Kivi twisted up her face, thinking it over. “All right. I’ll sit here and wait. They might find a way to squeeze us inside. Or maybe they’ll fix the generators before the batteries give out and the field dies. You guys can go fry yourselves together if you want.”

  “Eggs and bacon, baby!” Carlos said, tugging at my arm. “Let’s go do this.”

  Giving a warning to everyone that they should flip their faceplates down, I walked to the back end of the bubble and made a slit.

  Immediately, the air began to hiss out in a gush. After all, the ship was in an empty vacuum. There were some screams as the whole bladder began to flatten.

  I stepped out quickly and Carlos joined me. On the far side, I could see Kivi spraying sealant to close the wound we’d made. I could see her face through the faceplate, and she mouthed “luck” inside her helmet.

  After that, she sealed the cut entirely, and we stood out in the open.

  For some reason, I’d kind of expected to see stars out here. After all, we were standing on a spaceship’s hull hurtling through empty space.

  But there were no stars. There was only a diffuse white light. It was weird, like we’d stepped out of the world to somewhere else. I knew that I was looking at the interior of the warp field itself.

  The hull of the battlecruiser was clear enough to see, however. We paced along over it, looking for more hatches. In the distance, the other bladders were pitched like tents. They were kind of close together, if the truth were to be told. Each unit had its own tent, and there were around a hundred units in a legion.

  “It looks like some kind of campground,” Carlos said. His radio had automatically synched up with my helmet forming a local chat group. “Maybe we can find that hot adjunct from the fifth—what was her name? Oh yeah, Beverly. If we could cut our way into her bubble and rescue her—”

  “Shut up,” I told him absently. “Look for an external hatch.”

  We walked around between the bubbles for a good two minutes, but we saw nothing else.

  “I’ve got bad news to break to you, big guy,” Carlos said at last. “We’re totally wasting our time. Every hatch has a rubbery white bubble sitting on it.”

  “Yeah…” I admitted. “Let’s go forward, to the gun mounts.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “There’s got to be an external hatch on those big turrets. How else would the crew do maintenance?”

  Heaving a sigh, he followed me. We clumped along on the hull for a while. Each step rang in our ears as the magnetics took hold and kept us from floating away. There wasn’t any gravity or air out here—and nothing much else, either.

  After about a five minute walk, my tapper beeped. It was Kivi.

  “James, you’ve only got a few minutes left. A warning just went out for the crew—the field is weakening due to the dropping power levels. If you—”

  I couldn’t hear the rest. Partly, this was because I was now clumping along at a vastly increased pace over the metal deck. I wasn’t exactly sprinting, but I was moving as fast as my automated magnetics could grab and release. I soon left Carlos behind, as he had shorter legs.

  “Damn you McGill! Don’t ditch me, man!”

  I kept going, and soon he howled. “The field is losing integrity!”

  I glanced up, and I saw he was right. The field was no longer misty white. It now ran with glassy electric colors. To me, it looked like the Northern Lights in the Arctic Circle. Rainbow arcs flew and silently connected with the deck. At one point, I saw one of the rubbery bubbles blast apart. Dark shapes—probably troops left to die out here—were flung away in all directions.

  Hustling and breathing hard, I reached the nearest of Berlin’s great guns. Unlike the broadsides on a transport ship, these guns were fully independent. They were big and mean-looking. Each turret had four tubes, a box-pattern of cannons jutting up at the sky.

  There was a hatch on the side of the turret. It had a wheel on it. Gripping the wheel, my arms bulged.

  More lightening flashed behind me. A sheet of it crashed down, a colorful gush of light and power that would have made any primitive man’s guts let go in terror. A whole cluster of the rubbery bubbles were blown apart, leaving only scorch marks on the warship’s tough hide.

  “McGill!” I heard Carlos call on the radio. Then it buzzed and cut out. When it came back, he was in midsentence. “—leave me out here, you prick!”

