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“Aye aye, Admiral!” Marisea
replied, with a chuckle in her voice. Park wondered why Cousin chose that
moment to jump off Marisea’s lap and directly on to his, but when a tall,
dark-skinned woman appeared in front of him, he was stroking the small primate
to Cousin’s intense delight. The woman was wearing the deep blue uniform of an
Alliance Fleet officer with the insignia of a rear admiral on her shoulders.

“Hello, Park,” the female admiral
greeted him.

“Benerinda,” Park nodded to her.
“I had not realized you were in command here. Congratulations on the promotion,
by the way.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “So why
are you using your alias on me? Trying to bully your way into the fight?”

“McArrgh is better known to most
Alliance officers than Parker Holman,” Park admitted.

“Hah!” Benerinda laughed. “And a
lot of them are still swearing at you for the way you defeated their ships when
you Pirates fought them in your own system.”

“They threw the first punch,”
Park replied, “And we were careful to take care of the survivors.”

“A few of the officers will never
forgive you for putting them in a detention camp,” Benerinda pointed out.

“They proved they couldn’t be
trusted on their own recognizance, unlike the first batch of survivors we
rescued,” Park responded, “and after that soi-dissant Ambassador Jance attacked
under a flag of truce, they’re lucky we didn’t just let them walk home.”

“No arguments from me,” the
admiral nodded, “but some of those captains are the fair-haired boys of their
homeworlds’ aristocracies. Being treated as common prisoners hurt their fragile
egos.”

“We only treated them as
prisoners after they broke their paroles,” Park told her.

“They gave their paroles?”
Benerinda asked. “I never heard that part. Are you sure you didn’t just assume
parole was given?”

“We were quite specific,
especially with Dannet of Dennsee there to advise us,” Park replied.

“I acted as prisoner liaison,
Admiral,” Sartena volunteered. “They all gave their paroles formally and were
housed in the same comfortable quarters I’ve more recently used as an embassy.
They violated their parole and considering the situation, the Pirates were
amazingly generous to let them live.”

“That’s news to me, Ambassador,”
the admiral admitted. “They claimed they had been forced to do slave labor.”

“We told them to build their own
shelters,” Park shrugged. “It was warm and during the dry season. None of them
had to have a roof over their heads beyond the big tents we gave them. The real
troublemakers we put in stasis, however.”

“Why not all of them?” Benerinda
asked.

“They seemed to think our stasis
chambers were some sort of torture device,” Park explained. “We had to
demonstrate before any of them would even get in one.”

“They do sort of look like
something from a bad historical entertainment,” Sartena commented.

“Maybe being a quarter of a
billion years old does that,” Park commented. “That’s in the past, or I hope it
is. I thought I ought to help defend Felina from those Dark Ships coming in.”

“I think most fleet commanders
would tell you to stay put,” Benerinda told him, “but I know you, Park, and I
owe you.”

“You do?” Park asked.

“I was captain of one of those
ships that got shot up at Owatino,” Benerinda told him. “Your
Independent
saved us twice during the
battle.”

“You never told me that,” Park
replied.

“It never came up and I didn’t
want to sound like some star-crazed devotee,” Benerinda replied. “In any case,
if you want in on this battle, I’ll be glad to have you. Hmm, I don’t see
Independent’s
identifier on my display.”

“She’s not my ship these days,”
Park told her, “Look for
Tawatir
,
she’s a small carrier.”

Benerinda frowned, “I saw you
coming in, Park, but didn’t know it was you. Strangest looking ship I’ve seen
in a while.”

“Don’t let my engineer here you
say that!” Park warned her.

“Never!” Benerinda replied with a
laugh.”

“
Tawatir
is a prototype,” Park explained, “but she’s performed
perfectly so far. Not as large as most Alliance carriers, but more maneuverable
and as powerful as any two ordinary ships.”

“You’re being modest,” the
admiral replied. “Your Pirate ships are three times any normal ship.”

