"It seems that we will not be able to use the cloaking device to its full effect in an atmosphere," Sheila said when he came back to the bridge, refreshed by the shower and wearing the comfortable off-duty clothes.

"What do you mean?" Marcan asked, "They stole the craft exactly by using that very system to escape notice!"

"Yes, scanners are still unable to detect the ship, but visual detection is possible there. It seems that too dense mass around the ship disrupts the cloaking effect so that total cloaking is impossible."

"Ok. How about the rest of the equipment?"

"Nothing very special, except for the main weapon which seems to be custom built for this ship," Sheila reported. "Everything else is the way it was in the simulator I practised with. The scanner has a zoom option from 100 k to 25 k, with the 50 k as the normal setting. The radar mapper is one of the nicest features I have seen in any ship, with the feature of ranking the enemies according to their threat estimate."

"Yes, I heard about that one already," Marcan interrupted. "I think I'll try docking this manually when we get to the trading post so that I get some practice on how this ship handles. That take-off I did was not even nearly enough."

"I think that you will be pleased with the manoeuvrability. I suggest that you take the autopilot offline and try it even before we get near to the planets."

Marcan nodded, "I might do that. But we should think about the attack to the military base at Exioce. The system scanners will of course spot our hyperspace entry cloud days before we actually arrive. That should not be too dangerous since there are dozens of ships coming in each day, but we should be ready in case there is a welcoming committee waiting for us with their beam lasers burning."

"So, we'll rely on the cloaking device right from the start?"

"Yes, as soon as we can turn it on after entering the system. Then we'll head towards the sixth planet. It will probably be at least a two day flight before we get near to it. If we get there unnoticed, as we should, that will pass as soon as we have destroyed the military satellite orbiting the planet. From that point on, we'll have to expect trouble even with the cloaking device on."

"Because that device won't work properly in the atmosphere, we'll have to enter it far away from the target area," Sheila said. "Flying low, we can hope to evade detection long enough to get a distance of about 600 k before they will inevitably detect us, depending on the landscape and how well we can use it to hide."

Marcan nodded, the sergeant's figures sounded plausible enough to him, although we would not rely on them completely. There was always that possibility that something would go wrong.

For the rest of the flight towards Hooper Relay trading post, they discussed the plan and made some modifications to it, but they also spent time testing the ship and once they even turned on the cloaking device. Nothing seemed to happen on the computer screen, but the bridge lights were hooked to the system so that they turned red, giving the bridge a strange new shade.

While Sheila spent her free time writing her personal journal and reading various books from data cards that she had bought before the mission, Marcan spent his time going through the training data cards. As he went through the cards and lessons, he began to wonder more and more why he had ever agreed to join the FMI. Flying was what he enjoyed the most and the life of investigation, spying and bribery did not attract him as much as he had thought at first. He believed that if he could have made the choice again now, he would decline the offer. But, then again, what Lt. Commander Turman had told him just before the offer had been too intriguing to let it just go. And when he had found out the truth about Troy he had been completely hooked to the mission that was then given him.

Except that now he could not imagine continuing as a FMI agent after the current mission. No other mission would be personal to him and thus they would mean nothing to him. And there was no way they were going to let him return to his earlier position, either. For the first time he tried sleeping on his new bed, he had nightmares about his future life, spying and arresting people, as an unfeeling and uncaring tool of the Federation. During the second night, he saw equally bad nightmares about Sergeant Troy betraying his own and shooting Marcan's fighter into a ball of fire. He woke up drenched with sweat on both mornings.

Of course the mornings were not real mornings, since there was no sun rising above the horizon, only the beeping of the clock that said that, according to the Galactic Standard Time, it was now morning.

On that second morning, the last morning before they would dock to the Hooper Relay trading post, Marcan went to the bridge after taking a shower, and looked at the main display. Sheila was there, sitting on the pilot's seat when he came in.

"Anything happened?" Marcan asked, expecting to hear about at least one pirate attack.

"No," Sheila answered, "there's been nothing new. I watched a couple of movies and wrote my journal when I got bored watching that distance indicator. I even took a nap on that couch of ours."

Marcan laughed. Watching the main display and waiting for the AUs to change into kilometres and then kilometres passing by was the most hopeless pass-time activity that he could imagine. But then, he thought, so was reading through hundreds of volumes of training material, which was what he did mostly on his free time. But now, as he looked at the main display he noticed that they had actually got nearer to their destination. The yellow type G sun of Delta Pavonis had moved out of the screen and the planet Suzuki Reward was now getting bigger by the hour.

Not that the planet offered anything to look at. They had flown past the orbit of the only garden world of the system and Suzuki Reward was just another rocky brown planet with a thin atmosphere, the way de Gaul's Hole at Luyten 789-6 had been. In fact, Marcan could not spot any difference between the two, except that the local sun gave the planet a slightly different colour than the type M red star had given to the planet where Amaliel Corporation was based. And he suspected that he imagined even that small difference, since the colour ratings of the stars indicated differences in colour mostly undetectable to a naked eye.

"I wonder why no pirates attacked us on the way?" Marcan said, not really meaning it as a question.

"I have wondered the same thing, myself," Sheila answered glancing at the main display. "This system should not be this safe to travel in. The few ships that have come near enough to us to identify have been innocent traders, no more."

Marcan grimaced as he felt a strange feeling of dread coming over him. He could not put his finger to it, but he felt like he was being used again, or baited into a trap. Someone had to be out there, making sure that he reached Exioce 6 without trouble, and they did not trust that he could fight even a few pirates away by himself. But then he shook his head. That thought was absurd. He had been sent to destroy the military base and kill Troy and that was what he was going to do.

"What is it?" Sheila asked.

"Nothing, just thinking about finally meeting up with Troy."

"Yes, you told that he betrayed you in battle. That he killed some of your friends. Was that why they sent you to do this mission?"

"That's what they said," Marcan answered, realising that he had begun to wonder it himself. "I don't know really. It appears that I'm the only one alive of Troy's old team and they want me to revenge the murders of all the others." And that included many Marcan's old friends and all the other pilots who had survived from that fight in which Troy's true allegiance had been revealed. There were so many names and faces that he remembered, but who were all dead now.

"Did Troy really kill them all?" Sheila asked.

"I guess some of them died in normal battle, but I checked the files and it seems that many died in suspicious circumstances and some were outright murdered in public bars and at civilian space ports. It may have been Troy, but it may also be the imperials making sure that he has no friends on our side."

"To make sure that he sticks with them?"

Marcan shrugged. He did not know really. It was all guessing on his part, based on the few files that he had had time to access since the promotion and transfer. He had heard of some of the deaths earlier, of course, through his old friends, but he had not made the connection until he had been told that Troy was still alive.

"How come you are still alive?" Sheila asked.

Marcan frowned, "I don't know. Just luck, I guess."

"There is no luck," Sheila answered, looking at him weirdly, almost suspiciously. "There has to be a reason."

