Other fan boats behind the lead one were cutting their engines now. Gnomes were hurling every sort of buoyant object on their fan boats' decks into the midst of the swimming humans. Some humans were badly wounded and were being pulled from the water, screaming in agony. As the lead fan boat rounded the port side of the hammership, the crashed ship settled down into the water. The commander noticed one more survivor clamber out of the huge hole in the upper hull where the hammership's port "eye" had been, a man in soaking rags who could not use his legs. Exhausted, the man fell forward into the water-and disappeared.

"That way!" shouted the commander to his pilot. "Get that man!" The pilot snatched an oar and maneuvered the boat around until it was next to the man's floating, face-down body. With one movement, the commander reached down and dragged the human on deck, almost losing his seating and falling overboard himself in the process.

The commander carefully rolled the man over to see if he still breathed. He did, coughing immediately on the water he'd inhaled. "Lucky devil!" said the commander, wreathed in smiles and gently shaking the survivor. "Another few seconds, and you'd… you'd…"

Still coughing, the man squinted up into the commander's blue, wide-eyed, hippopotamus face, and the latter gasped.

"By the Great Captain's blunderbuss!" bellowed First Colonel-Commander Herphan Gomja, Commander in Chief of Base Security, Port Walkaway, Ironpiece. "You're Teldin Moore!"

Chapter Seven

"The helmsman on the Unicorn's Wing has ceased to speak with us, my admiral," said the battlewizard. Her hands dropped from the crystal globe in her lap. Her face was streaked with tears, but her voice was calm and even. "I fear the smoke and flames have overcome her."

Admiral Cirathorn said nothing. He stared out the broad, high windows of the Empress Dorianne's bridge at the yellow and red fires in the distance. He could see the Unicorn's Wing ablaze now, about two miles distant and receding swiftly. It was moot whether anyone else had survived the close assault the humanoids had staged against the man-o-war. The gnomes had arrived just as the Wing was being boarded; its captain apparently had mistaken the gnomes for more humanoids and had ordered his gunners to fire on them as well. It proved to be a costly error. One of the gnomish vessels caught fire, but three others unleashed their weapons at the man-o-war and humanoid ships, damaging everything in view-including, if reports were to be believed, one of their own ships.

That had been only a small slice of the action. The battle, all told, had taken about four hours. The most severe fighting had come in the first hour, when the elves sighted and recognized the fleet before them as humanoid in nature, then crept in for the first strike. This was followed by cat-and-mouse games played out by vengeful, blood-hungry elven and humanoid captains. Cirathorn had secretly hoped that Teldin would require rescue, placing him and his cloak with the Imperial Fleet, but that had proved unnecessary. If there were any winners, it would be the gnomes, who had driven all others away from their world.

A distant star of yellow and white bloomed among the almost-invisible wrecks. A few moments later, the star grew in ragged brightness, then grew larger again. One of the humanoid ships had blown up. It must have been the ogre mammoth, the one to which the marines from the Dorimae had teleported. A good move, that, to decapitate the ship's command and helm with one strike, just before decloaking and setting the mammoth ablaze. Orcs and ogres had crewed the mammoth's bridge, fighting surprisingly well for otherwise slow-witted scum.

"What word do we have of the Probe?" Cirathorn asked, still peering out the windows.

The battlewizard answered promptly. "It has either landed or crashed on Ironpiece by now, my admiral. It appeared to have been damaged by the initial assault before it pulled away. It was traveling at five times the basic speed a spelljammer can attain when it left."

Cirathorn hid his surprise. "Did you observe any activity aboard the Probe that would account for its speed?" "No, my admiral. Its flight was completely unexpected." The admiral stared out the windows in silence. The exploding vessel had come apart in a thousand pieces. The air envelope around the remainder of the hull was visible as an expanding gray smudge against the endless stars.

Teldin had used the cloak to help the Probe escape from the humanoids. Cirathorn knew this for a fact. Only the cloak might have the power to serve as its own helm, and so powerful a helm at that. Perhaps it had even overridden an active helm. It would hardly surprise the admiral now to hear it. The Cloak of the First Pilot was said to have been an artifact, after all.

What was there to do now? The humanoid fleet was massing again in a position trailing Ironpiece by about five to six million miles. Did the humanoids have reinforcements following them? Where had they come from originally? Was this the start of the long-rumored and long-feared second Unhu-man War? Were the humanoids allied with the undead, given that a pyramid ship-long known to be an abode for mummies, liches, and other perversions-traveled in their fleet with them?

There were other awful possibilities. Did the humanoids have a base in this sphere? The battlewizards said the humanoids were largely made up of powerful-looking ores who appeared to have been recently armed and supplied. Could the ores have invaded and conquered a nearby elven world? They reportedly had an elven wizard on the ogre mammoth's death helm, who had to be slain in his madness by the Dorianne's marines. The death helm warped the mind and spirit of its doomed helmsman, causing him to fight all attempts at rescue while it drained its victim's life force. The helm was a perversion that only humanoids would cherish; its possession by any being in civilized space was normally punishable by death.

There were many small colony worlds here, not a few of them elven, and most were widely scattered or socially isolated. Some elven worlds had been settled by renegades, officers cashiered from the Imperial Fleet for disobeying orders or causing trouble, and these worlds did not welcome any contact with the Imperial Fleet as yet. Had pride led a small elven world like Numeliador, Spiral, or Minial's Arch to turn down a chance to call for help to the fleet's forces at the Rock of Bral?

If the answer to the last question had been yes, then it had been a foolish, if not suicidal, error. Four elven man-o-wars and an armada had invisibly trailed the Rock of Bral for the last two years, their presence permitted by the Rock's bribe-hungry Prince Andru. One man-o-war was an odds-on favorite in most ship-to-ship battles; four could strike genuine terror into the commander of a small space fleet. An armada was avoided by all but the most desperate of warriors. The force could have turned the tide of an invasion and spared another world the fate of lost Aerlofalyn. That an elven world would be conquered in Cirathorn's own assigned sphere without his knowing of it-the thought was devastating.

The elves had taken no prisoners in this fight, there being so little time and coordination of efforts among the elven ship captains, but the orcs and their allies could have taken several prisoners during their boarding and firing of the Unicorn's Wing. Intelligence on the humanoids was thus minimal, though the battlewizards were working on the problem. Further reconnaissance of the sphere would have to be undertaken, meaning the fleet's presence here would have to be reinforced. Any delay could spell doom for the other colonies. Cirathorn was an elf, and he knew well how the Imperial Fleet worked. If this sphere had any salvation, he alone was that salvation for the foreseeable future.