But that’s not the spirit that has lent itself to staying alive, fighting another day successfully and remaining intact as an operational unit; and history’s on my side on this, a thousand times over.”

He showed us some examples from old records, some going back supposedly to the Homeworld itself, and they certainly seemed to bear him out. What he charitably described as a Service-with-a-capital-S was becoming another legion of the damned, and while history records these as dying gloriously and giving the other side a hard time in the process, it didn’t make up for the fact that they did end up dead and losing a lot of experience and expertise when they went.

“Part of the problem, of course, is that while I call you a Service, you cease to be one the day you quit training. After that, you have a fighting ship to which you’ve been sponsored, and you’re left to your own devices. No further logistics, strategy, tactics; no command structure, no unit identity, not even a uniform. You fund yourselves out of the piecework you do, and you sink or swim as you’re able.” Macrae shook his head. “I’ll not speak ill of those who founded this scheme, but in practical terms it’s not working out. Take a break, ladies and gentlemen, and then Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson will have some more insights to share.”

I managed to meet Terek while we were helping ourselves to lunch. He smiled at me a little nervously and a little apologetically, which was only to be expected but unnecessary.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I found someone to talk it out with, and now I understand. I didn’t like it much at the time, but I know you were doing it for the best, and you may well have been right.”

He grimaced. “Maybe. But I was feeling pretty near rock bottom a few days later. Stumbled into someone at Qube who said he had a long run coming up and would appreciate a travelling companion and someone to drink with off duty – and he used to be an escort back before he made enough to upgrade and get out, so he still had his pass to the bar. We got talking, and he said he had somewhere to visit that I might enjoy if I didn’t mind dressing different to fit in with how they do things here. Looks like the same happened to you.”

I smiled. “Looks like it did. And… the day’s not been cheering so far, but I’ve a kind of a hunch they’re going somewhere with this.”

And of course they were. Hugh’s next offering was “The Tactical Deficiencies of the Escort System”, on which he was blunt and to the point.

“History records, and theory further predicts, that an ambush seldom if ever results in a devastating rout for the ambusher. There are, of course, occasions when it turns out that he who believed he was the ambusher turns out to have been misinformed; but that’s a failure of intelligence and planning, not a deficiency in the ambush stratagem.

“What you have now, almost invariably, is a trader and a string of guards in one of a number of predictable formations. Some work better than others but none is foolproof. That means that your attacker is invited to look you over, decide on their plan of attack, and execute it if the numbers and position are on their side. Sometimes they take some losses. More often you take worse losses. As long as the decision to engage and to disengage is in their hands, triumphs for your side will be rare.”

Maps, records of old battles, facts and figures followed in almost bewildering succession. “At present, even if you win the occasional fight, the enemy simply retire until they are ready to re-engage with greater numbers and in more favourable circumstances.”

“But what else can we do?” demanded someone – it was the Gelegeusian horned redskin. “We can’t leave our freighters, and we’re not a Navy strike team.”

“Not yet,” broke in Macrae – and I felt a thrill at those two words. “The Navy has its hands full anyway. But we have new ships, a promise of more, talented fighters in search of a soul… and, in short, all we need to take the offensive.”

Disciplined until then, the meeting burst into a buzz of discussion.

[Malacandra]

Macrae gave the hubbub its head for a couple of minutes.

“Yes,” he said, when order had been restored, “I’m quite serious about taking the offensive. Our aim is to begin taking the profitability and viability out of piracy in the most efficient manner possible, and I don’t mean to waste good lives in doing it. Further, I have financial backing and many conditional pledges.

“Not even I am wealthy enough to have underwritten the entire squadron of Claymores awaiting you on the airstrip, but what I do have is the ear of a number of people who have wealth to spare and are sick and tired of seeing their prerogatives infringed upon. In short, if we can achieve sufficient success at the outset, we will see a great deal of money being released to further our endeavours. And concerning success, I’ll hand over once more to Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson.”

“Quite right,” said the lobster’s commset. “It is from me that you now need to hear. You can achieve some success simply by conducting armed sweeps in force in systems known to suffer high levels of pirate activity. With twenty Claymores in skilled hands it would be nothing to dispose of a typical pirate formation efficiently and without loss or even serious danger. This, however, only scratches the surface of what you can do.

“It is orders of magnitude more efficient to destroy the enemy’s logistical capability and support framework. To date this has been difficult to achieve. Some pirates are able to disguise themselves as honest traders, and we can do little about this. Others however take the precaution of constructing base facilities where they can stockpile surplus cargo, undertake repairs, refuel and rearm – and launder their gains by shipping them out aboard craft with no known criminal record.

“Some pirate hideouts are in the remote corners of star systems, while others are on lawless planets themselves. To date these have been difficult to locate. That state of affairs need obtain no longer.”

The screen displayed a piece of tech I didn’t recognise in the slightest. “Artefacts recovered from pirate derelicts have been examined and reverse-engineered,” Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson continued. “This device might as well be termed a ‘Pirate Compass’. If I need to explain further, you will not profit from the explanation.”

