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unfair that he was the only survivor, but the Odin ’s radar and remaining imaging systems—both infrared and visible—had found no trace of Munin or Nebula Storm since he had regained control of Odin . What had happened to them he could not guess; Munin had departed with the survivors many hours before Odin ’s final rendezvous with Io, but perhaps it had been unable to escape that collision itself. Nebula Storm , crippled by Fitzgerald’s brilliant if completely sociopathic attack, may itself have crashed somewhere, or merely lost power and dwindled into the distance, so far away that neither infrared nor radar could find her now. He had no idea of the full capabilities of these systems, nor was he an expert in their use.
    Perversely, he still had an occasional flash of wishing that Fitzgerald were here; the security expert had hidden a tremendously able mind behind his deliberately-affected accent and had undoubtedly been nearly as omnicompetent as Madeline Fathom, his chief opposition. He would certainly have figured out a better way to accomplish this objective, and might even have been able to tell them what really happened to the others.
    On the other hand, he’d simply have shot me for even trying to send the message I intend to send. He wanted Fitzgerald’s competence, not his presence.
    Hohenheim sailed with economical, efficient movements through the corridors and through rooms. Sometimes his passage disturbed the slow, drifting dance of ordinary objects—pens, paper, fragments of broken glass—in the air, leaving a rippling trail behind him that rang a distant bell in his memory, a fragment of one of the novels a younger Alberich Hohenheim had read while dreaming of space. He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead…
    Indeed, though not that long has passed, or is likely to. Still, the memory was a sort of grim symmetry; like Gully Foyle, Hohenheim was trapped in the wreckage of his own ship, living only to strike back against those who had condemned him to this space-drifting tomb. The difference was that Hohenheim knew how to achieve his goal, and he needed no miraculous re-awakening of the drive of his ship to do so.
    The next door showed only vacuum on the other side. He sealed his helmet and opened the lock. The corridor looked superficially untouched, but a close look showed the neat hole, nearly large enough for Hohenheim to put his fist through, that had let the air out of this section. A distorted and frozen corpse— Lieutenant DeVries , Hohenheim thought sadly—drifted in the weightless emptiness. He tried not to touch the lieutenant’s body as he went by—out of respect, not squeamishness. I must devise some kind of ceremony after I’m done. There are at least ten bodies on board this part of Odin and if I cannot commit them to the deep properly I must at least pay the proper respects—perhaps make Odin itself a tomb worthy of their sacrifices.
    He opened a panel at the far end and checked. Power still flowed here. Good . He inserted the end of one cable into the power source and locked it to the repeater and transceiver box, then moved on. Ten more meters…
    Naturally the door between there and here was stuck. He extracted the compact spreader-cutter rescue tool and inserted it into the gap. As he already had a power-connected cable, he removed it from the transceiver and plugged it into the spreader-cutter. The rescue tool hummed to work, the sound not audible through the vacuum but transmitted to Hohenheim through his suit as he held the tool in place. He could also feel and hear the groaning protest of the door as it gave grudgingly under the tons of force the tool could generate. A few minutes sufficed to force the door open wide enough for Hohenheim to wriggle through with the cable and transceiver.
    He left the tool behind him for now; it was “compact” only in the sense that it could be carried around by one man, but it was still a massive and clumsy