Starlight glittered on his space armor as Red Badger left the Dolomite's air lock and soared weightlessly toward the freighter wreck. Behind him came his backup man, Glint, illuminating the wreck with a powerful duolite beam.

Badger gestured, though their destination was plain enough: the gray mass of the wreck, tying in several distinct parts, blocking the stars.

Getting there was simple: both men, on a signal from Badger, opened squirt cans that propelled them across the intervening space.

Badger said into his helmet radio, "You reading me okay, Glint?"

"Loud and clear," Glint said.

They landed on the hulk's largest section with a clank of magnetic boots. Badger's power wrench opened the airtight door that led into the ship.

A lot of the freighter's metal covering had been peeled back by strong explosions. It was no trouble at all, once they were past the external armor, to slip in between two structural girders and make their way to the interior.

The searchlight picked out the bodies of men, trapped in the sudden inrushing vacuum when the ship's side had been pierced. Exploded bodies lay across girders and floated unsupported in the zero gravity.

Badger and Glint moved slowly, clumsy in their airtight space armor, their searchlights throwing brilliant swords of light through the gloom. A corpse, hanging over a loop of high-pressure hose, seemed to reach out and touch Badger's helmet, lightly, as if just saying hello....

The redheaded spaceman laughed and pushed the thing aside. The body floated slowly across the shattered compartment, its arms held out loosely in front of it like a swimmer doing the dead man's float.

They reached the flight deck. Here there were more bodies, some terribly mangled by the pieces of flying machinery that had taken on the power of exploding shrapnel as the ship had come apart, others looking strangely peaceful, as if they'd never known what hit them. Death had had a busy few moments here before the eternal silence of space had entombed them all.

"Here's the control section," Glint said over the little space-helmet radio that connected the two men.

"Good enough," said Badger. "Let's find what we came for and get the hell out of here."

They floated past an operations console that looked as good as new. The ship's name was still stenciled on the bulkhead, and the paint looked almost new.

"Valparaiso Queen," Glint spelled out. "She won't be going Earthside no more."

"Tough luck for her," Badger said, his tone flat and unemotional. "Here's what we're looking for."

Under the command console was a panel with three fingertip-sized indentations. Badger pressed them in counterclockwise order, starting at twelve o'clock. The panel slid away. Badger directed Glint to shine the searchlight inside. Using wire cutters from the tool kit strapped to his waist, Badger cut the leads inside and withdrew a small heavy box made of a metalized plastic substance.

"This is what we came for. Now let's get out of here."