The Star Fox

“Officially I’m secretary to the expedition. I have such skills from my job before I married, and got the rust off them working for the peace movement. Then too, I’ve had experience on other planets, including planets where you need special equipment to live. I used to go to New Mars quite often, ostensibly with Edgar’s mineral prospectors, actually to get away—No matter. That’s past. When I heard about this expedition, I applied for a berth and, rather to my surprise, got it. I suppose that was partly because most qualified people were scared to come so near the big bad Aleriona, partly because Vie knew me and felt I could handle it.” She handed him a glass and raised her own. “Welcome aboard, Gunnar. Here’s to the old days.” They clinked rims, wordless.

“When life was simple and splendid,” she added. Tossing off a sip of her Chablis, she toasted again, defiantly. “And here’s to the future. We’ll make it the same.”

“Well, let’s hope so.” His mouth creased upward. She’d always been overly, dramatic, but his own stolidity had found it a trait more endearing than otherwise.

“Sit down.” She waved him to her lounger, but he took a chair instead. Jocelyn chuckled and relaxed in the form-fitting seat. “Now,” she said, “tell me about yourself.”

“Didn’t you get a bellyful of me in the news?”

“There sure was plenty.” She clicked her tongue. “The entire Solar System in an uproar. Half the people wanted to hang you and H-bomb France for commissioning you. The rest—” Her humor waned. “I hadn’t known there was so much popular support for your side of the issue. Your departure crystallized it, somehow.”

He gathered his nerve and said, “Frankly, that’s what I hoped. One decisive gesture, to cut through that wretched muddle … Okay, you can throw me out.”

“No, Gunnar. Never.” She leaned over and patted his hand. “I think you’re wrong, horribly wrong, but I never doubted you mean well.”

“Same for you, of course. Wish I could say likewise for some of your associates. And mine, I must admit. I don’t like having the approval of some pretty nasty fanatics.”

“Nor I. The Militants—I quit them when they started openly applauding mob violence.”

“They tried to blackmail me through my daughter,” he said.

“Oh, Gunnar!” Her clasp tightened over his knuckles. “And I never came to see you while she was missing. There was this work for the movement, way off on Venus, and by the time I got back and heard, everything was finished and you were gone. But … are you serious? Did Yore’s people really—”

“I fixed that,” he said. “ ’Druther not say any more. We had to keep it out of the news. I’m glad, Joss, you broke with them.”

“Not with what they meant in the beginning, though,” she said. Tears glimmered suddenly in the long hazel eyes; he wondered on whose account. “Another reason I wanted to get off Earth. Everything was such a ghastly mess, no clear rights or wrongs anyplace you searched.” She drew a breath before continuing, with swift earnestness:

“But can’t you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it’s all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they weren’t going to wait any longer. They went home. We’ll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken.”

“Or come after them, if it breaks my way,” he said. “What you can’t see, you won’t see, is that they’ve no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether.”

“Why?” she pleaded. “It doesn’t make sense!”

He frowned into his glass. “That’s something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don’t think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there. Your faction denied the evidence, but be honest with yourself, Joss.”

“You be honest too, Gunnar—No, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren’t going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it’ll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You’ll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing.”

“I’m hoping the Navy will move,” he said. “If, as you put it, I make enmity worse—Uh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can.”

“So does a woman,” she sighed.

Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: “No more argument. Let’s be only ourselves this evening. It’s been such a long time.”