“And while I’m not as tactless as our technical expert here – who has omitted to mention the identity of the genius who did the reverse-engineering – I’ll just emphasise the main points again: We have a means of locating pirate concentrations. We have new ships capable of taking the fight to them in space or in atmosphere. We have wealthy backers who’re not beholden to the whims of a government to see that, once our enterprise takes off, it can and will snowball,” said Macrae. “Now, we have simulators configured for the Claymore specs and the first group can go try them out at once. The rest of you are welcome to take a look over the babies themselves, and I doubt me you’ll be disappointed.”

As we filed out, one of the attendants approached me and beckoned me aside. “Ye’re offered the compliments of The Macrae, and his invitation tae dine a’ his table the nicht. The Macrae seats hisself at seven-thirty punctually.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Please tell The Macrae I shall look forward to it.”

I wasn’t on the rota for the first turn in the simulators, so I joined the fourteen others scurrying out, some more on their dignity than others but all eager to see the new ships. Most spacers will gladly look over a ship they haven’t seen before, even if it’s a rickety old Worm that can’t mount a laser fit for more than a cat toy. But a new class of fighting ship, especially one with any kind of a novel feature such as atmospheric capability, will draw them like bees to an opening flower.

Although powered down, two of the Claymores were open for inspection so we could clamber over them, try the seat for size, and get the feel of how well laid out the cockpit was. There was even just enough room to slip out of the seat altogether, and rather more advanced plumbing than a Sidewinder boasted, so it looked like the hated space pants might be a thing of the past. I found the controls falling very naturally to hand and the interior looking almost like how you imagine a Fer-de-lance’s flight deck. There was a definite air of build quality and polish that I wasn’t used to.
For all that I looked forward to flying one of these, my mind was more than half on dinner with Macrae. It felt a little odd in prospect now that we were no longer shipowner and escort pilot – but I was confident Macrae would put me at my ease.

We got tired of looking over the ships after a while, and were itching for our turns at the simulators. I found myself on the last shift, and while it’s not quite the same as flying a ship for real, it’s a lot better than nothing. The Claymore felt fast and responsive, almost twitchy, but not uncontrollably so. Well, inherently unstable craft turn faster, so that was a plus point once you could learn to manage it. The sim included a spot of gunnery practice as well, which gave me notice that I was going to need the cross-training if I was going to hit anything reliably, but promised at the same time that once I trained my reflexes to the Claymore then I’d be able to get my sights on exceptionally quickly – and it came with some gunnery aids that the Sidewinder couldn’t have matched.

I made sure it was well before seven-thirty by the time I was dressed for dinner, wearing a small piece of gold jewellery on my blouse that had been left in my quarters. Macrae was dressed to the nines too, sword and all.

[Malacandra]

When I thought I had seen fine dining before, it turned out that I was mistaken.

Bearing in mind that this wasn’t even the principal Macrae residence, I was stunned as much by the setting as I was by the menu. Neither the table nor anything on it could have been less than four or five hundred years old, and what wasn’t solid silver or gold looked as though it was diamonds. If there were real kings anywhere in the galaxy or throughout history who’d taken their meals in more elegance than this, I was struggling to imagine it – even in the story books that we had very occasionally seen in the school when I was little.

Macrae, of course, wore it as to the manner born, as though everything he was sitting on or eating off was not a priceless antique; and as for the meal itself, well, I must have described Macrae’s taste well enough by now. He said that the entire Eight has nothing to show more fair than the taste of wild Highland venison simply presented, although if that was simple presentation then it was a lifetime’s skill to master. I was left groping vainly for superlatives. It was the kind of meal that makes you feel as though the rest of your life will be an anti-climax.

I was also introduced at last to the real, genuine Macrae whisky, and not just the second-best liquor Macrae was prepared to carry about with him as travel rations. It shone like liquid gold in the light of the candles and the sparkle of the cut crystal, and the scent… just inhaling it seemed to conjure the music of the pipes and the Macrae family gathering. “You’ve excelled even yourself, Commander Macrae,” I said.

He laughed gently and easily. “No’ so much of the Commander at the table, I think. I’m glad ye’ve enjoyed it. I’ve missed our little bit o’ dinner together these last couple of days.”

“To be honest I thought we’d be done with that now you were home again – and it’s a delight to be mistaken.”

“And also to have ye there. That wee bauble looks well on you, Marilee,” he added, indicating the gold filigree clasp.

“It feels marvellous – like I’m wearing history. Is it very old?” I’d just managed to rephrase the question in time.

“Aye. It’s no’ been worn since my great-granny passed – and I was quite a stripling then.” He sighed. “Well, the work’s begun at last. It’s been a time coming together. Are ye still in, or shall I write you up for a Cobra after all?”

I gave him a very direct look – more direct than I’d have dared before. “To be honest, I was still seriously considering the trading life until I heard you and your friend speak today. A free ship and the chance to make a fortune, maybe on the Isinor to Zaonce run, with injectors to run away from trouble… But what you’re describing matters more than that.”

