Ship's Boy by Phil Geusz Page B

vacuum—there were gold emblems on his suit and maybe that was why. The recoil from the first shot knocked me silly so that Sergeant Wells and I were now spinning slowly around each other; it wasn’t easy at all to line up for another shot. But somehow I managed, and my second over-powered discharge caught the stubborn Imperial square in the chest, ripping him into pieces. My gun was hot now, even through my Field-protected glove, and a yellow light was blinking. So I re-engaged the safety and holstered it, even though there was more to shoot at.
    Besides, by then Sergeant Wells was back in action and with him at my side I didn’t need to fight. He was like a remorseless precision machine, carefully aiming and then squeezing off one carefully-directed round after another. He killed at least seven men while we made our long drift, which was a very good thing because everywhere I looked Hummingbird ’s crewmen, particularly those not trained for advanced maneuvers—much less space combat!—were dying in droves. Inert orange lubber’s suits filled the sky, so many that I gulped at the sight.
    Then at last we were close-aboard Sword , and Sergeant Wells spun around feet-first to make his landing. I did the same with considerably less grace, and then we slammed onto the rapidly-silvering hull with enough force to knock the wind out of me; belatedly, I realized that I’d forgotten to account for the initial vector provided by Hummingbird ’s maneuvering-thrusters. In fact, I slammed home so hard that it was actually Sergeant Wells who unclipped the rope-spool from my belt and handed me the bitter end to clip down. I stared stupidly at him for a moment, then smiled and nodded. He clapped me on the shoulder again and smiled back, then scrambled away a few yards to avoid the inevitable warp flux.
    We’d already mounted a clip on the end of the rope, so all I had to do was find an unused eye of some kind on Sword’s outer skin. This was easier said than done, since apparently the Imperials were much less enamored of the things than Royal shipbuilders. Hummingbird and Broad Arrow were festooned with tiedowns—now that I really needed one in a hurry for the first time in my life, there wasn’t one to be found anywhere! And the hull was almost fully silvered!
    Finally I found a place where a steel pipe of some kind connected two long, low structures whose purpose I couldn’t discern. It was far from ideal—the connection would be loose and uncertain and thus spark continuously. And even worse, because I didn’t know what I was connecting to, for all I knew I was setting up the biggest explosion I’d never live to see. But there wasn’t anything for it; Sword was about to stabilize her Field despite all her handicaps. So I reached out with the cable…
    …the Field arced with a brilliant eye-stabbing flash, draining all the accumulated ship’s power from countless dimensions…
    …and I screamed my lungs out as my non-conductive and unpowdered fur blocked the proper eddy-flow inside my personal Field and, in places, burst into flame.
     

20
    Field suits are different than other kinds of vacuum gear in many ways. For one thing, they’re routinely worn for many hours a day by comfortably seated engineers in pressurized spaces, surrounded with perfectly good air. Plus, they’re almost never used in null-gee. So their climate-control systems are rudimentary—if one needs to go EVA, the designers reason, one can always don a less-specialized suit. The air tanks are also relatively small—when on engine-room watch, we simply topped off frequently. And the joints are stiff too, especially in the buttocks region where there’s plenty of padding. There are other technical differences as well, all of which go far beyond the Field generator itself. Most of them center around the safety-systems, which are both extensive and well thought out. This is due to the simple fact that despite all modern innovations engine rooms