Two screen generators went to hell and plastered the control room with jagged shards of smoking metal. There was a searing pain in Cutlass' shoulder, and blood trickled the length of his arm and along his fingers as he flipped the ship's inter-teleco switches. Just a glance told him they'd gotten through the screens—the jagged, gaping holes in the Vulture's ripped flanks told him he didn't have a gunner or a radarman left alive.
Damn them damn them....
He choked on the acrid fumes of the burnt-out screen generators as he fumbled painfully into a space-suit. Old Doc had bragged to him once that a man could travel the system end to end and back in a Raven-built suit—with a certain amount of pirates' luck, of course. Well, the Patrol wasn't to have Robbin Cutlass alive—
He was less than five thousand miles out when he saw the Vulture die. It was a Viking's death—a great mass of blinding white flame which seemed to rip Space wide open for a silent, coruscating second—and then there was the cold darkness of any grave.
Pluto glimmered eerily a hundred million miles ahead of him. And somewhere, a half-light-year beyond, was Doc's old freighter. Doc, with his well hidden laboratory, circling away the last years of his life in the quiet solitude of Deep Space—all that was left.
Barrel-chested and heavy-browed like his father, Robbin Cutlass stood there, his space-suit crumpled in a heap at his feet, and looked about him. Doc had explained it to him, but he still was not sure he understood.