Dorsey was no longer in the cockpit.

“You worthless, cowardly, backbiting—”

A thunderous impact shuddered through the entire ship, interrupting what would have been a brilliant stream of insults. Rogers closed his eyes and wished he had never left the military. At least then he wouldn’t have had such a good chance of being killed.

After what seemed like an eternity, warning sirens blared from the instrument panel, and Rogers came to the unbelievable realization that he was still alive. Opening his eyes, he saw that the Rancor had fired two disabling shots right into his engines with a precision he had never seen in all his days in the fleet.

The damage assessment popped up almost immediately: the engines had been ruined. But why would the Rancor sit there for the entirety of the fight, then just shoot out Rogers’ engines? And why wouldn’t they say anything?

Then Rogers knew. The Meridan fleet had discovered the missing ship—the Awesome, which Rogers thought he had so carefully erased from the fleet’s inventory before leaving with it—pinpointed Rogers as its new owner, revived the Rancor and its crew from the dead using voodoo and a lot of Scotch tape, and sent them after him. Any moment now, they’d come across the radio, tell him to prepare to be boarded, and he’d be on his way back to the closest Meridan magistrate for sentencing. What an end to a relatively short, relatively successful post-military career.

Instead, the Rancor promptly turned around and jumped back into Un-Space.

This was it. Rogers was going to become a rotting corpse on a perfectly good ship with no engines in the middle of nowhere. Nobody had come to pick him up. No ships had transited to which he could send a message. Maybe a spot this remote hadn’t been such a great idea, after all. His life support systems were on their last reserves, and it was only a matter of time now before the oxygen tanks gave out and he started to feel that uneasy, sleepy feeling that foretold a slow and hypoxic death.

He’d been in hypobaric chambers before in training; he knew the signs. First he’d start to taste funny things, then he’d be unable to perform basic mathematical equations. He’d start mumbling incoherently. The last traces of his intellect would vanish as his body no longer put oxygen into his brain. Then he’d be promoted to colonel and run the personnel squadron. It was an inevitable chain of events.

Rogers was an engineer, damn it, and a good one! He should have been able to fix those engines. But the compartment that held his Vacuum Mobility Unit and tools had been sealed when the Rancor blew a hole in it. Maybe if he held his breath long enough when he went outside . . . he’d been a pretty strong swimmer in his younger days . . .

Rogers shook his head. What was he thinking? Was he getting cabin fever, or . . . He checked his life support systems. He had less than half a standard day’s worth of oxygen left.