Marcan did not like the turn the conversation had taken. The suspicion he had banished only a few moments earlier came back now, but he still resisted believing it. "I haven't been outside the military camp that much. Perhaps they just did not have a chance to get to me," he said.

"They got all the others. It may be simple chance that you are still alive, but then this whole business of making you the avenger is rather stupid."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the Imperials have surely been keeping an eye on you and they may already know that you are going to Exioce now!"

There it was again. The notion that he was being used to lure out Troy more than sent to find him. "So they are using me as a bait," he admitted finally.

"Either that, or they sent you away because they were not sure that you could be trusted anymore," Sheila said.

Marcan looked at her, wondering where she had got so twisted a mind and why she was not a FMI agent instead of him. She seemed to have the brain for it. He understood what she meant by the lack of trust. No one would trust him if he was the only one left of the spy's old team members. That marked him as a possible spy as well. But why when had they sent Sheila with him? And why had they given him the state of the art heavy fighter?

"Why would they have given their best new ship to a man they suspected a traitor?" he asked.

"Well, perhaps they are just using you as a bait, then." She finished, turning back to the control table. She had moved from the pilot's seat to her own seat and he was now preparing to dock their ship manually with the trading post.

But she had said too much and suspicions did not leave Marcan alone now. Perhaps the second reason could still be true, even if he had been given the Wolf Mk II. As long as they had a way to control him and make sure that he did not steal the ship. He glanced at Sheila. Perhaps she was the spy, and had always been the spy in his team. Perhaps they had sent her to find out if he could be trusted and perhaps she was ready to take him out if he did something that he should not do. Perhaps she was the real FMI agent onboard the ship right now.

But he knew himself to be honest, so he should not be worried about all this. But he was bothered by the lack of trust the military seemed to have on him. Had not he served them well for the past several years? Had he not been the one to teach many of their best fighter pilots? But then, so had Troy. Then he cursed that name again, wishing that the man had never crossed his path.

Then he cleared his mind of the suspicions and new realisations and concentrated on flying. He had switched off the autopilot and used the retrothrusters to slow down the craft for the rendezvous with the trading post. Hooper Relay was now the object in their main screen that grew the fastest. The planet ruled the view whenever they turned towards it in their manoeuvres to get to that side of the station where the docking bay entrance was, but it did not grown in size anymore.

Marcan marvelled at the ease and speed that the ship answered to every single one of his wishes. It seemed that he could have turned the ship around on a laser spot if he had had to. The powerful manoeuvring thrusters were fast to respond to every command he gave them and it was easy to align the ship with the big space trading post. Marcan pushed the buttons on the Comm Panel and requested a landing clearance.

The trading post was shaped as a huge wheel, turning slowly around to provide gravity to those inside. The midpoint of the single axle of the wheel was the place they were headed. There was located the small, slowly turning entrance to the docking bay. When they got nearer the Wolf started to rotate automatically in synch with the entrance door and as they approached it with a speed of mere 30 km/h, it grew slowly larger and larger until it swallowed them whole. Then the automatic docking sequence took over and the ship was transported to one of the many single ship hangars located at the midpoint of the great axle.

They did not even leave their ship at the trading post. Marcan connected directly to the local Stock Market and paid for the unloading of the radioactive waste from their ship and bought new military fuel to replace it. Meanwhile Sheila connected to the Bulletin Boards and searched for newspaper articles to download to their computer, as well as entertainment programs and whatever else they had agreed on acquiring.

It did not take long for the loading robots to carry out Marcan's commissions and for Sheila to finish her business and so Marcan made a request for a launch clearance immediately. It had occurred to them that they might have visited the local pilots' lounge or bars to have a drink or two, but it would have been that much later when they arrived to the Exioce system. Besides, if they had wanted to spend time, it would have been better to head for the third planet of the system, which was a garden planet, and the big cities down there, or the big space station orbiting that planet.

Their entry to the Exioce system was uneventful. Their hyperspace entry cloud had not been paid any more attention than to the multitudinous others that appeared to the space at the target system at the exact moment that the hyperspace engine was engaged in the departure system. Although the trip felt at most like a few seconds to the pilots, those clouds stayed visible at the both ends for as many days as the trip took in real time. Thus it was possible to analyse departure clouds and find out the name of the target system and arrival time, as well as the tonnage of the ship that made the jump. That was how the ship Troy had stolen had been known to have jumped to Faexess. Except that Troy had intentionally caused a misjump and had not actually arrived to the target system.

Almost as soon as they had entered the Exioce space, Marcan pushed the blue button and turned on the cloaking device. They had waited only for long enough for any message to reach them to inform them if the Wolf Mk II had left the system already. After engaging the cloaking device, Marvan turned them to head towards the sixth planet of the system, which was once again a rocky planet with thin atmosphere, according to the system data screen. He tagged the planet as their destination and turned on the autopilot once again. The main systems monitor showed that they were over 10 AUs from the planet. They both grimaced at that. It meant three more days spending their time with nothing special to do. They had already planned their attack as well as they could without actually seeing the place with their own eyes.

Marcan knew that it would have been different if Sheila had not been there with him. He would have enjoyed the solitude with all his heart. But now the suspicion that Sheila was there to keep an eye on him and their mission was just a test of his loyalty, or a test whether Troy would try to kill him, ruined it almost totally for him.

But at least they now had newspapers on their computer that they could read. Marcan almost laughed aloud when he noticed that Sheila had ordered the RIG, Random Intergalactic Gossip, that seldom had anything worthwhile to say. Marcan turned to the other monthly newspapers, which were Federal Times and Universal Scientist and quickly scanned their cover stories from the past couple of months. Then he started reading them more fully, interested as always of the ways people succeeded in getting into trouble with each other and the new progress in colonisation efforts.

As he was absorbed with the news stories, Sheila searched the surrounding space visually from the top turret viewscreen. When she was happy with what she saw she turned and stood up from the co-pilot's seat and went down the descent well to their living quarters. Marcan glanced over his shoulder as she disappeared and then turned back to the news stories. Soon, he knew, Sheila would be asleep. He decided to wait for a while longer.

When he knew that Sheila would be asleep he stood up from his seat and sat down on hers. He opened all the small lockers on the right of the chair, trying to find something to prove his suspicions about her part in the mission. But he found nothing except her hand weapon, a rather small but powerful laser pistol. That was not much proof since he carried a military issue side arm as well. The fact that Sheila had decided to go with something other than the standard issue, was not really a proof of anything yet.

But he remembered the advice of the undercover agent about having to find a way to access someone's personal datapad to find the dirty secrets. But he had no knowledge of how to gain access to a datapad without a password. He had never had to do such a thing as he had never forgot his own passwords.

But he had a great source of knowledge in the FMI training data cards that he was supposed to study through. He remembered that the analysis program data cards had included some intruder programs as well, and there had to be a data card that explained about such things in more detail. So, he once again pulled out his new FMI issue datapad and started studying, but this time his motivation was on quite another level.

