25

Sucker Punch

We've congregated in the observation deck, which has the highest and most comfortable gravity now that I've spun up the ship again.

“So in other words, we're floating dead in space, everyone who is chasing us is getting exact updates on our position from the Snark about every five minutes or so, and it's going to take you a long time to fix the drive?” Miranda asks, peering at the shared 3-D map of the swarm, as if she had the skills to make any sense of it. Maybe by this time she does.

“Almost right. We're actually gliding along at almost one percent of lightspeed relative to the sun. But we can't stop or turn without the drive. And, yes, everyone knows where we are. They can catch up to us pretty quick, but only if they want to fly right past us at speed. If they want to match velocity and board, that'll take much longer.”

“And to fix the drive? How long?”

“That's the part I don't know. It's not just a step-by-step repair procedure. I have to design something to patch the cooling system with what I have.”

“Can we run the drive without cooling?”

“Sure, for maybe a moment or two before it either slags itself or blows the fuck up and we all die. It's possible I can pulse it every once in a while to charge the main batteries a bit, but we can't fly.”

I can't help but crack a smile. It's ridiculous. The universe just keeps conspiring to fuck us over in new and exciting ways.

“At least it would be quick. And really spectacular,” I say with a chuckle.

“You're crazy, Marcus. Don't you even take anything seriously?”

“Nah, that would be depressing.”

She rolls her eyes at me. But maybe with a hint of a smile.

“Pixie, we're outta good moves here. We just have to make the bad ones and appreciate the irony.”

Wait a minute.

“Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless, and I never thought I'd say this, we can call your family to bail us out?”

Miranda winces, hard, squeezing her eyes shut. “Can we please not?” she says, in a small voice.

“Yeah, I'm guessing there's some history there—”

“You have no idea.”

“—but it's probably better than being dead, kayno?”

“Can I think about that and get back to you? Seriously, though, Marcus, it won't work. We're about twelve light-hours from Mars, and there would be another twelve hours for them to send any message back. It would all be over by then.

I mean, yes, if the shooting stops and this all goes to arbitration, then being… me… will probably help. But out here, I don't think so.”

“What if we get on the radio, try and cut some sort of deal with the people who are out here? Would your name carry any weight with them?”

“Perhaps. But that would be a…. delicate… negotiation,” says Miranda. “It looks like there are a lot of different groups out here. Anyone we didn't come to an agreement with would have an incentive to make a grab for us. We could touch off another Artifact War.”

“Pixie, we made several big nuclear fireballs back there, out of somebody's relatives. I think we already crossed that item off our to-do list.”

“But that was self-defense!” says Leela.

“Everyone who fights a war claims they're defending themselves. Might even be true. It's still a war, and we're the smallest faction holding the biggest, shiniest prize.”

“Well, there's an idea,” says Miranda. “War. Play them off against each other. Maybe try to conduct an auction. Stall for time.”

I give her a searching look, but her expression is guileless, devoid of any complexity at all.

“Really?”

“Hey, you grew up out here, but I grew up in boardrooms. I'm good with people.”

“If you have blackmail material on them?”

“Are you still sore about that? That's different. You didn't matter. Now you do,” she says, with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, it's worth a shot.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

She's probably right. But I'm not in the mood to pat her on the back. I “didn't matter?” Why should I care what she thinks of me? Stuck-up little… oh, never mind.

I turn to Leela, who is studying the starmap with a giant cartoon magnifying glass as big as she is.

“Leela, if we jettison the Snark and try to hide… no, wait, that's no good. We have to assume it will find some way to keep broadcasting.”

Leela folds the magnifying glass up to the size of a walnut, and stows it in a pocket. “Yeah,” she says. “If we could find it, so could they. Besides, they probably have us on lidar by now, and the fact that we're sitting on something valuable may be the only thing preventing the next missile from being a nuke.”

“However,” she says, as a giant archaic filament light bulb appears over her head, “I think I have a better idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Railgun. Looking at some of these vector plots, I think that if some of the closer ones try to match courses, I can hit them pretty easily. If we hit the first one to try, I think the others will have to scatter, or at least not come in straight. Could buy us a few less enemies and a lot more time.”

