“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
Sam snapped his visor closed, then reached over to me and slammed mine shut. With a gloved hand, he motioned for me to follow him to the airlock.
“We’re going outside?” I squeaked. I was really scared. A guy could get killed!
“You want to stay here while they take potshots at us?” Sam’s voice crackled in my helmet earphones.
“But why are they shooting at us?” I asked. Actually, I was talking, babbling really, because if I didn’t, I probably would’ve started screeching like a demented baboon.
“Fuchs thinks we led him into a trap,” Sam said, pushing me into the airlock, “and the bastard who’s trying to bushwhack him doesn’t want any living witnesses.”
He squeezed into the airlock with me, cycled it, and pushed me through the outer hatch when it opened.
All of a sudden, I was hanging in emptiness. My stomach heaved; my eyes blurred. I mean, there was nothing out there except a zillion stars, but they were so far away, and I was falling, I could feel it, falling all the way to infinity. I think I screamed. Or at least gasped like a drowning man.
“It’s okay, Gar,” Sam said, “I’ve got you.”
He grasped me by the wrist and, using the jetpack on his suit’s back, towed me away from the riddled hulk of Achernar. We glided into the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid. I could feel them pinging off my suit’s hard shell; one of them banged into my visor, but it was a fairly gentle collision, no damage—except to the back of my head: I flinched so sharply that I whacked my head against the helmet hard enough to give me a concussion, almost, despite the helmet’s padded interior.
Sam hunkered us down into the loose pile of rubble that was the main body of the asteroid. “Safer here than in the ship,” he told me.
I burrowed into that beanbag as deeply as I could, scooping out pebbles with both hands, digging like a terrified gopher on speed. I would’ve dug all the way back to Earth if I could have.
Fuchs and the ambusher were still duking it out, with a spare laser blast now and then hitting Achernar as it swung slowly around the ’roid. The ship looked like a shambles, big gouges torn through its hull, chunks torn off and spinning lazily alongside its main structure.
They hadn’t destroyed the radio, though. In my helmet earphones, I could hear Judge Myers’s voice, harsh with static:
“Sam, if this is another scheme of yours . . .”
Sam tried to explain to her what was happening, but I don’t think he got through. She kept asking what was going on and then, after a while, her voice cut off altogether.
Sam said to me, “Either she’s sore at me and she’s leaving the belt, or she’s worried about me and she’s coming here to see what’s happening.”
I hoped for the latter, of course. Our suits had air regenerators, I knew, but they weren’t reliable for more than twenty-four hours, at best. From the looks of poor old Achernar, we were going to need rescuing, and damned soon too.
We still couldn’t really see Fuchs’s ship, it was either too far away in that dark emptiness, or he was jinking around too much for us to get a visual fix on him. I saw flashes of light that might have been puffs from maneuvering thrusters, or they might have been hits from the other guy’s laser. The ambusher’s craft was close enough for us to make out, most of the time. He was viffing and slewing this way and that, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter trying to avoid his opponent’s punches.
But then the stiletto flared into sudden brilliance, a flash so bright it hurt my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the afterimage burning against my closed lids.
“Got a propellant tank,” Sam said, matter-of-factly. “Fuchs’ll close in for the kill now.”
I opened my eyes again. The stiletto was deeply gashed along its rear half, tumbling and spinning out of control. Gradually, it pulled itself onto an even keel, then turned slowly and began to head away from the asteroid. I could see hot plasma streaming from one thruster nozzle, the other was dark and cold.
“He’s letting him get away,” Sam said, sounding surprised. “Fuchs is letting him limp back to Ceres or wherever he came from.”
“Maybe Fuchs is too badly damaged himself to chase him down,” I said.
“Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound at all sure of that.
We waited for another hour, huddled inside our suits in the beanbag of an asteroid. Finally, Sam said, “Let’s get back to the ship and see what’s left of her.”
There wasn’t much. The hull had been punctured in half a dozen places. Propulsion was gone. Life support shot. Communications marginal.
We clumped to the cockpit. It was in tatters; the main window was shot out, a long, ugly scar from a laser burn cut right across the control panel. The pilot’s chair was ripped too. It was tough to sit in the bulky spacesuits, and we were in zero gravity, to boot. Sam just hovered a few centimeters above his chair. I realized that my stomach had calmed down. I had adjusted to zero G. After what we had just been through, zero G seemed downright comfortable.
“We’ll have to live in the suits,” Sam told me.
“How long can we last?”
“There are four extra air regenerators in stores,” Sam said. “If they’re not damaged, we can hold out for another forty-eight, maybe sixty hours.”
“Time enough for somebody to come and get us,” I said hopefully.
I could see his freckled face bobbing up and down inside his helmet. “Yep . . . provided anybody’s heard our distress call.”
The emergency radio beacon seemed to be functioning. I kept telling myself we’d be all right. Sam seemed to feel that way; he
