The enemy, obviously taken aback that its volley made no impact, sent half a dozen bolts in rapid succession. Carialle attempted to avoid them, but two of them hit her-one in the tail, and one close to the airlock. The white light from their impact momentarily blinded one of her cameras, and the cabin lights faded down for a second. Carialle took the moment of the blast to slide into a narrow alley formed by a winding DNA-strand of floating rocks. The next blast missed them, exploding a meteorite that peppered the hull noisily with sand. Carialle maneuvered through the belt, hoping to keep the distance between her and her pursuer. It vanished among the rocks.

"How long will your shield hold?" she asked Tall Eyebrow.

"I do not know," he said. "Perhaps long enough, but a sustained volley might overstrain it. Especially if they have a Core, too."

"I'm sending that message to Simeon and the CW right now," Carialle said. "If we lose, no one will ever find us. It'll be weeks, if not months before the message gets home. Someone has to know about these people. They've obviously been using the outskirts of this system as a hideout for years, and no one knew about it."

"You did," Keff said, grimly.

"An unhappy surmise, unluckily turning out to be true. At present, that's no satisfaction," she said briskly.

"Are these the ones?" Keff asked, with a concerned look at her pillar. "Are they your salvage squad?"

"I don't know," she said. "I was blind then."

"Do the engines match the configuration?" Keff asked. "Did they make physical contact? Can you recognize the vibration? Frequency emissions?"

"I don't know. After the attack I know my sensors went skewiff, so I might have been filtering all I know through bad information. I'll only know if I can get one of them to walk on me again. And I'm damned if I'll ever let that happen."

She recognized that her voice had grown terse, and made an effort to pull herself together. The moment of indecision and resolution took only microseconds, but she knew Keff had noticed the hesitation.

"I'm fine," she said, making the Lady Fair image appear on the wall. The peach-colored veil from her hennin floated softly around her face, which wore an expression of peace. Keff gave it a skeptical glance, but nodded. Both of them had to concentrate right now on survival.

As they wove through the asteroids, two blips appeared ahead on long range scan. Carialle wondered if her new equipment was more sophisticated than theirs; could she see them before they saw her? It might mean the difference between escape and destruction. Carialle studied her telemetry. Where could she turn to avoid them? Nothing truly safe offered itself. A sharp turn in any direction threw her into the teeth of the celestial meat grinder. Suddenly, a gap opened to starboard. She took it, nipping in just before two bolts lanced through the space she'd been occupying.

"This was probably not a good idea," Carialle said. "One lone, unarmed ship doesn't have a chance against a force of three. We've got to get out of here."

"We still have to find the DSC-902," Keff reminded her. "Even if we can just locate it before we get away, that'll be a help. I'd rather rescue them if we can."

"I'm with you, O brave one, but we need to survive this mission to be of any use to them." She broke off to dodge the first ship, which appeared on the other side of a rock full of holes like Swiss cheese. It fired a few times, through one hole then another. Carialle avoided them all, but felt stone shrapnel ping against her hull. The enemy ship spurred after her. She fled, only to find the lone ship had radioed the other two, who appeared on either side of her at the next wide spot. Carialle calculated the period between spiralling rocks, and ducked upward. The three ships, unable to maneuver with her skill, plummeted forward.

Carialle widened the gap between her and the enemy to half a dozen planet-widths by diving down and through the asteroid belt, and coming out "south" of the plane of the ecliptic. She made a note of where the three ships were, and turned back up and into the stone dance at some distance from them. Her sensors indicated that the enemy had figured out what she had done and were coming after her, but she was ahead of them now, scanning for traces of the DSC-902.

"Do you know, they're fast, but their equipment is ancient," Carialle said. "I might be able to outlast them in hide-and-seek, if only we don't get in the way of sustained fire."

"Your engines are better than any of these brutes," Keff said, anxiously watching the aft monitor. One of the ships, blip number two, was outside the belt now, pouring on velocity to catch up. "We can outdistance them. Maybe we can outclass them, too. TE, can we convince them we've got some heavy armament?"

"How?"

"Grab one of those rocks as we go past, and sling it backwards toward this fellow."

The globe-frog looked worried. "It will mean relinquishing control of the shield," he said.

"We'll have to chance it," Carialle said. "My shields are 92% intact, and none of those old pots can match me for maneuverability. Go ahead."