For a moment he forgot the news, but a couple of hours into reading he needed something lighter again and remembered the RIGs that he had ignored before. He called them to the screen and started reading, eyeing quickly through the personal adds that seemed to be the life blood of the paper and less than concentrated on the articles about famous stars and wild rumours about new technologies and secret operations. Only when he saw his own name in the paper, did he pay more attention.

Marcan cursed. It was clear now that everyone knew what he was doing. That story was surely not an accident, somebody had intentionally leaked it to the paper. And it confirmed at least one of his fears: he was being used. Now the people behind that article would sit back and see if Troy and he would kill each other or if he was revealed a traitor as well. A gossip paper was a nice finishing touch. Federal Times would have raised suspicions, but a story on RIG might in this particular case seem more believable to Troy and the Empire.

He felt quite miserable for a couple of hours after reading the article. He did not like being used, but even less he liked knowing that he was not trusted by the people he worked for. It was unfair and wrong for them to think that he would betray them, and the way they handled the problem was even more despicable. To send him in danger just to see what happened was not a way a just government should work.

But once he got over the initial shock, he was more resolved than ever to find out the truth about Sheila. He read the instruction manuals and studied the working parameters of the intruder programs that he had like the undercover agent had instructed him to do. By the end of Sheila's sleep shift he had made some progress, but had not even been able to break into his own datapad yet without using his password and fingerprint. And he knew that if Sheila really was an agent, her datapad would be at least as well protected as his, if not better.

However, he did learn how to protect his datapad better than he had with certain programs that monitored his habits of using it and that made some information unavailable if he did not access certain programs in the correct order after turning it on. He hoped that Sheila was not as exited to protect her datapad as he now was his.

His eyes were sore as he greeted Sheila who came to the bridge after taking a shower. She did not even have to ask if anything had happened while she had been sleeping since their ship was cloaked and undetectable to everyone, including pirates. But he did show her the article he had found in RIG and she read it with interest.

She hummed before she said, "It seems that you are now a celebrity."

Marcan grumbled out, "This just about confirms that I'm being used by our own side! They throw me to the wolves just to see what happens."

"Have you thought that this could actually be an accident? Perhaps this really is a leak and not an evil plan to take your head," Sheila said, walking around the small bridge, not wanting to sit down immediately after having slept.

Perhaps if Marcan had not been as certain as he was that Sheila was an agent he might have taken what she said seriously. But in the light of his suspicions, her words sounded even more of a proof that she was not genuinely on his side.

"Perhaps," he said and stood up from his seat. "I'll hit the bunk now, if you don't mind," he said as he left the bridge to her.

"Ok, I'll try to keep us from hitting any stray planets," Sheila said lightly.

For the rest of the journey towards the planet Marcan tried to learn about circumventing security programs and equipment while Sheila wrote her journal and read the papers and the books. They joined once and a while to watch Dream Ware movies, but mostly they kept to themselves.

It was not like their relationship had been back at the military base, where they had both enjoyed each other's company and discussed the pilot's life together and with other pilots. It had never grown to anything more, but that was how they had liked it. Now, Marcan knew that Sheila had noticed that something in him had changed and their relationship was on a break. He was grateful that she did not push him to know what was wrong. He would not have liked to tell her that he was suspicious of her. He let her understand that his bad moods were because of the fact that he was being used, which was not that far from the mark.

Of course it was only a few hours they had to spend together since one of them was always awake when the other was sleeping and as such the situation did not have a chance to grow worse. They had things to do, both of them, and they still discussed lightly now and then, even though it felt harder to Marcan to laugh at her pranks than it had earlier.

Then Exioce 6 loomed in front of them. A small brown, rocky planet. They looked at it, knowing that if Troy was there, he knew that they were coming. There could be dozens of fighter pilots on the military base, ready to launch immediately. And the military satellite orbited the planet, now only 6000 kilometres from them.

"As soon as we destroy that satellite, all the alarms down there will go off and all the ships will be launched to find and destroy us," Shaila said grimly as Marcan guided the ship nearer to the satellite.

The satellite was a necessary target, though. If they did not destroy it and still entered the atmosphere of the planet, everyone would see where they were and would know where to find them, because the cloaking device was useless in that thick an atmosphere and the satellite would be able to track them. Or, that was what the manuals said. If the satellite was destroyed, they might be able to get as near as 500 kilometres from the base before they were found, depending on how many ships the base had ready to sweep the area.

"I know," Marcan said, "use the turret view and tell me how many of them are coming. I'll try to keep the ship aligned so that you have a good view."

Sheila was already turning the top turret to face the planet. She had to keep correcting its position as Marcan manoeuvred to get near to the satellite.

"Look at that!" Marcan exclaimed. "If we were not cloaked that satellite would have fried us already!"

They were now near enough to see the large weapons emplacement on top of the satellite. It seemed large enough to contain missiles and laser weapons. It was clear to them now that this was an important military base to be protected that well. And that had to mean that the stolen Wolf Mk II was really studied at this base. There was no certain way to find that out, of course. They could not attack the base and enter it to see if it was there and neither could they get there after destroying it with the missile, since the radioactive fallout would be deadly to them. They had to trust the intelligence that said that the ship was still at the base, since they had not received a message saying otherwise when they had entered the system.

Of course, the ship could have been removed after they had entered the system. And because they had travelled the whole distance with the cloaking device on, they could not have received any later messages since no one could have found them to send it in the first place.

"Get ready," Marcan said, inching his finger towards the missile launch button.

"I'm already ready," Sheila answered, looking intently at her monitor view.

Then Marcan launched the missile and turned the Wolf away from the satellite which was now only six kilometres away from them. He flew directly towards the planet first and then turned to face the atmosphere in a more gentle angle. Then the flash of the nuclear missile exploding lit the space behind them and he could even see the shadows on the planet gaining in intensity. The first explosion was immediately followed by another one as the whole satellite blew up. The heat sensors of the Wolf's hull rose only by a fraction of a degree though, since there was no matter in the vacuum between the ship and the explosion to transfer heat. The radiation was another matter, though, and the sensors beeped furiously, warning against anyone going outside the ship.

But inside the ship Marcan and Sheila were perfectly safe and Sheila was already reporting all the ships that she saw leaving the military base. They were too far to see the actual launching, but it was clear from the several small spots rising towards space that the enemy was coming.

"We'd better get into the atmosphere before that lot arrives here," Shaila said. "If they see whatever there is to see of us when we enter, we'll be an easy target."

Marcan nodded grimly, "I'll get us down as fast as I can."

"Be careful, I'd like to postpone my career as a crispy stick for a while longer," Sheila said, in a futile attempt to be funny. Her own voice betrayed that she was very nervous.

Marcan flew towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere as fast as he dared, trying to calculate exactly how fast he could go into an atmosphere as thin as this was. Then the colour of the space changed around them, from the normal black towards slightly blue and then finally it got a brownish tint as they got nearer to the hard crust of the planet.