“Okay, that's probably worth a try as well, although I'd prefer we try talking before shooting. We don't have a lot of railgun ammo left.”

“Okay,” Miranda says, all business, “looks like the plan is clear enough. You work on fixing the drive, I get on the phone and try to negotiate or at least stall, and Leela lines up the railgun in case that doesn't work.”

She sounds very sure of herself.

“Pixie, remember when you said you were the captain now? You do realize that didn't stick, right?”

“You can flog me for mutiny later,” she chirps, flashing a grin at me. “I'm just assuming that My Lord Captain would like to assign the technician to damage control, the businesswoman to negotiations, and the supercomputer to aiming the hyper-precision weapons system. Is that acceptable, High-Lord-Captain-Sir-Your Highness?”

Did she just make another joke? She's sure as hell smiling. I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with this new Miranda. But at least we're not fighting. Not with each other, anyway.

Great. Immanent death is all it takes to get us to play nice. Great start to a lifelong business relationship. Of course, about now, “lifelong” might be just enough time for her to finish a cup of coffee.

“Okay, okay… no bloody respect. But, yeah, let's get you on the horn. Most of this is going to be on you. That coolant manifold wasn't just a set of pipes. It had all sorts of sensors and flow-control pump circuitry. Stuff I can't rebuild here. But if I bodge something together, maybe we can cool the drive enough to not immediately go boom, if we don't push it too hard.”

“With all those people chasing us?”

“Uh, we'll run away very slowly while firing a big gun behind us. Relax, that's only Plan B. Plan A is you.”

“Plan A is me bluffing with no cards, Marcus.”

“Hey, it was your idea.”

“That doesn't mean I like it, it just means I don't have a better one.”

“Okay, then let's get going.” I say, turning to head for the ladder.

“Wait. Marcus, can you come here for a moment?” Miranda's voice sounds… odd. Tentative. I turn back, and she's staring up at me, blinking those giant cartoon eyes.

“We're not getting out of this, are we?” she asks. Worried, but calm. Resigned, maybe.

I kneel down so we're on the same level, and put both hands on her shoulders. “We're sure as hell gonna try. If you can't fight, you run. And if you can't run…”

“You walk,” she says. “You said that before. Except we can't.”

“So we crawl. I'm not giving up. I'm stubborn. You may have noticed that once or twice.”

“Yes,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Maybe it's starting to rub off on me.”

She grips both my forearms with her hands and squeezes briefly. Our eyes lock. “Good luck.” she says.

“You, too.”

And then I'm really gone, up the ladder, my brain already in the machine shop, imagining the connections the manifold had to make… maybe if I bend some spare conduit pipe, weld it into a central reservoir… but how would I get equal flow rates?

Ball valves? Just test and manually adjust them 'til distribution is even? But what would that do to throughput?

Damn. Lotta variables. Not sure anyone's jury-rigged a cooling system for a nuclear reactor before.

That's when Leela appears, still in an old-fashioned hoopskirt getup. She seems to be flying by holding onto some sort of lacy parasol, and she's shrunk the whole presentation to about a quarter size to fit into the shaft beside me.

“Told you,” she says.

“Told me what?” My brain is still full of pipes.

“She likes you.”

“Nonsense. We're just united by an outside threat. You may have forgotten what it's like, but us biological humans have stress hormones and things. We tend to lean on each other in a crisis. Besides, what do you care? I thought you hated her?”

Her face crinkles in a thoughtful expression under the lacy veil of her fancy hat. “I dunno about hate her. Maybe just mad at her. Anyway, I like you. And you like her. And she likes you. What's the problem?”

“The problem is that she's a sociopath. And she's only being flirty because she's trying to get on my good side. You heard her. I didn't matter. Now I do.”

That still stings. Why does that sting? Never mind. No time to navel-gaze.

“I'm kinda surprised you fell for it,” I tell her. “I, at least, am still well aware that she's kinda evil.”