“I promise you sincerely, I believe it in my heart. Whether we can or can’t help civilization to hold off barbarism,” Macrae said, “I’m convinced it’s the fight we need to be fighting.”

“And now I am too,” I said. I looked out of the east window. “The moon’s up. Can we see those lovely Claymores from anywhere in the house?”

“Aye. There’s a drawing-room that overlooks the field.” He rang for a servant to take my chair as I rose, just another piece of how the other half lived.

From either side of us, Macraes looked down over the centuries, and we stood together looking over the rows of gleaming Claymores, just visible in the moonlight and looking sleek and dangerous. Macrae sighed. “It will work. Hugh’s a planning genius. This is going to make a difference.”

“If it does,” I said, barely above a whisper, “will you give yourself permission to rest?”

His head snapped around and I saw the set of his jaw and the glint in his eye in the light of the fire in the drawing-room, and then he exhaled sharply through his nose and said “Ye know, then.”

“I wasn’t told that it was a secret. Sorry,” I said; and then a streak of cussedness made me say, “Except not. Macrae, I’ve suffered too! I saw my whole family die, and some of them weren’t dead when the fire started. So I know what it’s like to try to work out the secret that will make the memory go away, believe me!”

My vehemence seemed to startle him. He was silent for a while and then said, “Aye. Ye’ve no’ spoken out o’ turn. And… aye, permission’s a good word. I’ve wealth and power, as ye can see – an’ I’ve spent twenty-four years trying to find how best to put them to work, an’ in between times, makin’ a few of the blighters pay.” Except that he didn’t say “blighters”. “It’s no’ been enough yet. But… Take the larger view. This is a good undertaking for the sake of everyone, an’ no’ just tae help me sleep o’ nights.”

I turned to him. “You’re a good man, Alasdair Macrae. And I’m yours for as long as this lasts.”

I knew as soon as I’d said it that there was room to take that two different ways. I wasn’t sure, straight away, whether Macrae had noticed it too. He turned and said, “You’re a good one yourself, Marilee.”

My hand was resting on the S-shaped back of a peculiar seat. “What’s this?” I asked. Macrae grinned.

“It’s called a ‘love seat’. A young man and his maid can sit in it so they can face each other – ye see?”

“Perhaps it should be sat in,” I said, taking one side for myself.

We looked at each other in silence for a few moments before what felt like irresistible magnetism pulled my face towards his, our mouths opening at the same instant.


(I will be offline for the rest of the month as of tomorrow. Next update in September!)

Click here for the CENSORED episode, password "sidewinder"

[SteveKing]

(I will be offline for the rest of the month as of tomorrow. Next update in September!)

Oh damn, damn, damn, damn... and blast

and I'm on holiday (to parts remote) from September - got to wait a couple of months for my next 'Winder Pro fix

[Malacandra]

(Hey, turns out I have Wifi here after all.)

At about midnight we both woke up enough to make our way from the hearthrug to the bedroom next door.

To be honest, just lying in front of a fire on a thick fur rug snuggled up to Macrae was a joy in itself, but the fire burned itself out after a while and it certainly wasn't summer in the Highlands. Besides, though moving felt like a bother at the time, it had its compensations: By the time we'd moved and got settled down comfortably we decided that we wanted each other again. If it wasn't as explosive as the first time, it was certainly warm, intimate and highly enjoyable, and it kept us both pleasantly worn out until the dawn started to creep through the curtains.

I was awake before Macrae was, and I lay there in silence for some time, just watching him and thinking. I'd been convinced I preferred girls – and I'd been quite happy not having much experience of boys to change my mind. It would be a tired old cliché to say that I'd just not met the right man before, but one thing was for certain, Macrae was pretty much the definition of a real man that they could cite in the encyclopaedia.

He came round with me watching him – and he came fully awake in a matter of seconds. My grin was mirrored by his, which didn't look so very much older than mine at that.

“Well,” Macrae said, “that isnae how I was expecting last night to play out at all.”

“Any regrets?” I asked. He laughed.

“Traditionally it's meant to be the man who asks the young lady that question. But no. Ye know, I dreamed of Eileen last night.” Macrae grinned widely and in pure joy. “She said, 'Ye silly old fool, it's about time'. So I guess I did get around to givin' maself permission for somethin', after all.

“Aye well, another day, another load of things tae do. Best be movin', young Marilee.”

“In a little while. But before you do, Macrae, you've one task that needs doing right away, here and now.”

“Is there now?” He looked at me with the most impish expression you could imagine. And then... he got on with the task at hand.

I'd guess that the house servants of a gentleman of rank are used to the idea, at least, of picking up tactfully after their lord and master when he's been entertaining a lady at short notice. However much or little Macrae might have required them to do so, they'd moved seamlessly into action by the time we found clean clothes and breakfast for two waiting for us. Macrae breakfasted lightly and much less elaborately than he dined, but we still found time to linger over one last hot drink and talk things over before the business of the day got under way.

