She flinched back, hands upraised. “Go ahead, hit me! I don’t care!”
He almost did, just because she had said she didn’t care. But he caught himself in time and stormed out the door.
He always did that. He always wound up doing that, somehow, whenever they had a fight—always going out the door.
Some time, about two hours later, he came out of a morose alcoholic fog to look up and see a sign that said JOIN THE FLEET! with a picture of a marine in front of a spaceship.
He looked around and realized that it was the only lighted shop window left on the street; even the bar down the block had turned off its sign.
So he went in—just to get warm, he told himself. It was the only warmth in sight.
He never went back. He’d never even been within five light-years of Earth since then. But his paycheck went to her every month, and his letters went out every time they touched a Fleet base. She never answered them, though—until he received the letter from her lawyer with the divorce papers.
The beam didn’t show in space, but its impact did. And Corin was one with the two sets of cross hairs: one with the particle beams that were burning through to the cruiser’s control systems, and one with the torpedoes that sped toward it with warheads of nuclear death. He could finally kill everything in sight with a clear conscience—ships, Weasels, Khalians, bosses, lovers, wife, sister, mother! But Corin could see the sudden snowlike hail of blips that were torpedoes, moving outward from a dozen Khalian destroyers like hate and the consuming hunger that women called love, and coming finally to destroy him, as he had always known they would, to purge him in the fire of annihilation, but too slowly this time, too slowly ...
Then the largest blip on the screen turned yellow, and in the view port, the expanding disk mushroomed, swelling in a moment to double its diameter. The five shots of adrenaline had Corin at threshold anyway, teetering on the edge, and the sight of that fiery blossom blew him over into the sheer, blinding ecstasy of fulfillment, the fulfillment of destruction. As he saw Lisle’s cross hairs traversing downward to the swarm of torpedoes. and as he moved his own joystick to follow, he knew they couldn’t ever get them all, knew that even if they did, they couldn’t stop the lasers that must even now be burning through the hull to crisp them all.
He hoped a torpedo would make it first.
Then one did; its warhead blew up in their power plant, converting their fusion-generator into an H-bomb and, in the instant of life left to him in the midst of the nuclear flame, the consciousness that had been Corin knew it had all been worth it.