“Well, maybe? But I thought you agreed that you both weren't good people?”

“What? Leela! That was a private conversation. Do you listen to literally everything that happens on this ship?”

Suddenly it starts raining on Leela's avatar, and the parasol is soaked.

“Um…” she stammers, looking sheepish, “… sort of. A little bit.”

“A little bit?”

“You're not understanding me. It's not like that. Look, I have sub-processes, okay? They monitor everything. I sort of can't not listen. But they don't always tell me. I mean, the rest of me. And if they do, and it's private, I… delete it.”

Suddenly something makes sense.

“So when Miranda was acting crazy after her first spacewalk, and I asked you to play it back, and you refused…?”

“I couldn't do it. I literally have no idea what happened back there. It's gone. I just know you got mad about something, and told me to forget it. So I did. I erased about ten minutes of memory. I don't have any idea what she did, or what you did, or anything.”

“Oh.”

There's a minute or two of silence as I reach the machine shop level, and start to rummage around behind the CNC mill for where I stashed the fragments of the primary coolant manifold. I think I stashed it in here. I think.

Hmmm. Socket wrench set. Impact driver. Bunch of spring clamps. Oh, there it is.

When I stand up, Leela's still beside me, full sized now, parasol vanished.

Being rained on. Looking sad.

“Leela, ” I say, slowly, choosing my words, “you're allowed to have opinions of your own, you know. Just because I have a normal emotional reaction when you do something inappropriate doesn't mean you have to delete pieces of your brain. From now on, don't erase anything unless you think it was private, or if I specifically tell you to, okay?”

“But you did!”

“It was an expression! I had no idea you could even do that! You don't have to do it again. Unless it's a privacy thing, in which case I'll ask.”

It stops raining on her, and her face brightens up. “Oh. Okay, thanks.”

“Now, I need you to run along and leave me alone, okay? I've got work to do, and unlike you, I can't think about two things at once. Play matchmaker when we're not about to be shot, stet?”

She rolls her eyes. “Okaaay, Dad. Bye.”

Not sure what to make of that, but I have work to do, and no idea how I'm even going to start. I stare at the mess of bent and shattered aluminum, of burnt and trailing wires, of melted plastic circuit housings. This could take days we don't have.

C'mon, Miranda. Bail our asses out of this.

But she doesn't.

It's four solid hours of silence and work, of ideas sketched out and discarded, before I get any notion how things are going. Miranda doesn't volunteer and I don't ask. There's nothing to be gained by distracting each other.

Then the whole ship jolts, not a vibration, but a singular strong shove. A familiar sensation. Someone, either Leela, or Miranda with Leela's guidance, has fired the railgun.

Negotiations, evidently, have broken down.

I don't ask, not at first. What would be the point? Doesn't change anything. But that railgun just keeps firing.

“Leela?” I ask, at a whisper, which doesn't make any sense at all, but instinct never does.

“Yeah?”

She pops in, a tiny figure sitting on the scaffold around the drive core, watching me take measurements.

“You're firing a lot. I take it things didn't work out so good?”

“Yeah, actually, they kinda did. Turns out we're all over the news, and the whole solar system knows what we're up to. They even knew there was a Builder artifact. So when Miranda broadcast pictures and video, and called for a cease fire, we started getting bids. Big ones.”

“I thought we weren't planning to sell?”

“Yeah, but she didn't tell them that. Just stalled for time, kept tightbeaming different ships, and conducting a whole blind auction type thing.”

“Sounds good. So why are we shooting?”

“Turns out if the stakes are high enough, people who get outbid try other means.”

“Oh. Damn. How many are coming after us?”

“Can't really tell yet. I'm holding them at bay for now, but if this keeps up, more people are probably going to figure smashing and grabbing is cheaper than paying.

“Fuck. Okay, I'll work as fast as I can.”

“Do you want to talk to Miranda?”

“No, don't distract her. Wouldn't help anything.”

I bend back to my work. More hours pass, punctuated by the occasional thump of the gun.

I'm in the machine shop, annealing the ends of some pipes I've finished bending to shape, when Miranda's voice breaks through my concentration.

