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That was iline attached to hullalloy rings on a bulkhead wall The utility belt on a Navy engineer&039;s pressure suit wasa pair of thrashing African elephants fro Inders aving her aret Frick&039;s attention He looked over at her, disbelief pounding in his head She pointed at a short crack in the cargo bay bulkhead The crack ran straight through the line of clip rings

Then he saw it: One of the hullalloy rings had been ripped out

The tether rigs were sound, but the bulkhead was cracking

Frick cliline up and touched his suit&039;s audio probe to the bulkhead He heard the familiar hum of the Lynx&039;s air nanos, and the h what must have been another hull breach on the other side And soating in hullalloy The forward bulkhead--the last hullalloy barrier between the Lynx andFrick sed at thesound One of the flockerselse would cause the rate this way

Inteaht his hand up in a fist, thun for lethal eency When he had 107 every eye on hiht the hand down to point at the hatchway They had to get it open

Even through pressure nized surprise in a few faces The other side of the bulkhead was still pressurized Opening the hatchway noould piss away still rity of the walls between here and the next bulkhead, all the way back at the forward gunnery station

But with the bulkhead cracking, the oxygen was gone anyway And it would go far less explosively if they let it flow through the hatchway than if the whole bulkhead blew At this moment, the hullalloy had hard vacuum on one side and almost a full atmosphere on the other They had to equalize the pressure The Lynx&039;s designers would have assuradually, at least twenty seconds to ee space of air No one would foresee the entire front of the ship being sheared away at once And of course the metal virus added to the stresses on the metal

Metas on her tether like an acrobat, planting herher feet to either side She gave the manual wheel a twist It seemed to protest for a moment, then started to turn A few more hands reached the wheel in time to speed her efforts

When the hatch blew, the outrush of air knocked Metas in a leisurely arc, letting her strongline run out to its full length She executed a perfect landing on the far side of the cargo bay bulkhead, as pretty as zero-gee ballet

Frick pressed his audio probe back against the bulkhead It shrieked with the faineer&039;s sharp ears still detected the soprano ringing of a travelling hullalloy fissure

The Lynx was still breaking He shut his eyes and listened carefully, praying Then it caradually recede, lessening as the stresses of unequal pressure drained away through the open hatchway

Frick opened his eyes, sighing with relief

Now he could actually see the da his own tether ring by a few centier into the fissure It was less than four centi within it

The ship&039;s hullalloy had an iht off the Rix virus, but it ht take a while for the infection to be completely eliminated What the ship needed was a respite froee and sudden jolts, but for the moment, the Lynx had stabilized

At least until the captain decided to break her again

Engineer-Rating

Engineer-Rating Telht would return

Bigz kneas lucky to be alive at all By rights, his head should be sis system by now Pure chance had saved him As he&039;d been torn from the bulkhead wall, his face mask must have been whipped around so that it had sealed itself Either that, or Bigz had done so with some autonomic part of his brain whose actions were not recorded in memory

But in the seconds of hard vacuued bad He could see a sort of blurry streak before hiz figured that his eardrums had blown too But that didn&039;t bother him much Out here in the airless void, sound was not a native species And with co to anyone on his suit radio

But Bigz wished that he could see

At least then he could figure out why he&039;d been plucked froz was positive that he&039;d been clipped right Any shock strong enough to break his monofilament line should have snapped him in two like a breadstick

He concentrated on the blurry streak It pulsed every few seconds, a building-top blinker seen through a rain-soaked

Bigz judged the period to be about four seconds A pressure suit eency beacon pulsed once per second, so it wasn&039;t a crew ht was the Legis sun, andTel once every four seconds

He waited soradually cos, all with the same four-second period They slowly resolved into streaks of light

Stars He could alainst the black void

Bigz felt strangely euphoric The screa was absent, the pants-pissing fear he expected to feel had also not es on his utility belt

He grunted with recognition as his fingers found the expended shockpack Whatever lizard part of his brain had ed to seal his face mask had also pumped him fill of painkiller and sti out of control, half-blind and coz felt as sharp and confident as a ineer-rating smiled happily as his vision cleared

