Eric Flint - Threshold

His legs and abdomen were trapped under wreckage that had fallen on top of him rather than being sucked out into vacuum. He was hanging, in effect, off the edge of a cliff that dropped off into infinite space. Do not move yet. It seems stable for the moment. I do not seem to be badly hurt. What happened? It came back in a rush: theNebula Storm 's victory and face-saving offer, Fitzgerald's treachery… Yes, and then he'd realized that real fighting might break out, since Fitzgerald controlled the armory. So he ordered the bridge crew to prepare, and… Disaster. He'd gotten into his suit, but the others had not yet finished when the doors opened. The lockdown had been subverted. They hadn't managed to kill him, but he'd forced them to split up. He hoped that they hadn't killed the few people remaining on the bridge. So he'd diverted them away in one direction, managed to take down one who'd relied more on guns than bare-hand skill, and… and come to his cabin. And then there had been a shockwave and impact… Something had gone dreadfully wrong. Looking down the length ofOdin, he could see the mangled ruin of the fourth support rib. To the right and left of him, the habitat ring curved down and away, riddled with holes, missing pieces as far as he could see. Some of the drifting debris he could make out was not mechanical or structural in nature, either. He wished he could believe that this meant most of the mutineers had perished, but he knew better. They'd been wearing their armor, almost certainly ready to put on helmets. Some might have already been wearing the helmets. Maybe one or two were dead, but a far larger number of the main crew were now gone. He realized there had been no chatter of communications. The shutdown Fitzgerald had imposed was either still working, or the damage had been extensive indeed. In either case, it occurred to him that it might be even more useful to be thought dead. He could access the communications and update software… Yes, he could do it.

Reception should remain, and deliberate communication, but anyone doing a regular search would not get operating-status data from his suit. He studied his position. The wreckage that pinned him must weigh at least three hundred kilos-in this case, a good thing, because otherwise he'd probably have slowly slid out of its grip and plummeted off into the deep. The problem was going to be getting out from under it without possibly causing worse problems. He had no way of knowing how strong, or fragile, the wall on the other side of the support was.

If he moved wrong, put stress on the wrong place, it might fracture, leaving only the main support he was sprawled over intact. This might get him out from under-but it could also drag him overboard with the rest of the debris, and there was no swimming back to this ship. He wasn't wearing a suit with reaction jets. An idea struck him. He reached down to the area of his belt. Yes, the safety line was still there. That should work. Carefully, he managed to force the safety-hook end out of its place underneath him. Once that was out, the slender composite-metal combination line slid out with minimal effort. With great care he managed to loop the line entirely around the support, which was almost-but not quite-small enough to get his arms around. He had to try whipping the hook end from one hand to the other several times before he managed to catch it, but after that it was easy to pull it the rest of the way around and hook the line to itself. He tested the loop to make sure the hook was locked shut, then started wiggling, tugging, and pulling. The suit moved a fraction of a millimeter. Then a centimeter. He pushed and grunted and swore and gave a mighty heave. Abruptly the pressure holding him shifted, tilted, pulling him back and down as the other wall cracked. But the looped line prevented him from falling, while the carbonan suit shrugged off the glancing blows and scrapes as the remaining debris fell away fromOdin. Hohenheim dangled from the main support for a moment, then grabbed the support and clambered onto it. Standing up, he slid the loop of safety line with him, looking for a higher point to fasten it to. There was no floor left to this room now except the pieces remaining on the support beam, but the main door was visible.

And so was his wall safe, still securely fastened to the wall. The wall safe was what he had come here for. He studied the situation. The safe was about two and a half meters from the door. Maybe a bit more.

He couldn't reach it standing in the doorway. He looked up. That was more promising. Some of the ceiling had been ripped away when the cabin depressurized, and there were pipes and cables visible. Taken together, they should support his weight. If he climbed up the main support… It was not nearly as easy as it looked. Without the little safety line, he was not sure he could have managed at all. But eventually he was suspended from the plumbing and air tubing and slowly lowering himself to the safe. A code and verification later, and the safe opened. Hohenheim reached in, found what he was looking for, and pulled it out. A few minutes later he stepped through the doorway into the silent vacuum of the corridor beyond and made his way, gingerly, to the nearby connecting tube that led to the main hull. He paused a moment, looked down at his waist, where the gun now rested, waiting, and gave a nod of satisfaction. Alone in the silence of space, General Hohenheim crawled toward the body of his wounded ship.