The thick padding around her vanished suddenly, leaving her feeling chilled as if she was exposed to the cold of space. Hastily, she rebuilt her defenses. Carialle felt a momentary drag aft and to port as Tall Eyebrow hitched his power to a rock about three meters across and pulled it out of the dance. It sailed along behind them like a puppy. Carialle turned on all her dorsal thrusters in a sudden burst, and turned on her belly, heading back toward the pursuing ship. Tall Eyebrow made a pushing motion in midair. The rock spiraled up from Carialle's tail and flew in a tightening pattern around her body toward the enemy. With the extra momentum behind it, the missile appeared to elongate in flight.

The enemy ship had only seconds to avoid collision. It veered to up and to starboard. Tall Eyebrow reached out to the end of his range to alter the rock's course to match. It got to within a hundred kilometers of the enemy before the lasers exploded it.

"I missed," Tall Eyebrow complained.

"Whew!" Carialle said. "They have have got fast reflexes." got fast reflexes."

"More, TE, more!" Keff shouted, as the pirate recovered itself and fired its weapons at them. The Frog Prince threw the shields back into place just in time. Carialle swept deeper into the asteroid belt, and let a cartwheeling rock take the brunt. In the meantime, Tall Eyebrow picked up more chunks of debris to use as weapons. They circled around Carialle's middle like a planetary ring.

"The other two ships are coming," Carialle warned. "If we can disable this one, I can probably outlast the other two."

"We might be able to rely on psychology," Keff said. "If we're wrong, and they don't have the Cores, seeing us throwing rocks around by remote control might make them back up."

"We can only try it," Carialle said. "I'd better show my pretty face, then."

She dove out of the belt, coming out above ship number two. One and three weren't far behind. Burning her thrusters for an extra burst of speed, she got ahead of Ship Two. Tall Eyebrow used the inertia to help launch a series of stone projectiles, one after another, spiraling them down over Carialle's tail and into the path of the other.

The enemy snaked widely, shooting at the speeding rocks. Tall Eyebrow had chosen a good variety for his missiles. Some burst into gravel; some, with heavy metal content, slagged along the edges but kept spinning. One whirled with sawbladelike inexorability straight into the path of Ship One, which pulled straight up in an acute arc. The molten rock narrowly missed its tail fins.

Ship Two, wound too tightly among the asteroids to flinch, took a pair of fragments amidships. Carialle saw the leak of atmosphere escape from the side of the hull. It streamed out in a haze alongside the exhaust. For the first time she picked up transmissions from the raiders. She couldn't comprehend the language.

"Keff, listen to this," she said. Keff tilted his head as she re-ran the recording and raised his eyebrows at the staccato rhythm of voices. He couldn't understand the deep voices, but he comprehended the urgency.

"That's an SOS," he said definitely. "TE struck something vital."

"Hit them again, TE," Carialle said. "Aim for the engines."

The Ozranian continued his bombardment. Because of the limitations of the Core, he had to depend on a target maintaining its trajectory from the time he let go of a rock. With his superior grasp of spatial relations, Carialle only had to make certain he had a constantly updated overview in the astrogation tank. Keff, a fascinated but helpless bystander, led the cheering section each time one of Tall Eyebrow's missiles found its mark.

Battered and leaking, Ship Two eventually dropped back and out of the race to nurse its damaged hull. Now that Carialle had proved that her ship wasn't helpless, the other two ships became cagey. They flew a wide pattern alongside her, peppering her with laser fire, trying to herd her into planetoids. Carialle's shields fell to 68%. Now they were engaged in what Keff recognized as a true space battle, fought with atlases instead of micrometers.

Carialle focused her telemetry on what lay ahead. The going was more difficult here. If they picked up missiles to throw, she would have to remain on her own shields. Ancient comets had passed through this part of the belt again and again, chopping the asteroids into pieces ranging from those meters across to particles almost as small as dust. She worried that she might sustain a breach. On the good side, the cloud of dust seemed to cut off visuals of her to the other ships. On her scopes she saw them veer around uncertainly. Their medium-range sensors were nowhere near as good as hers.

"We can't get them both at once just tossing boulders," he said. "Can we set up a kind of chain reaction? What if we spin a big rock, the biggest one TE can handle, into one heading the other way? Could we get it to ricochet back toward the Joy Boys back there? Then we can attack the other more directly."

"I don't see why not," she said. She homed in on a set of nearly spherical fragments ahead, and bracketed them for Tall Eyebrow to see. "How are you at playing pool?"

Carialle let herself be "seen" on the enemies' scopes by surfacing out of the dust clouds. The other ships obligingly took the bait, and spurred to catch up with her. All their strategy for keeping their distance from her was dropped. They meant to kill.

