Bells rang, blood-colored lights flashed within the well as Zakh dodged the hurtling forms of crewbeings scurrying to action stations.

The alarm was deafening, voices of bell and siren stirring themselves into those of the crew scattering to man their posts.  By the time he emerged onto the gundeck, the drill he had looked forward to, thoughts of which had preoccupied hm belowdecks, was transformed, by wayfarer's fortune, into a survival issue.

"No more of that racket!"  Beside a projectible with a big "01" stenciled upon its curved back, Putin was in command, his voice carrying above all others.  Dressed in little besides worn-out trousers torn ragged at the knees---even with his belly overhanging their waist he cut an impressive figure---strapped to his muscle-corded forearms as though he were a Cossack, he affected two quickblades heavy enough to have been taken from one of the giants, if such a thing could be done.  Someone behind him lunged for switches, silencing the shrill.  Crewbeings ceased their top-of-the-lungs chatter to hear what he would tell them.  Zakh was at his appointed place, that of projector's helper and the third alternate at the fifth projectible.  Three deep about the ladderwell, where they would be out of the way unless needed as a desperate resort, dozens of untrained, nervous replacements stood by as a reserve.

Putin spoke again. "My friends, here is little Zilvagabond minding her own business in the black heart of the Deep.  Now, as a reward for her virtue, she finds herself pursued by a spacewolf of the Dzendayn Empery-Cirot!"

A buzz arose among the crew.  Putin permitted it.  Had they not been thus occupied they would have had too much to think about.  Zakh knew a corsair carried the small number of yardtiers as an adventurer, the same count of starsail, but of bigger area, spaced further apart, upon a mast half again as long.  Their enemy was a sleek, swift hunter-vessel commissioned by a rival imperium-conglomerate which, for centuries, had been at times inimical to the Cosmopolity---whenever the two were not at truce, allied against some third.

One quickblade glittering, Putin raised an arm, motioning them to silence again.  "As we find ourselves unable to outhaul the Dzen killer, we have no choice but to trade broadsides with her to protect ourselves.  We'll test her guts, then heave to with all rags aback and deliver our surprise!"  At this, someone a couple of stations from Zakh started a cheer.  He, like the merchantman whose fate they shared, was alone.  The solitary cheer tapered off and seemed to die of embarrassment.  "That sounded like a Navy man," Putin snorted, "anxious to be killed as to be killing.  When you so hastily abandoned Premier's bed and board, you should have left such shit behind you on the star!"  Laughter followed all around, nervous, but hearty with relieved tension.  "But he's right, messmates!  We'll get through this, by hook or crook, to lie and swear we're heroes afterward!  Somebody give me a darthelm before I hand him his head!"  He had not given them time to cheer his words.  A hiss of indrawn breath replaced the buzz of speculation which had not diminished altogether.  All conjecture was done with.  The battle for survival was about to start.

The ship's fifteen projectibles did not resemble the personal weapons whose basic principle they shared.  Each of the nine disposed at intervals about the gundeck, directed towards an oval "window" (differing from the rest of Zilvagabond​​​​​​​'s fabric in that, woven in concentric ellipses, it was transparent to the energies of her weaponry), stood two measures tall and consisted of the axis itself---an enormous cone, its apex pointed outboard, capped at the back with a massive hemisphere---and its caliprette.  This was a pair of trapezoidal slabs, thick as Zakh's waist, among few artifacts aboard not mesh constructed, between which the cone was trunnioned.  Armored conductoids from a boss in the middle of the hemisphere vanished between the uprights into a run beneath the deck.  Upon the outside of each caliprette-half, a chair and neckrest were bolted for the backward-facing projectors, along with a "glove box" from which a smaller conductoid ran to the sighting helmet or darthelm, referred to with typical irreverence as the "head box."  One of these contrivances was doffed by a projector at the 01 projectible and handed to Putin.  The first officer placed it over his head.

"There she is for a fact!" he exclaimed, glancing about helm-blinded and intent.  "Hard astern and coming up as fast as every measure squared can carry her, stunsails in the bargain.  Brace yourselves, for I think..."

A titanic thump! lifted the deck beneath Zakh's naked feet, tumbling the startled boy onto his back.  Mesh imprinted a grid pattern into his flesh but did not break the skin.  The air about him darkened with raised dust.  He coughed, staring openmouthed and empty-minded.  The adventurer groaned and shuddered as her purge-field soaked up punishment inflicted upon them.  If she survived the ordeal, this energy would be flung back at the enemy.  The vessel slewed, or maybe her inertia canceling fields faltered, and steadied.  From underfoot to overhead, the gundeck filled with profanity.  Zakh climbed to his feet.

