“Do you wish to cycle through?” he heard in his earplugs.
“Yes, and fast!” he told the machine, pointlessly except for the fury fuming in him.
Air pumps brawled diminuendo. He felt their throb in his feet and shins until they had evacuated the chamber. The two or three minutes it took stretched themselves. The outer valve opened and he saw, across ten meters, the cliff that was the flat end of the cylindrical hull.
This near the hub, it was only dimly starlit. Wan flickers pulsed across it as the wheel rotated. He had no other immediate sensation of spin. However, when he reached the exit, he discerned vague shapes: ports, bays, the second shuttle. Seemingly it was they that whirled past. He did not look beyond them to the stars. That way lay vertigo.
Instead he poised on the rim, gauged with a precision that was mostly subconscious, and sprang. The impetus tore his soles loose from the weak centrifugal acceleration and he soared. Here he could not escape seeing the heavens stream around him. He set his teeth and ignored them.
Tangential velocity bore him outward. As strongly as he had jumped, it should not carry him past the edge in the less than two seconds of his crossing — not quite. But it would land him at a speed that could break bones and whatever hold his boots laid on the hull. He twisted about, readying.
Impact slammed. His upper body, relaxed in cat fashion, swung freely. Tissue absorbed shock. As he skidded and lost contact, he brought a foot down. It also flew off, but it had dissipated energy. His other foot touched and dragged. On the fourth stamp, he rocked to a halt. All the while he had gripped his hammer.
For a moment he hung slack, weightless. Pain seared through his injured shoulder. At the end of the sleeve that housed its magnetic bearings, the wheel turned, enormous, a mill athwart stars that now gleamed as if they were eternally fixed upon the sky.
“Hoo-oo,” Ruszek muttered. “Did you get flung clear, Al, boy? That would simplify things.”
He was nearly at the verge of the cylinder. Recovered, one sole always touching metal but the stride long and quick, he stepped across the right angle onto the vast curve.
His sight swept clown the length of it — turrets, bays, webs, masts, murky against the constellations. He swore and started around the circumference. Of course he wouldn’t see Brent from here. If Brent made the passage, he’d seek the midships entry lock, which happened to be some eighty degrees off.
Ruszek rounded the horizon.
He jarred to a stop, swayed forward, peered. A radio detector cob-webbed the querning after wheel, but a lesser motion caught his eyes. Distance-dwindled, a shape went slowly, black, across the Milky Way.
Brent, almost at the entry lock. Lacking a safety line, he walked very carefully. Ruszek had more skill. He half ran. Having turned off his transmitter before he left, he could call in his mother tongue, into the infinite silence, “All right, I’m coming to kill you.” And, after a moment, a whisper: “For Hanny.”
Vision was a blur of dusk and shadow. He could hope to draw close unnoticed. But he had said Brent was a good spaceman, too. Wary, constantly glancing about, the fugitive saw the pursuer. Ruszek saw the pistol rise.
He swung the hammer thrice and hurled it.
The bullets ripped into him, through him. Air gushed from holes too big for self-seal, a ghost-white fog spattered with black. In starlight humans cannot see red.
The maul hit Brent in the belly. It knocked him off the hull. He drifted away. His limbs flailed. He screamed. Nobody answered. He reached the after wheel. A spoke smote. The fragments of him exploded into the emptiness around.
Ruszek’s boots clung. His body straightened and waited for his shipmates. They found a grin still on his face.
Nansen and Zeyd approached the Tahirians. Dayan stood in the background, a sidearm at her hip, but nobody supposed it would be wanted.
Ivan advanced, parleur in hand, to meet the humans.
“(You will release these two you hold,)” the captain ordered.