I agreed with him that last night had caught me quite as much by surprise as it had him, and Macrae said, “Aye. But it feels right, Marilee. You and I, we couldn't have more different backgrounds, but – It's trite to talk of 'soul mates', but I've noticed, we seem to understand each other wi' hardly a word spoken.”

“Yes. I've noticed that too. Last night, we seemed to manage to have a row and a reconciliation with not much more than a dozen words apiece. I said something, you reacted, I processed that and gave you my reaction in turn, and...”

“There we were, both of us feelin' we'd managed to say aye that needed to be said,” Macrae finished, “which counts for a great deal. Slightly more, even, than a gorgeous young miss flingin' hersel' at me.”

I pulled a face. “I'm an untutored farm girl from the arse-end of nowhere, and at best I might scrub up fit to be seen; but I've seen gorgeous while I've been a spacer, and I'm not it.”

“Well, ye look well in Macrae tartan,” Macrae said, “and I'm thinkin' that dinin' like a Macrae has done you naught but good. At any rate, to what extent gorgeous is in the eye o' the beholder, I'll say this much: there came a point last night when it would ha' taken a gun at my head tae keep me from kissin' ye.”

“I think I could date that to the second,” I said, “on the grounds that I was feeling the same way.”

He grinned and quoted something about a tide in the affairs of men, which was a reference I didn't get, and then said, “At any rate – to business, and no more distracting me. We have some likely lads and lasses to train on Claymores today and for some time to come, and that includes you. Let's get to it.”

Which leaves me fast-forwarding over the worthy but dull days spent in simulators starting to get used to the key features of the new ship, and to the much more interesting moment when I was sat in mine for the first time, with the drive up and running and the Claymore hovering a metre off the turf on its ground-effect thruster. The HUD had a number of displays that I wasn't used to, since I'd not flown an atmosphere-capable ship before.

Macrae's recorded voice was giving the tutorial. “Welcome aboard the Claymore, a new concept in space fighting that I am confident you will find enjoyable and a potent weapon all in one delightful package. In a moment your flight director is going to vector you onto a trajectory that will take you to the safe altitude of five thousand metres, where you can start to explore the capabilities of this lovely performer without either blundering into space traffic that you're not yet ready for or colliding with the ground, which is an experience you will not want to repeat. When you're ready, go.”

[Malacandra]

At five thousand metres, the Claymore skimmed through the thin air above the cloud layer.

“You are now flying a ship that has been designed from the ground up to be fully capable in air or in space. The tactical edge this can confer on you in the right circumstances can hardly be described adequately in a few words, but you'll come to appreciate it as you gain experience. You've the beating of any pure airplane in performance at altitude, simply because he's designed to work with aerodynamic lift and you aren't. You can use it, but at height you can work like a pure space plane just when he's pinned between his stall speed and his Mach number. Don't worry too much about the theory for now, just remember: You can beat any airplane if you fly high and fast enough.

“Equally, any spaceship that follows you into air is going to be struggling. Re-entry heating is not a problem at your speed, but you're designed to be aerodynamically efficient and a ship like a Gecko or a Sidewinder is not. The thicker the air, the more the turbulent airflow is going to swamp his guidance systems, and once he departs, he's done for. So remember – on the borders of the sky, where it's not quite space and not quite air, you're the queen of the battlefield. And you'll be no slouch when you're clearly one side of the line or the other, either.

“Now let's go down into cloud and work on your orientation. You've an artificial horizon when you're in air. Pay attention to it and learn to love it as your dearest friend when you cannot see the ground. Manage your ship gently when you're in air, and she'll pay you back richly. Off you go now.”

Our task was simple – maintain a straight course for fifty kilometres while remaining between three thousand and thirty-five hundred metres above ground. We were to disable the flight director but were free to use any other aids the atmosphere HUD offered us; and we found it difficult.

In space you have a clear unlimited view in all directions except straight into the sun, and you see any navigation hazards from at least twenty-odd kilometres away – a little less in the case of a cargo barrel or escape capsule, but the scanner flags those up for you anyway and it would be really hard to crash into one by mistake. And once you've pointed your ship where you want it to go, there's nothing to keep it from going there in a straight line.

Whereas in air your ship is always wanting to gain or lose height or wander off track to left or right, and a patch of cloud can cut your visibility to almost zero in moments. We still had the scanners to warn us of any solid objects in our airspace, including each other, and the HUD to at least provide us with the information we needed to keep us right way up and on the assigned bearing, but it took a few days before we could even complete the most basic of training exercises to Macrae's satisfaction.

It's also unnerving to be looking down at unbroken cloud from two and a half thousand metres, with orders to go down through the cloud until you're in clear air and the full knowledge that some peaks in the Highlands reach a good fourteen hundred, and your ship can cover the odd kilometre between those two limits in just a few seconds. Still, it taught us to take care, and once again, there turn out to be compensations. Even for a hardened spacer, there's a thrill in making a low fly-by that leaves a white trail in the loch below you, and then pulling up your nose at the end of the pass and making for the clouds like, as Macrae put it, “a homesick angel” with just a touch on the injectors taking you past twice the speed of sound in a vertical climb. You use injectors very gently in dense atmosphere, but you can use them.