"Stand by your projectibles!" Putin grinned like a skull, his big feet---he had stayed upon them---splayed over the deck, toes dug into the mesh.  "Number four, five, six!  Look sharp, projectors, make each blade count!  They've got the legs of us, and a stern chase is to their advantage!"  This time knowing what to expect, Zakh braced himself at the caliprette awaiting the next thrust whether issued by adventurer or starwolf.  He watched his projectible and its starboard operator, trying to anticipate the needs of machine and man, for the darthelmed projector was as blind to events within the merchantman as Putin, and for the same reason.  All upon the gundeck tensed.

Each projectible consisted of 3 subsystems for which projectors' helpers were responsible.  At its heart, deep within the hemispheric shield, lay a bundle, larger than the boy's head, of four half-twisted coils, each wound at right angles to the others.  Tachyonic currents flowing through the tortured microcontinuum they created and were required by an inscrutable geometry to do impossible things in impossible directions.  They protested by emitting pseudoquanta of kinetic energy.  The thruster core, a transparent, wrist-slender cylinder, ran through the coil bundle, down the middle of the mechanism to its pointed tip.  A single crystal of rare elements, it was here that energies extorted from the moebius coils---finding no other avenue of release within the interlapping fields---were collimated into a narrow beam.

Encircling the length of the core was the equivalent of a thrustible's designator.  Similar in operating principle---in an earlier era, against a less-defended foe, it might have been an effective weapon itself---the age which had invented it, preferring the counterfeit profundity of acronyms, had dubbed it "DARTACEP":  "Detection and Ranging through Tachyon Amplification by Coerced Emission of Psuedouanta."   Now it was referred to as the "dartjacket" which, through the darthelm, gave the projector eyes beyond the ship.

The final component, an internal torroidal cryopacket, helped make up, after the fact, for inefficiencies arising in the alteration of scale from quickblade to projectible.  Without it, residual "recoil," transmuted into heat, would soon have converted the system into shimmering slag.  It was the most vital--and most failure prone---of the subsystems.

Zakh's task was to replace failed components, including the projector himself if need be.  In the boy's hands, damp and trembling with what he hoped was anticipation rather than horror, he clutched a sheaf of spare conductiles, fabricated below specification in order to serve as fuses, ready to rip old ones loose and socket new ones in.   Bins within reach about him contained six crystalline thruster cores, parts for the cryopacket, replacement modules for the dartjacket, and one spare precious coil assembly.

Oily sweat streaming the visible portion of his face, Putin shouted another warning.  Zilvagabond staggered again.   As she yawned, he bellowed "Thrust!" Projectibles four, five, and six discharged as they bore, slewing within their caliprettes to prolong engagement with the enemy.  Valiant helpers hopped to and fro, trying to stand close by their projectors and at the same time leap out of the way of the heavy, fast-moving machinery.

"And blade again!"  The noise was such that the ears disbelieved it, a throbbing echo of the engines they hurled forth as the adventurer's projectibles discharged, the residuum more felt than heard, experienced in each cell of the body as a kind of anguish fundamental, as if the stuff of space itself were being stretched towards some catastrophic limit, and at any time might be torn asunder.  To Zakh, his hair soaked with perspiration running into eyes already watering and half-blind with smoke and dust, the sensation was....

"Stop blading!" The vessel straightened, taking the full-powered projectibles upon her gundeck out of play, an unfortunate necessity brought about by equally necessary ship-design.  It was a situation often commented upon, but about which, it seemed, nothing could be done save the obvious ploy Putin had described.  Elsewhere, the higher, less painful thrumming of Zilvagabond's stern chasers could be sensed through her fabric like the prickling, Zakh thought, of restored circulation in a limb.

"Stand by your projectibles, three, four, five!" To Zakh this meant the ship had started rolling, maybe to spell some of her weapons or---perish the thought---distribute whatever damage the spacewolf was inflicting.  By setting her fore-and-aft rigged staysails astagger, she could be induced to spiral about the axis of her mast.  Even through her purge-field damping, the boy could feel a slight pull, away from the deck beneath him, outboard towards the hull.

He braced himself again, watching his projectible.  A thin, bluish wisp issued from the boss upon the hemisphere which, partially, acted as a heat sink.  This phenomenon was normal, it was the conductoids he concerned himself with.  Presently, in his estimation, they showed little sign of---

The adventurer stumbled, without warning this time.  Claxons blared.  Men and metalloid fabric shrieked as an enormous section of the hull bulged inward a full measure, glowing with kinetic energy it could not shed.  For the first time in his life, Zakh smelt the odor of burning human flesh.  A crewwoman at the second projectible had ventured too close to the hull.  Arms flung wide, she screamed and staggered backward to lie smoking upon the deck, jerking in pain-induced convulsions, branded bone-deep with the pattern of the mesh.  She was far from the only individual injured thus.  Zakh saw many forms writhing upon the deck, lifeblood streaming into the thirsty mesh to be filtered and recirculated (maybe) as drinking water.  Horrified, he could not tear his eyes away.  It seemed impossible, but the dinted hull-section, visible to his adrenaline-tunneled vision dulled by stages in color and brightness, pulled back into shape by inforged memory and powerful hull-fields. "Blade three, four, and five!" Putin bellowed.  "Stand by two, three, and four!"

