Everything was dark. His arms and legs were secured. Ice began crawling through his veins, and he collapsed, shivering in the dark. Through the fog in his brain he could hear the steady whoosh of air cyclers, and the droning hum of superluminal space. The ice crawling through his veins reached his heart and he groaned as his chest began to ache and burn. Then the pain subsided, and his eyes drifted shut. He saw a flash of light and heard a fast-dying roar as explosive bolts blasted his canopy away and his flight chair ejected into space. Then came a painful silence as he sailed through the vacuum. Ithicus gazed down on the flowering explosion that had been his wingmate, Guardian Four, and then he saw his own nova fighter go rocketing toward the odd dozen Sythian missiles which were still tracking it. Those spinning purple stars quickly reached his needle-nosed Mark II and provoked another brilliant flash of light and accompanying cloud of fire. The flames quickly faded from an angry red to a pale, translucent gold, and then they died all together as their fuel abruptly dissipated and ran out.
