Somebody sniffed. “If this cluster is full of people, how come we never picked up signals from it?”
“How do you know we never did?” Oberholzer retorted.
“For all I know, maybe that’s why the Assam Dragon came here in the first place. Anyhow that’s not our problem. All we’re”
The lights went out. Simultaneously, the whole mass of the Novoe Washingtongrad shuddered savagely, as though a boulder almost as big as she was had been dropped on her.
Seconds later, the gravity went out too.
2
Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn knew no more of the real nature of the disaster than did the wardroom squad, nor did anybody on the bridge, for that matter. The blow had been inde-tectable until it struck, and then most of the fleet was simply annihilated; only the Hobo was big enough to survive the blow, and she survived only partiallyin fact, in five pieces. Nor did the Consort of State ever know by what miracle the section he was in hit Calle still partially under power; he was not privy to the self-salvaging engineering principles of battleships. All he knewonce he struggled back to consciousnesswas that he was still alive, and that there was a broad shaft of sunlight coming through a top-to-bottom split in one wall of what had been his office aboard ship.
He held his ringing head for a while, then got up in search of water. Nothing came out of the dispenser, so he unstrapped his dispatch case from the underside of his desk and produced a pint palladium flask of vodka. He had screwed up his face to sample thisat the moment he would have preferred waterwhen a groan reminded him that there might be more than one room in his suddenly shrunken universe, as well as other survivors.