I did comment to Macrae over dinner on the third evening that it was a shame to be missing the Macrae gathering, and he grinned.

“That's no lie – and I hope ye'll have the chance to see it another time, for it's worth the seeing and the hearing. But that's how it's got to be, and I'm sure you ken why.”

“Of course,” I said. “You need security for this exercise here, and so you've got the Macrae estates packed shoulder to shoulder with Scots from Ususor and Gerete both, and a stranger wouldn't pass for five minutes in a crowd like that; and meanwhile you've given yourself a perfect excuse to be somewhere else.”

“Aye. My lad and the Campbell girl were ready to formalise their relationship anyway, so all we did was advance things a mite – and once that's been done, it is indeed traditional to let the Young Macrae take charge of an event like this, with no father peeking over his shoulder to be sure he's doing it right.”

But my fellow trainees weren't allowed to suffer by having to miss the gathering, for Macrae had laid on plenty of entertainment for them as well – pipers and dancers among them, and an instructor or two to teach them how to dance reels and flings and so on, and if I was the only one dining personally at the Macrae's table, the rest were getting fed and watered royally on their own account.

Macrae watched all of this with fond satisfaction. “These lads and lasses have been asked to do a hell of a job for a long while with no sense of belonging. Now – well, look at them.”

I looked. It wasn't the wild desperate spacer partying I was used to. Something was changing.

[SteveKing]

Contented sigh as I sit back with a wee dram of scotch on a few rocks

[Malacandra]

(For shame. A good Scotch should not be chilled, it kills the bouquet. A small spoonful of water to help release the flavour is fine, though. This from my local distiller (yes, England has a whisky distillery...))

Macrae was giving his handful of escort pilots a soul.

He was giving them a lot more besides, of course. The speed, firepower and flexibility of the Claymores was a large part of it – and also, and quite unlike the singleships we'd been used to, they oozed build quality and a level of comfort that made their pilots feel valued in a way that a Sidewinder never could. I'd felt a kind of rough affection for Get An Honest Job, sure enough, but I was growing to love The Black Bear for a hundred little added extras. A few extra grams of solid alloy billet here, a little rounding there, a few centimetres of cushioning on this and a few extra degrees of adjustment on that, even the recorded pipe music it played while the systems were being brought online... it all combined to make it feel like my ship.

Above all, the promise of a tactical objective that did not simply boil down to “Sit there in deep space until someone shoots at you, then you can start shooting back and we'll hope that being pure of heart will carry the day against an opponent who's been allowed to choose the battle and dictate the terms”. Macrae had barely even shown me the notes on our planned operations, but he'd been happy to go over the broad aims with everyone: go out looking for pirates and for everything they needed to keep their vile business going, and descend on a point target with force overwhelming enough to wipe it out of existence.

“Of course,” he murmured to me one night, as I lay with my head pillowed on his shoulder, “this isn't everything by a long shot. Ye can see for yourself that there's too much uniformity about pirate operations the Galaxy over for it to be small-time criminals on their own initiative. Depend on it, there are crimelords hidden away in respectable offices on high-tech worlds, running the whole show like a business and several tiers away from ever getting' their own hands dirty. Well, but we can put a crimp in their balance sheet, at any rate.”

But the Claymore Force was being grown and nurtured, adopted into the Macrae clan and taking on a group identity along with the tartan and the music and dancing – and they were taking it on eagerly, like a brood of adoptees looking for a mother and father. Well, the Macraes were up to providing that and no mistake.

“O' course, it was all done wi' blood ties back in the day. Someone's daughter would marry someone's son – aye, not unlike Young Macrae and the Campbell girl – and from then on, the new family was grafted on to the rootstock an' as much a part o' the clan as though it had always been there. Their fights became the clan's fights, and likewise the other way round.”

“Is that what's happening with your son, then?” I said. “Are the Campbells now Macraes, or the Macraes now Campbells?”

“No, no,” Macrae chiding, in the tones that told me I'd made a child's error although with a glint in his eye that assured me he was only teasing. “Campbells and Macraes alike are both weighty clans in their own right and they're staying that way. But this is how we strengthen the bonds of friendship at any rate – and bring in a little fresh blood into the noble families. It's understood that the Macraes have judiciously accepted that the Campbell girl is good enough for their son. On our side, that is. Of course, the Campbells put a different slant on it.”

So over a course of some weeks, the Claymores became welded into a fighting unit, all of them dressing and carrying on as though they'd been Macraes all their lives, until one morning Macrae called us all to the flying field for what he called a “live exercise”.

“There's a freighter due at the Witchpoint in two hours and thirty minutes from this time. She's unescorted and carrying cargo and passengers enough to draw all the hounds of Hell down on her head. You know what to do. Bring the Quinquereme of Nineveh in safely, bring yourselves back alive, an' don't let a single whipped cur get away if you have the choice.”

