Too much momentum developed all that time screwing around? Just pent-up frustration building since we lost Johnson? I get a fat ration of fighting stares simply because I'm a friend of the Old Man, In a less disciplined service this moment would be the first step toward mutiny.

The Commander returns, resumes his post beside Westhause. With studied casualness he produces the infamous pipe and loads it. Little dragon's tongues of blue smoke soon curl between his teeth, drift through his beard.

The old hands fall silent. They apply themselves to then-work. He's given a signal.

"All hands listen up. This's the Ship's Commander. We're about to engage. Weapons, discharge your power accumulators. Ship's Services, vent heat and stand by on converters. I want internal temperature down to ten degrees. Engineering, I remind you that you're on standby for Emergency Climb."

He puffs his pipe and surveys the Operations crew. They avoid his gaze.

He's going up. Why? The hunter-killers haven't shown. They shouldn't for a while yet. Rathgeber is a long fly.

"Initiate your program, Mr. Westhause."

The ship ceases its endless hop, skip, and jump. A flurry of orders and their echoes fly. Weapons discharges accumulators. Ship's Services lowers internal temperature till I wish I'd brought a sweater. We make a brief hyper fly.

"Right down our throat!" Berberian shrieks. "Missiles..."

"Radar! Compose yourself."

"Aye, sir. Commander, missiles bearing..."

The collision alarm shrieks. Those missiles are close! That alarm is never heard except during drills.

"Emergency Climb," the Old Man orders, immune to the near-panic around him. "Take her to twentyfive Bev. All hands, be prepared for sudden maneuvers."

I haven't the slightest idea what's happening. I don the safety harness I'm supposed to wear whenever I'm on station. It seems a wise course.

The Commander gets a firm grip on a frame and thwartships brace. His pipe is clenched in his teeth, belching a noxious fog.

The Climber trembles as a missile detonates near her Hawking point. Internal temperature rises a degree.

"That was close," Fisherman murmurs. "Very close." He's pale. His hands are shaking. Moisture covers his face.

"Stand by," the Commander says.

The ship lurches as if punted by some footballer god. Metal squeals against metal. Plug-ups skitter like maddened butterflies. A barrage of loose articles slams around the compartment. A

plastic telltale crystal pops off my board, smacks me over the eye, then whistles off to dance with the rest of the debris.

Internal temperature screams up forty degrees in a matter of seconds. The change is so sudden and severe that several men collapse. The converters groan under the load and begin bringing it down.

Coolly, Westhause keeps moving ship.

"Take us down!" the Commander bellows. "Take us the hell down."

Five men are unconscious in Ops. Another dozen have collapsed elsewhere. The ship is in danger.

The Commander shuffles men to the critical stations.

A thermometer near me shows mercury well into the red zone. The converters alone won't get it down in time to prevent shock to the supercold systems. Venting heat externally is our only option.

The Climber goes down with sickening swiftness.

"Vent heat!" the Commander thunders. "Goddamnit, Bradley! Anybody down there. Move!"

Red lights on every board are howling because the super-conducters are warming.

Fuck the superconductors. Cool me off.... I never thought of heat as physically painful. But this... My head throbs. My body feels greasy. I've sweat so much I have a calf cramp. It takes all my concentration to keep my eyes on my screen.

Stars appear. "Oh!" A comet of fire spills across them, splashing the track of the Main Battle with blinding death. Glowing fragments pinwheel around the main glory, obscuring and overshadowing the background lights. She's millions of kilometers away and still the brightest object in the heavens.

The fire begins to fade.

I check my cameras. Hurrah! I turned them on.

A thought wanders through the aches and pains. That has to be the aftermath of a fusion chamber eruption. How did the Commander manage it?

The compartment cools quickly. As it does I come out of my universe of agony. My horizons expand.

I discover the Commander snapping an endless series of questions into the inboard comm. The first I register is, "How long till you get it stabilized?"

I prod Fisherman. "What's happening?" The kid seems not to have noticed the heat.

"Sounds like we've got an oscillation in our CT magnetics," he croaks. His body took it well, but his soul is in bad shape. He's got the morning-after shudders. His face is the color of a snake's belly. He and I and the Commander seem to be the only Ops people able to do any useful work. I drag out of my seat and try to lend a hand at something more important than visual scan.

It occurs to me that Fisherman is scared not because of the Climb, nor because of the danger of a CT leak. He's locked into his own mad dread of another entombment aboard a crippled ship. This1 one the other firm would find first.

He's of little use on the tachyon board, so I point him toward Rose's station and tell him to get a gradient on the supercoolers for the superconductor system. That'll keep him too busy to think.

The temperature is dropping faster. The scrubbers and blowers are throbbing, pulling the moisture out and moving the air around. Most of my discomfort is gone.

Worry about Fisherman diverts my own impulse to panic. Having put him on the compute board, and having started Westhause's board on automatic recall, I make the rounds of the men. That's the most important job left. The Commander is handling everything else.

They say my behavior is common to Climber people. They worry about their shipmates before themselves. I've heard it called the unit/family response.

Yanevich is first to revive. I divert him with questions. He answers one, "We're the legion of the damned. All we've got is each other. And a universal contempt for Command types who sentence us to death by putting us in Climbers. I'm all right now. Let me go. Got work to do."

I still don't know what happened. They don't want to bother explaining...It hits me. The Commander spent all that time refining his calculations so he could run our Hawking point through the Leviathan's fusor. Sure. No wonder we got rattled around. Our full mass hit their magnetic bottle at .4 c.

Amazing. And we hit it first try.

And came near killing ourselves, too.

The Commander's was a superb move. As a surprise tactic. On any other grounds it was sheer idiocy.

Would he have tried it again had he missed first shot?

Probably not. Even the old hands don't have the nerve to go into that with their eyes open.

Later, over an emergency cup of coffee, I ask the Commander, "Would you have taken a second crack?"

He slides off the subject. "You took it pretty good. Didn't think you were that tough."

"Maybe I'm used to more heat."

He slugs his coffee back and leaves without saying another word.

New tension grips the ship. She can't Climb till Varese gets his magnetic containment systems stabilized. The hunter-killers are closing in.

Fisherman is the center of attention. His board remains pleasingly silent.

Dead in space. Seven hours. Varese hasn't reestablished the balance among several hundred minuscule current loads in the CT containment fields. The field control superconductor circuitry suffered localized overheating.

Time drags—except when I calculate how long it's been since the Leviathan yelled for help. Then it seems time is screaming past.

We're still at general quarters. The friends of our retired friends could turn up any minute.