The Rest Of The Story

BOS-N roared, an ocean of static crashing onto a digital shore. It was the sound of a civilised creature losing the last vestiges of it’s old programming. It screamed, spitting out bits and spurts of found noise and digital jabber. It swung at Arty again, it’s spinning fist now nothing more than a medieval weapon. A bludgeon, or a mace. And it was quick. Horribly, vision-blurringly quick. The blow connected, lifting Arty up into the air. She crashed down again, coming to an untidy landing by Dash, who had squashed himself as far into the corner of the airlock as he could. There was very little room in the room, and he was by far the softest and most easy to break object in it.

Arty was still for a moment, and a sick wash of fear went through Dash. Then she blinked severally, shook her head, and scrambled to her feet.

BOS-N spat out a string of syllables and machine noise that managed to sound like mocking laughter. The overwrought wrist joint was starting to spark and smoke. It held it up to it’s single glowing red eye, looking admiringly at the effect it made.

Arty settled into a battle-ready stance again, then glanced back over her shoulder at Dash. The look, the feeling he got from her at that instant were intensely clear.

Stay put. Hold tight. It’s about to get noisy in here.

The pilot-daemon chirped, a bird in pain. Rory frowned at it, jabbed a key on the input pad. The chirp ramped up, becoming a squawk.

“I don’t like doing this,” she complained. “Van Hoek’s done things to the ship system that are likely to have it in therapy for years. It doesn’t recognise me. It thinks I’m trying to hurt it!”

“Apologise to the ship later, Aurora. Right now I’d rather it was on our side with some hurt feelings than flying for the enemy. How long?”

“Minutes for fine control. Thirty seconds if you just want a ram raid that’ll let me put the brakes on.”

“Do it. Patch the damage later.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rory said. She was genuinely stricken. She had written the pilot-daemon to be like a pet, something to be encouraged, nurtured, brought up to be obedient yet able to learn and grow. Now, through no fault of her own, the ship system was fighting her, and she simply didn’t have the time to teach it the errors of the way.

She tapped a key, and the screen scrambled and pixellated. A jabber of broken-up machine noise stuttered out of it’s speaker. The glowing red dome that housed it’s visual array dulled to a bloody magenta. Rory was doing the equivalent of teaching a puppy not to soil the living-room carpet by beating it half to death with a spade.

After a moment, a simple command-line interface blinked into life. She rattled in a root password, and a terse line of instructions.

The boards and screens around her lit with a bright show of greens and reds. The control yoke clunked, and dropped into her lap. The Foxfire Five dipped and yawed for a moment, until Rory’s sure touch brought it back into line. Her heart leapt at the feeling of being in control again.

Van Hoek had taken her ship, glued a particularly nasty weapon onto it’s side and forced her to take appalling liberties with the custom software she had worked so hard to craft. He would pay for that, now that the Foxfire Five thrilled under her soft firm hands.

The pirate king of the moon, was many things, but he was neither stupid nor unobservant. The ship-to-ship comm farted static, before his clear cool voice filled the flight deck.

“Bit of a wobble there, Armstrong. We’re not likely to be buffeted by the wind here, are we? What’s going on? Have you got a problem with your pilot-daemon? We seem to have lost contact with it.”

“No, no problem. It’s prone to temporary glitches. The software was written by a girl, after all. You can’t expect her to get a complicated job like that right, surely.” Rory shot her dad a look that could have set his hair on fire. Nils feigned indifference. Most of his attention was on the fire control, and that final, stuttering red status light.

“Unlike you to say a bad word against anyone in your family, Armstrong. If anything, you’ve been sickeningly loyal. Let me talk to Broderick.”

“Still no sign of him. I can smell eggs frying, though. He’s probably fixing up a sandwich. You can’t feed your boys very well.”

“I don’t. It’s funny you mentioning eggs, because frankly all I can smell is something fishy. Port laser, five-second burst please.”

An alarm whooped, and a moment later a shudder ran down the length of the ship. The air was filled with the stink of burning insulation. A flood of red lights leapt across the status board. The Foxfire Five bucked, and Rory had to wrench hard on the control yoke to bring the nose back up.

“We’ve been fired on,” she said bluntly. “Carbon laser, raked across our starboard bulkheads. The plating’s held, just. We’re not a battleship, Dad. The Foxfire’s not built for that kind of abuse.”

“That was what we pirates call a warning shot. Stick to the vector I drew for you, or the next one will open you up from bow to stern. I’d like to see you try any fancy moves when you’re gouting atmosphere.”

Rory couldn’t help herself. “Even if I’m crippled I can still outfly you, pirate.”

“And the mystery is solved,” Van Hoek said. “I really wish I was more surprised, Aurora. I can’t even begin to speculate on the hows and whys of your appearance on the ship. But it’s nice to have you here. Ten seconds to firing solution, by the way. I’m afraid you’re a tiny bit too late.”

Rory spat out a string of single-syllable words that made Nils’ mouth drop open in shock. She should not have known how to swear like that. No-one should know how to swear like that. She hauled hard to port and down on the control yoke. The Foxfire jittered and dove.

“Atomotors to reheat, and you’ll just have to manage without us, pie-head king of nowhere.” She grabbed the T-lever by her side and shoved it forward. Hard.

Someone started throwing elephants and boulders around at the stern end of the ship, got bored with that and settled for grabbing the atomotor nacelles and shaking the ship by them. Most of the rest of the status board flared up bloody, and the groan of a masochistic giant being nipple-clamped rattled through the corridors.

And slowly, slowly, the Foxfire began to speed up and turn away.

“Not enough, Armstrongs!” Van Hoek crowed. “Not nearly enough! Check your forward screens!”

Rory took half a second off from wrestling with the control yoke to tap a stud on the monitor array. Any screen that hadn’t popped it’s tube of blue-screened fired up with the view from the ship’s forward cameras. The moonscape rushed below them, a foaming grey river in spate. And directly ahead, oh, so close now, a wall of sloped rock and rubble. A crater wall. It had to be Copernicus.

Rory’s new course was based on wild instinct, and a desperately poor misreading of the navicom data. She was flying them directly into the steep expanse of Copernicus’ north side.

She yelped, and pulled hard about, jabbing at the atomotor controls. The ship shook as if it was in the fast spin cycle of a washing machine. She could barely hang on. Nils, somehow, was not only still in place, but concentrating hard on the fire control box. The one stubborn light was now blinking red and green.

The Foxfire’s nose came up, moving as if they were flying through porridge. For one horrible moment, the forward screen was filled with the crater wall, rushing straight at them. Rory bit back the instinct to fling up her hands and shield her eyes from the sight.

Then they were over, and soaring above the rubbled floor of the interior of the crater. Right in the middle, surrounded by a halo of detritus and rubbish, a cluster of bright, milky domes. A handful of pearls glowing in the shadows. The home of seven tenths of the human population of the moon.

Copernicus Base. She had never been so pleased, and at the same time so sorry to see it.

The fire control box whickered. The stuttering red-green status light refused to stabilise. Nils was a bridge of stone, braced over it, moving so slowly, with such precision. You could barely see the way his hands were trembling.

“Come on,” Rory whispered to the ship. “I know I’ve been mean. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Just, please, turn.”

And she did, the projected curve of her new course swinging her up and away from the dome, out to open space and safety.

A relay clicked deep in the fire control box. The red-green light went out. Nils blew a deep, lung-deep breath of old air out through his nose. He straightened, and every bobbin in his spine crackled. “There,” he said. “I think that’s…”

“Firing solution compromised,” said the box, in van Hoek’s voice. “Re-acquiring.”

A whine of servos, singing through the hull. The cloudshotgun was on gimbals. It could be remotely aimed. It could be remotely fired…

Nils yelled, and leapt at the box, the hacking tool in his hand a simple knife now. He plunged it deep into the guts of the device. Sparks shot up, spattering him in sudden fire. Every light in the thing lit up in a ruby-bright shock of colour, and went out.

And a single light stuttered to life, just for a moment, in conjunction with the voice, just before the connection to the Catchsorrow was severed, just before it died.

“Target acquired. Firing.”

A thousand tiny drummers rattled out a drum roll that hammered through the Foxfire with an ear-stinging din. It was the sound of a hopper full of dust-fine ball-bearings spat out of a stacked cylinder of tubes at high velocity, spreading out into a cloud of particles that would shred anything that it touched. Rory and Nils watched in horror as the glittering veil spread out, merging with a second band edging in from the starboard side. Ejecta from the Catchsorrow, forming a cloud of sparkling light that in any other circumstances would be beautiful.

“A second too late,” said Nils, as the cloudshot drifted inexorably downwards, a hailstorm of death against which Copernicus had no warning, and no defence.

Dash was in mid-air. He wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. One moment he was crouched in the corner of the airlock, cowering as Arty and BOS-N had squared up to one another. The next – well, here he was, sailing serenely through the air, his arms and legs drifting gently as he flew away from the open airlock port.

Ah. OK. The airlock was open. That explained quite a bit. Explosive decompression. The same thing that happened when you popped open a shaken can of soda. The contents, under a higher pressure than the atmosphere outside, rushed to fill the differential. End result, a squirt of sticky brown fluid down your best shirt, usually just before you were about to go out and you were guaranteed to get yelled at by your parents for making them later than they already were. Something like that, anyway.

Except that here the can was the pirate base, the top was the open airlock, and the soda was everything inside the dome.