Chapter 38 "Anything new, A.J.?" Madeline asked after a long period of mostly silence. The blond sensor expert nodded. "Getting something finally, with Horst's help." Jackie's head snapped around.

"Horst's alive?" A.J. grinned, the first normal smile any of them had managed in a while. "Sure is. Alive and kicking, in fact. He and Anthony are headed toMunin, their other lander. It has separate comm systems, so hopefully we'll have communications going soon." "Taking them a while," grumbled Larry. "Do they know about their deadline, emphasis ondead?" "Yeah." A.J. looked serious now. "But they're having to try to get past Fitzgerald's people-andOdin 's very badly hurt." "How badly?" Maddie asked. Something was starting to nag at her. "Do we have any idea how many people they have left, and what the condition of the ship overall is?" "Starting to get the picture," A.J. answered. "And I don't like it. The NERVA engine's workable, but the thrust nozzle is toast, and so is some of the venting around it. The mass-beam's totally screwed right now. Even if we could work around the lost support beam, the software's going to have to be reinstalled all through the thing after what we did to it." His lips tightened in an almost-white line; Maddie could tell he was both furious and upset.

"The habitat ring's the worst, though. There was damage all through it, and people weren't ready for this. It's… bad. Really bad."

Madeline felt her eyes narrow as a tight, cold feeling crept up her spine. "A.J., Jackie, give me a model of an explosion on that support rib. I want to see how it did that much damage." "Okay." A.J. worked for a few minutes, asking Jackie to help him on some points. "Here we go… Hmm, no, that didn't do it. Some damage, but nothing like what I see. Okay, boost the power… Nope. Hmm. Well, we've got… but no…" Maddie raised her head, looking at the image ofOdin. "A.J., try putting fragmentation in the shell itself-say five hundred kilos of armor-piercing, maybe ten to twenty grams each."

"Okay." A few moments went by, and he sighed heavily. "Yeah. Yeah, Maddie, that does it, all right." His voice sounded leaden. Now she knew."A.J., give me a plot-where are those shells fromOdin 's salvo going to be when they miss?" "Son of a bitch…" The screen lit up, showing the courses of the three shells andNebula Storm. Madeline leaned forward tensely in her seat, already knowing what she was going to see. At closest approach, the three shells bracketed theNebula Storm, the alien ship at the nearly precise center of a triangle. The third shell seemed to be lagging slightly, but not much. "Damn him. If we hadn't had so much going on, I probably would have thought of this sooner. Jackie, Larry, get us out of here." "Don't have much fuel left, and they're gettin' kinda close," Larry said. "But… let's see, we need to get probably well over a hundred kilometers from them to make sure not too many of those little beasts hit us. Yeah, we've got enough to do that. Stand by-we're doing a burn. Toward the side of the third one there. That one's a little behind the others."Nebula Storm began to pirouette, bringing its drive to the proper alignment to take them out of the path of the oncoming weapons. "That won't take usinto anything else, will it?" A.J. asked. "Not likely, but lessee… No, it'll take us closer to Europa in the end, close enough to do quick sightseeing from far up, but not dangerous. Jackie, drive ready?" Jackie looked up from her controls. "Accumulators charged. How much of a burn?" "Get us a delta of one hundred sixty meters per second. That'll do it." "Wouldn't want to do much more than that. We're kinda tapped right now," Jackie said. "Firing in three… two… one…" The adapted NERVA drive thundered briefly, shoving theNebula Storm sideways. A.J. watched as the trajectories diverged. "Yeah, that'll do it. We'll be over two hundred kilometers from the nearest one when it goes off. I don't know if we'll avoid all the damage, but I don't think it can concentrate fire enough to really screw us at that range." "Probably not," Maddie said, slowly starting to relax. "Not with a simple explosive shell. You can do a shaped and directed charge for some reasonable directionality, but there's a big difference between hitting a two-hundred-meter target at one kilometer versus hitting it at two hundred kilometers.