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side; but her shields held, interior bulkheads held, preserving a fragile integrity. One part of her nose looked like it’d been hit by an impact-ram, and a number of sensors and sniffers were dead; but no structural harm had been done. She would still function. She could go someplace and get help—at the moment, he had no idea where, his brain was too fuzzy from oxygen starvation, but someplace, it was still possible, she could do it somehow.
    Entirely by accident, one of the cameras which had been scanning Bright Beauty’s hull gave him a glimpse of the UMCP ship.
    She was coming for him, coming fast.
    She had a straight shot at him. As soon as she fired, his whole life would be reduced to light and electrons.
    And there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t even play dead. That wouldn’t fool her. She’d seen him brake: she knew he was alive.
    The thought turned his guts to water. He didn’t want to die. Almost without realizing it, he hit his distress beacon. Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, you fornicating filthy bastards, don’t kill me , I surrender.
    Starmaster came ahead as if she wanted to eviscerate him at point-blank range; as if Captain Davies Hyland wanted to see Angus Thermopyle die with his own eyes.
    The terrible injustice of it made Angus burn to shoot first, to key targ and at least go out fighting, even though matter cannon fire couldn’t hurt the UMCP ship. But he didn’t do that. Fear was more imperative than hate. Raging like a maniac, he fed his transmitter all the gain it could handle and sent his distress call into the dark like a wail.
    His cameras gave him a perfect view as Starmaster altered course, turned in the direction of the asteroid—and broke in half.
    Broke in half.
    A blast like that: one of the drives must have blown up. Fire and metal sprayed without a sound into the belt. Out of the center of the explosion, Starmaster toppled as if she were felling toward the surface of the asteroid.
    Angus watched in complete astonishment as the ship crashed and died.
    Instead of gutting Starmaster , the fire went out almost immediately. That implied—He was too stupefied to realize what it implied. On automatic again, his hands fumbled across the console, activating short-range scanners, focusing cameras. He was trying to think. He should already be dead, fried in his g-seat. The UMCP ship had a straight shot at him. But he was still alive. Starmaster broke in half. The fire went out almost immediately.
    That implied—
    Oxygen.
    The fire went out because it didn’t get oxygen. But the ship was full of air. Angus understood fires in space: he knew Starmaster s hould have burned longer than that. Some of her interior bulkheads must be holding. Parts of her retained structural integrity.
    That, too, had significant implications. They eluded him, however. Bad air and the fundamental shock of his survival muddled his head. Ideas that should have been clear to him refused to come into focus.
    Then he got it.
    If parts of Starmaster retained integrity, then some of her people might have been protected or shielded. There might be survivors.
    There were survivors. When he pulled his eyes down from the screen where his cameras reported what they could see, down to his scan displays and readouts, he discovered that his instruments registered life. Three or four people were still alive.
    No, not three. Definitely four.
    Still stunned by what had happened, and hardly able to breathe because Bright Beauty’s atmosphere had deteriorated considerably during the past few minutes, Angus struggled to think.
    He never considered trying to rescue the survivors. Even with all his wits about him, he would have dismissed that idea. Those people were cops; his enemies. And he didn’t bother to wonder what had happened, how Starmaster had died. He would probably never know the answer to that question. He would probably never care. His thoughts were more basic:
    Air.
    Water.
    Food.
    And he thought,