"This had better work," Carialle said. "Otherwise, we'll we'll have to run, and hope that the Core holds out until we can make Cridi atmosphere." have to run, and hope that the Core holds out until we can make Cridi atmosphere."

With almost a casual deflection of power, the Frog Prince set his chain reaction in motion. The cue ball, a stone sphere twelve meters across, was set spinning into its fellows. Most of the rocks it hit split off in a dozen directions, obvious, easy for the ships following to avoid. The eight ball, a rock dark with magnesium oxide, cannoned forward, gaining velocity toward a quarter-planetoid raddled by the eternal passage of fragments. With delightful precision, Tall Eyebrow had aimed his shot toward an obliquely angled "valley." Carialle saw the eight ball hit one angle of the corner shot and deflect onward, and then she was past it.

The other ships paid no attention to a rock that appeared to have missed. Tall Eyebrow had gathered up another stream of small rocks. He shot them at one ship then the other, in twos and threes, with varying degrees of success. It kept the enemy too busy to fire straight at Carialle, or to pay attention to where they were going. Carialle led them around and back along the trajectory she wanted them to follow. To make sure they could keep up, she dropped velocity slightly, daringly. They passed the alley down which the eight ball hurtled. Ship One was too intent upon Carialle, or perhaps its sensors were too confused by the dust and the flashes from its laser barrage, to pick up the huge rock until it rolled almost straight into its aft section.

The two ventral engines imploded, setting off a chain reaction like the lit fuse on a stick of dynamite that destroyed the rest of the ship.

Carialle heard an outcry on its audio frequency, then silence. Ship Three must have picked up that last, futile message, for it broke off its attack.

"What's it doing?" Keff asked, watching the ship veer deeper into the clouds of debris. Within seconds it was out of visual contact. "Is it coming around to sneak up on us?"

"Not unless it's going all the way around the orbit and coming at us from the front," Carialle said. "It's running away." She slowed down, and made her way cautiously out of the asteroid belt. A further check showed Ship Three really was fleeing. It had put the full width of the belt between itself and Carialle. "It's gone. The field's all ours. Congratulations, TE. It was your marksmanship that saved the day for us."

The Ozranian tipped a hand self-deprecatingly.

"Stop being so modest. You're a genuine hero, and I'm going to tell the world when we get back to Cridi. I'm turning around to see if we can pick up traces of the DSC-902." She swung off sunward from the belt, and turned a huge circle. "Call this your victory roll." The frog image repeated the concept with difficulty. Tall Eyebrow ducked his head.

"Cari, we've done it!" Keff said, dusting his hands together. "That'll neutralize the pirates in this system-killing two and scaring off the third. They'll never shoot at a ship in this place again. If they ever troubled you, you've evened it out now. Probably saved the future of the Cridi space program, too."

"I'm not satisfied," Carialle said, firmly. "I want to be certain that they are the ones. Were Were the ones. I want to see them face-to-face. I have to the ones. I want to see them face-to-face. I have to know know." She paused, waiting until the adrenaline in her system evened out. "And then I want to haul them back to CenCom and prove to that insufferable bureaucrat and his flunkies that I was not hallucinating. Then, I'll be satisfied."

They returned to the asteroid clump where they first saw the raider ships. Carialle searched for the ion traces, now slightly disturbed by their passage and battle.

Behind the cluster of rocks was a confused knot of trails. Carialle and Keff flew back and forth, trying not to destroy the delicate veins, as they read the order of the events that had gone before they arrived.

"Looks like they were here before," Keff said, thoughtfully, sitting at the console with his chin in his hand. "Then they went away and came back again. Where did they go?"

"I think this is where they waited to ambush the DSC-902," Carialle said. "Look at that mass of exhaust particles. Those three ships accelerated to get there, then sat a long time before kicking out. They did it twice, the second time when they came after us. They did grab the ship with a Core-look at the hard thruster emissions from two ships."

"But what happened to the DSC-902's emissions?" Keff asked, studying the starchart.

Tall Eyebrow let out a little gasp and planted both hands firmly over his mouth and nostrils.

"That's it," Carialle said. "Suffocation. They sealed it up in a forcefield like TE's shield, and carried it away."

"But where did it go?"

Carialle bracketed the traces that led away from the cluster. "If I follow the tangle correctly, they went galactic clockwise."

Not far from the original point of contact, the celestial fragments grew larger, until the belt alongside which they were traveling looked like a gigantic string of brown-red pearls. The spider webbing of ions led from every direction to the largest one. Even from a distance, the artificial structures there were apparent.