“Ah… Marcus? I don't suppose there's any chance you'll be finished soon?”

“Well, I've worked out a sort of arrangement of pipes that will divide the coolant flow semi-evenly, but the drive computer won't be able to control it or send it to hotspots. It won't handle much, and we might have to shut it down every so often, but we'll be able to limp along. Best I can do, I'm afraid.”

“Yes, Marcus, I'm sure it's brilliant, but when?”

“Soon. Shouldn't take more than about eight hours.”

“Oh,” she says. And that's all she says. And the sound in her voice… it's not a good sound.

“I take it that I don't have eight hours. Why don't I have eight hours? And, come to think of it, why have we stopped shooting? Did you make some sort of settlement? But then why do I need to finish in less than—”

Miranda sighs in my ear. “Marcus, if you keep asking questions nonstop, I can't answer any.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“We're out of ammunition.”

“What? How did you manage to waste it all just brushing them back?”

Leela's voice comes in. “Eight armed torchships against a single stationary railgun? Given those odds, I'm content with three—no, wait, make that four—kills.”

“Oh, so things got serious. Right. So how much time do I have?”

“One of them is almost on us. Three hours, maybe.”

Three hours. Forever to wait, but not long enough to fix, well, much of anything, really. If it can be fixed in under three hours, you're probably using “fix” as a euphemism for “hit it with a wrench and hope.” And when you're fixing a nuclear reactor built with exotic alien super-tech that no one really understands to begin with, wrench-swinging grease monkeys need not apply.

I'm not going to be able to fix the drive. Can't run.

No railgun ammunition left. Can't shoot.

“Marcus?”

“Hold on. Thinking…”

Railgun ammunition…

“Leela, check my thinking here. A railgun can theoretically throw any kinda ferrous metal object, so long as it's the right size, stet?”

“Uh, yeah. Theoretically.”

“Except these railguns are made for precisely manufactured ammunition.”

“If you say so. Actually, here… let me read the manual while we're talking.”

“Showoff. Anyway, you can rewrite software pretty fast, yes?”

“Parts of me can. They sort of do it all the time, as part of… well, let's just go with 'yes.'”

“Could you loosen up the railgun code parameters so it'll fire out-of-spec shells?”

“Oh!” Leela sounds genuinely surprised. Which means she probably was, a few milliseconds ago. “You're going to load it with scrap steel!”

“Yep.”

“Yes, I think so. I just finished the tech manuals, and I'm reading the code now.”

“Okay, so if I turn some bar stock down on the lathe, make it symmetrical enough so it can be spin-stabilized…”

“Right with you. Working on the code now. I… ah… think we'll only get one shot at this.”

“You mean we may get one shot at this. If that load is off center enough to hit one of the rails, we get zero shots at this, with lots of exciting hull damage as a bonus prize.”

“Marcus is cracking jokes,” says Miranda. “That means things are bad, right? That usually means things are bad.”

“Well, let's see, we're outnumbered dozens to one, flying through space with no way to maneuver other than small chemical attitude thrusters, and we have no ammunition left for our single weapon. Yes, Miranda, things are bad. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stop fabricating an improvised Belter coolant manifold and start fabricating improvised Belter railgun slugs.”

“Okay, okay… uh… what should I do?”

“I don't know, keep talking, maybe? Get somebody else to throw a few shots at them?”

“So, perform a miracle.”

“Hey, I performed a buncha miracles just to get us this far. So, yeah, Pixie, it's kinda your turn.”

“Okay, images are coming up now. There's what we're dealing with.”

Miranda finishes wrestling her braids under the hood of her vacsuit, and peers at the display hanging in the air over the bridge. The image is still fuzzy, with some angles reconstructed by the computer systems, but what I see looks familiar indeed, a cylindrical torchship, capped at one end by a cargo lock interface, and at other by a brilliant drive flame, pointed at us, decelerating to intercept.”

“Looks a bit like the White Cat, except without the cargo hold,” she says.