I was second in line behind Johnny Cope as we powered up, with Lochanside next behind me and Cock o' the North, Lovat's Lament and Mhairi's Wedding following in succession. We hadn't chosen the names; they were Macrae's invention, or as he explained, drawn from ancient Highland tradition – and the names of the music each of our ships played on power-up. I could recognise my own in a few seconds when the pipers played it, and a few of the others well enough, though I couldn't yet tell all twenty apart; and, naturally, I was already ready and willing to explain to everyone why The Black Bear deserved pride of place.

We came out of atmosphere with the Claymores in triple column and the Coriolis station low down towards the sunlit horizon, in local afternoon and hard to see against the sun. At full normal speed it was a good hour out to the Witchpoint but we were in no hurry to waste injector fuel so full normal speed it was;Torus drive is no use to ships that are meant to stay in formation.

At the Witchpoint we cut power, some of us with an asteroid to loiter close by and others just hanging silent in space, in a wide ring normal to the plane of the ecliptic and face-on to the planet. Somewhere close by, but out of scanner range, other ships were up to something similar. We watched the minutes count down while we waited for Quinquereme to arrive in-system.

“He's here.” The Bull's commset. “Stand by for action.”

It wasn't long in coming.

[Malacandra]

Macrae had not exaggerated when he'd spoken of “all the hounds of Hell”.

Quinquereme of Nineveh was a Boa 2, although I hadn't a clue either what a quinquereme might be or where Nineveh was – it was no planet that I had ever heard of. Macrae was to put me straight on that later. But for now, as we IDed the ship and her captain, Commander Bill Voce, we had other things on our minds.

Passengers draw contract hits – the higher-profile the passenger and the more important his trip, the more attention the Assassins pay to him. Pirates are more interested in cargo. If the two turn up at about the same time, neither has the least objection to working with the other since their interests don't clash, and this can spell very bad news for the freighter captain.

Voce, by the look of things, had been in a scrap or two, and a Boa 2 can be outfitted with a lot of desirable goodies. We could immediately see one thing he hadn't skimped on. His drive flame flared brilliantly and he surged forward blisteringly fast for such a big ship, for a Boa 2 is far from stately and that goes double if she has injectors.

Quinquereme had blasted away even as the messages started coming over the commset: “There's Bill Voce now. Let's teach him that dealing with Eensti D'razzraq was a mistake!”. But most of the assassins now converging on Voce had injectors too, so he'd done not much more than cut down the odds – and while a Boa 2 is a durable target with the proper upgrades, she's a large one too.

“Blue section, take the stragglers,” said The Bull. We'd taken to calling him that because Gelegeusian is hard to pronounce and The Bull adapted to it easily once we'd mentioned the qualities that bulls are mainly associated with: strength and courage. And we'd adapted easily to The Bull taking command of the Claymores once we'd reasoned that a leader who wanted the job was worth three who'd had to be persuaded to take it. Decisive instructions in good time are worth a lot; if they happen to be the right orders, then so much the better. Six Claymores headed for the injectorless assassins while The Bull himself pointed The Rowan Tree in the direction of the fleeing Boa 2 and her pursuers.

Claymores are fast. We were in time to see Quinquereme's aft laser burn through an Asp's shields before he broke away, injectors still at full bore, which would normally have let him back off, cool his own shields and laser, and close in again while the freighter was still trying to swat the rest of his foes with a hot laser. But this time was different. Johnny Cope broke after him, locked on and opened up before the Asp had time to do more than scream “I'm taking heavy fire from the [Unknown_Ship]!” and burst into white fire.

“White section take them. Red section, watch for hostiles!”

We'd been warned to beware of pirates as well as assassins on this run and The Bull wanted some of us to have cool lasers when they arrived. But over in White section, we were more than willing to choose our own targets. We arrived in line astern, each of us settling quickly onto a target and letting it have the lot. The Claymore's laser was fully effective at twenty-five kilometres, but fifteen kilometres was the range I was used to and it was the range I opened up at, burning through a Cobra III without wasting a single megawatt. As usual the nuisance had a missile auto-locked and launched in the instant before he blew, and inevitably my first scream of ECM didn't put it down. I cut thrust to zero, auto-acquired the missile and confirmed it as a hardpoint. Too much of a risk to try to shoot it.

“The Black Bear here. Missile incoming. Breaking.”

“Acknowledged. Lose it and get back when safe,” said The Bull.

Losing it wasn't going to be a problem as long as I had injector fuel to spare. But there was another collection of traces appearing and -

“Hello, Bill Voce. Today's toll is 10TC.”

“In a pig's eye,” sent Quinquereme of Nineveh – and he was slowing to bring his front laser to bear on the new arrivals. I was starting to like Commander Voce, all the more when his laser speared through the darkness straight into the Python who'd demanded the toll.

“Red section going in,” sent Bonnie Dundee, Terek's ship. They were all fresh and hadn't wasted or taken so much as a shot yet. I was still watching the hardhead behind me, now spiralling on its final run before a touch on my injectors took me out of reach... and out of reach again... and again until it blew with what might have been frustration.

