Said that the Almighty
Does not shoot craps.
KINGS WHO DIE
Luckily, Diaz was facing the other way when the missile exploded. It was too far off to blind him permanently, but the retinal burns would have taken a week or more to heal. He saw the glare reflected in his view lenses. As a ground soldier he would have hit the rock and tried to claw himself a hole. But there was no ground here, no up or down, concealment or shelter, on a fragment of spaceship orbiting through the darkness beyond Mars. Diaz went loose in his armor. Countdown: brow, jaw, neck, shoulders, back, chest, belly… No blast came, to slam him against the end of his lifeline and break any bones whose muscles were not relaxed. So it had not been a shaped charge shell, firing a cone of atomic-powered concussion through space. Or if it was, he had not been caught in the danger zone. As for radiation, he needn’t worry much about that. Whatever particles and gamma photons he got at this distance should not be too big a dose for the anti-X in his body to handle the effects.
He drew a breath which was a good deal shakier than the Academy satorist would have approved of. («If your nerves twitch, cadet-san, then you know yourself alive and they need not twitch. Correct?» To hell with that, except as a technique.) Slowly, he hauled himself in until his boots made magnetic contact and he stood, so to speak, upon his raft. Then he turned about for a look.
«Nombre de Dios,» he murmured, a hollow noise in the helmet. Forgotten habit came back, with a moment’s recollection of his mother’s face. He crossed himself.
Against blackness and a million wintry stars, a gas cloud expanded. It glowed in many soft hues, the center still bright, edges fading into vacuum. Shaped explosions did not behave like that, thought the calculator part of Diaz; this had been a standard fireball type. But the cloud was nonspherical. Hence a ship had been hit, a big ship, but whose?
Most of him stood in wonder. A few years ago he’d spent a furlough at Antarctic Lodge. He and some girl had taken a snowcat out to watch the aurora, thinking it would make a romantic background. But when they saw the sky, they forgot about each other for a long time. There was only the aurora.
The same awesome silence was here, as that incandescence which had been a ship and her crew swelled and vanished into space.
The calculator in his head proceeded with its business. Of those American vessels near the Argonne when first contact was made with the enemy, only the Washington was sufficiently massive to go out in a blast of yonder size and shape. If that was the case Captain Martin Diaz of the United States Astromilitary Corps was a dead man. The other ships of the line were too distant, traveling on vectors too unlike his own, for their scout boats to come anywhere close. On the other hand, it might well have been a Unasian battlewagon. Diaz had small information on the dispositions of the enemy fleet. He’d had his brain full just directing the torp launchers under his immediate command. If that had indeed been a hostile dreadnaught that got clobbered, surely none but the Washington could have delivered the blow, and its boats would be near—
There!
For half a second Diaz was too stiffened by the sight to react. The boat ran black across waning clouds, accelerating on a streak of its own fire. The wings and sharp shape that were needed in atmosphere made him think of a marlin he had once hooked off Florida, blue lightning under the sun… Then a flare was in his hand, he squeezed the igniter and radiance blossomed.
Just an attention-getting device, he thought, and laughed unevenly as he and Bernie Sternthal had done, acting out the standard irreverences of high school students toward the psych course. But Bernie had left his bones on Ganymede, three years ago, and in this hour Diaz’s throat was constricted and his nostrils full of his own stench. He skyhooked the flare and hunkered in its harsh illumination by his radio transmitter. Clumsy in their gauntlets, his fingers adjusted controls, set the revolving beams on SOS. If he had been noticed, and if it was physically possible to make the velocity changes required, a boat would come for him. The Corps looked after its own.
Presently the flare guttered out. The pyre cloud faded to nothing. The raft deck was between Diaz and the shrunken sun. But the stars that crowded on every side gave ample soft light. He allowed his gullet, which felt like sandpaper, a suck from his one water flask. Otherwise he had several air bottles, an oxygen reclaim unit, and a ridiculously large box of Q rations. His raft was a section of inner plating, torn off when the Argonne encountered the ball storm. She was only a pursuit cruiser, unarmored against such weapons. At thirty miles per second, relative, the little steel spheres tossed in her path by some Unasian gun had not left much but junk and corpses. Diaz had found no other survivors. He’d lashed what he could salvage onto this raft, including a shaped torp charge that rocketed him clear of the ruins. This far spaceward he didn’t need screen fields against solar particle radiation. So he had had a small hope of rescue. Maybe bigger than small, now.
Unless an enemy craft spotted him first. His scalp crawled with that thought. His right arm, where the thing he might use in the event of capture lay buried, began to itch. But no, he told himself, don’t be sillier than regulations require. That scoutboat was positively American. The probability of a hostile vessel being in detection range of his flare and radio—or able to change vectors fast enough—or giving a damn about him in any event—approached so close to zero as made no difference.
«Wish I’d found our bottle in the wreckage,» he said aloud. He was talking to Carl Bailey, who’d helped him smuggle the Scotch aboard at Shepard Field when the fleet was alerted for departure. The steel balls had chewed Carl to pieces, some of which Diaz had seen. «It gripes me not to empty that bottle. On behalf of us both, I mean. Maybe,» his voice wandered on, «a million years hence, it’ll drift into another planetary system and owl-eyed critters will pick it up in boneless fingers, eh, Carl, and put it in a museum.» He realized what he was doing and snapped his mouth shut. But his mind continued. The trouble is, those critters won’t know about Carl Bailey, who collected antique jazz tapes, and played a rough game of poker, and had a D.S.M. and a gimpy leg from rescuing three boys whose patroller crashed on Venus, and went on the town with Martin Diaz one evening not so long ago when—What did happen that evening, anyhow?
There was a joint down in the Mexican section of San Diego which Diaz remembered was fun. So they caught a giro outside the Hotel Kennedy, where the spacemen were staying—they could afford swank, and felt they owed it to the Corps—and where they had bought their girls dinner. Diaz punched the cantina’s name. The autopilot searched its directory and swung the cab onto the Embarcadero-Balboa skyrail.
Sharon sighed and snuggled into the curve of his arm. «How beautiful,» she said. «How nice of you to show me this.» He felt she meant a little more than polite banality. The view through the bubble really was great tonight. The city winked and blazed, a god’s hoard of jewels, from horizon to horizon. Only in one direction was there anything but light: westward, where the ocean lay aglow. A nearly full moon stood high in the sky. He pointed out a tiny glitter on its dark edge.
«Vladimir Base.»
«Ugh,» said Sharon. «Unasians.» She stiffened a trifle.
«Oh, they’re decent fellows,» Bailey said from the rear seat.
«How do you know?» asked his own date, Naomi, a serious-looking girl and quick on the uptake.
«I’ve visited them a time or two,» he shrugged.