The sun was obvious now, the brightest light az could see two of the systeiants

What he couldn&039;t see was the Lynx The darkened frigate must be pretty far away, and inertia would only carry him farther Fortunately, in another few e of the Rix big guns--Bigz could pull his ez decided that he&039;d had enough of spinning He pulled the reaction canister frole, then let off a quick spurt The spinning slowed, the stars noirling at the stately speed of a rink full of skaters He could live with that Engineer-Rating Bigz no a tether strongline flailing about hi with hi itself around Bigz He let it wind around his waist until he could grab the end

The clip was still in the ring The ringmount must have been pulled clean out of the hullalloy That was bad That e: a travelling fissure in a bulkhead, a bulkhead that was now exterior hull

But at least, Bigz thought happily, he hadn&039;t clipped hi out here in space wasn&039;t his fault

Then he saw so else Another object in the void

It was very distant, at the edge of his still blurry vision The shape was dark, its edges gli, thin Lynx But perhaps he was seeing the ship head-on That ate&039;s bow

Might as well get closer to hoed (as it surely was) it would be far easier to rescue a loose crewled his reaction canister again, and let loose a long spray He watched the object carefully for a count of twenty Yes, he was getting closer now He could see se and distant planetoid fooling his eyes It was artificial

It

He was going home

Executive Officer

ExO Hobbes rappelled down the last corridor before the cargo bay bulkhead, the wind of depressurization serving as gravity She clipped her belt to a nearby ring before ordering her strongline grapple to release and follow

The outrush of air was slackening, but she didn&039;t trust the respite It 111 had lessened once before, then increased again suddenly, as if various breaches were blowing in turn The last truly stable bulkhead she&039;d seen was the one at the forward gunnery station She checked her pressure gauge It showed near-vacuun, but at least with hardly any air left in this segment of the Lynx, there couldn&039;t be another decoo bay hatch before her, one jurapple and juline as she neared the hatchway She sed nervously, hoping she&039;d find Frick and his teah she had prepared herself for the worst--strewn bodies aes of the loose arh, she couldn&039;t believe her eyes

It was blacknesswith stars

There was no cargo bay

Katherie pulled herself through, aghast at the huge rent before her, a cracked dorabbed her shoulder

"Executive Officer?" cah the suit&039;s audio contacts

Hobbes turned to see an engineer-rating The woman seemed healthy and unpanicked, the athletic lines of her body obvious in the pressure suit

The rating nal, and Hobbes turned to follow her eyes

The whole engineering teaainst the bulkhead She breathed a sigh of relief

A suited figure ineer

They connected their audio contacts

"What the devil does Zai think he&039;s doing?" the engineer spat

"We had to accelerate, Frick," she explained "The Rix spotted our coldjet reaction mass; they were about to backtrack it to us"

"But ith a jolt like that? / lost a crewineer&039;s eyes sparkled with tears as he shouted, his hands grasping her shoulders For a ht have to fend off another physical attack, but the man forced himself under control

"You used the deadman drone launcher, didn&039;t you?" he said

She nodded

"We needed aas possible, and to use a solid object as reaction mass If we spread another cloud of water, the Rix could have found us again They used lasers to spot the ice crystals, and extrapolated back to the Lynx"

Frick thought for awith a o-bay exterior to go," Hobbes said

Frick shook his head "It shouldn&039;t have But there were hairline fissures, virus trails We were probably infected in the flocker attack This bulkhead here," he indicated what had been the cargo bay floor, "is cavitating as well"

Hobbes nodded They&039;d had less than twenty e One of the projectilesnanos

"So that&039;s why you opened this hatch," she said

Frick nodded "It was either a slow leak or another breakout If we&039;d had an uncontrolled decounnery station bulkhead as well, and so on all along the ship"

Katherie Hobbes sed, envisioning one bulkhead blowing after another, like the legendary 77fcan/c filling ater

Her eyes scanned the bulkhead, and saw the cracks that had coursed across its surface, fanning out in a wedge, a river delta seen from space