He had marked the base as a target earlier and he now turned to face the direction that would quickest take them near to it. The base was a quarter of the planet away from them, about 3000 kilometres now. Marcan took the ship as low as he dared, trying to follow the contours of the surface and stay between the extremely high mountain ranges. As the planet had only a quarter of the standard G, the mountains were a lot higher than one could realise, some of them reaching above the atmosphere itself.

Marcan kept the velocity of the ship at a steady 1500 kilometres an hour for the first part of the journey, but let it soon start dropping steadily as the atmosphere slowed them down. He did not wish to waste fuel for a few saved minutes.

"At least seven ships on low orbit," Sheila reported. "Try to stay low so that their scanners wont detect us."

Marcan resisted snapping that that was exactly what he was doing. It was only then that he had time to notice the strange rippling of the atmosphere around the ship. It seemed as if they were charged electrically, or as if they had passed through a thunder cloud.

He coughed and asked quietly, "What exactly did that manual say about keeping the cloaking device on in an atmosphere?"

Sheila looked back at him, then again at their monitors. It took a moment for the realisation to hit her, and then she shouted, "Turn it off, now!"

But she was slightly too late. The energy field of the cloaking device around the ship had built up enough charge and now it acted as a thunder cloud would have: it searched for a place with an opposite charge, and the closest such thing was the planet under them. The air around the ship disintegrated as the lightning struck the ground below them. Almost every single piece of equipment aboard failed momentarily and Marcan lost the control of the ship.

The Wolf Mk II plummeted from the sky, towards the surface of the planet, that had not been far away to begin with, as Marcan fought with the controls. The ship did not have wings like an ordinary aircraft would have, and it relied solely on the several thrusters around the hull of the ship to keep it away from the planet. Now those thrusters barely worked, and when they did, they worked against him, pushing them even faster towards the planet.

"Shields are now at 15 %, the autopilot is wrecked, all thrusters seem to be failing," Sheila reported.

Marcan realised that the shields had been depleted completely in the sudden discharge of energy. The autopilot did not matter at the moment, but the thrusters did. They were now plummeting towards the ground at 150 km/h, over 50 km/h faster than the landing gear could compensate for even if he managed to turn the ship into the correct angle.

That brief thought reminded him to try to lower the landing gear, and to his amazement it actually worked. The gear lowered down to its position with a hum of the hydraulics, that was almost indistinct in the frenzy at the bridge.

"Shields at 20 %," Sheila said just before they hit the ground with loud screeching noises.

A few seconds later, Marcan dared to open his eyes. The monitor in front of him was blank as were almost all the other monitors and lights in the bridge. There was no sound of the engine in evidence. He looked towards the co-pilot's seat, but in the dim light he could not make out if Sheila was unconscious or dead. The seat should have saved her, but one could never be sure.

At that moment Marcan forgot his suspicions of the woman and remembered with complete clarity the times they had talked and laughed with each other, and the times when they had trusted their lives to each other's hands in their patrol flights. He had to admit that she had always been his favourite student, and whatever her true identity was, it could do nothing about that friendship.

"Sheila," he called quietly. A moment later he repeated the call, but there was no answer.

Marcan forced back the tears that tried to flow form his eyes and he stilled his already shaking body. He tried to reorient himself to their new situation. The ship was still intact, and there were some lights on. He felt around the dark control console, trying to find the buttons to restart the engines. He found them and pushed them and heard a promising sound, but that was all.

Frustrated, he almost let his emotions take over, but he forced himself to continue. The next step was to turn off all the engines, even the batteries that kept the few emergency lights on, and try a complete restart. He had to do it all in pitch black darkness, but he managed. Slowly but surely he turned on an engine after an engine and watched as the lights on the control board became alive again. Some of them did not come back on, but most did. Finally he tried turning on the main systems monitor to see if he could see outside. With a reassuring click, it turned on as did all the other monitors around it. Even the scanner lit up again. The hum of the main engine was once again reassuringly in the background.

Then he forgot the computer systems for a while and turned again to look at Sheila. She was still unconscious, but breathed steadily. He decided to leave her that way and see if they had a chance to escape death yet. He did not want to wake her up only to die a second time a few brief moments later.

He checked the rest of the systems and the computer reported that they had not lost any vital systems, although the ship had suffered a lot of collateral damage. The hull was down to 89 %, the autopilot was dead, as was the combat computer and the auto targetter. The shields were powering up again, though, and the weapons systems were functional. And through the monitors Marcan could see that they had landed on the landing gear after all.

When it seemed that the lift-off was a realistic possibility, Marcan turned to see to his co-pilot and old friend again. He reached with his right hand and shook her shoulder slightly. She woke up almost immediately and started groaning and complaining about her neck. It had apparently suffered a mild whiplash injury in the crash. The back of the seat should have prevented anything like it happening, but somehow it had happened anyway.

"What's our condition?" Sheila asked when she had recovered almost completely. She kept holding her neck with her left hand.

"We survived the crash pretty well. We lost only some secondary equipment. The shields are now powering up again and we can soon attempt a lift-off," Marcan explained.

"Many ships coming this way?"

Marcan knew also that their crash and play with lightning bolts could not have gone unnoticed. The looked at the scanner, at its best zoom-out, but saw no dots indicating ships nearby. Then he turned to the turret view and inspected the nearby sky. There were several dots in the sky, descending into the atmosphere, and when Marcan turned on the text labels, the various registration numbers appeared on the screen.

"Several ships are descending back into the atmosphere, but none of them are on top of us. I guess more of them are coming directly from the military base right at this moment," he said, his voice dull with the knowledge that they still faced almost certain deaths.

"Well, we'll have to fight our way through then," Sheila said, cheering up again.

But Marcan did not turn to the controls yet. Instead, he looked at Sheila intently. "I have to ask you to forgive me," he said.

She looked at him, surprised, "For what?"

"I suspected you earlier. I thought that you were one of the people using me in this."

"Oh," she said.

"But I know better now. I don't understand how I could have forgot our past and believe that you would do something like that to me," Marcan said apologetically.

"Why did you believe it in the first place?" Sheila asked.

Marcan was too ashamed to look directly at him. He looked at the systems monitors, as he explained how he had believed that she had been sent with him only to keep an eye on him and to report him back if he turned out to be unworthy of their trust. His explanation was not very coherent, but the woman seemed to understand what he was trying to say.

"But, Marcan, didn't you think that they could have sent me with you because they knew that I was your friend. If they suspected you because you were once close to Troy, they certainly suspect me as well, because I'm your friend!"

Marcan had not thought that. Now, he could not believe that he had not come to think of it, since it was the most natural reason for what had happened. He apologised again.

"Don't worry about it right now," Shaila said at last. "You should be more concerned about our survival. The number of ships out there seems to be growing."

Marcan turned his attention back to the monitors and saw that some dots had already appeared on the scanner, indicating that some enemy ships were now less than a hundred kilometres away from them. He took a hold of the controls and Sheila did the same with hers, swivelling the top turret around and looking for the closest targets. But they were on the bottom of a deep valley and no ships were yet visible.