  The wheel was spinning, I had the hatch open. It was dark inside. Crawling in, I looked back when my boots let go of the deck.

  Outside, the universe had gone mad. The surface of the ship was buzzing with random discharges. I could feel the shocks coming through my suit, stinging my hands and my ass—anything that was touching metal.

  Carlos was only a few paces away. I could see his face in the flashing, colored lights. He looked hopeful, desperate.

  Then another surge came down. This one was like a wave of lightning—a connection point that went on and on, dragging itself like a brief tornado over the hull, destroying anything it came into contact with.

  One thing it touched was Carlos. One moment he was there, reaching for the hatch I’d left cracked open, the next, there were only two blackened boots, still clinging by the magic of their magnetics to the hull.

  I slammed the hatch shut behind me and spun the wheel.

  -22-

  The inside of a battlecruiser’s turret is never roomy. The dark region I’d taken refuge in was more of a crawlspace than a chamber. Scrambling over thick cables, hanging pieces of insulation and the like, I wormed my way down to another hatch in the deck.

  There, I hesitated. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be inside the ship at all. I was supposed to be trapped out on the exterior enjoying the lightshow like all the unfortunates I’d left behind.

  After about five seconds of thinking it over, I shrugged and spun the wheel to open the hatch. Hunkering inside this crawlspace for the next week or two didn’t appeal.

  I half fell out and onto the deck below. My entrance was anything but grand, but I did cause a commotion. I’d fallen on a number of people who were huddled in the passage. They were sitting in lines, butt-to-butt, as far as the eye could see in either direction.

  Those I fell on grunted and snarled in pain, as I was a big load when I land on a person all at once.

  “Gee-zus!” called out a veteran with a stern eye. He gave me a sharp punch to the ribs. “What’s wrong with you, you giant moron—?”

  He broke off, no doubt having caught sight of the twin red crests on my shoulders.

  These insignia marked me as an officer.

  “Oh… ah… sorry Centurion, sir. Let me help you up. You startled me is all.”

  “He damn near broke my neck,” complained another trooper nearby.

  “Sorry about that,” I told them as I climbed to my feet and smiled good-naturedly. “My mamma made me wrong. I came out too big, she always says.”

  “You can say that again,” complained the one rubbing his neck.

  The veteran gave him a swift kick to shut him up, then turned a false smile in my direction. “Can I give you directions to your unit, sir?” he asked. “As you can see, we’re all full-up in this passageway.”

  He made a grand sweep with his arm, and I couldn’t argue. Every boot, butt cheek and shoulder was pressing up against the next guy.

  “I’ll find my own way, thank you kindly.”

  Turning in a random direction, I stumped off. I ignored the surprised eyes and darting limbs of everyone I approached. They squirmed and squeezed to get out of my way. No one wanted to have my size thirteen magnetics clump down on top of them. The troops made room, even though there wasn’t any.

  It took me a good half-hour of stomping around overcrowded decks to find the rest of my unit. Half of Legion Varus was huddling in misery inside Berlin, and I could see why they’d ordered the hatches shut after the battlecruiser had filled up.

  After fielding a few welcoming hoots and calls from my boys when they saw me, I was greeted by a tall thin woman in a crewman’s uniform. She seemed familiar, but it took me a moment to place her. At last, I did.

  “Centurion Leeza?” I demanded in surprise. “What are you doing here, girl?”

  She peered up at me. She’d been Armel’s staffer, sidekick and reportedly even his lover before he’d gone rogue. Despite those almost inexcusable lapses of judgment, I’d found her to be an otherwise intelligent person.

  “McGill…?” she asked with surprise almost equal to my own. “I’m an ensign now. I’ve gone Fleet.”

  She had a slightly euro accent and attitude to match, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to see her alive again.

  “Fleet, huh? That’s a surprise.”

