Sternwood gestured acquiescently with a prosthetic. "You could say that." Mina was suspicious. "I'd have thought the ship itself would make most of the decisions. It must have been in situations like this before?"

"That would be true, except the ship tends to be reactive. The Eloi hope for some kind of more outgoing suggestions, since, it would appear, they fear the ship might decide to reduce itself an eterna-pod in the face of danger."

"Eterna-pod?"

"A huge space seed, able to grow again after a period of dormancy. If that were to happen, the Eloi - and us - for that matter, would perish very early in the process."

Slide, the Queen, Lupo, and Rosa all received this news thoughtfully, but no one felt inclined to be the first to rely. In the end, Lupo turned to the wheeled half-man and shrugged a slight, uniquely nosferatu shrug. "What can I tell them? I've seen wars and am intimately familiar with death, but I have little or no advice in this context."

Rosa Coote nodded. "None us are exactly military experts, except maybe Slide, although if the tales told are true, he's more of a specialist in diversion and desertion…and maybe street fighting."

Slide was about to defend himself, when Queen Mina interrupted. "Actually I have some grasp of battle tactics. I organized a number of military campaigns against the Slimy Things on Mars before I entered my narcotic phase."

The Eloi again chattered at Sternwood. They seemed impatient. "So what should they do?"

"They should get busy masturbating that great sack of goo to ensure it keeps with the present plan and doesn't turn into a seed on us. Or something equally damaging and ridiculous. All available power to the screens. They can't fight off the pirate fleet, there are far too many of them, so everything depends on how much of a battering the screens can take. If they go down, then we have only one thing in our favor."

"What's that?"

"The enemy's intention is to plunder, not vaporize. The biocraft is a very valuable prize. The profit-taking on the tech alone would be planetary GNP. We might well find ourselves in more danger when the pirates fight over it among themselves. As they inevitably will."

Slide couldn't fault her reasoning. Mina Harker's mind had become far more acute since she had left the drug-soaked fleshpots of Mars. He was also calculating the odds, when the pirates stormed the Eloi ship, of being able quickly to change sides in the confusion since, in all their fancy battle armor, the four of them looked considerably more like pirates than Eloi. He, of course, said nothing in front of the Eloi. It might be necessary to grease a few of them for theatrical effect and authenticity when the moment of realignment came.

The Eloi chattered a third time at Sternwood. Impatience had turned to urgency. "They say that the shields will last…well…roughly translated into your time scale, about another twenty minutes."

Mina arched an eyebrow. "I can only suggest they stand by to repel borders."

Sternwood translated this for the Eloi. This seemed to be enough for them, and they hurried away, apparently issuing twittering instructions as they went, back to the center of the cortex. Slide glanced at Mina. "You think they have any chance of handling this?"

The former Queen of Mars shook her head. "None."

And her estimation of the Eloi Mina's was confirmed all too quickly and all too clearly, when they deployed their defending force, presumably, as Mina had told them, to repel boarders. The ones who came to make their stand in the cortex were in full fantasy, and there was no reason to believe that others in different parts of the ship were not the same. The first to appear were a squad of archers, moving in precise military formation, longbows a high port and light gossamer cloaks flowing. Lupo almost choked. "Archers?"

Rosa Coote more scornful than surprised. "They look like bloody elves."

The archers were followed by what Slide would describe later as a "phalanx of operatic fucking hoplites." By this point, Lupo had regained some of his composure, but still couldn't believe what he was seeing. "It has been a long time since I saw anything as fatuous as this."

Slide gestured as fatalistically he could in his heavy armor. "It happened all the time back on the Darogad. They came at each other from out of all manner of historical fantasies. You'd see mounted Mamalukes with lances and scimitars hurling themselves at Nazi-style panzers."

"And did the Mamalukes expect to win?"

"That's been a hotly debated point ever since that particular incident."

"No Mamalukes left to ask?"

"Exactly."

"Are the Eloi stupid enough to think they might win?"

Slide looked bleakly at the Eloi force. The best word was theatrical. The lightweight silver armor, the long slender lances of the infantry, their small circular shields, and the apparent fragility of their fused-glass swords suggested nothing less that a wholly negative and ass-backwards grasp of reality. When an archer was plucked at random by an orchid, apparently as a snack, his companions looked round wondering what to do, Slide could only, slowly and sadly, shake his head. "The bastards really are as dumb as an flower's lunch."

From that point on, there was really very little to do but wait until to see if the shields went down as the Eloi had predicted, and watch the apparently inevitable come to pass on the repro-vision display. Slide knew he should have acted on his original instinct to jump out of there. Now it was totally too late. No way was he going launch himself back to the Gantenbrink through all the flashing, throbbing mess of energy that surrounded the beleaguered biocraft.

A four-pod Treen fighter, that would have been more at home over the silicone flame belts of the planet Venus, suddenly double-eex-zee winked out and was gone. A second-generation Cylon craft, with the trademark, oscillating redeye, was consumed by a plasma fireball. A Steely Dan suddenly blew apart in spectacular explosion for no reason that was immediately apparent to Slide. The pirates were certainly taking a beating, but for each pirate that flared, burned, or merely vanished, a dozen more remained to take his place. The Eloi shields pulsed and shimmered under the constant onslaught of multiple weapons, and were taking on the violet-through-ultra sheen that indicated they were stretched to the limit. Spectacular as the battle might be, Slide kept at least one wary eye on the cruiser Starhawk that simply held its position and poured relentless phaser fire at the biocraft shieldwall. Although, right then, it carried no markings of planet or fealty, he knew that it had, in various timelines served as the grim flagship of Chacedon the Terrible, who's concubine had, more than once, been the equally malevolent Nuygen von Bulow. A part of his mind was kept occupied with an examination of the possibility that one, if not two, entities that really hated him were close at hand, an eventuality at high odds with his total disbelief in coincidence. Maybe it wasn't really the Eloi or even the orchids that had brought him to the biocraft. Could it be that he was really being set up for one, if not two, or his most sworn and vindictive enemies?

Needless to say, he didn't communicate any of this to his companions. They had more than enough on their minds right there and then, and he also was far from sure how they, especially Lupo, would react, if he revealed himself as a potential liability. The situation was plainly turning bad, and Rosa Coote's expression was grim. "It can't be too long now."

Mina concurred. "There does come a time when surrender is the best remaining option."

Lupo glanced at Sternwood. "You want to relay that piece of advice to these creatures?"

Sternwood wheeled his trolley around. "No. I doubt they know how to run up a white flag anyway."