By now my laser was fully cooled again and I was eager to be back in on the action before it was all over. The assassins were scattering without even a message sent – but they weren't fast enough to get away from Claymores, and they each had two members of Blue Section double-teaming them.

“There's too many! It's a trap!” yelled one of the pirates – but they'd lost their Witch-capable ship, and they had nowhere to run either. The battle turned into a rout, and the rout into a massacre, with messages coming over the commset on all sides:

“You wouldn't kill me for a few credits, would you?”

“Please, let me go! I surrender!”

“You win today! Keep your cargo!”

But for today the Claymores were going to remain nothing more than a rumour, with no survivors to carry news away. We conducted a quick count as we watched the last criminals blow. All present and correct, and the Quinquereme undamaged.

[Malacandra]

For a live exercise, we thought it was an unqualified success.

Commander Voce certainly had something complimentary to say about it, addressing his thanks to “mysterious strangers who I have never heard of before” while turning back for his run down to the Coriolis station. We backed off to about twenty kilometres and formed a ring much like we had around the Witchpoint – close enough for all of us to keep Quinquereme of Nineveh in plain sight, but far enough away that only a few of us would register on anyone's scanners at a time until they got inconveniently close to the Boa.

We peeled off one by one when Voce reached the aegis, with no more pirates seeming to think it worth while today, and re-entered on the far side of the planet, closing formation as we did so. The Highlands and the Macrae estates lay forty kilometres below us as the thin air began to register on the Claymores' atmosphere planes. One by one we followed the Bull down in a wide spiral, touching down in succession on the field we'd left a couple of hours previously with eleven kills to report, no losses, and no enemy escaped.

“And Voce got the Python, ye say? That's no surprise – he's no' so very green at the game. Well, I'm thinking we'll keep this up for a week or two, and then we'll see if we can't root the knaves out of Ususor system altogether. Which'll not hold for good and all, but will make their profit and loss look the worse and cost them no small time and trouble to fix.”

We'd been running the Claymores “clean” up to now, but they had hardpoints for missiles – which turned out to be unpleasantly draggy in atmosphere although, of course, they barely make a difference you can feel to a ship's performance in space. But Macrae got us all trained at both carrying and firing them in air. Parts of Ususor aren't habitable and don't belong to anyone, and these made good practice ranges for letting off rockets without hurting anyone.

“This'll be good practice for later,” Macrae told us. “Extensive research has failed to turn up any pirate basing facilities on-planet – which is not to be wondered at; the noble houses would take a dim view of such goings-on – so ye'll not be missiling anywhere on Ususor itself. Later, though, you'll be having to go down onto some worlds and get your hands dirty.”

The honeymoon period went on for another week or two. However Macrae was setting it up, he didn't reveal even to me, but I can think of any number of ways he could have managed it. He was plainly on first-name terms with a number of tough trader captains all over the sector – Voce among them although, as I was to learn, by no means the chief – and it couldn't be hard to include a coded message on, say, a tape of shrew cutlet recipes or zero-gee cricket highlights, which were being constantly couriered to all destinations. At any rate, we kept getting sent out on live exercises, we kept counter-ambushing, we disposed a number of assassins and pirates at no cost to ourselves, and all went well.

It was only a matter of time until someone slipped the net, though. Lovat's Lament was closing in to put the finishing touches to a Cobra I when a blue hole opened in the sky and the plasma-shedding villain disappeared. We had standing orders not to dive singly through any wormholes and we certainly weren't in a position to go through together, and all we could do was lock a Wormhole Analyzer on it and report back later.

Macrae was philosophical in bed that night – from which you can gather that our own personal honeymoon was by no means over, although the intensity had cooled to more bearable levels from the white heat we'd started out at. “That's the news out, then. It was going to happen sooner or later, and I never thought else. Well, but my backers are already sitting up and taking notice, and I've five more Claymores being commissioned, and my recruiters are due to report in any day.”

“Does this affect our plans at all?” I said, co-opting Macrae's plans as a shared undertaking.

“No more than I was allowing for. We'll conduct that sweep I've been talking about and dispose of any basing facilities in this system; it'll take a little while to locate them, but thanks to Hugh's little box of tricks I've no manner of doubt that we'll find it. Energy signatures and communication codes, ye know.”

I might have wanted to go over the plans in more detail, but Macrae had something more urgent on his mind, which meant that within about half a minute, so did I.

All of which meant that, shortly after Highlands dawn, all twenty of the Claymores were lifting off with a pair of missiles apiece, and our lobster genius's pirate detector pinging away. We were expecting it to be a long day, and we weren't disappointed.

A solar system takes a good deal of searching, even when you're looking for something that's likely to be the size of one of the larger asteroids – big enough to accommodate a Rock Hermit, or maybe bigger, even if smaller than a Coriolis station. We were expecting something that could store Quirium – maybe refine it, even – and missiles, not to mention hundreds of tons of cargo and some innocent-looking haulers to take it where it could be sold. Beyond that, we had no firm expectations.