Then Marcan dared the lift-off and cried out his joy when the ship actually lifted up, its bottom thruster fighting against, and beating the low gravity of the planet. They appeared from between the high hills and mountains, to the field of vision of dozens of enemy craft. The position might have been hopeless, but they were only 300 kilometres from their target now and it was their primary objective. Marcan kicked the thrusters to full power and they lurched forward, toward the military base. And there were only twenty or so ships between them and that target.

The hopeless situation made Marcan almost laugh out loud in desperation. The distance counter to the target started diminishing and the closest enemy were now only a little over 10 kilometres away. Soon they were going to open fire towards them, and even though their shields were now at full power again, they could not survive for long.

But then he remembered that their military lasers had a longer range than the normal pulse and beam lasers of their enemies. He realised that Sheila had already known that when the top turret opened fire towards the closest enemies. The blue, rapid pulse fire blew up one of the enemy ships already before Marcan had time to put on the goggles that he had to use to aim and fire his more powerful laser.

Now the real power of the weapon became apparent, when he did not have to turn his ship to face his enemies completely. It was enough to get them into the 5 degree radius of the main crosshairs, then the computer would read the movement and point of focus of his eyes, zoom up the ship that he was looking, and fire the magnificently powerful lasers.

It was hard to miss with that laser, because it helped targeting by zooming up that part of the view that he was looking at when he pressed the fire button slightly. And the almost white, rapid fire pulse laser wreaked havoc amongst the enemy ships, dropping three of them out of the sky before they understood to start evasive manoeuvres.

Sheila had started by shooting at the forward targets as well, but then she turned the turret to face the other enemies who had descended into the atmosphere behind and around them. Her laser was not as powerful as his, and it was not targeted like his, so she was not as successful at the other fronts as Marcan was with the enemies coming at them from ahead.

But even with the unbelievable weapon, Marcan could not destroy all the enemies that were headed towards them, and soon three ships got past his volley of fire and flew over them at close range. Sheila got one of them with a lucky shot, but they had already fired their missiles.

Marcan hit the E.C.M., but not before one of the missiles had reached its target. The shields of the Wolf Mk II dropped by some 50 %, but there was no other damage. It was clear that they were still outnumbered, because while Marcan had taken the time to hit the E.C.M., several other ships had got too near for him to take them all out. Soon the shields started depleting when a red beam laser found its mark.

Marcan pulled the Wolf up in an attempt to evade the fire before it drained their shields completely, and managed to fly straight through another similar beam. The shields were almost depleted now. He climbed to 4000 metres and levelled out again, looking for their target. It was under a hundred kilometres away.

"Sheila, keep them at bay. We are going in!"

"I can't keep anything at bay if you keep bouncing back and forth like this!" she answered back, desperately trying to turn the turret in time of his manoeuvres to keep the laser aimed that the enemies.

Then Marcan fired the nuclear missile at the military base and pulled their ship up and away, so that the top of the ship was now towards their enemies. He was thus unable to aim and fire at them, but it was an excellent position for Sheila, who destroyed a ship after a ship of their chasers.

Then the missile exploded and the surrounding brown landscape burned brightly for a long moment. Several enemy ships that had been too close to the base, or had just left it, were destroyed with the rest of the base. Other ships were desperately turning around to evade the fiery hell that had once been their hangar.

The mushroom shape of a nuclear explosion rose high onto the sky, overshadowing everything around it. The electromagnetic pulse that came with the nuclear explosions destroyed the computer systems of those smaller craft that did not have enough shielding around them and they crashed to the ground soon after. That was only a couple of unlucky ships though, since most space worthy ships needed to have those shields to survive in space. The sound and heat waves took out more ships. Again the smaller ones, too fragile to stand up to the almost solid sound waves of compressed air, were the ones to go.

The Wolf Mk II was almost two hundred kilometres away by then, one of the few ships that had survived the ordeal. And Sheila was already heating up her laser by shooting the others out of the sky as rapidly as she could. The radiation and the heat sensors aboard were once again screaming in agony.

Then Marcan saw something that he had wished not to see on this mission. Another Wolf Mk II was rapidly gaining in altitude ahead of them. The registration code of that ship was FW-001, the code of the stolen ship, and it was only seven kilometres from them.

Marcan targeted the military laser and fired, and the computer confirmed that he was hitting the target with a deadly volley of white laser fire, but then the other ship disappeared, leaving behind it only a brilliantly red cloud. It was not the cloud of explosion, but a cloud that meant that the other ship had just made a jump to the hyperspace.

As Marcan looked around, he saw that the other remaining enemy ships were jumping out of the system as well. Soon there were six such clouds around them.

"They all jumped away," Sheila said, sweat glistening on her forehead and gluing her hair to her scalp.

"But where?" Marcan asked, punching the buttons of their hyperspace cloud analyser as quickly as he could. Five of the clouds indicated a jump to some other Imperial systems nearby, but the one left by the other Wolf was different. And it was just because it was different that Marcan knew that it had been Troy piloting that ship. He was the only person whom he knew who would not choose the most obvious choice for his escape.

"What are those coordinates?" Sheila exclaimed when she saw the results he had gathered.

Marcan studied them as well. The computer did not give the name of the system for those coordinates as it did to all the others. It said simply 'unknown'. Marcan compared the coordinates to the star map, and pinpointed the exact location of the jump.

"It's in the deep space," he said after a while, not believing his own words.

"A brown star perhaps?" Sheila attempted, but they both knew that it was impossible. These parts of the space had been studied well enough that even the almost invisible brown stars had been noticed hundreds of years ago.

"No, those coordinates are in the real deep space. There is nothing there," Marcan said again.

"But how did he manage to jump there?" Sheila asked, and continued, "The computer does not allow that normally."

"I know," Marcan said as he was already accessing the programming level of the astrogation computer. The blocks against jumps into the deep space had been made simply because it was believed that no one on his right mind would ever want to jump there. And one usually ended up there only as the result of a rare misjump. Those blocks were not hard to remove, but Marcan knew that it would take too long for him to do that, even if he had studied computer programs lately. But there was another thing he could do.

He accessed the system database and simply added another entry, giving the coordinates in deep space to a new star system. He named the entry simply 'The Deep' and saved the new database. Those were the only necessary bits of data that the hyperspace programs needed to work; the coordinates and a name for reference. All the other system info was secondary, and in other databases.

"Will that work?" Sheila asked from the other seat, studying carefully what he was doing and at the same time piloting their ship out of the gravity well of the planet.

"It should," Marcan answered simply and selected his new entry as their hyperspace target. The whole process of adding another system had taken him only five minutes. That meant that they would not be far behind Troy when they arrived to the new location. Then, looking at Sheila, he sent them to the hyperspace, which was now truly worth the fearful name 'witch space', since they did not know where they were going to end up.

