destroyed by controlled contact with normative matter.
At the moment, Hatch's MegaCommand Cruiser was still drawing on its emergency power supplies to maintain its artificial gravity. So for the moment, all the armor-suited warriors were firmly orientated to the floor. They were anchoring themselves in preparation for the opening of the airlocks.
'All men anchored,' said San Kaladan, when he was sure the job was done.
'Very well,' said Hatch. 'Open the airlocks.'
Hatch wanted all his men out of the ship before it collided with Lupus's helpless craft, so he had no time to cycle his people through the airlocks in the conventional manner, one or two at a time. That would have been intolerably slow. So he was going to open his ship to the night.
'Opening the airlocks… now,' said San Kaladan.
All through the MegaCommand Cruiser, airlocks opened. The ship's atmosphere boiled out into the vacuum, carrying with it a brief blizzard of papers and unanchored detritus. Hatch felt the air-tug tide of the venting atmosphere pull at his suit, then subside.
'Interior pressure is zero,' said San Kaladan.
'Pressure at zero,' acknowledged Hatch.
Then, with San Kaladan at his side, Hatch left the bridge, and ventured through the airless corridors of the ship. He moved clumsily in his armor. The cumbersome armor, black upon black, was swollen at the joints where extra engineering protected the machinery. In the corridors, Hatch met with other battle-warriors similarly suited, their features invisible behind the bulbous faceplates of helmets. Those faceplates were tinted against radiation and blast – tinted so heavily that they were almost black. This was an army of shadows, an army of night. An army of armored creatures insectile with antennae.
'Free yourselves,' said San Kaladan, seeing that some men were being slow to free themselves from the various devices which they had used to anchor themselves as the ship vented its air.
Hatch clumped ponderously down the corridor to the nearest airlock. All its doors were jammed open. Open to the night. He entered the airlock and stood in the last doorway. Stood on the edge of the immensities of eternity. He could exit simply by stepping from the ship. By stepping out into the deepness and darkness of space.
'Ship's gravity dies in three,' said San Kaladan. 'Three.
And. Two. And. One. And. None.'
The ship's artificial gravity died away to nothing. Hatch floated. He took hold of the rim of the airlock's outermost doorway and hauled himself forward. He began to float outward, out toward the coldness of deep space.
As Hatch quit the ship, he felt a wave of coldness sweep over him. He knew the sensation was entirely psychological, for his suit insulated him perfectly against the numb death of the vacuum.
Nevertheless: he felt what he felt, and he could not deny it.
He was still moving, still floating away from his ship, slowly but surely. If he did nothing to stop himself, he would float forever. For the time being he chose to do nothing. When the two MegaCommand Cruisers collided, he did not want to be too close.
So Hatch floated in space, his ship sliding through vacuum at a constant velocity, on a collision course with the helpless hulk up ahead. From here he could appreciate the huge bulk of the MegaCommand Cruisers, vast leviathans of the intergalactic depths, colossal in their menace. Both ships were outlined in the darkness by patterns of winking lights: electrical emergency beacons which had come on automatically when their asmas failed. Hatch was reminded of fish he had read about, fish which lived in the lightless abysses of the ocean depths, and which were patterned with self-generated luminescence.
The best energies of the Nexus had gone into the design and construction of those ships, for the wealth and reach of the Nexus had automatically increased the number and the strength of its enemies, as if by the operation of an inexorable law of physics.
Though the Nexus had paid lip-service to the highest of ideals, it had ultimately, in truth, been a society of high-energy warlords.
Hence in the Nexus – a society of incredible wealth – poets, architects, musicians and healers had had to struggle for survival, while those who devoted themselves to games of death and war were richly rewarded.
Thus the greatest creation of the Nexus was the MegaCommand Cruiser, a battle machine capable of fulfilling the worst scenarios of Ultimate War.
Members of the Free Corps were typically oblivious to the probable consequences of the military dynamics which had governed the Nexus for so long, but Hatch was ready to believe that there was a good chance that, were the Chasm Gates ever to be reopened by miracle or by a vaunting renaissance of high technology, then the Nexus might well be found in ruins.
While Lupus Lon Oliver thought that a great Age of Light surely now dominated the Nexus, Hatch darkly suspected it to be peopled by hairy savages runting around in the wasteland ruins of cities ten thousand years dead. If Hatch's grim premonitions were right, then the Nexus truly lived only here, here in this illusion tank universe where two dead ships cruised through frictionless space toward the moment of collision.
There was no sound but for Hatch's breathing, the beating of the blood in his ears, and the white noise deliberately generated by the suit itself – absolute silence being bad for the soul. So floated Hatch, and with him in the darkness floated his forces, the wink-lights of their suits creating transient constellations in the abyss. From the enemy's direction there was no answering light.
Where was Lupus Lon Oliver?
Not in his ship, surely.
Surely he couldn't be so stupid, so blind to what had happened.
Or could he?
Hatch imagined Lupus on the deck of his MegaCommand, staring at dead screens.
That MegaCommand Cruiser was coming ever-steadily closer as Hatch and his battle-suited warriors drifted through the vacuum.
Hatch's men began firing rocket flares at regular intervals. By the green-white ignition of the flares, Hatch saw vast swathes of the bare hull of the enemy ship. But none of the enemy. What was Lupus playing at?
– He's still in his ship.
– He must be.
– He doesn't realize!
If Lupus did not realize that the two ships were on a collision course, then he would have no good reason to abandon ship.
Hatch flicked the chin switch that would allow him to speak with his troops by means of the modulation of electromagnetic waves of a particular frequency. There was a special name for this electromagnetic communicator, but Hatch found he had momentarily forgotten it, because he used such primitive devices so seldom.
It was -
Vidrolation, of course, that was it.
'Crew,' said Hatch, speaking over his vidrolator. 'Crew, this is Captain. Just before collision you must brake. Remember your physics.' Some would resent this lecture, but he had to give it.
Nexus Startroopers typically made stupid mistakes when forced to fight in spacesuits in hard vacuum and zero gravity, for they spent most of their careers living and working at standard gravity in natural atmospheres. 'Remember your physics. When the ships collide, our ship will slow down. Nothing will diminish our own forward velocity, so we must use rockets to slow ourselves down. So remember: just before collision you must brake.'
Hatch's MegaCommand Cruiser – empty, airless, abandoned, dead – was like a big piece of paper being carried along by the wind.
His men were like a thousand scraps of confetti being carried along by the same wind. And Lon Oliver's ship was like a fist poised in space.
When the fist slammed into the big sheet of paper – when Lon Oliver's ship collided with Hatch's wreck – then the bits of confetti would be swept onward by the wind.
That was how Hatch visualized it. Intellectually he knew that he, his men and his ruined ship were sliding through the frictionless vacuum of space with nothing to drive them forwards and nothing needed, but he preferred to think of them as being driven by a wind. The image comforted him. He had never liked deep space, and he did not like it now.