  Leeza shrugged. “To me as well. I can’t seem to recall signing the transfer request.” She studied her tablet, which was linked to her tapper. She shook her head. “There’s something wrong, Centurion. You’re not supposed to be here at all. You’re marked as dead.”

  She eyed me with a mix of suspicion and curiosity. I got a lot of that look, especially from women.

  Ensign Leeza, however, was a special case. The last time I’d seen her was back on Clone World, where’d I’d executed her on the spot for treason. She didn’t remember anything about those events, fortunately. She’d been revived with a few months of her engrams missing, just like Winslade. I figured now wasn’t the time to try to explain anything complicated to her.

  “Huh…” I said. “The computer must have made a mistake. I’m feeling fine.”

  She shook her head in disbelief and poked at her tablet. “How did you get back out of the oven already? No revives have been scheduled until we reach the target planet. There isn’t a girlfriend down on Blue Deck I should be talking to, is there?”

  “No Ensign, nothing like that. I never even died. I just found another hatch and entered that way, see.”

  Eyeing me, she nodded after a few seconds. “Of course you did... as I recall, you’re a difficult man to kill.”

  “Trying to get rid of James McGill is almost hopeless. It’s like stomping at a rat in your bare feet.”

  “Okay then, I’ve edited the roster. You’re officially back with your unit and in command. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  She moved to brush by, but I gently caught her arm. She frowned down at my fingers like they were snakes.

  “Hey, just between us,” I said in her ear, “what happened to the ship? It’s like a lightning storm is out there sweeping the hull clean. I think the warp bubble is breaking up.”

  She eyed me in alarm. “You saw that? You should get your dosimeter checked. The radiation—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know all about that. But what happened?”

  She slid her arm out of my grip, but she didn’t walk off immediately. “There was a power malfunction,” she said in a low tone. “The techs managed to stabilize it, but we almost lost the bubble. They say a full, sudden collapse of the field could have destroyed the ship.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Who knows?” she said, shrugging. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to Winslade and turn in this report.”

  I grabbed her arm again. This time, she looked like she wanted to cut it off.

  “Sorry,” I said, letting go quickly. “Just tell me one more thing: Why is a Fleet ensign reporting to a hog like Winslade? And what’s he doing aboard Berlin in the first place?”

  “He’s an observer for Hegemony. I understand that he’s been posted aboard as part of a watchdog effort—the focus of which is your Legion Varus.

  “He must have some new, powerful friends,” I said. “I wonder who…” I trailed off as I realized who the friend had to be. “That Wurtenberger guy… He’s been playing the part of Winslade’s guardian angel lately, making arrangements for him all over. It’s like they’re related or something.”

  Leeza shrugged and walked off again, but she hadn’t taken a dozen steps before she turned to glance over her shoulder.

  I was thumping along right behind her.

  “McGill? Is this the prelude to an ill-advised attempt to seduce me?”

  “Huh…? Oh… no, no, Ensign! Not that you aren’t pretty and all, but I have other goals in mind today.”

  “Then just where are you going?” she demanded. “Why are you following me?”

  “I want to see Winslade. I’ve got some questions for him.”

  Shaking her head, she turned away again, and I followed her through the passages.

  Frequently, when the hunkering men saw me coming, they groaned in dismay. Leeza could slip through any crack like a ghost—but not me. I was more like a wandering elephant, and every now and then some sorry-ass recruit got a stray appendage stomped flat while he was dozing with his head against a wall.

  Some things just couldn’t be helped, I guess.

  -23-

  “McGill?” Winslade said in his least inviting tone. “Seriously?”

  Considering all the effort I’d gone through to meet with him in person, I would have figured he’d be more polite about it. But not old Winslade. There was no help for the man when it came to having better manners.

  “That’s right, Centurion,” I said, giving him a smile and offering him a big hand to shake.

  He ignored both of these and turned to Leeza instead. “Pass me those personnel reports, Ensign.”

  She did so, flicking them from her tapper to his.

