The End Of The Fighting

Continued from here:

in order to wreck the ship, Gomez is flushing out the reaction mass;

while Tokugawa and Nielsen distract Gomez with noise at the other end of the bulkhead, Banning's gang burns through near the skin of the ship;

Banning and Vladimirovitch step through the bulkhead into an outer room with a door to the engine room;

hearing Banner enter, Gomez turns while drawing his gun;

Banning fires but misses;

when Gomez fires, recoil sends him backwards;

Banning, while pursuing, orders Vlad to stop the pump;

Gomez fires repeatedly but to no immediate effect in free fall;

Banning aims, fires and hits Gomez on the second attempt;

shot through the heart, Gomez dies but Vlad realizes that too much reaction mass has been lost.

Now all the bad guys are dead. This is a relief. The extended fight has lasted for forty two pages. The captain, the first and second mates, four crewmen and two passengers have survived the hostilities but must now learn how to survive in a spaceship with insufficient reaction mass. They have about fifteen pages left. They now face a purely technical problem, what CS Lewis called "the Engineer's story." At last we have merely a hard sf question dealing only with masses, orbits, the Jovian atmosphere (as in one "Flying Mountains" story) etc. We can trust Poul Anderson's characters to cope.