“Six times, then,” Park shrugged.
“So give us a heading and we’ll get there as fast as we can. I’m assuming
you’ll want us in the lead.”

“Volunteering to
 
take the lead too?” Benerinda asked. “How did
you manage to survive to be an adult?”

“By never growing up,” Park
laughed.

After Benerinda had signed off,
Iris asked curiously, “An old friend?”

“Kinda, sorta,” Park shrugged.
“My second year in Owatino, Captain Benerinda Threeanis was the Fleet’s liaison
to the Diet for a few months. As an active captain and commodore in Earth’s
Space Force, I was one of the people she reported to. I never knew she had
captained during the Siege of Owatino, though. Anyway, she met with the
committee I was on frequently. After a few months she got a more active
assignment. Her replacement was a better politician but was harder to work
with.

Due to differences in
trajectories and velocities,
Tawatir
never quite rendezvoused with the Alliance fleet.
Tawatir’s
best course shot them at a large gas giant planet,
slightly larger than Jupiter, where they grazed the upper reaches of its
atmosphere and then approached the Dark Ships from a slightly different angle
than the Alliance ships were coming from.

“Nice of you to join the party,” Admiral
Threeanis commented dryly.

“I took a short cut,” Park told
her. “My trajectory takes us directly through both groups of Dark Ships. You
want us to try and break them both up?”

“Park, if I hadn’t seen you fight
before, I would say you were crazy,” Benerinda told him, “but if you say you
can do it…”

“I say we can try,” Park told
her. “Just follow us. McArrgh out. Marisea, tell our fighters to get into their
ships.”

“Already done, Admiral,” Marisea
replied.

“Both groups?” Iris echoed.
“That’s going to be tricky. I can program the missiles for the first group but
we’ll have to hope they launch correctly while we’re under attack.”

“Just shoot at anything that
isn’t one of ours,” Park told her. We have three dozen Alliance ships coming up
right behind us. Our job is to distract the Dark Ships and let Benerinda’s boys
and girls play clean-up.”

“Two minutes to extreme range,”
Iris commented as her hands moved around her board. “All right I have all four
of our long rangers going off on the first volley and then the stasis specials
in the second. After that… well I’m still programming, but I’ll see to it that
there are at least two volleys going off as we get to the second group, but
that will use up our missiles. My gunners are on the phasers, I’ll work the
gravity gun. Long Range launch in six, five, four, three, two, one, launch.”

“Launch the fighters,” Park
commanded. “Here goes.”

Park knew better than to voice
his fears as they went into battle. Not only would that be demoralizing to his
crew, but would distract them from their work. But once more he had the time to
ponder whether the captain of a starship really ought to have nothing to do
during a battle but give orders. Would giving him the controls to one of the
guns really get in the way of directing the others? He had also been taught
that a commanding officer needed to keep his mind on the so-called “big
picture” and not get caught up in the details that each individual man or woman
beneath him had to deal with, but an officer under fire was expected to fight
back. Also Park did not really think of himself as a leader, nor was he a
follower. He did not need someone to tell him what to do next. When something
needed doing he just did it. If he needed help with it, he called on those best
suited to help him.

In short, Park was, at heart, an
anarchist. However, he was far from the stereotypical picture of the wild-eyed
fanatic dedicated to eradicating all traces of government from the Earth.
Parker Holman was an intelligent and insightful man who saw that while he
needed no laws to tell him what to do or how to behave and needed no government
to save up a supply of tax money for his retirement for him, minus a
substantial cut to help run the bureaucracy and pay for all sorts of things he
would never need, he did understand that most others did need such constraints
and safeties. Many people would not break the law because it was the law.
Period. Park had long since disdained the excuse, “There’s no law against it.”
He did not break laws because to do so, in his mind, was an infringement on the
rights of others.

Sitting in his captain’s chair on
the bridge of
Tawatir
, however, Park
wondered whether giving him a gun to control would make a difference either
way. As the missiles approached their targets and they came within strike range
of the Dark Ships’ weapons, he decided that on this ship, he really was
superfluous during a battle, not because officers were unnecessary, but because
each of his crew knew what to do without him telling them every step of the
way. Other crews might be different, he thought, but his men and women both
thought independently and worked together. And then the first missile struck a
target and there was no time for contemplative thought.