  “Dismissed,” he said to her in his usual, kind of snotty tone.

  I frowned as I watched all this and saw her slip away into the sweaty crowds.

  “Winslade, you’ve never had the touch with women, have you?”

  He gave me a pursed-lip stare. I knew he wanted to order me out of his face already, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t outrank me. Not today. That part was kind of nice.

  “I’m not trying to molest every female that comes within reach,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “See there? That’s the source of your problem. You’re probably the sort who finds flaws in most of the women you meet. So, you either skip opportunities, or you…”

  He stared at me with hostile eyes.

  “Uh… just trying to help.”

  “Mind your own business, will you, McGill?”

  “Okay, okay. What I’m really here to talk about is what happened to the ship. Did you know the warp bubble almost collapsed? That would have been a sure-fire way to get us all permed if it had happened.”

  “What are you going on about?” he said, studying his computer paper.

  “Just that. If this ship was lost while in warp this far out… well, they might never find a trace. Not even a burnt streak of molecules unique enough to identify. We’d be just so much interstellar gas out here, and they couldn’t revive the legion without a verifiable report on our demise, now could they?”

  Winslade pursed his lips and seemed to consider my words. “Well, fortunately, that didn’t happen. Now, if you’d be so kind—”

  “After giving my thanks to the Almighty for that reprieve, it came to me that there are certain mysteries aboard this ship that might deserve a second glance.”

  He peered at me, shifting up his eyes away from his computer, but not his head. “Such as?”

  “Such as the rare odds of all our generators going down at once. It’s not supposed to happen that way, you know. There are fail-safes and all kinds of backups.”

  “Hmm,” he said, tapping his lips with a stylus. “I suppose that you’re right, there must be safeguards.”

  “So, sabotage comes to mind as the likely explanation.”

  He was looking up fully now, and we locked eyes on each other. I was still smiling, but he wasn’t, and no one who saw the two of us would have been fooled for more than an instant.

  “Why that?” he asked quietly.

  “Because it makes the most sense. Don’t you see it? My mamma didn’t raise a fool. Those power generators didn’t all switch themselves off at once, now did they?”

  “What are you suggesting, Centurion? What exactly has gotten into that Neanderthal’s skull of yours?”

  He’d lowered his voice, so I lowered mine to match.

  “Just this: you’re not supposed to be here, Winslade. You’re supposed to be dead, permed back when we dusted off the last of Claver’s legions. Instead, you’re living, breathing, and bitterly poking around on my legion’s ship.”

  “That’s pure speculation on your part, McGill.”

  “Yeah? We’ll see about that. Out here, we’re in deep space, and we’re in warp. Praetor Wurtenburger can’t save your ass. You can’t even call on him for help. You remember that.”

  I turned to walk off, but he called after me. “You should watch yourself, McGill. I gave you a pass earlier because you were honest with me aboard the sky train.”

  “Gave me a pass?” I demanded, coming back around on him. “What fate did I escape?”

  “A grim one, let me assure you. I have friends now, powerful ones. I’d advise you—”

  I reached out and grabbed up a wad of his flimsy spacer suit. Lifting him half-off his feet, I noted the lower level troops around us were looking antsy. They didn’t know if they should try to intervene or not. After all, we were the same rank. If two officers of the same rank wanted to have a duel, it was acceptable behavior in Legion Varus, just as it had been in Napoleon’s army, or almost any other organized force in the past.

  “Your friends aren’t aboard this battlecruiser, Winslade. But I am. So let me advise you to keep yourself out of trouble for the rest of this voyage.”

  He glared at me, but he shut up. I put him back on his feet. There was a needler in his hand, but there was a combat knife in mine. We both would have been seriously injured or maybe dead if either of us had gone further.

  As I walked away, I tossed a glance or two back at him. He was shaking his head, glaring at me. At last, as I got to the next corner, just about to turn it, I saw him look down again at his computer paper.