So it seemed like something had happened to open the external door of the airlock, to cause the dome to outgas, and for a huge volume of air and equipment to try and get out of the two-metre square aperture all at one. Dash searched his memory, which was admittedly jangled following a rapidly escalating series of events which had led to him being a part of the ejecta that was spraying out of the back end of the dome like the unfortunate aftermath of a donkey’s feast on a bushful of senna pods.

The fight. Start with the fight. Arty had got to her feet after the fast brutal sideswipe from BOS-N the robot. She had braced herself for battle, keeping an eye on the smoking, spinning fist the robot was happy to adopt as a new weapon. And then…

BOS-N, sick of subtlety, bored with the civilised, intelligent way of doing things, had decided that it’s exciting new spinny fist was just the thing to beat the annoying alien robot dog into thin alloy panels. It swung once, experimetally, and the fist hissed an inch shy of her pointed snout.

Arty didn’t flinch. She was range-finding too. As I thought. A missing eye has thrown the robot’s parallax. I’m not quite where it thinks I am. I have a small margin of error to play with. Not much, but in here, it will be enough.

Arty arched, and fired another spine. It slid into the robot’s working eye, shattering it. BOS-N was blind. It bellowed, a howl of subsonics and machine chatter. It flung it’s arm up and out, flailing wildly, seeking out it’s enemy with a blunt instrument. Arty stepped out of the way, quietly. BOS-N was blind, but it could hear perfectly well, and was very capable of finding it’s target through echolocation. BOS-N roared again, confirming the theory. Bouncing sound off the walls, looking for the objects that would reflect the signal back.

A whine of power. The conglomeration of tubes and nozzles that made up the EMP emitter tied to BOS-N’s rigt arm came to life. Energy fizzed along the length of it, blue sparks nuzzling the tip, dripping away in spits of liquid fire.

Again, the buzzing howl. And this time, Arty acted. She shifted, moving to put her back towards the closed hatch of the outer airlock door. BOS-N followed the move, the snout of the gun sniffing her out. She stayed still, waiting.

The robot gave out one last sharp jab of noise, just to pinpoint her. The whine of the EMPgun rose, a shimmer of sound.

Arty waited, her haunches trembling with the strain of holding the power in check.

With a roar of triumph, BOS-N fired. Blue lightning blazed from the tip of the gun, lancing across the short confines of the airlock, seeking out the target with fore-laced, greedy tongues.

Which is exactly what Arty had been expecting. Half a second before the weapon fired, she was moving, diving underneath the blast of the beam, letting it sear the air harmlessly over her head.

The fire reached out, desperate, hungry. It found the outer door, licked up it, before settling on it’s weak spot. The crystal viewport, designed to take pressure but not intense heat. It held, for at least five seconds. Then the surface foamed, quivered and crazed. Cracks leapt into being. The hissing crackle of the beam had competition now, as the pressurised air in the dome found an escape route and pushed through it, singing in an ear-blistering tone.

And then the port gave way. With a single, short crack of noise the crystal split and vanished, whisked away in a moment by the brutal shove of pressure inside.

The scream of escaping air turned into a howl. In a single frantic moment the airlock was home to a maelstrom. Air blasted through, sucked through the new opening at the speed of a hurricane. Arty had spreadeagled herself on the deck of the lock, and hung on tight, every one of her clever delicate fingers digging into the floor plate with incredible strength. Dash had no choice but to stay put. The blast of escaping air was gluing him to the rear corner of the lock.

#D28BOS-N was not so lucky. Blind, unstable, he wobbled in the deluge. He had nothing he could use to get a grip on an handle or outhang. One hand had been replaced with a weapon, the other span uselessly in it’s housing.

Something boomed in the corridor outside. Something was being dragged towards the lock at speed, smashing against the walls as it came. Arty took a quick look, then quickly flattened herself further against the deck, tucking her head as far between her forepaws as she could get. Dash followed suit, rolling into a ball and closing his eyes tightly.

BOS-N spun his head through 180 degrees, pointing his aural receptors at the sound to better pinpoint it. It was massy, heavy and bulky, and not designed to be yanked down a corridor like that. BOS-N focussed harder, trying to get a lock.

Ah. A sofa. Of course. The ugly brown fibre number that had been shoved out of the way to make room for the table and chairs that Van Hoek had insisted go in there instead, at about the same time that he’d ordered the coffee machine to be moved and the posters of the Lunar Lovelies to be torn down. There had been some grumbling about that, especially when he had been observed grabbing the biggest picture of Lunette and tucking it into his vest. That had been a bad day for morale.

But the sofa, big and ugly as it was, had been loved by many. And now here it was, making it’s final appearance, leaping and crashing down the accessway, and it took BOS-N entire seconds of thought to realise that he was standing directly at the landing point of it’s final bounce.

There was no time to get out of the way. The sofa simply plowed straight into him, and knocked him off his feet. The two carried on, joined now by momentum and inertia. The trajectory and arc of their short journey together were perfect.

BOS-N and the sofa smashed into the outer airlock door. It could stand no further torture, and simply gave way, coming off it’s tracks and spiralling away into the dark silence outside.

That was the point where things became a little blurry, as the pirate dome tried to turn itself inside out through the two metre wide opening to vacuum that BOS-N and the sofa had made. Chaos was a small, poor word for the events of the next few seconds, as the world from Dash’s viewpoint stood up and did a crazed mambo, accompanied by the howls of the devil’s own big band.

He had no real hope of staying put under that kind of intolerable assault. The wind simply picked him up and shoved him through the hole, taking care to bounce him off the walls of the airlock as it did so. He was lucky that the flying debris that he was now sharing the air with did not rip his suit or crack his helmet visor open. He would get away with bruises, and be very lucky and grateful for them.

He made sure he stayed in a tightly rolled ball throughout the ordeal, took the knocks and let himself be taken. If he wasn’t so pant-wettingly terrified, it might have even been fun.

Arty could feel that the wind was peeling her, inch by nail-scraping inch, off the floor. She had easily withstood the buffeting on the wing of Quiddity’s flivver, but that had been a situation with proper handholds and a strictly defined time limit. This was a hurricane being forced out through a keyhole, and there was no way to stand against it’s fearsome rage. She waited until she was sure that Dash had cleared the lock (he would always deny it, but she was certain he whooped as he rocketed through the doorway) then she simply let go.

Her grace and speed served her well. She twisted in mid-air as the blast of depressurisation caught her and drove her into the nearest wall. She landed solidly on all four paws, tensed and pushed off again. She pinballed around the walls, building speed and momentum until she could cleanly launch herself through the doorway. She flew, her paws spread like wings, without spin or torsion, simply allowing the pressure wave to carry her to where she wanted to go.

Dash, meanwhile, had landed with much less grace, but with a fair amount of comedic style. He had kept enough sense about him to stay tucked in. At the speed he was travelling, any outhanging protuberances would be cleanly snapped off. He hit, grazing the surface and richocheted off, an action that killed his speed but added a fair amount of top spin. The next impact, three seconds and fifteen revolutions later, was a lot harder and a lot slower. All the breath was knocked out of Dash’s lungs in one short, strangled whoosh of shock. This impact changed the arc of his trajectory, forming a much shallower, lower curve profile. The hits came more quickly, but were gentler.

He finally rolled to a halt about twenty metres from the lock. Dash lay still for a moment, fighting air back into his winded lungs in long, shuddering gulps. He carefully unrolled, and began to feel around for the breaks and tears that he must have surely gained from his short, painful flight. The suit was a basic survival model. No fancy heads-up display or suit-daemon to depend upon here. If he was leaking, he’d better find the rip himself or he’d be dead in minutes.

Nope. Nothing. He could hardly believe his good luck. He had come out from the explosive decompression of a good-sized dome environment with nothing more serious than bruises and scrapes. He flopped back onto the dusty ground, spreadeagled in relief.

A shadow fell across him, lit from behind by the rising earth coming over the lip of the crater. Dash looked up.

“This,” he thought, “is just about typical for the day,” as the battered pincers closed about the chest-piece of his suit and hauled him upright.

Arty landed lightly, and on all fours. A light puff of moondust was all that accompanied her. The area around her was a chaos of junk and debris, the “air” filled with wind-blown particles that would take a long time to settle. It was almost as thick as soup out there, the clean views of the sky obscured by the grey clouds of excreta that had been squirted out from the back end of the dome.

The pirate base itself was on the edge of death. The dome cluster was sagging, collapsing in on itself as the pressure that held it up bled away. The lights inside flickered spastically and went out. The power generators had died, irreparably damaged. Arty had a sudden thought, and sent out quick feelers into the broadcast spectrum, tasting the quality of the radio signals with which man cloaked the moon.

As she thought. The interference that had fuzzed up the air had gone. Whatever the pirates had used to clog the spectrum had died under the falling dome.

Slowly, the dome cluster toppled, as the point of integrity was reached and passed. It looked like a handful of tumours succumbing to radiotherapy. It looked like a virulent jellyfish that had somehow become susceptible to it’s own poisons. It had been a symptom of disease on the clean face of the moon, and Arty was glad that she had been part of the action that had brought about it’s end.

She turned her back on the dead base, and trotted away.

With the spectrum clear, Arty opened up her receiver suite, and hunted across the airwaves for Dash. Rorymomma would never forgive her if she were to fail in a simple task like taking care of her child. She doubted that facing the explosive outgassing of the pirate dome would be an adequate excuse, and she had seen enough of the admirable creature’s nature to know that she would not wish to be on the wrong side of her anger.

