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“You want to die? The pods will become murder pens.” Fig sighs, irritated she has to explain to us idiots. “The small ones are moving through the maintenance tunnels like they built them. Big ones prefer the halls. They’re not driving to objectives. They’re hunting. What do you want to bet they know where the prey will go? It’ll be a massacre.”

“Then you have a backup plan,” Volga says.

/> “Doll, I’m a freelancer. I always got a backup plan. There’s an emergency escape craft beneath the bridge level. Which is not in the schematics. If our luck holds, the freaks won’t know it’s there. I’m headed there myself, after a little detour.” She grins at us. “So, ladies. Whaddya say?”

THE PANDORA IS A HIVE of corridor fighting. A mass exodus flows through the ship. It isn’t just Julii’s soldiers on the Pandora. It is her entire household from Luna, which she was moving back to Mars. A miniature civilization of cooks, academics, researchers, accountants, and horse trainers floods to the escape-pod levels. I watch in wonder as a dozen of the beasts are herded through the corridors by old Obsidian women.

Fig’s detour took us to her stateroom, where she grabbed a backpack and a more peculiar item, a glossy black globe that contorts over the back of her neck to attach somewhat like a tick or a parasite. I’ve no idea what it is, but it makes her look like a hunchback. Volga stares at it in awe. Obviously she’s given up the pretense of Fig being our captive if she let her have that.

“Can I have my pistol back now?” Fig asks as we float upward toward the bridge through a maintenance corridor.

“No,” Volga says. “It is ours, for damages.”

“Takers keepers,” Fig says, giving the pistol a longing glance.

* * *

—

The closer we get to the bridge, the more sounds we hear. Twice, Fig saves us from running straight into one of the roving Ascomanni or whatever they are. We wait in the shadows of an armory amongst dead Grays as a pack passes.

When we hear them call to each other in joy, we know they’ve found their next victim. Fig motions us into the hall. It is empty. The gravity reverses as we run, growing lighter and lighter until we reach a security door marked with radioactive symbols. Fig reaches for something on her belt and pulls out a thin plastic container. Inside is a small gelatin disk. She inserts it into her eye. It expands and turns her irises Gold. A scanner appears in the door. Blue light flickers over her eye. The door opens.

“Retinal forger,” Volga mutters. “This is Julii’s personal escape craft?”

“Does it matter whose it is? Woman’s gonna pop with a baby yesterday and she’s off fighting. The maniac.”

Volga takes hold of her collar and pushes her through the opening door. It dead-ends in a maintenance closet filled with cleaning robots.

“Welcome, Madam Barca,” a nasty, manly voice says as Sevro au Barca’s face appears in a hologram. A reinforced door shields above us. Weapons appear on the walls. Expensive weapons. The Julii’s personal stash. Volga looks like she’s gonna faint from joy. “I don’t want an escape craft, she says. Ha! I told you you’d need one. Now scurry home and we’ll hunt whomever you pissed off together.” He waves and disappears. The panel on the far side of the room slides back to reveal a dark tube. I shove Volga to make her stop drooling after the guns.

“No, no, no,” Volga says as Fig heads to the tube. “I go first.”

“What if the ship is already gone? And this leads out into space?” I say. “Let her go first.”

“Or she could get in and shut us out,” Volga says, thinking.

“Slag it.” I dive into the tube.

Its gravity seizes me immediately, hurling me up the chute. It twirls a dozen times. My breath seizes in my chest. Metal whips past. My head grows heavy. Then gravity slows. My stomach whirls at the new sensations. The chute’s circular door opens and I fall into a plush leather chair, safe and sound. That was one hell of a slide.

I give a little whoop.

I find myself in a lounge, and it is already occupied. More than a dozen heavily armed Sol Guards and several bloodied Golds carrying heavy rifles turn to stare at me. And sitting directly across from me in a leather chair, in green metal armor with a weeping sun on the swollen abdomen, is Victra au Barca.

She tilts her beautiful head at me in amusement and then punches me in the face.

* * *

—

Reality returns in stuttering frames.

Not again. Not again.

The cabin is spinning. My stomach lurches. Sunlight rushes through a hole in the hull. Victra stands there holding on to the wall, firing out of the ship with a huge gun. Something punches two hundred miniature holes in the hull. People around me disappear in a red mist. Two tubes shoot out of my chair and jam into my nostrils. Volga wails somewhere behind me. Wind and light. A great huge roar. Victra is gone. Whipped out the hole in the hull. Trees through the windows. Then a hiss as my chair swallows me up in a cocoon of darkness.

THUUUUUUUMM.