Beat. “Fox one.” The wingman’s voice.

Slow motion or not, the missile’s exhaust flashed like a red laser toward the Firewitch and exploded the mammoth Slug fighter in a vast purple cloud. The wingman pivoted his Scorpion back over front, searching for threats and targets.

Eddie Duffy’s voice overrode the audio. “Enhance the furball, please, Mr. Dowd.”

I swallowed. So much for my theory about a random collision of dinghies in the Pacific. The Slugs had jumped the fleet as it prepared to launch the two stealthy modified Scorpions that would win the war.

The Bridge’s enhanced display substituted enlarged images of distant ships for the pinpricks that maneuvering ships would show as when dispersed across hundreds of thousands of cubic miles. The display wasn’t pretty. The Abe, faithfully rendered in two pieces, drifted in the center of a massive dogfight, aka “the furball.” Around us were arrayed a half-dozen cruisers, where there should have been twelve. Whether the others had fallen to Vipers or in ship-to-ship combat I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. The fact was that the fleet had already taken a beating.

One of the six remaining cruisers drifted, like the Abe.

Against the backdrop of starlit space, Scorpions and Firewitches by the hundreds darted and spun in a silent cloud around the great pearlescent cruisers, the fighters’ marker traces boiling like red, green, and purple thread.

Audio crackled with chatter, from controllers and among Scorpion pilots.

So many fighters burst, then winked out, that the furball was like watching fireworks on holo with the audio off.

“Jason?” Eddie spoke to me over his audio while the battle raged.

“I’m fine. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Is the Silver Bullet Scorpion flyable?”

“Huh?”

“We can see the modified Scorpion, Jason. It’s standing on the launch rail, in what’s left of Bay One.”

“I saw it myself, from in here. I couldn’t see any damage. But I don’t know what to look for.” My heart thumped. “Eddie, is there a live pilot back here?”

Eddie said, “The George Washington’s sustained damage, like we have. She’s unmaneuverable but alive. But Silver Bullet II’s destroyed. We need to get Silver Bullet I off the Abe and onto another cruiser.”

“Once you stabilize the battle.”

“Now. Both halves of the Abe are getting sucked into the jump.”

I swallowed again. A cruiser, or, theoretically, a modified Scorpion, dove into a jump, dodged other debris, slingshot past the ultradwarf star mass core, then powered safely out the other side in new, folded space, light-years away.

An unpowered cruiser, or a piece of a cruiser, that got sucked in didn’t power out. It would simply crush in upon itself, until it became part of an ultradwarf star mass smaller than a golf ball.

“Can’t somebody come take us all off?”

“They’re busy. Whether we all get off the Abe’s unimportant. But that Scorpion back there with you’s got to find a home on another cruiser. So a pilot can fly it through the jump and deliver the bomb.”

“You said there was a pilot alive back here, somewhere.”

“I said-never mind. Who’ve you seen alive back there?”

I shrugged, to no apparent purpose. “ Me. Jeeb. I can’t get to the impeller rooms.”

Eddie paused, and I heard his breath through the speaker. “You ever fly a Scorpion, Jason?”

“Hell, no!” I paused. “Actually, kind of.”

“It’s a very forgiving ship. All you gotta do is ease it off the rail and slide it over to a cruiser. Then somebody can talk you through maneuver and docking.”

“Can’t they talk me through it first?”

“Jason, we have four cruisers left healthy enough to receive that Scorpion. Pretty soon, we may have none.”

Boom.

The back half of the Abe shuddered so hard that Jeeb wobbled, perched above the flatscreen.

Waiting here for the fleet to ride to the rescue was no option.

“Crap!”

“Now what?”

“Eddie, I have to cross a hundred feet of vacuum to get from the bay hatch into the Scorpion.”

Eddie’s breath hissed out again.

Thumps and shudders shook the deck every few seconds now. The Slugs could be potshotting the Abe’s carcass, or the hull could just be breaking up.

Above the flatscreen, Jeeb swiveled his head at every thump and whined, like he wished he could hide himself in a suit of armor.

I leaned my head on my palm, with my elbow on the shelf in front of the screen. “Okay. I have an idea.”

THE INFANTRY ARMORY aboard the Abe hadn’t been stripped just because she was carrying no infantry this trip. A half-dozen Eternad infantry armor suits hung from racks behind a repair and refit bench. With the ship’s rotation now virtually stopped, the weightless suits’ legs bounced every time a new impact shuddered the ship’s dying carcass, like a robot chorus line. Eternads are made airtight and oxygen-generating principally to protect a GI from chemical and biological agents, but as a field-expedient space suit, they had worked for me in the past.

The second suit I tried on fit well enough that it should have been able to hold pressure once buttoned up. In Eternads, I could cross the open-to-space bay deck, clamber into the Scorpion’s cockpit, close it, and pressure the ship up.

The trouble was that the hatch that separated the destroyed bay’s vacuum from the shirtsleeve comfort in which I then resided wasn’t an airlock. Once I depressurized the flight deck, so I could open the hatch that led into Bay One, I would have no refuge to return to. If the Scorpion had been damaged, it would become nothing more than the most streamlined retired veteran’s coffin in history.

Ten minutes later, I stood at the Bay One hatch, listening as all of the flight deck’s air hissed through a bleed valve into vacuum while my heart pounded so hard that I heard it above the hiss. So far, I had ascertained that the suit had been down checked because its radios didn’t work. That did not, of course, mean that it hadn’t also been down checked for lack of pressure integrity, in which case I would blessedly pass into unconsciousness before I decompressed to death.

An hour ago, the human fleet had stood poised to launch the two Scorpions through the jump into which this derelict was now falling. The scorpions would drop a couple of bombs, and mankind would declare victory, without a single additional human casualty. We might still salvage victory, if I could limp this Scorpion to a pilot aboard another ship. But at best victory would come at a previously unimagined price.

The Slugs approached war with the blunt simplicity of a caveman with a club. Somehow all of our collective cleverness was never enough to anticipate what the Slugs, in their alienness, would do. I suppose we shocked the hell out of the Slugs just as often. But mankind had, until now, muddled through by the skin of its teeth and the individual initiative and sacrifice of our disparate, imperfect parts.

The pressure around me equalized with the pressure of the rest of this universe, which was none. The hatch status light flashed amber, its chime soundless in the vacuum I had created.

I undogged the hatch, and Jeeb stepped through with me.

If the Abe had been rotating, Jeeb and I would have been spun off into space, where gravity would still, eventually, tumble us to be compressed into the insertion point’s core. Instead, I was able to creep across the deck, grasping the tie-down loops spaced across the plating, while Jeeb clung to my back with all six locomotors, like a treed cat. If there is a benefit to weightlessness, it is that even though it’s the ultimate form of falling, you don’t feel like you’re falling, but rather like you’re floating in a pool.