“Somebody’s inside, in the emergency passage. They won’t answer; we thought it might be you with damage, maybe… we were just thinking of shutting the external hatch and airing up so we could open the compartments.”

If she hadn’t been in a suit, in free fall, she’d have pounded her head with her hand. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Captains should never leave the ship in dangerous situations. She’d had that pounded into her time and again at the Academy. Never. Whatever the temptation, the captain stays aboard to deal with the peril… and she had flung herself out the hatch, grandstanding, as MacRobert would have said. Correctly. And one of the scumsucking bastards had made it aboard her ship.

“Lock the hatch open, Lee,” she said, even as she wondered why the boarder hadn’t closed it already to keep her out if she escaped his allies. “Don’t break compartmentalization. Scan for other powered suits between us and the Kaleen.”

Abruptly, startlingly, Fair Kaleen’s running lights came on, the beacons defining bow and stern blinking and the others holding steady patterns that outlined her shape. Either the automatic reset had worked, or someone aboard was able to get the systems up. Reset wasn’t a problem, but the other possibility…

Now that it was too late, she could think of other things that might have worked better…

“We lost vidscan in the emergency passage,” Lee said. “We’re still compartmented—”

“Good,” Ky said.

“But we don’t know where whoever that is has gone or what he or she is up to.”

She knew. She knew with the absolute certainty that had not yet failed her. He was going to blow up the ship, and her family with it, and all he needed was the time he already had. The time she had given him. A flicker of despair, the first touch of a black wave… but she had no time for that. “Patch me to Martin.”

“Right.” A pause, then Martin’s voice.

“Ky—Captain—what’s happening?”

“Martin, you’re in the same compartment with the mines, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Take one with green markings, like the one I used before. Open the side—you saw me do it; you know where. There’s a manual control, a dial. Turn it to the left, all the way. Point the forward end so it will intersect the emergency passage. Set it to a five-second delay and get as far away from it as possible.” An EMP pulse could be focused to some degree. Her implant threw up a schematic showing what ship systems would be in the way of that destructive beam. Too bad… better that than complete destruction.

“But that will—”

“Do it now!” Then she tongued shipwide, and never mind if her enemy heard it. “Disaster stations! All hands, disaster stations and hold position.”

A second passed. Another. Another. Another.

As suddenly as Fair Kaleen’s lights had come on, Gary Tobai’s vanished. Her ship—her responsibility—now lay blind, all systems knocked out by a pulse of magnetics strong enough to injure the crew in some cases.

The hypercritical part of her mind screamed at her, Really smart, Ky—now you’ve disabled your ship and you’re barreling toward it and can’t even see when to brace for impact, and that’s if Osman doesn’t blow it anyway—Then she hit, hard, the suit’s protective mechanisms cushioning the blow—but the jar was still enough to take her breath for an instant. Her gloved hands scrabbled for something to hold on to, as rebound took her away, tumbling, and the loop of elastic in her hand caught a protruding stud… one of the eighty-two external mounts for the new defensive suite.

There was a control, if she could just get a boot onto the hull… and the rotation from that one tenuous handhold brought her left heel down long enough to trigger it. She lost the handhold, but her foot was attached now, thanks to the emergency gripper attachment built into the boots. Now to get her other boot down… there. So fine, the nasty mental voice went on. Now you’re stuck to the side of your ship like an old-fashioned bowsprit ornament, and what good does that do? Ignoring the voice, Ky leaned over slowly and gripped the nearest external mount. The faintly adhesive pads on the glove fingers gave her a good grip. The far more adhesive pads on her boot soles grritched loose, one at a time, as she lifted one foot carefully, obtained a second handhold, put that foot back down, and then lifted the other.

The whole trick in moving on a hull without safety lines, the instructor had said, is not to do it in the first place. But just in case you’re blown out of your ship and onto an enemy ship, here’s what you can try. Move slowly. Always have three points of contact. Be aware of gravity fluctuations.

That at least she didn’t have to worry about, with her ship’s systems down. Artificial gravity bleed-through faults in the external containment were the least of her problems. Finding the air lock, for instance, was likely to be a harder task. Figuring out what to do when she found it… could wait until she found it.

Chapter Twenty-One

The flashing beacons of the other ship stung her eyes… and gave, as she moved, intermittent glimpses of her own ship. After months in space, Gary Tobai’s hull was no longer as immaculate as it had been, but it still gleamed dully when the light flashed on it.

Except where the dark hole of the air lock gaped, now under her feet, just over two meters away.

Her enemy was in there. Somewhere. Armed with a ship-destroying mine, she was sure, and personal weapons as well. He could blow the ship now, but he would want to be sure she was there to see it happen, and he also wanted her implant. He would wait—at least awhile—to see if she came for him.

Clearly he could handle himself in free fall and hard vacuum, but the change from a lighted passage at one standard g to a dark passage in free fall should have done something. He should be blind, disoriented, his suit com and any electronic suit functions dead. That left his ship-killer. Had he attached it yet? Had he armed it yet?

Her implant, protected from the pulse that disabled her ship, told her the minutes and seconds since she’d left the ship. Plenty of time, if he’d gone in immediately, to attach and arm a mine, to set the delay…

She felt around the hatch edge. As on all external hatches, geometric shapes defined the top and bottom, making it impossible to attach hatches, transfer tubes, or other equipment upside down. She was at what would be the deck side, if gravity were on. Carefully, she worked her way around, keeping the hatch itself between her and whoever was inside. He should have been on the deck when the ship had gravity. What happened when the systems went out would depend on what he was doing, but his mental orientation should still be that the deck was down and the overhead up… whereas in free fall it did not matter.

She eased cautiously into the air lock, as flat against the bulkhead as possible to occlude as little of the starfield… in case his vision had returned. Through her gloves, she felt some vibration, as something collided with the surfaces of the escape passage. She dialed down her own faceplate’s transparency and turned up the implant’s visual display to full bright. Working off the suit’s external monitors, it gave her a ghostly pale sense of a tube with something lumpy moving erratically in it. She couldn’t identify the mine she was sure the enemy had brought aboard, or how far away he was. She needed light.

Her suit light, up to full power, blazed, searing the passage with brilliant white light—she knew that, though her view was blocked by her mirrored visor, by her enemy’s response. She had the one bit of luck she’d prayed for: he’d been facing aft, and the light hit him full in the face, half blinding him before his faceplate could adjust. The arm thrown up across his faceplate, the rotation that gave him, all gave her an instant in which to scan the passage for the… and there it was. At the moment, flat on what would be the deck… but whether already adhered and armed, or just there accidentally, she didn’t have time to find out at the moment.