When they came out of the hyperspace, they could not believe their eyes. It was really deep space and not a brown dwarf star system, but there was life out there. Their main monitor showed them large shapes that could have been very big asteroids, but the computer did not label them as such. Instead it gave them registration codes, similar to those of conventional space ships. There were five of them, and they all were round and at least five miles in diameter.

They flew nearer to them and saw that they could have been huge space stations, if they had not been almost completely round and if they had not happened to have large sub-lightspeed drive systems attached to them. They were all moving rather slowly into the same direction through normal space. Marcan could not understand why anyone would want to travel at such speeds when the journey between any inhabited star systems could be crossed in a matter of days with normal hyperspace engines.

"They are Bubbles," Sheila said suddenly.

"Bubbles? What are those?" Marcan asked.

"They are human habitats that travel in the normal space. They are basically big empty hulls, made from large asteroids by sending them towards a sun to boil and then the ice within vaporises and stretches them into big bubbles like these. They rotate fast enough to give anyone standing on the inner surface a feeling of a near 1G. They are hollow worlds populated by hermits and outcasts from the society, or sometimes by some who simply want to get away from the big powers and their power struggles," Sheila lectured.

"How do you know all that?" Marcan asked.

"There was a small article in Universal Scientist recently. Most of these are manufactured at Wolf 424 by Dillon's Bubble Forge, and the shells are mostly nickel-iron compounds. Lately the Federation and the Empire have announced that these bubbles are illegal and will be destroyed when found."

"But why?" Marcan wondered. He rather liked the idea of living in the deep space, away from all the worries of the modern world. And he had always been interested in the ways the humanity found to spread around the galaxy. He thought that all such attempts should be encouraged, especially when they did not hurt anybody, as these bubbles certainly did not.

"I think they claimed that it was their drive system or something that was deemed a threat. Personally, I think that they are afraid that all their tax-payers will go away like this and leave them all alone."

Marcan chuckled. That was an idea he liked very much. No one liked taxes, as the well-known colloquialism began.

"Do you suppose Troy has docked with one of those?" Sheila asked.

"Well, we saw the entry cloud back there, but there was no departure cloud. He has to be here somewhere. I just wonder what he has to do with these people and how he knew that they were here."

"Me too," Sheila agreed.

Soon after, their Comm Panel chimed as one of the bubbles contacted them. A face of a middle-aged woman appeared on the small holo display. Her hair was short and reddish brown and she seemed to have suffered a lot; her face was more wrinkled than normal.

"Unknown spacecraft! Why are you here?"

Marcan exchanged looks with Sheila before he answered, "This is Federal Military fighter in pursuit of a known criminal travelling in a stolen Wolf Mk II, registration number FW-001. Commander Marcan Rayger speaking."

The woman on the other end looked at someone at her side, who was not visible in the small hologram and she said a few words, also unheard. Then she turned back to them and said in a voice that sounded more tired than on the first time. "Federal Military vessel, I am Angela Melvoin, the president of this small collection of worlds. Please, dock into the Bubble SV-453."

Marcan glanced at Sheila again before answering, "Roger, we'll come in immediately." Then he cut off the communications channel and turned to Sheila, "I wonder what all this is."

"Your friend Troy seems to be a lot more than he seemed," Sheila said, to no one in particular.

"He was always full of surprises," Marcan said, his voice filed with contempt. Then he flew the Wolf Mk II into the docking bay of one of the big bubbles, through an entryway that rotated like any other entryway at any other space station that rotated around its axle. The docking sequence worked as normal and when they got into the hangar, it did not seem much different from the many others Marcan had seen. The only difference was that it was not a single ship hangar. There were six spaces there, three of them empty, but on one space the ship was all too familiar. It was the stolen craft, now surrounded by construction scaffolds as the damages to the hull were repaired.

Marcan and Sheila changed into their uniforms as fast as they could and then lowered the ramp from their ship. Marcan locked the inner doorway and then they both walked down the ramp. There was a group of people already coming towards them; the old woman that they had seen in the holo-message walking ahead of three other, younger people

"Welcome to the command bubble," the woman who had identified herself as Angela Melvoin said. "I think that we should talk," she continued as she shook their hands.

Marcan took the charge, being the one of them with the higher rank, "That would be preferable. Can you arrange for the transfer of the prisoner into our care as soon as possible?"

The middle-aged woman looked at him with a blank expression on her face, "No. Emic Troy is in the charge of our defences and you cannot have him. Now, follow us and we will discuss this in much cosier surroundings."

At that she turned around and started walking away from them. The three of her companions stayed put until Marcan had shaken his shoulders and started following after the self-appointed president. They really had no other choice. The gravity in the hangar was small and it made walking a somewhat clumsy and bouncing activity, but they managed to follow their escorts to an elevator.

When the door into the elevator opened, Marcan and Sheila gasped out in surprise. The opposite wall of the elevator was completely transparent and gave them a view into the brilliant, green world that had been built inside the huge bubble. As the bubble rotated around, the outer walls, or now rather the ground, gained a feel of gravity close to 1G. The elevator was high, near to the central axle of the world and thus in every direction around them; above, left, right and below, they could see the crop fields and small buildings that formed the world. There were even some artificial lakes and rivers in the landscape, as well as small forests.

The outer diameter of the bubble was about five kilometres, but to make the ground inside as even as possible, it had been filled so that the open habitat was actually a cone, stretching out to the other side of the sphere where there were identical elevators as the one Marcan and Sheila had just stepped into, leading to the central axle, where the artificial gravity was a lot weaker. The land did rise slightly towards the each end of the cone, but most of the land in between was even.

As the elevator started descending towards the landscape below, and they could feel the gravity increasing, Marcan looked at the magnificent view, and asked, "How big is it?"

Angela Melvoin looked proudly at them as she answered, "The diameter of the bubble is 5.2 kilometres, but to make the ground below us even remotely even, the diameter inside is only about 3,5 kilometres. And when the length of this greenhouse is about 3.9 kilometres, it makes about 28500 cubic metres of space. There is about 37 square kilometres of open air land in that sphere."

The claim about open air was of course false, since the whole world was located inside and when one looked up, one could see to the other side of the world. The whole space was lit by the glowing axle that span from the north pole to the south pole, across the huge bubble. That made the insides bright enough for the plants and people to live there in the open.

They had now descended to the midpoint of their travel, and were still about 700 metres above the ground. Marcan saw now some animals and people on the ground, and several youngsters enjoying the beach life around a small lake.

"How many people live here?" Sheila asked.

"In each of the bubbles we have about 8000 inhabitants. Most of them live in the buildings under the artificial ground, and this piece of nature is here mostly for agriculture and relaxation with some open air restaurants and other facilities with direct access lifts to the city underground."

Marcan calculated quickly that there was still about a kilometre of space for structures between the floor of the great garden and the outer hull of the bubble. That gave a huge amount of room for homes and settlements for the inhabitants. "I take it that it is not very crowded here?" he said lightly.

"Certainly not," Angela laughed. "Our population is free to grow for the next few hundred years, at least."