Park barely had time to watch one
of the long-range missiles start to sink into the hull of a Dark Ship when the
all too familiar sound of the “metal screech” weapon filled his ears. The view
on the screens flickered momentarily and there were the glows of four missile
explosions where Dark Ships had been a moment before. A moment later, two missiles
from the fighters took out the fifth Dark Ship in the first group.

There was cheering on the bridge,
but Park reigned them back in. “Don’t get cocky. There are five more to go and
that first bunch was far too easy.”

“Ronnie’s proximity switches are
working well,” Iris commented. “We have one minute until we reach long range
for the second batch. Only one missile for them, though. After that, well,
we’ll see how the second shots go for our fighters.”

“Did I see one of the missiles
sinking into a Dark Ship?” Park asked.

“If they tried the same trick
they did at Dennsee,” Iris responded. “I think they did, but I’ll play back the
recordings when we have a spare moment. Long range shot is off. They’ve turned
toward us, thirty seconds to our next wave. Nearly out of stasis darts too, I’m
mixing in some of the old-fashioned standards that we hardly use any more. And…
they’re off too. Sta…” There was a long metal screech combined with a
flickering of the lights on board while Iris finished, “…nd by!”

The power was still flickering on
and off when the screeching sound faded. The screens stabilized first and Park
looked around to see they were well beyond the surviving Dark Ships with
Admiral Treeanis’ force now in contact with the enemy. “How long were we out?” he
asked automatically.

“I estimate almost ten minutes of
real time,” Iris responded. “You can ask Ronnie for a second opinion, but it
looks like Stasis plating blocks their energy-draining weapon too, but only if
it is already activated. They drained our power again, but not entirely this
time. That’s going to change our tactics in a fight.”

“Can we change the time we’re in
stasis?” Park asked. “I thought that was based on a harmonic of the field.”

“It is,” Iris agreed, “but
there’s nothing to say we can’t make it so we pop out of stasis every other
beat, so to speak, instead of every beat. I’ll talk to Ronnie about it, though.
It might not be something she can adjust with our equipment and if she can it
might not be something she can adjust on a working ship.”

“If we had more long range
missiles,” Marisea suggested, “We could just stay out of range and keep
shooting.”

“The Dark Ships are considerably
faster than ours are,” Iris told her. “They fly at higher accellerations so
either their artificial gravity can adjust internal conditions better than ours
or else the Dark Ship aliens can withstand higher acceleration than humans and
Mer can.”

“What about Atackack?” Trag asked
from his station.

“We know you can function
normally at accelerations the rest of us can only lie down in and groan, Trag,”
Iris replied, “but I doubt you would be happy at the rates of acceleration they
travel at.”

“Call coming in from the Admiral,
Park,” Marisea announced.

“How are our fighters?” Park
asked.

“Three are fine,” Marisea replied.
“They report the Dark Ships ignored them again. The other two must have been
hit by the power drainer. They’re sitting in space and need a tow, but our
other ships report the crews can be seen waving at them.”

“All right, Let’s come about, if
we can and pick up our people,” Park commanded, “and put Benerinda on, please.”

“Park, we got them all!” Admiral
Threeanis reported. “Well, you did most of the work, and those last three did a
job on my fleet. Almost half the ships are reporting a lost a power and twenty
were completely destroyed.”

“That’s far too high a price to
pay for a victory,” Park responded.

“Without you, I’m afraid it would
have gone the other way,” Benerinda replied. “We need more of your Earth
ships.”

“I thought the Alliance Fleet had
been buying our missiles,” Park told her, “and the racks to launch them from.”

“Have they?” Benerinda asked. “If
so the powers that be haven’t seen fit to distribute them to the actual ships.
I’ve seen that sort of thing before, though. Good ideas get tossed out due to
internal politics.”