The entire pirate fleet swung majestically into the field of the gaseous display; three distinct formations, and two dozen or more small ships. Slide knew from millennial experience that Pirates of The Lower Quadrant had never been able to maintain a single, overall coordination, but they had at least all managed to arrive in the same place at the same time. He could only imagine that recent pickings had been slim, and the Eloi biocraft was viewed as necessity rather than a prize. Although not exactly acting as one, the sheer size and variety of pirate fleet was epic; discs, deltas, and asymmetrics, Treen telezeros, Adamski saucers, ancient, tri-robot fighters left over from the Cylon wars, and Pleiadean beamships, attack-customized with strap-on Steely Dans. When the alarms had sounded, Slide had expected maybe a half dozen marauders, but what he saw was closer to two hundred ships, that ranged in size from hulking, rust-stained, former Imperial Sardakar battle-barges, to tiny predator pods of the metal-eaters that were more cell structures than machines. In the middle of the attackers, Slide spotted the dark bulk of the cruiser Starhawk, which was more than enough to crystalize his immediate flight or fight response, and it was wholly the latter.

"Out of here?"

He turned to Lupo, expecting to be met with a similar negative reaction to his own, a desire to get off and away from the Eloi ship by any means necessary, but Lupo was staring at the buccaneer armada with rapt attention. He was totally absorbed and, behind the plexiglass of his bubble helmet, his eyes blazed with a chill and momentary nosferatu glee. "So the ballet begins."

For a vampire created during the Italian Renaissance, Lupo seemed to accept a space battle with pleasurable anticipation. He was the closest that Slide had ever seen him to excited.

Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Mrs. Rosa Coote, still in full space armor, helmets locked down, and with the semi-human Sternwood leading way on his rolling mechanized chair, hurried to what was known as the cortex. On any ship of steel, polymer, ceramic and electricity, the cortex would have been would have been called the bridge, but on an Eloi ship, where almost every component - from gunport to bulkhead - was more or less living cell-structure, things were done a little differently.

The centrepiece of the cortex was a misshapen ovoid, a thick, multi-vesseled,

dermal sheath containing a slopping liquid interior of sweating, and - Slide suspected - sentient ooze. The monstrous and less that appealing growth stood over thirty meters tall and maybe three times that in circumference, and it was surrounded by a complex, tree-like gantry, on the branches of which selected Eloi monkey-moved - serving/aiding, maybe controlling the huge soft-ovoid's function - although Slide doubted that the nebulous Eloi, too dumb even to prevent themselves being eaten by the orchids, were capable of any such thing, and that nothing controlled either the cortex or the biocraft, except the cortex or the biocraft itself. The primary function of the Eloi on the various gantry levels seemed to be that of entering or modifying data by massaging, kneading, and prodding designated sections of outer skin, much in the style of those old monks in the Damaged World who'd had a big bio-computer they'd called the Living Meditation, or the Vreen'agth who had called their all controlling bio-brain the Mind-Sac. Slide knew that he was in some crucial confluence of the biocraft's primary nervous system, and he didn't like it. Growths of giant orchids lined the walls of the chamber, but seemed to play no visible role in its operation, except, every now and again, one would reel and unreel a predatory tendril as though stretching.

"I feel like a parasite."

He had not addressed the remark to anyone in particular, and no one answered. This lack of response was mainly because the pirate fleet had chosen the very same moment to open fire, not with any degree of coordination, but, when one group decided to blaze away with everything it had, the rest obviously felt it was incumbent upon them to do the same. The first thing this barrage revealed was that the biocraft had sturdy and effective screens, extending well into the mid-distance, that manifested themselves with a purple, zapper flash each time a photon torpedo, a plasma blast, nova boom, or the burn from a PBA, attempted to penetrate it.

Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Rosa Coote were able to view the battle on a highly detailed repro-vision that appeared before and even around them, and provided a panoramic, if somewhat ghostly 180 degree view of the space immediately in front of the Eloi biocraft. The appearance of the display was the one acknowledgment of their arrival in the cortex. The biocraft didn't appear to have any captain, commander, first mate, or even a master at arms to greet them, brief them, or otherwise tell them what they were supposed to be doing there. This part really didn't bother anyone except Slide, and since no one else in the group from Mars seemed to share his instinct to flee - and he wasn't in the mood to discorporate out on his own - he contented himself, for the time being, with standing beside Lupo, and watching the miniaturization of the conflict unfold. The pirates were maintaining their intense bombardment, but the biocraft was so far successfully taking on the shields.

When the biocraft finally returned fire, seemingly a result of an almost orgiastic flurry of physical activity on the branch-like gantries around the mind-sac, he observed that the biocraft was by no-means vegetable helpless, and, in fact, could muster two separate levels of weapon technology. One was matter/anti-matter-based, as Slide might have expected. Slow-moving plasma fireballs were dispatched from some invisible transmitter behind his vantage point. The other was more remarkable if less spectacular. Where the fireballs - once locked on - rolled up on their targets and consumed them to a crisp, the other weapon was nothing more than a focused double-eex-zee shimmer in space, and the vessel at it's epicenter simply winked. Slide figured the weapon manipulated its target past the Horowitz barrier, and shifted it in either time, space, or both, and, if the mind-sac, or the supposedly, top-of-the-food-chain orchids were capable of viciousness, it probably re-materialized in the heart of a sun without its occupants having a chance to set the controls.

Just as Slide was starting to come to the conclusion that this Eloi ship was so fucked up no one would ever going to bother to tell him and his companions why they were there, but just leave them alone to observe the battle undisturbed, three Eloi detached themselves from a group of a dozen or more at the base of the mind-sac. In this state of emergency, they still favored their filmy, gauzy, semi-nudity - more suitable for a Dionysian bacchanal than a firefight - and, as two women and one man approached, they still seemed both vague and vacant, but at least managed to look a little worried. They first spoke to Sternwood in their own lisping, trilling, multi-octave castrato-sounding language. The half-human in the cyber-chair was seemingly supposed to play interpreter, and Slide wondered why the ones who had served the champagne in the previous episode had spoken English and these didn't. Was it some obscure matter of protocol, or had the champagne servers been specially trained by Sternwood?

"The Eloi want to know what input you might have regarding the current crisis."

"Our input?"

"They credit you with more experience in these things than they have." Queen Mina's voice was royally contemptuous. "The Eloi, I suppose, need all the help they can get? Having failed to grasp the tactical basics to avoid being eaten by flowers."