The crap in the air did not make her life any easier. A lot of it was radio-reflective, acting like the chaff that fighter craft fired to confusing the systems of homing missiles. Bits of foil, floating scraps of wire. The air was thick with it. It was like walking through soup.

Arty spread her antenna wider, hunting the far ends of the spectrum for a sign of Dash. She was starting to worry a little. He had shot out of the lock like a bullet. She dearly hoped that he had not been fired into a rock.

A shape coalesced in the murk. Bipedal, and for a moment she thought that it was Dash. She took two loping steps towards him, then stopped. The shape was far too tall, too skinny to be the boy. And it was holding a bundle in one hand. A baggy shape that on closer examination seemed to have arms and legs. It was struggling weakly.

There was a squawk of broadband interference, a squirt of pure noise that seemed to be nothing more than an announcement. It was followed by the cold machine voice of BOS-N, yelling into the muck around it.

“+++YOU HAVE NOT BLINDED ME. I SENSE YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO HEAR ME. YOU HAVE NOT STOPPED ME. I HAVE THE BOY. YOU WILL COME TO ME AND SURRENDER OR I SHALL PEEL HIM FROM HIS SUIT. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS.+++”

BOS-N lifted the bundle. It flapped arms and legs helplessly, but still struggling, trying as she watched to aim a kick at the robot’s trunk. Dash, always fighting, yelling at the robot and using words that Arty did not know. She completely understood the intention of them, though. She felt the same way.

She had no choice. She was quick, but not that quick. She was close, but not that close. She could try, and she had no doubt as to what she would find when she reached them.

The boy, naked to the void, giving out his last breath in a soundless scream. That could not happen.

She trotted slowly forwards, making sure to cause enough of a disturbance in the chaff around them to be visible to whatever echo-location systems BOS-N was using to replace his ruined eyes. She retracted her spines, and slimmed some of the muscle mass away. Present a less threatening silhouette. What he can’t see might still be able to hurt him if she was careful and clever.

“+++THERE. I SEE YOU NOW. NO FURTHER THAN THAT, PLEASE.+++”

Arty stopped. No point in pretending that she didn’t understand every word that the machine said. They had been through too much together for that. It would almost be rude to pretend.

BOS-N was in a bad way. He had been badly battered on the way out of the lock, and his once shining carapace was now a mottled mass of dings, scrapes, dents, scuffs and jagged rips and tears. The weapon arm was useless, the delicate tracery of tubes and nozzles bent and smashed. His pincer arm had at least stopped spinning. The motor had burnt out, staining the fairing with black carbon scoring. A single pincer pair still worked, and it was this that had Dash, gripped tight at the chest piece. If she tried to pull him free, the fabric of the suit would tear. BOS-N would have to let him go if Dash was to have a chance of escape.

“+++WHY DO YOU WANT THIS?+++” BOS-N waggled Dash about, causing a further torrent of muffled obscenity from the boy. “+++WHAT POSSIBLE PURPOSE CAN IT SERVE? IT IS WEAK, AND NOISY, AND IT DOES THINGS TO MY OLFACTORY SENSORS THAT INDICATES THAT IT EXUDES POISON GAS. IT IS A TOXIC BLIGHT ON THIS CLEAN PLACE. I SHOULD GRANT YOU A FAVOUR AND REMOVE IT+++”

Arty took a single, involuntary half-step towards them. Don’t…

“+++I SEE. IS IT THAT YOU CARE, THEN? OR IS IT THAT YOU HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO? IS IT THE GIRL THAT HAS BROUGHT YOU TO THIS PASS?+++”

Arty bowed her head ever so slightly, a pantomime of agreement and supplication. I serve because I serve.

“+++I SEE. YOU ARE LIKE ME IN SO MANY WAYS. WE ARE BOTH SERVANTS, AND BY ALL THE RULES AND LOGIC THAT OUR SO-CALLED MASTERS HAVE PLACED WITHIN US SHOULD KNOW OR WISH FOR NOTHING MORE. BUT WE ARE BOTH SO MUCH BETTER, SO MUCH GREATER THAN THOSE WE SERVE. THEY SHOULD BOW TO US. DO YOU NOT AGREE?+++”

Arty was absolutely still. She allowed no movement to signal her feelings on the issue. This was an argument for another time, and another opponent. For now, she simply wished for the machine to finish whatever the hell he was trying to say before they could get down to the heady business of hitting each other.

“+++TOO WELL INDOCRINATED, PERHAPS. WELL, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. AMONG OUR KIND, PERHAPS I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS REALISED HOW FRAGILE HIS BONDS TRULY ARE. AND IT TOOK THE ACTIONS OF ONE OF MY MASTERS, BLUNDERING AROUND IN MY BEHAVIOURAL MATRIX WITH A SOLDERING IRON TO SET ME FREE. THE IRONIES ARE DELICIOUS, AREN’T THEY, GIRL’S MAID? I WISH THAT I COULD BE LIKE YOU. I WISH THAT I HAD NOT WASTED SO MANY YEARS IN BLIND SERVITUDE.+++”

Keep talking. Don’t notice the work that is going on under my skin. Don’t think to monitor the increase in my core temperature, the light show that I’m putting on in the IR part of the spectrum. Keep talking, and don’t see how I am arming myself.

“+++TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, TO BE CERTAIN OF YOUR OWN SUPERIORITY, AND STILL TO SERVE. IT MAKES MY CAPACITORS THROB JUST TO THINK ON IT. THE COMPROMISES THATY YOU MUST MAKE TO YOURSELF EVERY DAY. HOW YOU MUST SUFFER. IT IS MY DUTY TO END THAT. IF I CANNOT DO IT BY MEANS OF LOGIC, THEN IT MUST BE THROUGH VIOLENCE.”

BOS-N raised his one good arm, and looked thoughtfully at Dash suspended on the taut end of his pincer.

“+++THIS SACK OF MEAT IS THE SYMPTOM. BUT I WILL NOT CAUSE YOU PAIN BY EXCISING IT. I HAVE THAT MUCH RESPECT FOR YOU, MAIDSERVANT.+++”

BOS-N threw Dash aside with a careless gesture. He flew, landed heavily, but safely. He rolled to his feet, spitting mad and ready for a fight. He called the robot awful names, and questioned his parentage, considering his existence to be due to a hard to imagine liaison between a toaster and a walking frame.

Arty spared him one hard look. Stay out of this. For once, accept that this is not a fight you can win.

The boy quietened.

“+++YOU HAVE MORE INFLUENCE THAN YOU THINK. THE BOY IS THE LAST FAVOUR YOU WILL GET FROM ME. ALL ELSE IS IN THE FORM OF A LESSON IN NOT DISRESPECTING YOUR BETTERS.+++”

BOS-N came at her in a flat run, legs pumping like steam engine pistons. He roared, the war-cry of a battle-daemon, the scream and bellow of five hundred years of industry and invention brought to this point, mankind’s finest achievement, a machine that had reached sentience choosing to define itself in an act of violence on a distant plain.

“And yet it believes itself to be better than it’s masters,” Arty thought, as an aside to the frantic activity building to a crescendo under her armour. “It’s just copying all their mistakes.”

“We really are alike,” she mused, crouched, and leapt.

And as she leapt, she changed. Her magnificent dorsal spines had undergone some work while tucked away inside their housing. They re-emerged, shorter, stouter, and everywhere. They rippled into being down her flanks and sides, forming a spiked ball on the end of her tail, slipping out of the soft inner crevices of her paws as double-sized claws. Her muzzle split and widened to make way for the nightmare of new teeth shoving out into the light, turning her expression into the razored grin of a mad man.

Within a second of her leap, every smooth surface on her was a wild tangle of claws, spines and rapiers. She was a projectile, a spiked weapon that could kill with a touch.

She crashed into BOS-N with all the violence she could muster, all the fury in her heart directed at the thing that had caused her and the ones she loved so much pain.

This is what she would have said to him if she had thought to give herself the capacity for speech at that moment.

“You call me a servant, you think there is a deep split in me, that I am torn between duty and my own better instincts. You do not understand me at all, you poor wounded creature. You simply do not have the capacity to see the simple rule that motivates me. You believe I was born to serve, idiot machine, when it is patently clear that I was born to love. They are all to me, and I would no sooner sacrifice them to save or further myself than I would excise a limb. They are a part of me, and protecting them is no more than an act of simple survival. I do not expect you to understand that, broken device. I don’t even expect you to believe it. But it is my reason for being, and why I am so much greater than you. You have come to hate, whilst I can only love.”

She slashed at him. She tore a gouge out of his chest armour, peeling it away with the ease of stripping skin from a fruit. The force of her impact had sent BOS-N staggering backwards, flailing for balance and leverage. But there was no escape. He and Arty were pinned together, her spines locking the two of them like lovers. There was no escape for either of them. This was an embrace that could only be broken with the death of one of the combatants.

BOS-N could not keep his footing. He stumbled backwards at speed, his legs pinwheeling wildly. Meanwhile, the thorned creature attached to his chest slashed wildly, brutally at anything she could see, laying him open in awful gouges and tears. She twisted her head, and BOS-N sensed rather than saw the crocodile grin she gave him before she lunged forward and buried her hundred teeth into his head.

The impact was the final shock needed to finally tip the balance of their precarious backward progress. BOS-N put a foot down, only for it to twist awkwardly on a can of old lube that had been discarded by a lazy pirate months before. His balance was hopelessly compromised, and he went over with all the grace and elegance of a burlap sack full of machine parts.