"You can support that many people with the mere agriculture?" Sheila asked.

"Yes, mostly. There are large greenhouses underground as well, so this what you see here is not all of it. We are almost completely self-sufficient," Angela announced proudly.

Then the elevator reached the level of the garden and the doors slid open with almost undetectable sound. Angela and their other escorts stepped out into the warmth of the eternal summer and Marcan and Sheila followed uncertainly. There were no roads, just a narrow path that lead towards a large restaurant a hundred metres away. They walked along the path and into the open restaurant building. There was no need for a roof, since it never rained. They went to a reserved table near to a fence and Marcan saw that the restaurant had been built on the top of a twenty meter high cliff. They sat at the table, from which they had a clear view over the fields and forests, and for a moment Marcan could only admire the beautiful view. Whoever had designed the landscape, had made it as close to natural as it was possible in such surroundings.

Only the three of them sat at that table though, while the three younger escorts chose another table next to theirs and kept to themselves. Marcan assumed that they were their guards. Then he noticed the waiter coming at their table and quickly picked up the menu, that was printed on archaic paper and opened it. All the foodstuffs carried names that were unreadable to him and he commented on it.

Angela looked at them over her own menu, and said, "It's meant to be that way. We live here like the human ancestors lived thousands of years ago. The history books that we studied indicated that in ancient times people used to visit restaurants just like this, that had menus written in languages that they could not understand. Just make an order randomly, I assure you that it will be something edible."

Marcan made a face at the explanation, and turned his eyes back to the menu. He decided that 'Fruit de la Mer' had to have something to do with fruits, so he ordered that. Sheila made a similarly random choice as did their host. Marcan suspected that whatever he chose from the list, the chef in the kitchen would just choose to give him whatever he happened to have ready. If no one there understood the menus, there was not much else they could do.

And, although he could not know it, he was proven correct in his assumption when the waiter later brought a plateful of rise and meat in front of him. Before that, though, Sheila managed to surprise him once again with her vault of knowledge.

"This is a society of anachronism then?" she asked, using a word that said nothing to Marcan.

"Oh, not completely!" Angela laughed, "only here in this beautiful garden of ours. Here we try to live as close to the manners of our ancestors."

Then the datapad that she carried with her chimed and a hologram appeared above it. Angela exchanged words with the caller, but Marcan and Sheila heard none of them. It was the small hologram of the head that took all of their attention. It was a head covered with thick brown fur from everywhere except the face, which was a brown shade of pink. Marcan stretched out his head and tried to see the face more clearly. The creature had large brown eyes and a slight snout with a mouth. The nostrils were on the slight bulge as well, rising only a little to form a nose. Large ears were on the both sides of the head, surrounded by the thick fur. The creature spoke with words of the standard language, but it gave them an alien accent, a slightly wheezing quality.

When the hologram disappeared, Marcan and Sheila looked at their host, their question written on their faces.

"Well," she began, "we are not all humans here in the bubbles. One of the five bubbles is inhabited solely by our friends."

"Aliens?" Marcan asked. He could not believe what he had seen. No alien races had been reported since the Thargoids had been defeated. The prior 'purifying' process committed by forces of Tau Ceti had made almost all sentient alien races extinct.

"No more aliens than you and me," Angela said. "They are the result of an old experiment on genetic manipulation. They were originally bonobos, a species of apes from the old Earth in the Sol system. The scientists wanted to find out how smart they could become with a little help, as the bonobos had already showed that they could learn to speak in the rudiments of language. The project received much resistance and the results, our friends here were set free onto a remote part of a certain world, where they started to prosper. They were denied the human technology until we smuggled them to these bubbles."

That rang some bells in Marcan's memory from the years he had spent in school. What he could remember from the boring history lessons on genealogy reminded him that the attempt of the scientists had been to enhance the genotype of bonobos in an attempt to create a species of some intelligence. It was hoped that the peace-loving and egalitarian lifestyle of the bonobos and their ingenious tool-using capability would have given a fruitful basis for such new species.

After only few months the research was discontinued because of the public uproar that it caused amongst laymen, but not before results had been achieved. The result was a new species of small stature, resembling what many believed to be the form of man when he first started walking upright, but of superior talent. Also like bonobos, the new species was dominated by close-knit groups of females, although the males were physically stronger individually.

"Yes," Marcan said after thinking about he could remember, "I have read about them. Are they intelligent?"

"As intelligent as you and me," Angela answered, "and more peaceful. Their culture is ruled by the females and their socialisation habits are almost completely devoid of violence. We brought them along in hopes to teach them that which should have been taught them a long time ago. Perhaps we can even make the humans learn to trust them so that we can someday live peacefully side by side."

"But you have confined them to just one bubble?" Sheila asked.

"No, not at all. We have another bubble where humans and bonobos live side by side, and they are free to visit these other bubbles as well. When their future generations have learned enough they can take full command of their bubbles and leave us, if they wish to. The one who called me just now was Panbanisha, one of the command crew of the bonobo bubble."

Marcan listened to the explanation and hauled some of the rice and meat into his mouth with the inconveniently sharp tool that had been provided for the job and found that he liked the taste of the food. But the food and the aliens were not the reason why they had come there and he realised that they had forgot the real purpose of the mission. When he had emptied his mouth and drank some liquid that carried a name equally strange to the food, he looked seriously at their host.

"We came here after a known criminal, and you told us that he was the head of your defence here. Would you care to explain that to us?" he requested earnestly.

"Yes, Emic Troy was introduced to us by our good friend, Alana Vera," Angela answered, accepting the change of topic quickly. "She is a trader who financed much of the construction of these bubbles and helped the people here to realise their dream of total independence from the great powers. But, when it became clear that the Federation and the Empire, and even the relatively new Alliance were against these bubbles and threatened to destroy them on sight, we had to pay some attention to our defences.

"Then Alana brought this man, Troy, to us and told how he had left the Imperial Navy behind and how he was one of the best fighter pilots that she knew. So we hired him to train some of our youths to fly and fight in case we are ever to be found by those who have something against us."

Marcan shook his head, "You cannot trust that man. He has betrayed people before and even killed them. He will do the same to you when you are no longer useful to him."

Angela, who was the president of the bubble worlds, looked at him seriously. "Yes, he told me that he betrayed you once and that he regrets it," she said calmly.

"Regrets it?" Marcan exclaimed. "He lead his wing of fighters into a trap and even killed one of his own men! There is no way a simple regret will correct all that!"

Marcan was now very angry. He remembered once again much too well how the tide of the fight had turned and how Troy had turned around to shoot at his own men. And he remembered equally well the news that he had received of the deaths of all the other pilots that Troy had ever known on the Federation's side.

"Yes, he regrets it," the woman said simply, appearing not to notice the dangerous gleam in his green eyes and the expression on his scrawny face. "But, I'll let him explain it all to you by himself."

