Her left leg hurt like hell, and felt warm and sticky inside the suit. In a way she wished that the sealant layer sandwiched between the armour and the inner suit had not done its job so well. Had it not, she would not face the prospect of suffocating in about twenty minutes from now. The Lyric was gone, John was either dead or soon would be, Pelter would see to that, and the safety lock on her suit even precluded her opening the helmet to vacuum. Jarvellis hung in space over Viridian and watched pieces of her ship flaring in atmosphere below her—when she could see through her tears.

The old ring station was perhaps a few hundred metres away behind her. Straining round she could see a light deep inside it, behind exposed structural members. That option was closed to her as well. She had used up all the fuel in the suit’s impellers in order to escape the blast. ‘Get out,’ John had said. She had heard him clear, even as she had blown the airlock door and fired-up the impellers. The disc of fire had cut below her, then the debris cloud riding the blastwave had slammed into her back and tumbled her over and over. No doubt the piece of the Lyric that had punched into her thigh had been a fragment of chainglass. It had been one of many hits she had felt, and nothing else could have penetrated the ceramal armour.

Eventually her tears dried and Jarvellis tried her comunit again. Again she just got silence. The EM pulse from the explosion must have burnt out the suit’s radio. Planar explosives had been used, and they did not produce such a pulse. It had come from one of the secondary explosions, either when the pile went or when the disc cut the underspace engine in half. There would be recovery ships up from Viridian in time, but they would come too late for her. Rescue was not an option, and only two others remained: either she died slowly in the suit or . . . Jarvellis reached down and unclipped the solid-state laser clipped to the suit’s utility belt. It wouldn’t work through the helmet, as the chainglass would automatically polarize. She needed to hold it over her heart. She estimated it would take about a minute to penetrate the suit.

No more grief now. Everything was gone and now there was just her. Then . . . then she remembered the other life starting inside her, and that only made everything seem worse. She looked down at the laser in her heavy glove. It was just a matt cylinder with a button on one end.

Oh, John . . .