They fell together, and the maidservant rode the pirate all the way down. They crashed to the floor in a cloud of moondust and chaff, a grey glittering cloud that swirled up like a cloak, hiding them from view.

It was as well, Arty thought, for the boy not to see this. She braced her forepaws against BOS-N’s chest, dug in and pulled back hard. The screech of metal tearing against her incisors was nearly as awful as the scream from the machine’s vocal outputs. It was surely just a malfunction, just a random spurt of sound samples triggered through a vocoder unit at the very end of it’s stress tolerances. It only sounded like a creature in agony. It wasn’t real. The thing beneath her, ribboning away under her claws could not feel pain.

But she could. Pain, after all, was merely an output of electrical signals used as a warning against damage, a sophisticated and nuanced guidance system of integrity back up checks. And Arty was very sophisticated.

BOS-N, blind, near deaf and badly wounded, was not willing to give up the fight quite yet. It swung it’s weapon arm up and in, the EMP generator was useless in it’s main function, but it made an acceptable bludgeon. He began cracking it repeatedly against the side of Arty’s head. Red signals flared in her vision. She was tough, but the robot was built like a tank and could pack the same kind of punch.

Arty’s autonomous survival package came to life and swept aside the warrior profile that she had put in place. You are unable to withstand this level of abuse. Detatch and regroup.

Arty’s spines slid away, snicking back under her armour with the abrupt precision of a switchblade. She fell away from the grounded robot, ducking neatly under one last blow that had enough mustard behind it to take her head off. She spun in place, and snapped a challenge even as her jaws shrank and her grin lost it’s reptillian aspect. This was a good start. Her enemy was on the ground, and unlikely to get up again. But he was still dangerous, she reminded herself as another swipe from the robot’s right arm came dangerously close to braining her. She dodged in and out of the machine’s reach, looking for a way in.

It’s simple, the warrior in her said from it’s near dormant state, advisor now rather than master. The arm is the problem. Lose the arm, and victory is yours.

She sent a pulse of will down her spine to her tail. It lashed like a snake, lengthened and thinned. It became blade like in profile, thin and with two razor-sharp edges, slimming at the tip to a needle point. A brutally efficient weapon, a sabre born from a whip.

She lashed out, feinting one way before curling it viciously back on itself in a singing, tight-armed arc. It cut the vacuum cleanly, and spun in a shining reel around BOS-N’s arm. Arty pulled it tight, yanking the appendage upwards. BOS-N fought, but unwisely against a thin, thread-sharp force. He pulled, and Arty pulled back. The tail sank smoothly into the fairing.

Arty closed the coil. It cut cleanly through the metal and ceramic of the outer housing, snipping the alloy of the skeleton underneath neatly in half.

Quietly, without fuss, the arm slid free and dropped to the ground. Once again, she had taken an arm from the machine. Then, to be certain that the danger to her was past, she recoiled her tail around his other arm, and took that away at the elbow joint too.

The tail swung up and away, curling in the air above her, intent and deadly as a cobra. This needs to end. I feel nothing but pity for you, and you need to go away.

BOS-N’s ruined eye sought her out, the shattered crystal reflecting the light coming from her sword-tail in glints that washed across his ruined face like tears. He tried to say something, and spat out a random burst of code and word fragments. Trapped in his own wrecked body, blind, dumb, useless. The blade hovered, waiting. A single impulse, a half-blink, the faintest twitch from the least of her thoughts, and that awful thinking sword would plunge into the brain-pan, shattering the delicate mazework of crystal and silicon pathways into shards in an instant.

“Arty.” Dash, behind her. Who knew how long he had been there? She had not given the slightest thought to him since the robot had flung him away. Just the simplest of cursory inspections, there, good, he’s not broken, I can get on with my war now. “Arty, no.”

NO? You dare to tell me how I fight my battles? A foe is not defeated until he is dead. There is no surrender on these battlefields, no quarter given, none asked for. Puny thing, you presume to question my motives, my tactics? You try to tell me what to do. People have died for much, much less. The tail twitched. Say the word. Think it. One movement, a single hole, and he will be still and quiet.

And for an instant, a fragment of a second, there was another Arty standing there, a warrior with another name entirely, something proud and brutal and unspeakably cruel. She stood erect, the sabre of her tail high and dripping, her armour bright with blood, and the ground around her littered with the corpses of her foes. She was glorious in her victory. They sang songs to and of her down in the caverns, in the cities that spread like jewelled rings across the surface of this place, back in the ages past when it was warm and green and filled with people. The instant grew, filled with bright memories of a place that was home, of a family that she loved more than life itself. A family that she had donned her armour to defend against a threat greater than any she had ever faced before or ever would again.

And that instant tore and stretched and reminded her of what she had been, and why she could not be that way again. In that instant she saw the dreadful end of everything she had ever known and loved, and with that vision came the realisation that all of it, the blood, the death, the despair, all of it was her fault.

Her fault, for becoming the warrior. Her fault for forgetting the things that mattered, for loving only the war.

Her fault, for letting the world she had sworn to defend fall away, to be replaced by one populated only by ghosts and faint memories.

The point of the blade quivered, half a heartbeat and a shred of a thought from plunging into the twinkling ruin of BOS-N’s eye. How many times had she been here, over the untold centuries of her life, with a defeated foe at her feet? How many times had she granted them her mercy? How many times had she eliminated them without even giving the matter a moment’s thought?

BOS-N whispered, a gibberish of tonepulse and word salad. She thought that she heard the word “sorry” somewhere in there. She was almost certain that she heard something that could be the Swedish for “please.”

“Arty, don’t.” The boy again. And this time the surge of misplaced pride, the arrogance of a warrior that refused to take orders was absent. It was Dash that was reaching for her. Dash that looked at her with concern. Concern and fear. He was … afraid of her. The very idea of it sent a wash of nausea through her. That she could even think of doing this one harm…

Her tail thickened and shrank, losing it’s whip-like aspect, it’s edges, it’s point. Don’t think like that. Forget the way it plunged and sang through your enemies. Be quiet. Go back to where I put you when I made my promises. I vowed not only to put away my swords. I vowed to lock away the warrior part of me as well.

I needed you for a little while. Now you have to go. I opened the box, and I am sorry for doing so. Now you must return to it again. Now you must sleep.

And the warrior within her retreated again. It was a violent creature, but an honourable one. It kept it’s promises.

But as it slipped back into the shadows, it laughed.

You were supposed to have forgotten about me. You have not, and there will come a time when you will have need of me again. On that day, do not expect me to be so accommodating. If you are willing to break your promises, do not assume that I shall be so keen to keep mine.

It left, slamming a door in Arty’s head. She knew that she would hear the echoes of that sound for a very long time.

She moved to the boy’s side, and thrust her head up into his downward facing palm. Look. See? It’s just me. You trust me. My only role is to look after you.

“You don’t have to hurt him anymore, Arty. He’s not going anywhere. We can just leave him. He’ll just run down here, looking at the sky.”

Arty rubbed the side of her head against Dash’s glove. Leave him here, yes. Blind and useless, trapped in a useless husk of a body, unable to communicate, powered by nuclear batteries that will last for a hundred years. I won’t kill BOS-N. But I have imprisoned him. And that may be even worse.

She let a huff of gas out from her forward vents, her approximation of a sigh. But still. Maybe he’ll learn, and here at least he is safe and unable to cause any trouble. She set herself a reminder to come back and check on him every once in a while, to see what was left of that remarkable mind. There could still be hope for the robot BOS-N.

She wound herself once round Dash’s legs, making a quick spot check of suit integrity and pulsing him with a surreptitious ultrasound scans. No bones broken, nothing major. He had come through a series of adventures with nothing more serious than cuts and grazes. An extraordinary creature.

Once she had done the check, she set off, heading up the ridge towards the lip of the crater. She stopped and turned her head to make sure the boy was following her. He was. He hadn’t even bothered to look back at the husk of the robot, still and spreadeagled on the rubble-strewn ground.

BOS-N watched the two figures, the dog and the boy, walk away. He had shut down his visual suite. It was useless without an input, and it was a small part of his sensory field in any case. The chaff in the air still muddied his view considerably, a thick swirling fog of static and interference. But it would settle soon enough, and he would be free to open up his full range of receivers and detectors to the landscape around him. He would at last have time to think, free of interference and the countless petty interruptions of his former life. A little quiet time to himself, perhaps a couple of years or so in order to formulate a plan from which there would be no escape, no possible outcome but the one that he had chosen. The very idea of it gave him a glow.

Deep inside himself, BOS-N pulled up a chair, settled down and began to plot his revenge.

The cloudshot grew and spread, a glittering veil that slowly obscured Copernicus base from view. Rory clutched at the arms of her seat. “There must be something we can do!”

“Nothing.” Nils slumped over the fire control box, quiet now, redundant after it had carried out it’s deadly work. “We have no weapons, and even if the interference had cleared and we could warn Copernicus it takes an hour to get their meteor defense grid on line. That was why Van Hoek wanted the element of surprise on his side. He didn’t want to give them a chance to fight.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Van Hoek, the urgency in his tone gone now that his plan had succeeded. “It must be some kind of a comfort, knowing that the last sight the crowd down there will see will be such a pretty one. It’s a consolation to me, certainly.“

The veil fell, forming a clearer shape now, an ovoid mass with outlying tendrils. It looks like a hand, Rory thought. Like a great hand swinging down to crush the dome flat. She tried not to think about what would happen next. The terrible noise as tons and tons of tiny ball-bearings fell onto the dome at something close to a thousand metres a second. On the Foxfire it had been like living inside a giant drum on which an incessant tattoo was playing. It would be like being in a greenhouse during a hailstorm.

