He heard a voice over his own helmet com. The com seemed to be damaged, like everything else about his vacsuit, and it took him a second or two to recognize it as the young voice of the shuttle's pilot.
"Admiral . . . everyone . . . our drive's gone, and there's a gunboat coming in fast! Stand by for ejection!"
Prescott obeyed like everyone else, out of the sheer auto-response of decades of training. But even as he sat, his eyes were locked once more upon that uncaring, damnable HUD and the blazing scarlet icon of his suit's location transponder. Even with a working transponder, the chance that an individual drifting survivor would be detected by search and rescue teams-assuming there was anyone left to worry about SAR-were considerably less than even. Without one, there was no chance at all.
Raymond Prescott stared at the blood-red death sentence, and a strange, terrible calm flowed through him. The death that every spacer feared more than any other, if he were truly honest. The fear of falling forever down the infinite well of the universe, alone and suffocating. . . .
He began to reach for a certain valve on his vacsuit.
It was only because she was following the gunboat that Irma Sanchez detected the crippled shuttle. She pressed on after the Bug, crushed back into her flight couch by the brutal power of the F-4's drive. Grayness hovered at the corners of her vision, but it wasn't acceleration alone that bared her teeth in a savage grin.
There was no time for a careful, by-The-Book attack run. The only way she was going to be able to get any kind of targeting solution was by coming insanely close.
The damage the shuttle had already taken must have affected the circuitry. The pilot's first attempt to eject his passengers and himself failed.
Surprise at that stayed Prescott's hand.
Someone screamed. The gunboat was lining up on them. Prescott prepared for a quick death instead of a slow one.
Then the pilot yelled something about a fighter.
The F-4's computer screamed audible and visual warning as a Bug targeting radar locked the fighter up. Irma knew where it was coming from. There was no more time-no time for a proper target lock from her own fighter. She laid the shot in visually, the way every instructor at Brisbane had told her no one could do, and her internal hetlasers stabbed out with speed-of-light death.
In the fragment of an instant before it erupted into a ball of flame, the gunboat birthed its own, slower-than-light death darts.
The second time, it worked. With a g-force that almost induced blackout (and finished off his suit com once and for all), Raymond Prescott was out into the starry void, just in time to be dazzled by the gunboat's death.
His rank meant his was the first seat in the sequenced ejection queue, and the old-fashioned explosive charge hurled him outwards. But even it was damaged; it fired erratically, its thrust off-axis, and the starscape swooped and whirled crazily . . . and then the shuttle blew up behind him.
A fresh stab of grief ripped through him. So much grief. Grief for all the men and women who'd never gotten off of Riva y Silva at all. Grief for Amos Chung . . . and for Jacques Bichet and the other shuttle passengers he knew were still sitting in their seats, still waiting for their turn in the queue. Still waiting, when the dead man without a transponder had already been launched because he was so "important" to the war effort.
The charge stopped firing, and his hands moved mechanically, without any direction from his brain as he unstrapped from the seat. He thrust it away from him almost viciously and watched it go pinwheeling slowly off across the cosmos. There was a huge, ringing, silent nothingness within him-one that matched the infinite silence about him perfectly-as he watched, as well as he could through his damaged visor, while the seat vanished into the Long Dark that waited for him, as well.
Strange. Strange that it should come to him like this, in the quiet and the dark. Somehow, he'd always assumed it would come for him as it had for Andy, in the flash and thunder and the instantaneous immolation of matter meeting antimatter. In the fury of battle, with the men and women of his farshatok about him. Not like this. Not drifting forever, one with the legendary Dutchman, the very last of the farshatok who'd planned, and fought, and hoped beside him for so many years.
His vacsuit had never been intended for extensive EVA. Its emergency thrusters' power and endurance were strictly limited . . . and they showed another yellow caution light in his HUD. It made no difference, of course-not for a single, drifting human in a vacsuit with no transponder-but he reached for the thruster controls, anyway. The life support of his damaged suit was undoubtedly going to run out soon enough, yet it was important, somehow, that he exercise one last bit of self-determination before the end.
He tapped the control panel lightly, gently, almost caressingly, and the thrusters answered, slowing his own spinning tumble.
When the end came, he would choose a single star he could see through his damaged visor, fix his gaze upon it, and watch as the darkness came down at last.
Somehow, Irma had managed to punch out in time.
She had no idea how. Nor did she have any true memory of the death of the faithful little fighter which had served her so long and so well as it ate the Bug missile. Now, as she tumbled through space, amid the horror of vertigo, she clung for her sanity's sake to the thought of the extremely powerful transponder every fighter pilot's vacsuit contained.
Actually, a pilot's suit had a number of goodies that went beyond the standard models that everyone aboard a warship wore in combat-and not just its greater capacity to absorb body wastes before overloading with results best not thought about. For one thing, it had a considerably more powerful thruster system than a standard suit.
That thought drove through her brain at last, and she forced control on herself and used the thrusters to stop the tumbling. Then she shut them off. No need to waste the compressed gas. She had nowhere in particular to go. If anything was going to save her bacon, she told herself philosophically, it was the transponder, not the thrusters. Not that it was likely to. She'd probably survive for the short run, for the battle had receded, turning into a distant swarm of fireflies. But that had a downside: no one was close enough for her half-assed helmet com to communicate with, and the odds of anyone coming close enough to pick up even her transponder signal were slim, to say the very best.
So she simply drifted. There was nothing else to do. She drifted for a long time. Eventually, she stopped looking at her helmet chrono. Periodically, she took sips of the nutrient concentrate the suit's life support system dispensed, with no great enthusiasm-the stuff would keep you alive, but it tasted like puke. Mostly, she let her mind wander listlessly through the landscape of memories.
Then, after some fraction of eternity, she spotted another vacsuit.