Prescott dragged himself back to awareness, shaking his head inside his sealed vac helmet. The reverberations of the kamikaze's death throes echoed through his brain, making it impossible to think quickly or clearly, but his eyes sought out the plot and the data sidebars that detailed his command's wounds out of sheer spinal reflex. But then his attention was pulled back away from them as his private com screen awoke with the call he'd ordered be automatically patched into it if it came.

"Raaymmonnd!" Zhaarnak'telmasa's voice was as torn by static as his image was shredded by interference. "You must abandon ship immediately! The Bahgs have realized you can barely defend yourself now. They are closing in from all sides!"

Intellectually, Prescott knew his vilkshatha brother was right. But there was a difference between what intellect recognized and what the wellsprings which made a man what he truly was demanded.

"All right. But first I want Admiral Meyers and his staff to get off." Riva y Silva was doubling as Allen Meyers' flagship for Task Force 71. "After that-"

Amos Chung had always been bad about delaying the moment he helmeted up. That probably explained the blood streaming down from his lacerated scalp . . . and it certainly explained how he overheard the vilkshatha brothers' hurried conversation.

"Admiral Meyers is dead, Sir!" He shouted over the whooping of the emergency klaxons, the screams of the wounded, and the creaking groans that arose from the ship's savaged vitals. "Direct hit on secondary Flag Plot! And the same hit buckled the escape pod tubes from Flag Bridge! We'll have to use the elevators!"

"All right," Prescott said to Zhaarnak as he unlocked his crash frame and sat up, then turned to Chung. "Amos, tell Anna-"

"She's dead, too, Sir," the spook said harshly.

For a moment, Prescott sat amid pandemonium, head bowed, unable to move.

"Raaymmonnd!" The voice from the com unit was the yowl of a wounded panther.

"Incoming!" someone shouted from what was left of Plotting.

"Come on, Sir!" Chung pleaded. Jacques Bichet joined him. Together, they dragged the admiral physically to his feet and started him towards the hatch. After a few steps, he started moving under his own power. Soon, he and Bichet were helping Chung.

They'd just gotten into the elevator and started toward the boatbay when the next titanic sledgehammer smashed into the wounded ship.

Irma Sanchez blinked away the blinding dazzle of the fireball. Well, the Ninety-Fourth was the only multispecies squadron, she thought, seeking with bitter irony to hold her grief back out of arm's reach where it couldn't hurt her.

But there was no time to mourn Eilonwwa. She'd broken free momentarily of the battle pattern, where she could at least take stock. They'd stayed with the kamikazes as the latter passed through the collapsing cruiser screen, and on towards the battle-line. Now some of those gargantuan ships were close enough to be naked-eye objects.

She managed to study her HUD through muffling layers of fatigue. The nearest one-a Howard Anderson-class command monitor-was an atmosphere-haloed wreck, shedding life pods, shuttles, and pinnaces as it signaled its distress. Then she noticed the ship ID: it was Riva y Silva, flagship of her own Seventh Fleet. With the years of experience that made the fighter an extension of her own body, she wrenched the little craft into the kind of tight turn that only inertia-canceling drives made possible.

The Code Omega arrived just as her viewscreen automatically darkened.

Not even the shuttle's drive field saved it from the shock wave that rushed out from the bloated fireball astern where Riva y Silva had been, and small craft carried only the most rudimentary inertial compensators. It was hard to see-the secondary explosion inside the elevator shaft had damaged his helmet visor badly, and the HUD projected on the inside of the scorched, discolored armorplast showed strobing yellow caution icons for at least a quarter of his suit's systems. But Raymond Prescott could see as well as he needed to when the brutal buffeting was over and he knelt beside the motionless form of Amos Chung. The intelligence officer's shattered visor showed the ruin inside only too clearly.

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.