“Yeah, it's a standard kind of design for mining craft. They're like tugboats—designed to push loads. Don't know what it was doing out here, but I don't think this is any sort of picket ship.”

She nods slowly. “Maybe I don't know what to look for, but I don't see anything that looks like a railgun. Or any other weapons.”

“Could just not be visible from this angle. Wouldn't count on anything we see here. Resolution's only so good. Won't be long now. They're about five hundred kilometers out. Leela, we prepped to go?”

Her avatar appears in what looks like an old-fashioned naval uniform, and snaps me off a sharp, probably ironic, salute.

“Yessir, the gun should be ready to fire. We're at about two rotations per minute, so we'll have to keep it moving, but we're all prepped other than that.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Keep the track unpowered until the last minute. I wanna look like we're floating dead in space, right up until we fire. If they see signs of life before that, they might try to soften us up first. We're going to time our shot with our spin, and move the gun as little as we can.”

A glance shoots around the room, bounces back and forth between all three of us. Leela's smiling. I know she can feel worry, but maybe fear is different for her. No glands. No adrenaline.

I think. That's how it works, right? I don't know.

Miranda looks determined, but her knuckles are just a bit white where they grip the console.

“Okay, ” she says, “makes sense. So… we just wait?”

“Yeah, shouldn't be long.”

I minimize the telescope image, punch up a course projection map, and wave my hand through it.

“I think they'll wait until they're pointing past us to make the final deceleration burn. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to see us through their own drive flame. I don't think they wanna come in blind.”

“How long?”

“About fifteen minutes,” Leela says, before I can answer. “Gun is charged and hot. I'll leave the final firing solution and trigger to you. First Law of Robotics, and all.”

I cock an eyebrow at her. “Didn't you just take down four ships full of people?”

She steeples her hands in a beatific posture and casts her eyes upwards to where a golden halo has suddenly appeared above her head. A moment later, her avatar changes altogether, to what I can only describe as a different… art style? Renaissance. Glowing colors. Elaborate light and shadow.

“Me? I'm a sweet angelic little giiiiiirrrrl. I just aimed. Miranda pulled the trigger. I'm letting you meat people do your own killing.”

I'm not sure if she's joking.

“Okay, okay. Everyone with a physical body, seal your vacsuit, have a seat, get strapped in. We don't have thrust, but if this goes wrong, things could get real bumpy real quick.”

We try to talk, pass the time as the ship looms closer, but trivial chat just seems to echo and fall flat before the enormity of what we're facing, and we shy away from anything more serious.

Leela is silent as a tomb, her avatar vanished, her attention who knows where?

Finally, her voice reappears, disembodied. “They're inside six kilometers,” she says.

“Okay, final firing solution is up, tracking, aaaand…”

I clench my hand around the stick, pull back slightly, rotate and pitch a bit, lining the projection reticle up with the image of the craft's primary drive assembly…

…press back on the smooth, flat surface of the trigger…

“… firing.”

Click.

Nothing.

And my display lights up with error messages. Ammunition overmass. No feed. Low capacitance warning. Irrationally, I squeeze the trigger once more, twice.

Nothing.

“Leela!”

“I see it! The gun's rigged to fire! You should be good to go.”

“I'm not. I'm getting a facefull of error messages here!”

“That's not right, I fixed all the—oh. Shit.”

“What?”

“Mother fucker,” she snarls. So much for her saintly little halo.

“I messed up. The gun's good to go. But the computer doesn't think it is. There's a whole bunch of safety checks I didn't find. Wrong section of code.”

“Can you disable them?” Miranda asks.

“Already working on it. Don't know how long. If you have a plan B, now would be the time.”

“Did you see me working out a plan B?”

“Well, then start!”

Shit.

I check the displays again. Five klicks out. Four and a half. Coming in hot, aligning with chemical thrust and braking with fusion, same time, smooth. He's not going to overshoot at all… he's just going to seat-of-the-pants the whole thing, throttle and stick and lots of chutzpah.

So, he's a Belter, then. He's pretty good at this, and he knows it.