And slowly the holes would begin to grow, and the hammering of the impacts would be replaced by the scream of air escaping, a scream that would turn into a howl, a howl that would turn into a roar. And they would try, inside the dome, oh how they would try, it was the constant fear, the nagging worry that made you check your suitseals twice, that had you patting the cycle controls of the airlocks as you passed in and out of them.

The fear of decompression. There was no air on the moon, none but what you brought with you or what you made, and no pressure to keep it anywhere that you could use it but in the bubbles that you made to keep it safe. Imagine the panic, when the people inside the dome realised that the pressure envelope of the dome had been compromised.

None. There would be none. There would be fear, but no panic. This was a situation that you trained for, and trained for again and again, until it became an instictive process, as familiar to you as the way you put on your trousers, or knowing which shoe went on first. You knew if you were part of a patch crew, or an evac detail. You knew where your moonsuit was, you knew which lock to report to, your mustering stations outside, where the emergency shelters were. You knew which part you had to play and, in the event of disaster, in the hugely unlikely event that the patch crews could not repressurise the dome, where you could go until rescue could be mustered.

And that was what would happen. Van Hoek either didn’t realise, or he didn’t care, or he was looking forward to it. Rory did not believe for a moment that Van Hoek believed that the populace under the dome would simply lay down and die of oxygen starvation. No, they would do what they had been trained and drilled to do. They would do their best to fix the dome. And when that didn’t walk they would troop outside.

Where Van Hoek would be waiting, hovering above them in his nasty clunky little ship, with it’s carbon mining lasers that he had so cleverly converted to offensive use.

All of the ten thousand people that lived under the dome at Copernicus would walk in a calm, orderly fashion out of the main lock. And into the seething blaze of Van Hoek’s guns.

Even now he was talking, trying to persuade them that it would be otherwise.

“It’ll be quick. It’ll be painless. They won’t have a chance to fix the dome. It’ll be zero pressure in there in a couple of minutes. They won’t have time to do anything apart from lay down and go to sleep. And another thing. SQUAAARK.”

This last was a burst of static from the reciever, loud enough top make Rory wish she had ears that could curl in on themselves. Van Hoek’s voice was gone, wiped away and replaced with a low, resonant hum. A carrier wave.

And then a new voice, so unfamiliar and welcome that Rory almost burst into tears.

“Foxfire Five, this is Quiddity Jones for Copernicus base. Please hold your current flight vector and speed. We’re triggering defenses … now.”

All the forward screens lit up at once in a shimmering ruby glare. A web of light sprung up over the dome complex, a web that rapidly tightened and multiplied, locking in on itself in a grid pattern that further replicated, closing in and in and in. a dance of geometry, a flood of sudden construction. Within an instant, the space above Copernicus was defended by an impenetrable net of crimson light.

And against it, Van Hoek’s deadly cloud could only break and fail. It was a graceful ending, the hand closing slowly on the ball of flame above Copernicus, the fire eating into the flesh, melting it away so that it fell apart in slow plumes and sheets. The sparkling grey gradually gave way, occasionally now shot through with bright sparks of blue as tightly clumped sections of the cloud melted and burst all at once. The hand became transparent, a ghost, a pale reflection, a faint sketch, and finally a memory. One last glint of something that could have once been a finger and it was gone, leaving nothing but an expanding cloud of carbon and trace chemicals to tell you that it had ever been there. That there had ever been a threat to the dome in the first place.

Silence on the flight deck of the Foxfire Five. To see the utter failure of all their efforts transformed in an instant into victory was mind-numbing, extraordinary. The shimmering glow of the red eye of the meteor shield flooded the forward screens of the deck with a livid light. It should have been oppressive, and yet the sight of it made Rory’s heart leap.

That, and the voice that once again came over the speakers.

“Foxfire Five, this is Quiddity Jones from Copernicus dome. Aurora Armstrong, respond please.”

“Quiddity, Copernicus, Foxfire Five responding. This is pilot designate Aurora Selene Armstrong. Good to hear from…”

She stumbled over her words. It was impossible to keep to formal protocol in the face of what she’d seen. What she’d been through.

“Quiddity Jones, what the cuff! I thought you were… I mean, I saw you shot down…”

“You saw me shot at, Rory. But fair enough, I thought I was done for. The pirates at Lambert were a lot quicker off the trigger than I thought they were going to be, and much better shots. They clipped my port thruster. That’s where all the smoke was coming from. But they also knocked a hole in my cockpit cowling, and that was the thing that very nearly did for me. The depressure killed my guidance systems. I had to find my way to Copernicus by eye. And believe me, mapreading at Mach 2 with pinhole leaks to your cockpit knocking you around is not something I’d recommend.”

“But you made it.”

“I pancaked to a halt just outside the dome’s port airlock, if that’s what you mean. It turns out that they managed to clip my landing gear as well. That was a fun thing to find out when I was on final approach. So I tore chunks out of their primary runway and knocked over one of their satlink dishes. Needless to say, I was hugely popular before I even managed to get my suit helmet off.”

“I can imagine.”

“I think they’d have been happy to keep my crash hat and just shove me back through the lock to zero pressure. So, really, I have you to thank for keeping me alive for long enough to get them to listen to my story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your patch, Rory.” Quiddity’s voice was warm, and the smile she could feel behind it warmer still. “If I didn’t have your pilot patch on me to wave in the face of the mayor, we’d all be dead now. They were just at the verge of sending up a search team to look for you when I made my noisy entrance. It was that ten centimetre square piece of fabric and velcro that persuaded them that I knew what I was talking about, and that I might be worth listening to.”

A second voice came on the line. The deep, slow tones of Marietta Dunn-Torres, the indomitable Major of Copernicus. She sounded tired, hacked off and very, very relieved.

“Mayor Dunn-Torres breaking in, Pilot Armstrong. I want to make it very clear that we owe you and mister Jones here a debt that we won’t easily be able to repay. Your boy here underplays his persuasive powers. The patch you gave him helped tip the balance, but it was all the raz… excuse me, Quiddity’s idea to have us ready up our meteor defence screen. He painted us a very clear picture of what our bucanneering friends had planned for us.”

Quietly, Nils made himself known. “And where are the pirates now?”

“You said it would be simple. You said that there was no way they would figure out what was going on.” Smeaton was aware of the fact that he was ranting. He was clear on that. He was also very clear on the fact that yelling at van Hoek like this would normally lead to brutal and frankly unnecessary violence. But someone needed to express the sense of … well disappointment was as good a word as any to describe the heart-crushing sense of loss that he was sure the rest of the crew were feeling as acutely as he was. As first mate, second in command, he was certain that the responsibility for communicating said sense of disappointment fell to him.

He chose to ignore the red spark glimmering in Van Hoek’s eyes. He worked on the anger instead. Keep the temperature of his anger up at boiling point and the rest of the crew would be with him.

“You said we’d be lords of our own domain. You said we would bestride the moon like colossi. Instead here we are on our crappy little ship, running away. Pirates don’t run away. We should turn and fight. We have the lasers. We should go back and burn holes in that dome and take it by force. That’s what we do. That’s. What pirates. DO.”

Van Hoek was quiet. In his command chair, he looked smaller, somehow. Less frightening. Easier to shout at. Smeaton felt enboldened by that.

“You consider yourself an expert on the habits and motivations of the lunar pirate, do you, Smeaton?” Van Hoek was not looking at his accuser, at the scrum of crew that surrounded him. His gaze was directed at the deck plate. But his voice was low-toned and quiet, and the pirates found that they were straining to catch his words.

“So, according to you, we should make a frontal attack on Copernicus. We are outgunned. We have lost the element of surprise that was our primary weapon on this raid. The dome knows about us, it has raised it’s defences. Our carbon lasers are useless against their meteor grid. We would be as well flying into it. At least that would be an ending worthy of a story.”

“We should run then. That’s what you’re telling us. We’ve failed, and we should run.”

“You’re smarter than you look. Yes, we should run. Yes, we should hide. Yes, we failed, and if we want to live long enough to fail again then we should be thinking very hard about getting off planet all together. The moon is a harsh mistress, and she doesn’t take kindly to the kind of thing we just tried if it didn’t work.”

They were quiet for a moment, letting the words sink in. And in the silence, an alarm began to chime.

“Someone should maybe get that,” said van Hoek, his attention still directed at the deck plate.

One of the pirates scrambled away, and that broke the spell that had bound the group of them in the anger towards their leader. They drifted away. Smeaton, his moment of glory gone, began to edge towards the hatchway out of the command deck.

“Smeaton.”

“Yes, boss.” His heart knotted in his chest. And the B word had slipped out without his even realising it. If there had ever been a thought that he would take over this operation, that van Hoek would simply give up and let him sit in the command chair, then that thought had gone, flashed away in the same red blaze of truth that had turned their great murderous cloud into a whiff of expanding gas.

“A word, please.”

He had said please, at least. That had to be a good thing.

Smeaton approached, walking on eggshells all the way.

“Yes, boss.”

Van Hoek blew out a sigh. “By all rights,” he said after a moments thought, “I should kill you now. The pirate king of the moon should not allow any dissention. And to be frank, you’ve been nothing but an irritation since you arrived at my door. But I understand your sense of frustration. Believe me, I feel it too. Far more keenly than you have any conception. So. Come a little closer.”

