One Good Soldier

it. Then he began kicking and tugging at the ejection seat until he managed to free it from a piece of loose hull plating on the ship. He dragged the seat on top of the armor fragments—he was glad there was only half a g, or he might never have gotten the couch moved.

Jack looked up. The QMT facility filled most of his overhead view. There was no way he could miss it. He'd more likely kill himself with the HE than drift off into space. And by that time, if he did miss and was floating off into space, Penzington might be able to come and get him.

While Jack was looking up, four supercarrier class Seppy ships materialized out of hyperspace out in front of the ship he was on. Then several new battle cruisers and a couple of older haulers came out of hyperspace.

'Holy shit! The Madira is gonna be in it deep,' he muttered.

You got that right, Candis agreed with him.

Jack adjusted the seat angle to what he hoped was somewhere near the edge of the QMT pad and not into the jump region. He needed to get moving. The ship could start moving into jump position at any moment. He sat down in the chair and strapped himself in. He made sure his feet and arms would be inside the shadow of the chair so no shrapnel or plasma from the explosion could damage him or his suit.

'This is really gonna fuckin' suck!' Jack pushed his body into the couch as best he could and tucked his chin into his chest.

Okay, Candis, trigger this thing.

Are you sure, DeathRay?

Yes, that is an order Lieutenant Commander!

Yes, sir. Going in five, four, three, two, one . . . 

The high explosives went off from the wireless trigger signal Candis sent to the detonator chip. The stored chemical energy inside the solid material converted to kinetic energy in the form of heat and a plasma moving upward at over three thousand meters per second. The shockwave vaporized the first armor plate and slammed the second one upward into the ejection chair. The ejection chair blasted upward away from the hull of the Seppy supercarrier with about twice the force of a standard ejection seat. In other words, it went up pretty damned fast—fast enough that Jack was slammed into the chair with a force of about ten gravities for about a second. But DeathRay was used to high-g maneuvers that rattled his bones. It didn't hurt as much as he had expected, but that was probably because he had just taken a shitload of immunoboost and pain meds.

The chair crested the ten meters that he needed in order to clear the ship's gravity well, and it kept on going. It kept on going pretty damned fast. The acceleration was over within microseconds after the blast, and any deceleration was finished once they escaped the Seppy ship's artificial gravity well. DeathRay was in microgravity at this point and was floating freely along a constant velocity vector straight at the QMT facility. Jack could see the surface of the QMT moon starting to get slowly closer. The planet Ares filled his field of view off to his right. The Jovian planet Ares orbited was behind him now.

What is relative velocity, Candis?

Using objects on the surface for angular-size reference, I can approximate that we are moving at about fifty kilometers per hour with an error bar of about five kilometers per hour.

Okay, the seat was designed to take a fall at fifty-five kilometers per hour with no problem.

Yes, but that assumed it landed first. Jack, you do realize you are staring at the surface?

Holy shit! Is this fucking nightmare never gonna stop? Okay, we have to rotate the seat.

That would be advisable.

What can we use for a thruster?

You could always throw things.

How about my railpistol? There is a certain amount of recoil to it. Jack had blasted himself out of one predicament into another. But at fifty kilometers per hour or so and the surface five kilometers away, he had about six minutes to figure out what to do.

That might work.

He pulled his pistol out of the thigh holster and held it straight in front of him with both hands. The safety grip received the safety code from his AIC and unlocked the trigger and safety. Jack thumbed the safety and then pulled the trigger. He waited a few seconds to see if he could tell a difference in his angular orientation. He was moving at about a degree