You think you're slick as fullerene, don't you, pal? Just give me a drive repair and some ammunition, and leave your swarm of friends behind, and we'll dance. But kiss your sweet old momma goodbye first, and hand her some money to buy that black dress. But no coffin, 'cause they won't ever find enough pieces to have a corpse of you.

Of course, my drive does not miraculously repair itself and an old-fashioned dogfight, my fantasy duel in the sky, does not ensue. Instead, I sit here, stuck in the desert, waiting for the vulture to circle down. Vultures don't fight duels of honor.

Well, time for plan B indeed.

Two and a half clicks. Telescope. He's heeling over fast. Two clicks. He's opening his cargo bay doors…

“Leela! Gun! For fuck's sake!”

“Working on it! I cannae break th' law o' physics, Capt'n!” For some bizarre reason, she's trying out a Scottish accent. No time to wonder what that's all about.

Fifteen hundred meters. And out the open bay doors on the front…

Cargo crane. Can't be sure from this distance, but it looks like a General Electric, one of the big ship-towing models, claw the size of a Martian house, with an aramid-and-doped-fullerene cable as thick as a man's waist. He grabs us with that, we're not going anywhere, not without him along for the ride.

Plan B was dodge with the chemical thrusters so they couldn't board until Leela got the gun up. So much for plan B.

Nine hundred meters.

Well, I've got thirty seconds, maybe, to come up plan C. Spin the Cat to make her difficult to grab? Try to blind them with the lidar array?

Stand out on the hull and make rude gestures?

No time.

Incoming grapple. “Brace for impact!” I yell, somewhat redundantly, 'cause Miranda's strapped in, and Leela—well, she's bolted to the cargo rack.

I'm counting the seconds, three… two… one… and the hull rings, loud as a gunshot, a cacophony of scraping and creaking metal. I can barely turn my head enough to catch Miranda out of the corner of my eye, but she's clearly got her hands clamped over her ears.

Oh, yeah. She's not a Belter, never worked in vacuum. Not reason to have her eardrums replaced. She'll suffer from that if there's shooting. For a moment I think we should find her some hearing protection.

Stupid. Doesn't matter now. Somewhere outside the hull, that cable snaps tight and screams. I'm jolted sideways, for an instant, then slammed the other way, and then the world is chaos, as down becomes every direction, each for a fraction of a second.

This is no simple, slow, controlled cargo bundle capture. Whoever that pilot is, he's got balls of tungsten steel to even try such a high-speed grab. The Cat and the intruder bounce and haul against each other, two masses spinning around a common center, straining at the high-tech tether that binds us together. I've tucked my chin into my chest, neck flexed, every muscle in my body tight. I can't hear Miranda—she's behind a wall of noise that swallows everything.

How in the screaming blue fuck is that cable holding together? How has the grapple not torn free? How have we not simply ripped the crane off, or torn through the 'Cat's hull?

I can't imagine the forces involved, can't even think, really, can only hold on as “down” tries to decide which direction it's going to be. My display is a symphony of flashing red, and alarms are screaming, but they're nothing against the howl of tortured metal.

I can't tell if it's been seconds or minutes. I can't think. At least I know our guests aren't moving, either. They're smaller, they'll be shaken worse than we are. And no one get can get out an airlock in this storm, not without being bludgeoned, crushed, and folded into something compact and easy to carry.

Is it finally dying down, just a bit?

I hold fast.

It's an eternity before gravity reaches a consensus, with us orbiting, cable-held, around a common center. We're still swinging back and forth, but “up” has decided it's going to be towards one corner of the bridge ceiling.

Could be worse. We're canted sharply, almost completely sideways, but at least we're not upside-down. Even the loud creaking is blessed silence compared to a moment ago.

“Gun is up!” barks Leela's voice in my head.

“Too late,” Miranda groans. So at least she's alive, if still pretty shook up and voidsick. “They've grappled us. We're not getting off that without the main drive.”

“Yeah, I think we all noticed. I'm taking the shot anyway. Try to do some damage, slow them up. Is the gun in position?”