Lines from Zakh's unguarded face, something popped and hissed.  Compulsion broken, he watched one of the flexible conductoids at the hemispheric breech of his projectible flare into pyrotechnic life and burn through its shielding.  Not stopping to think, he whipped at the conductoid with the spares in his hand, snapped it from the boss, bent and jerked it from its socket in the caliprette, and replaced it.  Above him, something heavy or fast traveling struck the hemisphere, a blow he felt through the deck, showering his back with searing fragments.

Jumping up, he whistled at the glittering powder splashed upon the hemisphere.  Peering into smoke which, reeking with excrement and smoldering pungency, now filled the deck, he calculated that the hot debris had been hurled across a long chord from the 8th projectible, whose thrusting he had not heard ordered.  All of the machine's conductoids had volatized upon the first attempted blade, this minor and foreseeable disaster being far from the worst.  The heavy boss now flapped from stop to stop upon its thick, invisible hinge like the storm-ravaged door of a flimsy building.  Behind it, the thruster core had failed, as they were inclined to do, unpredictably obedient to the complex laws of purge-probability, having upon this occasion shivered into useless powder, dangerous because it occupied hundreds of times the volume of the solid core, exploding through the rear of the weapon killing both helpers, one of their projectors, and coming close to settling Zakh's prospects.  His own projector was dead, jeweled with a lethal and prismatic encrustation.

At that very same moment, operators and the next projectible screamed and hither-dithered, spewing disgusting fluids from every orifice as their sphincters failed. A microfracture in the core of their weapons had permitted a fraction of its energies to seep into the DARTACEP circuitry.  As helpers struggled to free them, two dull explosions inside their helmets preceded a gush about their shoulders of superheated blood, boiling spinal fluid, and pureed brains.  Zakh vomited into the deckmesh until was emptied and aching.

The 2nd alternate projector, the helper at the other side of Zakh's projectible, stepped around the caliprette. Sharing the boy's grim silence, she assisted him in pulling the dead projector's smoking wreckages from its place, took up his scorched but functional darthelm, and strapped herself in where, seconds earlier, her fellow crewbeing had been burned alive. As the remaining projector's helper, it was up to Zakh now, to do the work of two.  About him, the ship began to flail and vibrate like something tortured.  The weakening fabric of the Zilvagabond, bludgeoned again and again with increasing accuracy and effect by the swiftly approaching Dzendayn bludgeoned again and again with increasing accuracy and effect by the swiftly approaching Dzendayn enemy, shrieked a funeral dirge to the fallen among her crewbeings.  She did not keen without accompaniment.  Rising to the overhead, the moaning of Zakh's burned and mutilated comrades returned the compliment to the dying vessel.

"Stand by all projectibles!" Putin bellowed.  "Blade the slutspawn as you bear!"

Even so, Zakh felt lucky, given the grisly alternatives represented by his wounded and dying shipmates.  At the same time, he was astonished, realizing that he was no longer scared.  Maybe---his thoughts were analytical and cold ----because he had been willing to consider death, since his first hour aboard the Zilvagabond, if not desirable in itself, then a reasonable alternative to life as it had become; what remained for him to be scared of now?  Incredibly, as it had been the case while caring for the slaves below, his thoughts turned again to his lessons.

Early purge-fields being less than perfect (Putin was unaware he repeated Maria's teachings), lasers served following peebies until purge-fields improved.  Materials ancient when mankind leapt to the stars reflected or absorbed them, sacrificing themselves for the sake of whatever they protected.  But, in all but the most moribund of cultures, when means fail, other await.  The quickblade had for some time constituted the last word in personal weaponry.  Now bigger "projectibles" arose, suffering none of the limits of atomsmashers, peebies, or lasers, working as they did on a subtler level of reality.  Projectibles were expensive and unreliable scaled to vessel-size.  They required a good deal of training and their appetite for power was voracious.  Thus, a principal mode of ship-to-ship combat even now consisted of maneuvering "to windward" of an enemy, robbing her of headway and putting armed parties aboard.

