He stopped. Silence grew around them. And then, from the intercom, music began again, a low orchestral piece which spoke to deep places of their awareness.

“Excuse me,” said Flandry. “I really shouldn’t have wished my sour pessimism on you.”

Her smile this time held a ghost of pity. “An’ o’ course ’twouldn’t be debonair to show your real feelin’s, or try to find words for them.”

“Touche!” He cocked his head. “Think we could dance to that?”

“The music? Hardly. The Liebestod is background for some-thin’ else. I wonder if Chives knew.”

“Hm?” Flandry looked surprised at the girl.

“I don’t mind at all,” she whispered. “Chives is a darlin’.”

Suddenly he understood.

But the stars were chill behind her. Flandry thought of guns and dark fortresses waiting for them both. He thought of knightly honor, which would not take advantage of the helplessness which is youth — and then, with a little sadness, he decided that practical considerations were what really turned the balance for him.

He raised the cigar to his mouth and said softly, “Better drink your coffee before it gets cold, lass.”

With that the moment was safely over. He thought he saw disappointed gratitude in Kit’s hurried glance, but wasn’t sure. She turned around, gazing at the stars merely to avoid facing him for the next few seconds.

Her breath sighed outward. She sat looking at Cerulia for a whole minute. Then she stared down at her hands and said tonelessly: “Figure you’re right ’bout the Empire. But then what’s to become o’ Vixen?”

“We’ll liberate it, and squeeze a fat indemnity out of Ardazir,” said Flandry as if there were no doubt.

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. Bitterness began to edge her voice. “Not if ’tisn’t convenient. Your Navy might decide to fight the war out where ’tis. An’ then my whole planet, my people, the little girl next door an’ her kitten, trees an’ flowers an’ birds, why, ’twill just be radioactive ash blowin’ over dead gray hills. Or maybe the Imperium will decide to compromise, an’ let Ardazir keep Vixen. Why not? What’s one planet to the Empire? A swap might, as you say, buy them peace in their own lifetimes. A few million human bein’s, that’s nothin’, write them off in red ink.” She shook her head again in a dazed way. “Why are we goin’ there, you an’ I? What are we workin’ for? Whatever we do can come to nothin’, from one stroke of a pen in some bored bureaucrat’s hand. Can’t it?”

“Yes,” said Flandry.

Cerulia, being a main-sequence star, did not need vastly more mass than Sol to shine more fiercely. Vixen, the fourth planet out, circled its primary in one and a half standard years, along such an orbit that it received, on the average, about as much radiation as Terra.

“The catch lies in that word ‘average,’ ” murmured Flandry.

He floated in the turret with Chives, hands on the control panel and body weightless in a cocoon of pilot harness. To port, the viewscreens were dimmed, lest the harsh blue sun burn out his eyes. Elsewhere, distorted constellations sprawled stark against night. Flandry picked out the Jupiter-type planet called Ogre by the humans of Vixen: a bright yellow glow, its larger moons visible like sparks. And what were its Ymirite colonists thinking?

“Ogre’s made enough trouble for Vixen all by itself,” complained Flandry. “Its settlers ought to be content with that and not go plotting with Ardazir. If they are, I mean.” He turned to Chives. “How’s Kit taking this free-fall plunge?”

“I regret to say Miss Kittredge did not look very comfortable, sir,” answered the Shalmuan. “But she said she was.”

Flandry clicked his tongue. Since the advent of gravity control, there had been little need for civilians ever to undergo weightlessness; hence Kit, susceptible to it, didn’t have the training that would have helped. Well, she’d be a lot sicker if an Ardazirho missle homed on the Hooligan. Nobody ever died of space nausea: no such luck!

Ardazir would undoubtedly have mounted tight guard over conquered Vixen. Flandry’s detectors were confirming this The space around the planet quivered with primary-drive vibrations, patrolling warcraft, and there must be a network of orbital robot monitors to boot. A standard approach was certain to be spotted. There was another way to land, though, if you were enough of a pilot and had enough luck. Flandry had decided to go ahead with it, rather than contact Walton’s task force. He couldn’t do much there except report himself in … and then proceed to Vixen anyway, with still more likelihood of detection and destruction.

Engines cold, the Hooligan plunged at top meteoric velocity straight toward her goal. Any automaton was sure to register her as a siderite, and ignore her. Only visual observation would strip that disguise off; and space is so vast that even with the closest blockade, there was hardly a chance of passing that close to an unwarned enemy. Escape from the surface would be harder, but this present stunt was foolproof. Until you hit atmosphere!

Flandry watched Vixen swelling in the forward viewscreens. To one side Cerulia burned, ominously big. The planet’s northern dayside was like a slice of incandescence; polarizing telescopes showed bare mountains, stony deserts, rivers gone wild with melted snows. In the southern hemisphere, the continents were still green and brown, the oceans deeply blue, like polished cobalt. But cloud banded that half of the world, storms marched roaring over hundreds of kilometers, lightning flared through rain. The equator was hidden under a nearly solid belt of cloud and gale. The northern aurora was cold flame; the south pole, less brilliant, still shook great banners of light into heaven. A single small moon, 100,000 kilometers from the surface, looked pale against that luminance.

The spaceship seemed tomb silent when Flandry switched his attention back to it. He said, just to make a noise, “And this passes for a terrestroid, humanly habitable planet. What real estate agents they must have had in the pioneer days!”

“I understand that southern Cerulia IV is not unsalubrious most of the year, sir,” said Chives. “It is only now, in fact, that the northern part becomes lethal.”

Flandry nodded. Vixen was the goat of circumstance: huge Ogre had exactly four times the period, and thus over millions of years resonance had multiplied perturbation and brought the eccentricity of Vixen’s orbit close to one-half. The planet’s axial inclination was 24?, and northern midsummer fell nearly at periastron. Thus, every eighteen months, Cerulia scorched that hemisphere with fourfold the radiation Terra got from Sol. This section of the orbit was hastily completed, and most of Vixen’s year was spent in cooler regions. “But I daresay the Ardazirho timed their invasion for right now,” said Flandry. “If they’re from an A-type star, the northern weather shouldn’t be too hard on them.”

He put out his final cigaret. The planet filled the bow screen. Robot mechanisms could do a lot, but now there must also be live piloting … or a streak in Vixen’s sky and a crater blasted from its rock.

At the Hooligan’s speed, she crossed the tenuous upper air layers and hit stratosphere in a matter of seconds. It was like a giant’s fist. Flandry’s harness groaned as his body hurtled forward. There was no outside noise, yet, but the flitter herself shrieked in metallic pain. The screens became one lurid fire, air heated to incandescence.

Flandry’s arm trembled with weight. He slammed it down on the drive switches. Chives’ slight form could not stir under these pressures, but the green tail darted, button to dial to vernier. Engines bellowed as they fought to shed velocity. The vessel glowed red; but her metal was crystallized to endure more than furnace heat. Thunder banged around her, within her. Flandry felt his ribs shoved toward his lungs, as direction shifted. Still he could only see flame outside. But his blurring eyes read instruments. He knew the vessel had leveled off, struck denser atmosphere, skipped like a stone, and was now rounding the planet in monstrous shuddering bounces.