“Wasn't,” says Leela. “I'm moving it on the track now. Twenty-three seconds.”

“What? I said not to move it!”

“What are they gonna do, fly away? If they have us caught, we have them caught, too! Get on the damn gun!”

She's right. I grab the stick and pull up the display. At this distance, the front of the other craft is a wall. I back off the magnification, scan around the front end… sensor booms, cargo grapple, airlocks… crane. Maybe if I aim for that, I can cut us loose. Under the right corner of the reticle, a section of hull is painted, a cartoon of a grinning roughneck in an armored vacsuit giving a big thumbs-up gesture, over meter-high letters: “Tuf Voyaging.” I wonder idly if the misspelling is intentional.

Never mind. Line up the shot. We're swinging, hard, and the crane heaves back and forth in my view, as the railgun, and the Cat's software, try to compensate.

“Leela,” I mutter, “this had better fucking work.”

She doesn't answer. I press the trigger back, hold it right at the wall, wait for the view to swing back… lead it just a fraction… Now.

The trigger just clicks. A jolt…

…And then the whole front of Tuf Voyaging bursts open, writhes, twists itself into an abstract sculpture of tattered metal, spinning shards, and spraying atmosphere. How can this much destruction play out in dead silence? Something in my brain rebels at the sensory mismatch. I somehow expect to be able to hear the noise, even muffled, through two hundred meters of vacuum.

I can't, of course. There's nothing. Just a spreading fog of escaped atmosphere, water and coolant jetting into the void and instantly boiling to cold steam, and then I duck involuntarily, squeezing into my seat as a torn section of structural beam comes pinwheeling right into my face, hits me.

No, not me, of course. The number seven camera I was looking through. My vision's full of static, and I have to switch cameras twice more before I find one that hasn't suffered a similar fate. Outside, the debris cloud is spreading… oxygen and nitrogen fog, boiling and freezing at the same time. Wall panels. Furniture. A piece of diamond laminate port window, torn like so much tissue paper by impact and explosive decompression. A shredded boot. A bobblehead doll of a grinning puppet, curiously intact, a figure from an old children's show I can't quite remember.

Ronnie… Romper? Something like that, anyway.

And spinning away to the left of my field of view, what looks like a body… not vacsuited. Not moving. Part of the leg is missing, a stump trailing blood.

I don't follow it. I'm scanning the wreckage. Tuf Voyaging spins and thrashes like a released balloon, with little more air to vent, but plenty of leftover momentum, bouncing at the end of the tow cable. I can hear it creaking through the hull.

I can't see the crane, or what's left of it, but we're still attached. Still stuck.

“Ho-lee crap, Marcus,” says Leela, “That actually worked. I'm seeing a lot of what I think is vaporized blood on the spectrometer. I don't think anyone is alive in there, and if they are, I doubt there's much they can still do. Can we get that cable cut?”

I'm cycling through external cameras, trying to find the electromagnet, the claw, or whatever it is that the corpse of Tuf Voyaging is holding onto us with, but I've lost too many. It's hiding somewhere in the static.

“Not quite yet. I'm gonna need a couple minutes to stabilize us, and we'd better give all that junk and shrapnel a few minutes to stop flying around. We'll also need to get some explosive charges ready—can't just saw through if it's under tension, or it'll whip around. Miranda, those charges are stored in the—”

“Marcus,” Miranda whispers.

“—hold, directly forward of the inner airlock, in a cabinet labeled—”

“Marcus!”

“What?”

“Look!”

Whatever she's seen, it's urgent. I switch cameras again, and I see it, too.

Long streaks of vapor, leaving the wrecking in a spray of angles. White, nebulous, throwing back the harsh light of our 'floods. Curving towards the White Cat.

EVA thruster trails.

I count six suits, maybe seven, but there's a chance I haven't seen them all. Too much gas, too many floating shreds of hull insulation and the detritus of shipboard life. But I can see the rifles. The shotguns. A heavy electric angle grinder. Gas cylinders and a torch.

They're coming for us. Coming to cut into our shell and scrape the meat out.

This isn't over yet.