Near the Witchpoint we turned up nothing but blanks, and the outer asteroids had nothing either. That meant a long foray sunwards, where a few chunks of rock were almost lost in the solar glare.

Then The Bull's calm voice: “I have a trace. Prepare to deploy.”

[Malacandra]

It was a mighty big rock we were looking at.

At twenty kilometres we seemed to be seeing a slight twinkle, whether from metallic inclusions on the rock's surface or from artificial lights we couldn't yet tell. But Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson's little gizmo was flashing it up as “Pirate Base” and that was conclusive enough for us. We fanned out by sections and locked sights on.

“Hold your fire. Missile launching,” said The Bull. The temptation to plaster it with twenty missiles at once was obvious but the objections were equally so. We watched in silence as a single missile sped towards the rock, then exploded harmlessly many kilometres short. The alarm announced ECM and the rock was the apparent source. Inhabited for sure, then, and not one of the known habitations either.

“Inject to ten k's and fire missiles in slow succession. Make them ECM every single one separately. Blue section, laser it.”

ECM is a valuable defence but it's not a cure-all; it takes energy to power it and that's not something you can spare much of when you have half a dozen laser beams boring through your shields. So the basic tactic is to make sure the enemy's ECM takes out only a single missile at a time, and he has to fire it up again for the next one... and we were packing a lot of missiles between them.

“Loch Lomond: Hostiles on the screen. That asteroid's launching.”

“The Rowan Tree: Red section, take them.”

I watched as the seven ships of Red section hared off after the new arrivals. We were still being held back as the reserve, with our own missiles unlaunched and our lasers cool. One by one the ships in Blue section sheered off, lasers overheated and missiling the asteroid one by one. It had to be feeling it by now although there is room for a lot of shield generation on a rock that size.

“The Rowan Tree: White section, laser the station.” I had a lot of time for The Bull by now. He was fully committed to the ships he was chasing – the typical pirate mixture of small fighters and multi-role ships like Cobra Ones and Moray Star Boats – but he was still keeping an eye on the battle as a whole. I locked on and let that rock have the lot, checked to see if there was a missile trace on the screen, then fired one. White section peeled off with hot lasers and let Blue section take over again. The amount of fire that thing was absorbing was...

“There she goes!”

...insupportable. Now it was time to mop up. There were excited yells coming from half the Claymores at the sight of the base blowing, but there were still a number of enemy ships scurrying about. It looked like a burst anthill, but ants can sting. The Bull bellowed at us to stop the chatter and get the comms board cleared, and everything went quiet for a moment while we got on with business.

“Lovat's Lament: I've got one on me!”

I looked to see where Lovat's Lament was in the confused whirl of red and yellow traces and the flicker of laser beams. One yellow trace was running fast and straight, a couple of reds after it.

“Lovat's Lament: I'm taking heavy fire from the Cobra III. Help!”

There it was. I settled my sights onto the Cobra III and set to work to strip away its rear shields. A touch of my injectors would put me right on its tail, but I was perfectly happy at the range I was. Someone took care of the Gecko that was also roughing up Lament.

“Stop shooting! I surrender!”. That was the Cobra III – but we had our orders, and they didn't entail giving quarter, any more than pirates would if the roles were reversed. I gave the Cobra a final pulse and watched it blow.

“Lovat's Lament: Missile locked onto me!”

ECM jangled briefly, but the missile was still coming. The Bull called for any ship within range to ECM it again. Sometimes you get lucky that way. Sometimes you don't.

“The Rowan Tree: Inject, inject!”

“Lovat's Lament: Negative injectors!”

I swore, too softly for the commset to pick up. Nearly any ship will outrun a missile handily on injectors, but Lament must have damaged hers in the fight. I saw Johnny Cope fire a long laser burst from a shallow angle, hoping to score a direct hit on the missile. I heard The Bull call for Lovat's Lament to break hard... and then the missile blew.

I hoped for a long moment that Johnny Cope had scored a last-second hit or that Lovat's Lament had run the missile's motor down. But there was nothing but a cloud of dust and hot gas, which I found myself scanning uselessly for a living body that we couldn't have recovered even if it had been there.

“The Rowan Tree: Reform and return to base.” There were no red traces left, and no wormholes. We'd succeeded one hundred percent with a single casualty.

On a low, slow pass over the loch, hours later, The Bull put us into finger-fours instead of columns by section. For those who don't know, read it from the left as follows: Two ahead of and above One, Three behind and below Two, and Four behind and below Three. But the final quartet was missing its Three; they call that the “Missing Man” formation.

Macrae formed us up by the loch just before sunset, all of us in ceremonial dress and a single piper playing, with aching appropriateness, Lovat's Lament as the sun dipped below the horizon. There was a fresh breeze blowing up the evening mist. At the last note of the Lament, Macrae himself lit a fiery beacon by the loch, and we stood in silence for two minutes.