Ackerman Boone spat on the polished, gleaming floor of the crew quarters. “He’ll never get us out alive, let me tell you. He wants to shift us into subspace at the last possible minute. Suddenly. Like this—” and Ackerman Boone snapped his fingers.
“There’d be a ship full of broken bones!” someone protested. “We can’t do a thing like that.”
“He’ll kill us all!” a very young T/3 cried hysterically.
“Not if I can help it, he won’t,” shouted Ackerman Boone. “Listen, men. This ain’t a question of discipline. It’s a question of living or dying and I tell you that’s more important than doing it like the book says or discipline or anything like that. We got a chance, all right: but it ain’t what the Admiral thinks it is. We ought to abandon the Glory to her place in the sun and scram out of here in the lifeboats—every last person aboard ship.”
“But will they have enough power to get out of the sun’s gravitational pull?” someone asked.
Ackerman Boone shrugged. “Don’t look at me,” he said mockingly. “I’m only an enlisted man and they don’t give enlisted men enough math to answer questions like that. But reckoning by the seat of my pants I would say, yes. Yes, we could get away like that—if we act fast. Because every minute we waste is a minute that brings us closer to the sun and makes it harder to get away in the lifeboats. If we act, men, we got to act fast.”
“You’re talking mutiny, Boone,” a grizzled old space veteran said. “You can count me out.”
“What’s the matter, McCormick? Yellow?”
“I’m not yellow. I say it takes guts to maintain discipline in a real emergency. I say you’re yellow, Boone.”
“You better be ready to back that up with your fists, McCormick,” Boone said savagely.