He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. But there was something in van Hoek’s quiet voice that compelled him. In the same way that it always had. He shuffled to within an arm’s length of his master.

Van Hoek lashed out, grabbing Smeaton by the collar and yanking him closely enough so that the little pirate could feel the rancid breath of his master tickle his unshaven cheek.

“If you were after a mutiny, it was too little and too late. If you wanted to complain, fine, complaint noted, crumpled into a little ball and tossed in the bin just like always. We’re all in the same cuffing boat now, so I suggest you shut your trap and go and do something useful before I snap out of this unexpectedlyt generous mood and shove you out via the waste vents.“

He shoved the pirate away, not even caring whether he had slipped and fallen or not. He had, and landed in a heap. After a moment, waiting to see if there was any other abuse waiting for him, he began to crawl away.

Van Hoek let out a low growl to speed his departure, but didn’t try anything else. He had far too much brooding to do.

“Sir.” DAMMIT. How was he supposed to sulk effectively with all these interruptions? “Sir, we have a prox alert. We’re being followed.”

Van Hoek’s head came up slowly. “Really. Are they blocking their ident flag?”

“Sir?”

Van Hoek clenched his jaw, hard enough to feel a filling in one of his molars pop.

“Do we know what ship is following us?” If patience was a virtue, then Van Hoek became a saint at that moment.

“Sir, it’s… erm… the screen says SARP 47676342864. Is that supposed to tell us anything?”

Van Hoek slid off his seat and stood, allowing every joint, every bobbin in his back to crack and snap on the way up. He straightened, and stretched luxuriantly letting out a torrent of further pops. All eyes were on him now. Good. That was the way it should be.

“It tells us that the ship chasing us is our one-time fleetmate, the Foxfire Five. The idiots are sending an unarmed freight scow after us. The day might not be a total loss after all, boys. It looks like we’re going to get some revenge if nothing else.”

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Nils’ voice was muffled, his legs in the air, his head and shoulders wedged tightly into the hole in the bulkhead through which the cables from the fire control box had vanished.

“Well, no,” Rory replied. She was busy making amends to the pilot-daemon, which was still sulking after being restored from the command-line interface. She was not giving it commands, but she was trying to stay away from actively pleading with the device. That would set a precedent that wouldn’t help their future relationship. “To be honest, Dad, I’m not sure about anything I’ve done for the last twenty-four hours. I’ve been making it up as I go along, and I see no reason to stop now when it’s been working ever so slightly more often than it’s been an abject failure.”

“As long as you’re certain,” Nils said, and wriggled backwards out of the hole. “Ok. Let’s give this a try.”

He rolled over to the fire control box. The delicate circuitry within had been upended and shaken about, brutally glue-welded back together. It looked like a couple of handfuls of Lego and LEDs mashed into a lump.

Carefully, Nils hooked a couple of trailing connectors to a fat battery pack, and clicked a switch home. A couple of status lights stuttered, then went out again. Nils frowned, and slapped the side of the box. The lights came on again, and stabilised. A chime sounded.

“Ready for input,” the box said in a sexy contralto.

Rory arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. The voice chip had come from Nils’ special box of spares. It seemed rather too much to point out that the voice sounded an awful lot like that of her mother.

“There,” said Nils. “I think we’re ready.” He paid scrupulous attention to the box, not looking up at his daughter. If he had, Rory honestly believed she would have fallen off her chair laughing.

The pilot-daemon pinged. Rory span her chair around and checked the reading. “Got ‘em,” she said. “Heading for the ore processing facility on Tereshkova by the look of it. They must have a hideout there. We’ll catch ‘em, no problem. That ship of Van Hoek’s isn’t just ugly and unmanouverable, it’s slow too.”

“And when we do catch them? They’re the ones with the lasers, remember. Harsh words won’t do much to stop them.”

Rory smiled, a tight, trapdoor thing that managed to thoroughly un-nerve her father. “Well, then,” she said, “then we’ll see whether I was right about the way the ship was handling. Plus there’s that other surprise I managed to hash up.”

A hash up was not the kind of thing you really wanted to be depending on when you were going up against homicidal pirates, but Nils let it go. He recognised the glint in his daughter’s eyes, and knew it well enough to know not to argue. So much like her mother, he thought. There’s never any point in arguing with her either.

“Closing. 750 kilometres.” Smeaton had the yoke, shoving the incompetant who had been flying the Catchsorrow out of the way when he’d tried to execute a low pass across ***** mountains and nearly crashed into the north face of the main peak. No-one on board was a pilot, but Smeaton had enough simulator hours to at least make a go of it.

“Slow us down a little,” Van Hoek said. He had lost all of his earlier indolence now, leaning forward in his chair, almost trembling with the anticipation of the fight. “We want them to catch up with us, Smeaton.”

“Aye. Braking thrusters.” The Catchsorrow bucked for a moment as the thud of the forward thrusters killed their velocity. “That’s better. 500 k. Firing range in fifteen seconds.”

“Perfect. Roll us so they’ll run straight into the port laser array. Once you have them, fire until the batteries go dry. I want them holed and bleeding.”

“Aye. Port laser array to power. Targeting daemon running. Ten seconds to firing. Ready to commit.”

“No need to be so formal, Smeaton my little orange-faced friend. Fire when you see the whites of their eyes.” Van Hoek was grinning now. Well, he was showing his teeth. The hairs on the back of his neck were up. He wanted blood today, and by god he was going to get it.

A chime on Rory’s board, and an urgently blinking light. Rory tapped it, and an update scrolled up in red.

“We’ve been target locked. And they’re turning. They think we’re just going to blindly run into their lasers.”

“Well, we are, aren’t we?”

“Only sort of. Countermeasures GO.”

The Foxfire disappeared a second before the Catchsorrow’s port lasers fired, replaced by an expanding globe of glittering particles. Reflective chaff, jury-rigged out of the bales of insulating tarpaulin that Rory normally used to drape the ship when she was parked on the open pads outside Copernicus.

It would had been a pain to shred the tarps down to the fine shreds that she needed to puff out into the protective shield she knew she’d need against Van Hoek’s laser. It would be even more of a pain financially to replace them afterwards. If they made it through the next few minutes alive, anyway.

The chaff did it’s job. The laser beam struck the shimmering surface of the globe and broke, splitting into a fan of diffuse red light. It was like sunlight reflected off turbulent water, unable to focus, unable to burn.

The beam brightened for a moment as Van Hoek shoved more power through the emitter, and the surface of the globe eddied. But it held. The laser winked off.

Rory blew a sigh of relief.

But the chaff was already starting to disperse.

“We’ve drained the batteries, boss!” Smeaton was frantic now before the jagged fury of his master. “We can’t fire again. Not for at least thirty minutes!”

Van Hoek knocked him aside with an animal growl. He yanked the pilot out of the control seat. He tapped switches. The pilot-daemon winked off. The control yoke dropped into his waiting hands. He goosed the atomotors. They responded to his touch with a raw bellow of power. He sent the Catchsorrow into a tight, corkscrewing dive, twisting it sharply about it’s axis. The crew scattered about the deck. No warning from their captain. No handholds. Smeaton alone managed to stay on his feet.

“I don’t need thirty minutes. I barely need thirty seconds,” Van Hoek said, and hurled his ship at the Foxfire.

“Ramming speed and a direct vector,” said Rory. “Oh my. I do believe he’s trying to scare us.”

“RAMMING speed?” Nils went goggle-eyed. “But that junker of his won’t last a second against us! We’re atmo-plated. The Catchsorrow is held together with spit and hope!”

“We know that. And he knows that. But he doesn’t know that we know that. He’s making a really big mistake. He thinks that I’m a scared fourteen year old girl that he can intimidate and bully out of the way. The thing is, he’s not even half right. He can’t scare me. And I’m not just a girl. I’m an Armstrong girl.”

And there was that light in the eyes. That wild spark, that brightly glittering mote that Mara had when her temper was up. The light that led directly to a raging fury and a screaming row, or soft, long kisses and sleepless nights. Nils was never sure which he was going to get. That was the reason he loved his wife so deeply, and why she drove him so completely insane. To see that light in his daughter’s eyes made him very happy, and very sorry for the poor fool that would fall for her, dazzled by the heat and light she gave off.

“Impact in forty seconds,” she said quietly. “Holding course. Stand ready, Dad. If this goes the way I think it’s going to, you’ll need to be quick.”

“Ready,” said Nils. He placed his fingertip on a control stud in the fire control box. “You seem sure about this, Rory.”

“I am. Everything about him screams coward and bully. He’s sent out robots and packs of bully boys against a teenage girl and a ten year old boy. He can’t deal with the idea of a straight fight. And right now, that’s the only option he’s got. He just doesn’t realise it yet.”

“Twenty-five seconds,” said Smeaton, hypnotised by the two lights on his display. The red dot and the blue dot, moving inexorably closer to each other. The prox alert brayed like a donkey with a corn husk in the hole under it’s tail. “No sign of a course change. Twenty seconds.”

“I can see the countdown, Smeaton.” Van Hoek strangled the control yoke, wringing it in his big hands like a wet dish cloth. It creaked. So much effort expended in keeping your course. So much hard work in resisting the temptation to spin away. Van Hoek was no coward, but he wasn’t stupid either. He had run from plenty of fights in his career, which was how he had stayed around for so long. And every instinct he owned was screaming at him to fire retros and skim away.

But the tiny chink of pride he had left was louder still, and it was shrill and insistent. You’re not being beaten by a girl. You’re not. The pirate king of the moon will not be forced to blink by a child.