It was this, more than the ceaseless battering, which experienced officers and crewbeings feared.  According to a saying more ancient than starsailing, a stern chase is a long chase.  Yet the Dzendayn starwolf's steady reach upon her Romanovan prey was inexorable, each of the latter's countermoves proving futile.  Despite armament and power sufficient to most contingencies, the adventurer, verst by bitter-fought verst, had begun to fail those aboard her.  A moment had arrived for the most desperate, unprecedented measure to be afforded serious consideration.  Zakh discovered himself deep in furious concentration upon all he had learned aboard the merchant vessel, everything Terrible Yvan and Mistress Maria had ever taught him. Something nagged at the edge of his consciousness, something from his lessons which might be of us.  Idea after idea surfaced in his inventive mind, only to be rejected.

​​​​​​​What in Premier's name was it?  Boarding parties fit in somewhere, he was sure.  Intersecting purge-fields, as well. Parties could not board until fields coalesced.  Something else----something Mr. Putin had shouted only minutes---Deep take him; it had been hours before----about "all her rags aback."  What was it about parlor tricks, the chance of initiating explosions by squeezing fissionables within a shrinking purge-field?  Zakh was sure whatever idea was bothering him was something promising and vital, but, in all this noise and smoke, steeped in the odor of death and dying, he couldn't fit it all together.

The first officer tore his darthelm off and cast it aside, bringing the small fingers of both hands to his lips.  Zakh thought his eardrums may burst with the shrillness of Putin's whistle.  "Cease blading! All hands stand to! Stow the noise and listen!  Captain below the decks!"  It was as if even the pursuing starwolf heard and obeyed.  Silence settled over the gunduck.  Putin had barely finished speaking when the moan came of a hatch-dog, followed by the scream of battle-stressed hinges.  A stocky, cloak-swathed figure emerged from the oval ladderwell entrance, straightened, acknowledged the first officer's salute---Putin's head bowed until his chin touched his chest, both wrists outstretched, palms upward--and stepped into the mesh.  Straining behind him, a pair of sinewy, sweating crewmen dragged a metal-bound chest from the ladderwell and set it upon the deck with a thud.

Since first coming aboard the Zilvagabond, Zakh had dealt---in ways that would have shocked his family and teachers----only with her first, second, and third officers, Putin, von Baumbach, and Rodya.  Neither he nor any other crewbeing he knew had even glimpsed whoever commanded the vessel.  Thus, until now, they had been spared a singularly impressive spectacle, after its own manner more alien in characters than any nonhuman aboard.

Supreme Merchant Turr Omarov, capitalissar of the Zilvagabond, had seen as much of the known galaxy as could be experienced firsthand in any one lifetime.  Yet his travels, adventures, and great wealth, had not been without price.  One of the man's eyelids was laser-welded shut over an empty socket, whence a deep-furrowed scar curved along one dark cheek towards a pierced, ring-bearing ear.  The wound must have been horrible, for it was not beyond the power of medicine to replace an eye, given contemporary medical technology.

The other ear was missing altogether.  Given other of his features, this went almost unnoticed.  His long gray hair hung in more than twelve stiff braids, stopped at the ends with bands of polished metal.  Each served as a setting for a row of colored stones which, even in the spreighformer era, might be considered priceless due to their brilliance and unprogrammed rarity.  They swung, amidst their glittering companions, about his scattered and swarthy face, from time to time alighting upon his shoulders like iridescent insects.  His nose had been broken so many times and so thoroughly that it now spread twice as wide upon his cheeks---pocked with the weather and disease of a hundred planets---as it had in his youth.  It, too, was pierced, through sidewall and septum, where a pair of baubles made it more grotesque.  Beneath it, a moustache drooped from the corners of his full-fleshed, cruel mouth.  Beneath his lower lip, a triangle of beardlet had been spared the combrazor.  

Like Putin, the captain wore a quickblade upon each arm, his being lighter of construction and more embellished.  Their wristbands were jeweled bracelets, the hands beneath them much adorned with heavy rings.  Unlike his near-naked first officer, he wore a billowing, shiny-surfaced blouse fastened with elaborate studs, ruffled at the throat as at the cuffs, the sleeves being rolled up to facilitate quickblade use.  His loose-fitting trousers ended at a pair of kneeboots, fashioned from the hide of some exotic animal.  Over everything, he had draped a deck-length, voluminous cloak of heavy texture, tailored with a hem and high collar of some long-haired, spotted fur.

"Get that rubbish cleared away!" Speaking to Putin, he pointed a weapon-heavy hand at the violated bodies at the 8th and 9th projectibles.  His voice was high, nasal, with a rasping edge that carried through the din.  "I want replacement crews an' those machines returned to action in two minutes, or, by the last fifty premiers, I'll figurehead every officer upon the gundeck!"

Despite his outlandish appearance, Zakh knew at once that this was not a man to laugh at.  Omarov was a man to fear.