Free King's Test by Margaret Weis

shook
himself free of Tusk's hold. "I'm going to find Dixter. Okay if
I borrow this?' He took Nola's lasgun, started off through the smoke.
    "Dion! Damn
it, kid—"
    He heard Tusk
shout, but Dion didn't turn around. He’d spotted what looked to
be a way out.
    Dion opened a
door, peered into a narrow corridor. According to the blueprint, this
corridor connected Delta deck with Charlie. The young man advanced
cautiously, weapon drawn, expecting a raging battle.
    The corridor was
strangely, eerily quiet. No smoke, no signs of life or death. A door
at the end was labeled with a large C. Dion dashed toward it. his
heart in his throat. He hit the controls with his hand so hard he
bruised his palm.
    The door slid
open. He darted inside, prepared to take immediate cover, and
blundered into a desk. The room was brightly lit; he couldn't see
anything after coming in from the darkness of the corridor. He shoved
the desk out of his way, but another step brought him up against
another desk. Blinking, he saw the place was filled with them!
Rolled-up star charts and a coffee maker humming to itself in a
corner gave him an idea where he was—a pilot's ready room.
    Shoving desks
aside, he headed for a steelglass viewport that must face out onto
Charlie deck. Dion pressed his nose against the steelglass, expecting
to see the same chaos he'd left on Delta: smoke, laser bursts, tracer
fire. He recognized the mercenaries' spaceplanes, but the only signs
of combat were trailing wisps of smoke being sucked into Defiant' s
ventilation system.
    "Charlie
deck!" he muttered. "It has to be! But what's happened?"
    The fighting's
ended! Which means—
    Dion's knees
felt weak. He sat down suddenly at a desk, stared out onto the deck,
searching for people, seeing no one. That's it, then. They're all
dead.
    "What
should I do?" he asked himself bleakly, feeling empty, drained.
"Go back to Tusk. I can at least help him and Nola and Link
escape, take them off in my spaceplane. Hell. That wouldn't work.
They'd never leave. But I could. I could escape. Get out while I can,
like Tusk said. No one would ever know. . . .
    "Yes . . .
he would," Dion said softly. "Sagan would know. He always knows! And. once again, he'd know that I ran. He'd figure I was
scared.
    Dion rose to his
feet. "Let him find my body with the bodies of my friends.
I'll—"
    Out of the
corner of his eye. he saw the man, saw the gun. . . .
    Pain . . . and
then nothing.

Chapter Six
    Have you built
your ship of death. O have you?
    " The
Ship of Death ," D. H. Lawrence

    Disguised as a
pilot—a wounded pilot, her "borrowed" flight suit
covered with blood—Maigrey hoped, in the confusion. to make her
way onto one of the evac ships. She arrived on one of Phoenix's flight decks and hovered in the background. keeping to the shadows,
watching, appraising the situation. Time was running out, maybe
another fifteen minutes left in the safety window. But this, she
discovered, had not been one of her better ideas.
    First, there was
no confusion. No panic. Each man, apparently. had his own assigned
place on his own assigned ship. The men—those who were left,
and there weren't many— were proceeding on board the evac ships
in the well-drilled orderly fashion she might have expected of
Sagan's crew. Second, disguised as a pilot, she had no idea what her
assigned station was. Gnawing on her lip, swearing beneath her
breath, she watched for several minutes, hoping to see some breakdown
in discipline, wondering if she couldn't bluff her way on board by
claiming she had been knocked out, missed her own evac ship.
    No. that would
draw attention to her. Sagan had undoubtedly alerted the guards to
her disappearance. They'd be watching for her.
    "The
hospital ship,' Maigrey muttered. She recalled Sagan saying something
about using his own shuttle to transport wounded. The wounded
wouldn't have any assigned stations! She glanced down at the bloody
hole in the front of