“Two thousand kilojoules. We call them spine crackers.”

“You smuggled arms onto my ship, Sergeant?”

“Just felt a little naked without ’em.”

“I’ll overlook it this time,” Bull said and raised his hands, rallying the troops to him. They took cover behind the half-closed door. Verbinski crawled out onto the surface and peeked over the side, out and back fast as a lizard’s tongue. Half a dozen bullets split the air where his head had been. The Martian floated in the air, his legs in lotus position, as he armed the little black grenade. Bull waited, Holden and Corin at his side.

“Just to check,” Holden said. “We’re throwing grenades into the place that controls the reactor?”

“We are,” Bull said.

“So the worst-case scenario?”

“Worst-case scenario is we lose and Ashford kills the solar system,” Bull said. “Losing containment on the reactor and we all die is actually second worst.”

“Never a sign things have gone well,” Holden said.

Verbinski held up a fist, and everyone in the group put their hands over their ears. Verbinski did something sharp with his fingers and flicked the black cassette through the gap between the door and its frame. The detonation came almost at once. Bull felt like he’d been dropped into the bottom of a swimming pool. His vision pulsed in time with his heart, but he pushed the joysticks forward. His ears rang and he felt his consciousness starting to slip a little. As he maneuvered his mech through the space into engineering, it occurred to him that he was going to be lucky if he didn’t pass out during the fight. He had a broken spine and his lungs were half full of crap. No one would have thought less of him if he’d stayed behind. Except he didn’t care what people thought about him. It was Ashford who cared about that.

The fight on the other side was short. The grenade had been much worse for the defenders. Half of the soldiers had dropped their weapons before all of Bull’s people made it in. Only Garza had held out, holding the long corridor between main engineering and the communications array board until Corin had stepped into the space and shot him in the bridge of the nose, doing with a pistol what would have been a difficult shot with a scoped rifle. They took half a dozen of Ashford’s men alive, the prisoners zip-tied to handholds in the bulkheads. None of them had been Bull’s.

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They found Ruiz under a machining table, curled with her arms around her knees. When she came out, her skin had a gray cast to it, and her hands were trembling. Naomi moved around her, shifting from a display panel to the readouts on the different bits of equipment, checking what was being reported in one place against what it said elsewhere. Holden hovered behind her like the tail of a kite.

“Anamarie,” Bull said. “You all right?”

Ruiz nodded.

“Thank you,” she said, and then before she could say anything else, Naomi sloped in, stopping herself against the desk.

“Was this where Sam was working?” she asked.

Ruiz looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending. When she nodded, it seemed almost tentative.

“What are you seeing?” Bull said. “Can you shut it down?”

“If you just want to drop the core, I can probably do that,” Naomi said. “But I don’t know if I can get her started again, and there are some folks on the ship who might want to keep breathing. Controlled shutdown would be better.”

Bull smiled.

“We need to shut everything down,” Holden said. “The reactor. The power grid. Everything.”

“I know, honey,” Naomi said, and Holden looked chagrined.

“Sorry.”

In one of the far corners of the deck, someone yelped. Corin came gliding across the open space, serenely holding in a choke an Earther Bull didn’t recognize. It occurred to him that she might be having too much fun with this part. Might not be healthy.

“I don’t know what Sam put in place to sabotage the comm laser,” Naomi said. “I have to do an audit before I can undo any of it. And without—” Naomi stopped. Her jaw slid forward. She cleared her throat, swallowed. “Without Sam, it’s going to be harder. This was her ship.”

“Can you just take the laser off-line?” Bull asked.

“Sure,” Naomi said. “As long as no one’s shooting at me while I’m doing it.”

“And how about turning up the nitrogen in the command enough that everyone up there takes a little nap?”

“I can help with that,” Ruiz said. Her voice sounded a little stronger.

“All right,” Bull said. “Here’s what we’re doing. Nagata’s in charge of engineering. Anything she says, you do.” Ruiz nodded, too numb to protest. “Your first priority is get the laser off-line so none of those pendejos in control can fire it. Your second priority is to tweak the environmental controls on the command deck. Your third priority is to shut down the ship so we can bring it back up, see if Mister Holden’s ghost is going to keep its promises.”

“Sir,” Naomi said.

“Corin!” Bull shouted. The coughing stopped him for a moment. It still wasn’t violent, and it didn’t bring anything up. He didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. Corin launched herself to the control board. “You and Holden head up the external elevator shaft with a handful of zip ties. When everyone up there’s asleep, you two make sure they don’t get confused and hurt themselves.”

Corin’s smile was cold. Might be that Ashford wasn’t a problem he’d have to solve. Bull tried to bring himself to care one way or the other, but his body felt like he’d been awake for a week.

“Why am I doing that?” Holden asked.

“To keep you out of her way,” Bull said. “We’ll keep your XO safe. We need her.”

He could see Holden’s objections gathering like a storm, but Naomi stopped them. “It’s okay.” And that seemed to be that.

“Alex is going to the Roci to shut down whatever we left on,” Holden said, shrugging. “I’ll help him with the EVA suit before I go.”

“Okay,” Bull said gravely. He was willing to pretend they’d struck some kind of compromise, if that helped. He heard the sound of men laughing and recognized the timbre of Sergeant Verbinski’s voice. “Excuse me.”

The mech clanked across the deck, magnetic locks clinging and releasing. The others all floated freely in the air, but with three-quarters of his body dead and numb, Bull knew he wouldn’t be able to maneuver. It was like he was the only one still constrained by gravity.




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