And at that Marcan turned his eyes to where Angela was looking then, and saw the man of his worst nightmares appear into the restaurant. The man whose sharp blue eyes he remembered so well, and whose short-cut greyish brown hair was almost glued to his scalp. But he saw a difference in him as well. He was older now, at least sixty years old. It was old enough for a human these days to start showing some early signs of ageing, and Marcan saw the thin lines on his face and the slight wrinkles around his eyes as he looked at him.

Emic Troy walked to their table and stood by it, looking at Marcan carefully, like a wild animal looking in the eyes of the predator to see if he was hungry. That unsettled Marcan slightly; to see a sign of fear in the eyes of the man who never feared. But now that man seemed to fear his old student as their eyes met over six years after the incident that had changed Marcan's life.

"Marcan," he began.

"Don't call me that, traitor!" Marcan said back, his words hitting sharply like a whip.

The older man began again, "Sgt. Major Rayger, then. I'm happy to see that you are alright."

Marcan threw the eating apparatus from his hand as he stood up to face Troy. He did not want to look up at him, and when he was standing, he did not have to. Emic Troy was only slightly under two metres tall, but Marcan was of the younger generation and reached the height of almost 2.1 metres when he stood up straight.

"Happy to see me alright, you are!? When you are the one who has killed most of my old friends!" He shouted, attracting the attention of all the other quests at the restaurant. But he did not care about that. He only thing that kept him from attacking the old man right there and then was the presence of the three escorts who had stood up at the same time as he.

"I did not do that, Sergeant Major," the older man said quietly, almost docile in his manners.

That was something Marcan had not seen in the surveillance recordings and it unsettled him further. "You did not? The who did it?" he asked, with a voice only slightly calmer than before.

"It was the Imperials. When I resigned from their service, they apparently wanted to make sure that I had no reason to go to the Federation," Troy explained.

"You could not have come back to the Federation in any case, since you had turned your coat on them," Sheila inserted from the table and Marcan looked at her, not liking it that she had intervened in their confrontation.

But Troy answered Sheila's question as willingly as he had answered Marcan's. "I was forced to do that. I had always been an agent of the Empire, sent to infiltrate into the Federal Military, but I had long ago learned to like my life on the other side of the border, when the order came. It was a simple border skirmish, but it was deemed important enough to blow my cover," Troy explained. Then he turned his eyes to Marcan, and continued, "I had to do it. There was no other chance. I had found out that the Federation was onto me and had almost found out who I was. I had to return to the Empire, but I had to pay the prize to do that."

There were tears now, in the eyes of the man who stood in front of the only man left who was alive to forgive him. "I have regretted that missile I fired at young Mishala ever since that day. I have regretted the deaths of all the pilots that I had trained and come to know every single day for the past six years."

Marcan was stunned now. Not so much because of the words Troy said, but because he saw the old man crying in front of him, begging for his forgiveness. He had not expected that their reunion might go like this. In all of his dreams they had been fighting, and one of them had died. In none of them had he heard words of regret fall from Troy's lips.

"But why did you steal the Wolf Mk II, if not to deliver it to the Empire?" Marcan asked, his voice softer now.

Emic Troy sat down at their table, beside their host and looked at the two Federation officers sitting side by side on the other side of the table. "I stole it for these people here. They need to know what kind of weapons the great powers might be using against them. I heard about the project from my remaining sources on the Empire's side and I started working out a plan to steal one of them," he explained.

"But why were you in that military base at Exioce?" Sheila asked.

Emic Troy laughed slightly, "Well, my sources were not as reliable as they once were. They had found out my escape route and surprised me when I came out of the hyperspace. There were too many of them for me to fight, and I was supposed to be their friend, after all. So, I had to give up and follow them to Exioce 6 where they studied the ship inside out before you two came and blew them all to hell and back."

Marcan sat down quietly also, trying to understand what all he had learned so unexpectedly. He was still stunned of the beautiful secret world that they had found, and now he was asked to forgive to the man who had caused him nightmares for the past several years. He looked at his food and tried even tasting it a bit as Sheila asked more questions from Troy. He did not pay much attention to it, since it had more to do with his work at the bubble's defences than the past. And it was the past that bothered him still.

He knew that he could not now just kill the older man, after seeing him cry, but he wondered now, if he could forgive him either. Troy had tried to explain how he had been forced to do what he had done, and it suddenly reminded Marcan of the way he had been manipulated in the past month and with the fabrication of Troy's death as well. With them both having been used, there was much that they shared.

Then the moment of truth came. Troy turned to look at him after answering to Sheila's latest question. His expression was serious as he asked, "Sergeant Major, what will we do now?"

Marcan looked back at him and surprised even himself with his answer, "You can call me Marcan, Emic."

There was a smile on his face and tears in his eyes, when Emic Troy reached his hand towards him and they shook hands.

"Then you are going to leave us?" Angela asked from Marcan and Sheila as they stood beside their damaged ship. They had not wanted it repaired, because they did not want to explain to their superiors where exactly they had done it.

"Yes," Marcan said, looking around the hangar and at the other Wolf Mk II. It would remain there, for the bubble-people to study and learn from, but Marcan and Sheila had to return quickly. "We have to report back and let them see our flight records from the battle at Exioce 6."

They smiled at that. The recordings had been altered so that it seemed that there had never been a Wolf Mk II in the air outside the military base. It would be evidence enough that they had destroyed the ship with the camp. Marcan had also removed from the astrogation computer the new entry that he had added there to be able to follow Troy.

"But we will come back," Sheila said then, shaking the hands of Angela and Emic. After the dinner, they had found out that the two had a romantic relationship going on between them. They had been given a small and hasty tour around the bubble before they had been ushered back to their ship, but that had been enough to Marcan and Sheila realise where they wanted to spend their lives. Sheila shared Marcan's dream to follow the progress of mankind in space. "I will resign as soon as we reach our home base. Then I'll take my savings and Marcan's savings and buy ourselves a nice ship to come back here."

Emic looked at Marcan with a considering expression on his face, "You know, they will probably give you a promotion and a medal for this. Are you sure you will want to leave such glory behind?"

Marcan took a hold of the black uniform that he was once again wearing, "To get rid of this, I'll leave anything behind. Perhaps they will give me a monetary reward as well. That would come handy when buying that new ship." Saying that he looked at Sheila and smiled. He had a feeling that there might be something deeper between them in the future, now that he had got rid of his oppressive memories. And the rest of the oppression would go with the FMI uniform.

Angela interrupted the long look between the young soldiers, "You should come back quickly, since we are going to move out of these coordinates soon. We have been stationary for long enough, waiting for Emic and his friends to come back."

Marcan nodded, "In less than a month, we'll be back here."

With that, they walked up the ramp back to their ship and disappeared from the view of Angela and Emic, who started walking away from the ship as it prepared for lift-off.

On the bridge of that heavily damaged ship, Marcan and Sheila sat side by side and started up the ship's engines. Then, just before Marcan lifted the ship up, Sheila turned to him and said, "I feel that something wonderful will come out of this."

Marcan looked back at her and smiled.