"A base!" Keff exclaimed. "Give us a closeup, Cari."

The facility looked like a travesty of the spaceport on Cridi. What must have been a small fuel depot huddled beside a prefabricated dome of extreme age. Both were riddled with pockmarks from meteor strikes. Around them lay debris Carialle recognized with a sinking heart as sections from destroyed or dismembered spaceships. The most recent wreck was frosted white. The residual moisture from the life support system of the DSC-902 had not yet had time to leach away in vacuum. Its hatch and all the cargo bay doors stood open, unspeakably lonely and vulnerable. Lights were on inside.

"Oh, no," Keff whispered. Tall Eyebrow murmured a tiny, sympathetic creak.

"The hull shows half a dozen breaches," Carialle said, pulling a closeup of the imploded hull plates, showing black holes partially opaqued by the film of ice. "You can see what happened. They held it in place, and they peppered it with laser fire. See how rough the holes are. They were using a mining laser, not weapons grade. I'm getting no trace of radiation from the engines. It looks like our three friends stripped out the drives. No signs of life."

"Bodies?" Keff asked.

Without a word, Carialle magnified a small section of the asteroid's surface. What Keff had taken for a heap of short lengths of tubing in the faint light from the distant sun were half a dozen human bodies. The expression on the staring faces was that of surprise. Keff swallowed hard.

"Those bastards bastards."

"There's more," Carialle said. She shifted focus to another one of her cameras. They were above the base now, able to see the ruins on the other side of the structures. Carialle showed them pieces of tiny ships, strewn like discarded toys.

"Even their Cores couldn't protect them," Carialle said.

"Cridi? They did not crash?" TE asked, smashing one of his long hands down on the other.

"They did not crash," Carialle replied grimly. She showed them the parts of the ships. On extreme magnification the pair in the main cabin could see that the pieces showed little damage, except where the laser holes were evident.

"And the crews?" Keff asked, subvocally.

"Dead," Carialle said, without elaborating, but she made a comprehensive recording of the pathetic scatter of small bodies in protective suits near the landing pad. Carialle wished she could not see them. At least she could spare Keff and TE that, and showed them the bodies from a distance. Keff and TE fell silent.

"I hope we blew up the ones carrying the Cores," Carialle said. "This is what the CenCom should see: what happens when that extraordinary power falls into the wrong hands."

"Four ships," Keff said sadly. "All destroyed."

"More," TE signalled suddenly, pulling handfuls of air towards his chest.

"What do you mean?" Carialle asked.

The Ozranian leader tapped the side of his head. "Observation. Please put the pieces in the air for me. Like the puzzle."

"Ah, I get you." Carialle blew up the parts of the ships and placed them in holograph form before him. With lightning speed the Frog Prince reconstructed three small ships from which pieces were missing, but there were parts left over that could not possibly belong to any Cridi ship. Among the leftovers Carialle recognized a nose cone and landing fins of an obsolete model of a human-made ship. She constructed a hologram of the completed ship around the screen image. Keff gawked at Tall Eyebrow.

"How did you do do that?" he asked. that?" he asked.

The Ozran shrugged modestly. "Observation," he repeated.

"That spatial talent of his," Carialle said. "Extraordinary. I'd like to see his people engaged in engineering design work with ours."

"But, see what is left," TE continued. "It is like yours, but not like."

"It's old," Carialle said. "Do you recognize the model, Keff? It dates from fifty or seventy years back. About the time that Cridi got bottled up."

"So a Central Worlds explorer might have found the Cridi before now," Keff said thoughtfully. "These pirates destroyed them before they could get back to report on their findings."

"Maybe they didn't find Cridi Cridi," Carialle said.

"What do you mean?"

"These thieves don't live on this rock," she said. "They can't. There's no facilities, no supplies, barely any air. They didn't simply intend to destroy the ship, or they would have left the hulk floating where it died. These unknowns are ambushing and robbing starships. This is a chop shop, a staging area. They come from somewhere else. They go go somewhere else, with the stolen booty. Doesn't it make sense that it's right here, in the system?" somewhere else, with the stolen booty. Doesn't it make sense that it's right here, in the system?"

Keff's teeth showed in a feral grin. "It does. We'll find them. We can't let these brutes get away with mass murder." He poked a finger at the shining strands in the holotank. "Shall we see if those ley lines from the engines lead anywhere?"

Chapter Nine.

"Planet Five," Carialle said, turning all her video screens to the view of the dark hulk silhouetted by the distant sun. "The traitors live right here in the Cridi system."