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Yar, I saw him. Freaking fool near broke the trans-paristeel port, he was so close-!

As he headed for the aft trash lock, Bleyd began to seal the robe. Under the cloth was a thinskin emer-gency vac suit, complete with gloves and boot seals, a flexicris head shroud and face cover. The emergency air tank held but five minutes of life-thinskin vac suits were designed to work inside a ship during a sudden atmosphere loss, and then only long enough to get to a pressurized section or a full vac suit. But five minutes would be more than enough, assuming everything went as planned...

The trash lock was just ahead. Bleyd triggered the re-mote control, and the hatch dilated.

A second remote activated the antigrav unit on the carbonite slab and pushed it out the lock.

Expertly, for he was a good pilot, Bleyd pulled the Starspin to a velocity matching the slow-moving slab’s, then used a grapple arm to grab it and pull it against the ship’s body. He locked the arm in place.

He took a deep breath. This part wouldn’t be pleas-ant, but he could not tarry. He sealed the vac suit, acti-vated the airflow, and cycled the ship’s canopy open. Then he maneuvered himself out of the cockpit, aimed at the open trash hatch, and pushed off.

Since the MedStar’s orbital position was currently over the night side of Drongar, it was cold out there, a biting, harsh chill that stabbed him through the robe and thinskins like a thousand needles of frozen nitro-gen impaling him all at once. But he ignored the cold, refused to accept the shock it threatened to plunge his system into. Bred into him was the stamina and strength of a thousand generations of hunters, an ar-mor woven from his ancestors’ ancient DNA. His re-solve was icier by far than the void through which he floated.

His aim was a hair off, but not so much that he missed the hatch. As soon as he was in the ship’s gravity field, he dropped, but he had been expecting that, and he landed on his feet, his balance firm. He slapped the hatch control, and the hatch constricted and closed. The chamber, even unpressurized, was still considerably warmer than the raw vacuum outside.

He activated the pressurization cycle and moved to the viewport to look at Mathal’s ship, triggering the re-mote for it as he did so. The Starspin’s ion drive lit, and the little vessel, its carbonite load still firm in its grasp, shot silently off into space.

Bleyd watched for a moment. The course was laid in-there was nothing more to be done now.

He unsealed the vac suit and headed for the inner lock door. In a matter of a few minutes, an unidentified ves-sel would violate Separatist orbital space on the far side of the planet. The ship would not respond to queries, nor would it deviate from its course. There would be warnings given, and finally the Separatist batteries would open up, and the ship would be blown to bits.

And alas, Mathal, the representative of Black Sun, would be vaporized as well, and nobody would ever be able to tell that he had been dead before it happened, for the thermonuclear explosion that destroyed the Star-spin would not leave enough of the slagged carbonite to fill a wingstinger’s ear. There would, however, be just enough trace molecular residue to establish that an or-ganic body, probably humanoid, had been vaporized along with the ship.

No one would be particularly surprised, either. While the rules of war forbade one side attacking the other’s orbiting medical frigate, no such injunction held against the invaded side defending itself.

As he stripped off the robe and thinskins to change back into a spare uniform, left there earlier for that pur-pose, Bleyd went over it yet again. He was no fugue master, but he was adept enough at dissembling to pull this off. When Black Sun came to call, as eventually they would, and when they asked him what had become of Mathal, as eventually they would, he did not doubt that he would be able to pass a truth-scan, if he worded his reply