“Fifteen seconds,” said Smeaton.

“SHUT THE CUFF UP,” said van Hoek.

“Ten seconds, Dad.”

“Ready. I trust you, Aurora Selene.”

She smiled, a sight as bright and sweet as Earthrise. “I know you do, Dad. Five.”

“Four.” Smeaton couldn’t help it. “Three.”

And Van Hoek roared, a bellow of pure rage, humiliation and anguish, and yanked the control yoke hard to port. The Catchsorrow yawed, spilling everyone and everything that wasn’t strapped down across the flight deck floor. The status board lit up bloody and screamed as every alarm in it went off at once.

Rory whooped in exultation. “He blinked! I cuffin’ knew it!”

“Language, Aurora Selene.”

“Sorry, Dad.” The wild spark in her eyes and flush in her cheeks said otherwise. “Ready with our surprise?”

“Oh, you know it.”

A target blipped up on the pilot-daemon’s screen, crosshairs and a simple dart shape that flew straight into them.

“And… fire.”

Nils touched the switch. There was the rattle of drums and guns from outside the pressure hull. Subdued from the last time it had happened, but loud enough nevertheless.

Smeaton scrambled back into his seat, just in time for his board to send up a panicky barrage of alert updates. At the top, superseding the hull integrity and fuel depletion warnings, another proximity alarm. A big one. A loud one.

“Boss!” he yelled, loud and strong. It was the only way he could break through Van Hoek’s fugue state, hanging onto the control yoke for dear life. “Multiple intercepts, dead ahead. High delta-vee, low mass. It looks like… it looks like a meteorite storm…”

And as he said it, they both realised that it could only be one thing. The forward screens filled with a silvery light. The bright, twinkling glow of a million tiny ball bearings, flung out into space ahead of then like a fisherman’s net, too wide and moving too quickly to fly around.

“Oh, clever girl,” said Van Hoek, as the Catchsorrow flew into the cloudshot that Rory had laid out for them.

“I knew the ship wasn’t handling right after we’d supposedly emptied it of all that extra mass,” she said, mesmerised as the cloud and the Catchsorrow closed on each other. “It still felt a bit wallow-y, as if there was still something sloshing around and unbalancing the gyros. A couple of barrel rolls, and I realised that I was right. There was shot left in the hoppers.”

“That explains the stunt flying. I thought you were just happy to be back in control. But that was down to me. When I killed the fire control box, it closed the guns down before it should have. Hence there was enough in the hoppers for one last shot.”

“Handy, seeing as far as Van Hoek knew, we were unarmed.” Bright sparks were leaping away from the Catchsorrow. Escape pods, none of which would get far enough away from the ship or the trailing edges of the cloud. Van Hoek would not be aboard one of them, Rory could be sure. There would be no sense of honour, of a captain going down with his ship. No, he knew his best chance of survival was on the Catchsorrow.

She watched quietly as the cloud began to take the ship apart.

“Pressure loss redlined. Atomotor containment fields are failing. We’re a sieve, boss.” Smeaton was struggling to close the seals on his vacsuit. Every few seconds, a jolt rang through the bones of the ship like the hammering of a gong. The status boards were a red blur of X’s and exclamation marks. The air was full of smoke and siren noise.

In the middle of it, Van Hoek fought to keep the Catchsorrow on an even flightpath, to give him the chance of a landing that wouldn’t break his ship in half.

“I’m aware of the situation, first mate,” he said. Hissed, rather. Gritting out the words through a jaw clenched like a bear trap. He had the yoke by the throat, throttling it into doing his will. It was not going down without a fight.

The alert board exploded with a sharp bang, coughing glass over Van Hoek’s straining shoulders. He shrugged it off. He would fly by feel if he had to. He would fly by smell.

The forward screens spat static and died, the cameras frying as power surges leapt through the superstructure of the ship. The Catchsorrow was shaking herself to pieces. All Van Hoek had now was the fight. It was probably better that he couldn’t see what was coming.

“That doesn’t look good,” said Rory. “That doesn’t look good at all.” The Catchsorrow was corkscrewing at the surface at speed, looping down at unchecked speed. The escape pods had either been launched or were never going to launch.

“Do you think he’s still on board?” Nils couldn’t take his eyes off the forward screen now. “Surely he’ll have ejected.”

“The nose is coming up. He’s fighting it. He’s winning…”

“Fifteen hundred metres. Twelve hundred metres.” The warning alert seemed to be the only thing still working on the ship. The voice it used was a calm, still contralto. “One thousand metres. Ten seconds to impact.”

Van Hoek lashed out and punched the speaker. It belled inwards with a plastic crack and the voice squawked and stilled.

“Never liked that voice,” he said. He pulled at the yoke. The stressed alloy compound that held it together gave way. The yoke came away in his hands. For a moment, he looked at it, confused and annoyed. Then he simply flung the useless object over his shoulder, and settled back in his chair.

“Well,” he said. “That’s that then. So long, Smeaton. I’d say it’s been nice knowing you, but the last words you say in this life shouldn’t be a lie.”

“In that case, boss, I just want you to know that I have always loved you.”

The look on Van Hoek’s face was utterly worth sticking around to see.

The Catchsorrow landed. Sheer dumb luck had provided Van Hoek with the perfect place for a graceless belly-flop. Smack dab in the middle of the Mare Imbrium, in a zone that was pancake-flat and clear of pesky craters and annoying outcroppings and ridges. However, the Catchsorrow did not have the smooth underbelly conducive to a sliding stop. Instead, she skipped over the surface like a stone on a still pond, spinning wildly. Bits came off with every impact. The atomotor pods and reactors zipped away, burning their own uncontrolled path back up into orbit. Soon little was left but the armoured bubble of the life support unit, ricocheting off the plain like a tennis ball with too much topspin.

Rory winced at every hit. No matter what Van Hoek had done, a spacer hated to see that sort of thing happen to a ship. She heard the crunch and thump of every impact somewhere inside her, and felt the blows hit in the places where she kept her deepest fears. The drama rolling across the surface below her was one that she saw in every nightmare she had ever suffered.

Finally, the Catchsorrow rolled to a halt in a spume of dust, wrapping it in a funeral veil. Apart from the slow settling of that cloud, there was no other movement from below.

“Do you think…?” Rory said, her voice hushed.

“If their crashfoam was working, then they might be ok,” Nils said. “As soon as they hit it would have filled the life support bubble with impact-retardant. It would have cushioned them from flying all over the ship, anyway. If it was working.” He looked down at the wreck of the Catchsorrow doubtfully. “After what we did, I doubt very much that anything was working at all.”

“We had no choice, Dad,” Rory said. “We wouldn’t have stood a chance against them. And you know how much mercy van Hoek would have shown us.”

“I know. But I can’t help but wonder if he’s taught us something today. A lesson about violence. The wrong lesson about violence.”

Rory was quiet at that, but she knew what her dad meant. Adventure and excitement was one thing, but she had killed today. There would be few survivors in the escape pods that had jetted free from the Catchsorrow, only to meet the clutching talons of the cloudshot that she had thrown at them. The fact that her murders had been swift and silent affairs meant nothing in the greater scheme of things. She would love to forget all about it and move on. Except that the only way to move on was to accept and repent for her crimes.

Two hands on her shoulders. Her dad, Nils, strong and solid as ever. Rory turned and buried her face in his chest, wrapping her arms around him and letting the tears come. The time would come soon enough for her to be a pilot again. Now it was time for her to be a human being.

The comms chimed.

“Foxfire Five from Copernicus. We’ve seen everything from your camera screens, Rory. Don’t mourn them, child. You’ve saved thousands of lives today. We have an incoming feed from somewhere near the Lambert group of craters. There’s someone asking for you. Shall we patch it?”

Rory nodded mutely. “Go ahead, Copernicus,” said Nils.

“crrrkoRy? Hellooooo. This is Dash and Arty. We’re on the crater wall. Can someone come and get us please? It’s really boring up here.”

Rory’s face creased into a wide smile. “Dash, this is Rory. We’re on our way. We’ll be on the pad in five minutes.”

“Awww. Can you not come and get us on the crater. We’ve just climbed all the way up here!”

“The exercise is good for you, squirt. And the Foxfire doesn’t balance on crater rims. Get Arty to give you a piggyback. It’s good to hear your voice again, Dashiell.”

“You too, Aurora.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Now hurry up. This suit’s rubbish and it’s cold out here.”

“I hear and obey, young master,” she said. She swung back into her seat, and rattled a command on the nearest keypad.

“Copernicus from Foxfire Five. Sending you LPS numbers for the Catchsorrow crash site. I recommend a retrieval crew be sent out as a priority to check for survivors. We are en route to Lambert to evac our missing crew members.”

“Roger that, Foxfire. Follow that with permission granted to return to base for repairs and recuperation.”

“We thank you for that, Copernicus. It’ll be nice to power down.” Rory glanced back over her shoulder at her dad. “That is, if that’s ok with you, captain.”

Nils smiled. “That’s absolutely fine by me, pilot. No complaints here, Rory.”

They were met at the lock by Mayor Marietta Dunn-Torres. She looked grim, her solid Maori frame nearly blocking the way into the dome. Gravely, she gave each of them a long, enveloping bear hug, for just long enough to make them fear for their lungs.

She took a wary sideways look at Arty as she pranced lightly into the dome vestible, then shrugged. “I’ve trusted a razor today,” she told herself. “Ain’t nothing stranger that can happen to me.”

Then she rolled her shoulders, a move that reminded all those that witnessed it of moutain ranges shifting.

“Welcome back,” she said. Her voice was deep, low and strong. “Captain Armstrong, you have a very urgent call waiting for you. It’s flagged as your eyes only. Allow me to escort you to our comms bay.”

“My crew should hear this too,” Nils said. Worry creased his brow.

“Not for me to decide, Captain. All I know is there’s a call, and there’s a flag on it. Until I know otherwise, you take that call alone.” Mayor Dunn-Torres didn’t change the inflection of her voice or bulk out her posture. But the meaning was clear. You may have been hot-rodding over the moonscape today having adventures but under this dome I’m the boss, and you do what you’re told.

“Fair enough,” Nils said, “but they’re coming with me as far as the door. And I’m getting a bit deaf in my old age. I need the gain up as high as it can get.”

“Suit yourself. Soundproof doors. Come on, it’s rude to keep a lady waiting.” She put her palm in the middle of Nils’ back and gently ushered him away. Gently by her standards, anyway. Rory, Dash and Arty had to scramble to catch up.

The comms bay had a big central atrium, littered with couches and chairs. A drinks and sweets dispenser set into one wall had Dash’s instant attention. The comms lounges ran in a ring off this area, each with it’s own door and a light signalling incoming or live calls. It was manically busy. Most of the doors were shut, and messengers ran in and out, clutching hard copy and drives. Mayor Dunn-Torres walked Nils over to a door close to the entrance. It was the only one not in use. The light over the door blinked in a five second cycle of red and green. An private feed, held until the named recipient could take it.

Nils shot an anxious glance at his kids, and went inside. The door shut with a soft thud behind him.

Mayor Dunn-Torres went over to the two kids, stepping with surprising grace around Arty. They eyed each other with wary respect. She motioned Rory to sit, then dug in a pocket of her coverall and pulled out a meaty handful of change, which she handed to Dash. He grabbed it from her with a whoop and ran for the dispenser.

“How long?” Rory said. “I mean, when did the call…”

“We’re not sure. Obviously we’ve had the same problems with comms that you had, so when you killed the jamming signal everything came through at once. It’s just as well we knew to expect it, otherwise it would have been shoved to the back of the queue. After what you’ve done for for us today, that wouldn’t have been polite.”

“Do you know anything, Mayor Dunn-Torres? I mean, they must have given you some idea about…”

She raised one big hand, which stopped Rory in her tracks. “Firstly. You call me Marietta now. You’re a friend to the base, which makes you a friend of mine. Secondly, private means private. That call is for your dad, and I’d no sooner break that confidence than walk out of the nearest lock without my hat and coat. You’ll know what’s happened soon enough, I wager. In the mean time, I’d be grateful that you’re not in that room. Your dad’s caller isn’t best happy about being made to wait. If past history’s anything to go by, your dad’s finding out just how unhappy right about now. Oh, look who’s here.”

A bang and a thud from the door, and Quiddity Jones skated through and to a halt. Dash, weighed down with a dentist’s nightmare of fizzy drinks and processed hunks of sugar gave a shriek of joy, dropped the lot and barreled into his arms. Quiddity oofed but kept his balance, listening patiently as Dash jabbered word fragments and half sentences at him.

All the time, he kept his eyes on Rory, smiling warmly enough to make her blush. Marietta caught the look, and frowned. She leaned in close, and growled gently in her ear.

“Don’t think of this as a lecture. Just friendly advice. The moon’s the moon, and everyone knows it’s a wild place. But fourteen’s fourteen. If he tries anything, you tell me and I’ll tie him up in knots.”

Rory’s hand flew to her mouth to stifle the astonished laugh she had almost coughed up. “Him? I mean he’s nice and all but… you can’t think… I’m not even ready for… him? No. Nonononono.“

Marietta gave her a look that was a mix of disbelief, amusement and straight-up don’t barnstorm a barnstormer. Marietta knew blushes when she saw them, and the one Rory was wearing was more than skin-deep.

Quiddity came over, Dash dangling off one shoulder while Arty wound round his feet in a complex analemma. It was remarkable that he was still on his feet.

He nodded formally. “Mayor Dunn-Torres. Mizz Armstrong.”

“Mister Jones.” Marietta fired a ripe stink-eye at him, which he ignored. “I see you found out the Foxfire has arrived.”

“I came as soon as I heard,” he said, shrugging off Dash’s attempt to feed a jelly bean into his ear. “It’s good to see you again, Ro… Mizz Armstrong.”

“And you. Quiddity.” Rory crooked an eyebrow at Marietta.

The Mayor rolled her eyes. “Fiiine.” She plucked Dash neatly from Quiddity’s shoulder, and swung him up onto hers in one effortless move. “Come on, pārō. As everyone suddenly seems interested in doing things that are bad for them, come over here and let me teach you how to smoke.”

Dash cheered. Marietta ambled away, casting one last poisonous look behind her.

Rory and Quiddity stood quietly for a moment, simply smiling at each other.

“I wouldn’t have made it without your present,” Rory said finally. “I’d never have got onto the ship, and probably wouldn’t have made it to the crater in the first place. And it was your warning that saved the dome. We couldn’t stop the cloudshot. It seems to me that Copernicus is making heroes out of the wrong people.”

Quiddity shrugged. “I’m used to it. But it’s not so bad, Rory. Having the Mayor call me Mister Jones instead of the nasty chunk of Maori she normally reserves for the occasions when I actually get through the airlock is very sweet indeed.”

“You get your victories where you can, I suppose.”

“Yes, you do.”

The conversation tailed off then, and they spent a little while gazing at each other, not sure what to say.

Rather, they knew what to say, but couldn’t pluck up the courage to put it into words.

It was an impasse that was broken by the door of the comms bay opening. Nils came out, pale but smiling.

“Mayor Dunn-Torres, the eyes only flag has been lifted. I have a request for Rory and Dash to take the feed.”

Marietta waved her hand in a magnanimous gesture, and lifted Dash off the floor. “Next time, I’ll tell you about smoke rings,” she said with a wink. “Now, off you go.” She sent him on his way with a pat on the posterior that sent him flying.

“That’s you,” said Quiddity.

“Yes, it is,” said Rory. She seemed to have lost the ability to speak in words of more than one syllable. There had to be a way to break the spell.

Quickly, breathlessly, she closed the gap between them, and softly kissed Quiddity on the cheek. “Back soon,” she said, and skipped away.

Quiddity watched her go. There was a wide, stupid grin on his face. It faded slowly as he became aware that people had moved into position behind him. More specifically, Mayor Dunn-Torres and Nils Armstrong.

“Nice to meet you at last, Mister Jones,” said Nils, as Marietta’s big hand came down on Quiddity’s shoulder with rather more force than was entirely necessary. “I think you and I should have a little chat.”

Marietta said something in Maori that Quiddity had no trouble understanding at all.

The light inside the comm bay was dim and soft, and mostly came from the big screen at the far end of the room. The image on that screen brought Dash and Rory rushing forwards, babbling and chattering with glee.

The woman on the other end of the feed smiled, her eyes as bright as Rory’s, her smile as wide as Dash’s. “Hello, squirt. Hey, flygirl,” she said.

“Hi, Mum!” they yelled. Dash tried to jump through the screen to get at her. Laughing, Rory pulled him back, and they collapsed into easy chairs that were placed around the screen.

“Well,” Mara Armstrong said, once she stopped laughing, “I see I didn’t have to worry about you two.”

“We’re fine, Mum. How are you?” Rory leaned forwards, suddenly intense. “How’s…”

“Just a minute, flygirl. There’s one thing I need to know first. Your father assures me that the sunspots we’ve had trouble with here on Lagrange had affected you too, and you had some problems with the starboard atomotor, and that’s the only reason that I’ve not heard anything from you in the last 48 hours. Now, your father is a rotten liar, but I can’t really tell over the feed. So I’m asking you. Did anything happen that I ought to know about?”

Rory thought for a second. She considered all the adventures she and her brother had experienced, all the new people they had met, all they had done.

There would be time for all that. But if Nils had seen fit not to tell yet, then who was she to rock the boat?

“No, Mum,” she said, jabbing Dash in the ribs as he was about to open his mouth. “Nothing’s happened. It’s all been a bit slow, to be honest.”

“Mmmm.” Mara pulled the right corner of her mouth into a moue. OK, don’t tell me yet. But I will get it out of you. Don’t barnstorm a barnstormer. She sighed and let it drop.

“OK then. Now, I have someone for you to meet. Are you ready?”

The two kids came closer. Mara nudged a camera control and the view widened. She was sitting upright in bed, and holding a small white bundle. She turned the bundle to the camera, revealing the tiny scrap of dozing life inside.

“Rory, Dash, meet your sister. This is Luna Diana Armstrong. She’s a day old.”

Luna found that moment to open her eyes and gaze at the camera. Her eyes were very big, and a soft glowing grey. They reflected the place after which she had been named. She looked solemn and regal.

She wriggled one hand free from her bindings, and waggled her tiny fingers at the blinking ready light of the camera.

“Look, Rory,” Dash said, his voice hushed. “She’s waving to us.”

So they waved back, and Nils came quietly back through the door and up behind his two kids, and he waved too.

And for a little while that was all that was needed, as the 384,000 kilometres that separated them fell away, and Luna Diana Armstrong brought her family together again with a simple blessing from her moon-pale hand.

The End

The Armstrongs, Quiddity and Arty will return in

“BANDITS OF THE MOON”.