“How long once that door opens?”
Bobbie ran through the layout in her head. It was an old habit, beaten into her by years of training in the toughest military outfit humanity had ever created. Plan it through before you go in, because once the bullets start flying, the time for thinking is over. All you can do is move and react.
“Fifteen seconds to cycle the hatch closed. A few seconds to squeeze past the reactor housing; it’s a tight fit. But a good thirty seconds to equalize the pressure, so that’s our speed bump. Once the atmo in the crawlspace is equalized, I can be through that inner hatch in less than five.”
“Naomi? Can you keep our guest out of the controls for the next minute so we don’t cook our only good Martian?”
“Hey, Cap, that’s low,” Alex said with a laugh. Bobbie found it reassuring and terrifying that they could joke at a time like this.
“Bobbie,” Naomi’s voice said, gentle but firm. “No way he gets that reactor on while I’m alive.”
“Copy that. Draper is a go on your mark.”
Holden simply said, “Okay.”
The hatch in front of her vibrated under the palm of her vacuum suit’s glove as Naomi cycled it open. A faint puff of vapor escaped as the hatch popped open. Bobbie pulled herself inside, squeezing into the curved space between the inner hull of the ship and the outer shielding of the Roci’s reactor core. The hatch began to cycle closed behind her.
“Governor Houston,” Holden said over the radio. “I’m sending this over the 1MC so I know you can hear me. It won’t compromise your position at all to at least open a dialogue.”
Bobbie pulled herself around the curve of the reactor to the inner hatch. The panel glowed red with the lock symbol, and the status read, NEG ATMOSPHERE. The timer in her HUD showed only ten seconds had elapsed, so the outer door wasn’t even finished cycling. Almost forty seconds, then, before she could pop the inner hatch and go kick this Houston’s ass up one side of the ship and down the other. She pulled the heavy recoilless pistol from the harness on her chest and double-checked the ammo counter. Ten self-propelled high-explosive antipersonnel rounds. If Houston forced her to shoot him, they’d be cleaning up red stains for a month.
Bobbie had served on ships most of her life. She wasn’t scared of a little mopping.
“Come on, man,” Holden said. “At this point, we can keep you from doing just about anything. Sooner or later, you’ll need a snack.”
To her surprise, Houston’s voice answered. “Naw. Found your mechanic’s beer fridge down here. Had a big bag of sesame sticks in it. Jalape?o-flavored. Bit spicy for me, but still tasty.”
“Better not be drinking my fucking beer,” Amos said in that same nonchalant voice.
“Anyway,” Holden cut in, “we still have a situation. You’re not going to be able to take the ship, and I’d really like to start using it again. How do we come to some sort of agreement?”
Bobbie heard the first hiss of the atmosphere system outside her suit. The pressurization was almost done. She held the pistol in her right hand and gripped the door with her left. The second it showed green, she’d be in the room with that asshole.
The asshole said, “I don’t know that we do. You’re right. I can’t get past that diagnostic lockdown. That was smart work, by the way. But I figure I can probably get the reactor back online from in here, and then I figure I can collapse the bottle if I just find the right wires to pull. You figure the same way?”
“Well,” Holden started, but the light on the inner hatch clicked green and Bobbie yanked it open.
The main console for the reactor would be to her left as she entered the compartment. It was likely that Houston was using that workstation, so that was her first target. If she pushed off hard, she’d come out of the small hatch like a missile, do a quick flip to land feetfirst on the opposite bulkhead. From there she’d have open sight lines to the entire engineering deck. Nowhere for Houston to hide.
Bobbie gripped the edge of the hatch and pulled with all her strength to launch herself into the room. She had to—
Something crashed into the side of her helmet and sent her into a flat spin through the air. She tried to get her hands up to keep from crashing facefirst into the bulkhead, and only half succeeded. Her left arm crumpled under her, and she felt something tear with a wet heat in her shoulder. She bounced off the wall and saw Houston standing on the bulkhead above the access hatch, mag-booted in place, and holding a heavy fire extinguisher with a dent in the bottom.
Miraculously, the gun was still in her hand. Blackness creeping in at the edge of her vision, Bobbie tried to line up a shot. Houston launched himself off the wall with one strong kick and brought the extinguisher down on her hand in a baseball-bat-style swing. She felt two of her fingers break, and the gun and extinguisher flew off in opposite directions across the room.
The deck seemed to swim up to meet her. She caught a glimpse of Houston spinning off toward the ceiling. She managed to turn on the mags in her glove and pull herself down long enough to get her boots locked onto the deck plating. If this was going hand-to-hand, she’d want leverage, and that meant planting her feet. She turned the boots’ mags almost up to full, and watched Houston catch himself on the ceiling.
She spread her arms wide, though from the tearing sensation in her left shoulder, she didn’t think that one was going to be much use. And the broken fingers in her right hand made grappling or throwing a punch problematic.
“You’re lucky you’re wearing that suit,” Houston said, gulping to catch his breath. “I put a dent in that helmet woulda knocked your brains out without it.”
“And you,” Bobbie said, “are very lucky it’s this suit. I’ve got another one.”
“Well. We gonna talk or are we gonna dance?”
“They’re playing my—” Bobbie started, then Houston launched himself off the ceiling straight at her. She was expecting it. Getting someone else to talk while you threw a punch was an old trick. The moment he left the bulkhead above her, she was already shifting her body to the left and rotating through her hips. As Houston sailed past, she brought her right elbow into his chin.
Houston’s teeth slammed shut with a crunch that meant he’d cracked a few, then his whole body cartwheeled past her and into the wall with a thud. She kicked her mags off and pushed over to him, wrapping her right arm around his neck for a choke hold. It was unnecessary. His eyes were rolled up in his head, and he was breathing blood bubbles out of his ruined mouth. One and done. Just like the old days.
“I put our guest to bed,” Bobbie said over the radio, then hauled Houston over to the wall panel and removed the locks on the hatch. “Amos, take that bomb off the door before I open it, ’K?”
Bobbie sat in the galley, her left arm in a sling, and her right hand in a cast that the ship had spun for her out of carbon fiber. Holden sat across from her, a steaming cup of coffee on the table held down by the gentle 0.3 g Alex was flying them at.
“So,” Holden said, then paused to blow across the top of his coffee. “Turns out that guy had a few more skills than I clocked him for. Thanks for saving my ship.”
“I kind of feel like it’s mine, too,” she said with a smile. Holden was Holden. He’d need to take the weight for every bad thing that happened, and to overstate his appreciation for the good ones. It’s what made him him. He projected selfless heroism on everyone because that’s what he wanted to see in people. It was the same thing that caused most of the problems in his life—most people weren’t who he wanted them to be—but this was a nice moment. Ship safe. No one dead. Not even Houston, though if someone didn’t keep an eye on Amos, that might change.
“So it’s funny you should say that,” Holden said. He’d paused over his coffee long enough that she’d sort of forgotten what she said. “Would you like to buy the ship from me?”
“I—” Bobbie started, then, “Wait, what?”
“Naomi and I are thinking of pulling the ripcord. We’ve been doing this shit for a lot of years. It’s time to find a quiet spot somewhere. See how we like that for a while.”
It was more of a hit than anything Houston had managed. The ache started just below her ribs and spread up. She didn’t know what it meant yet.
“Is everyone else on the crew …?” Bobbie said, then wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.
“No. As Naomi recently pointed out to me, Alex will die in that pilot’s chair. Whoever buys the ship will have to be okay with that. I can’t speak for what Amos plans to do, you know, after.”
After. He meant after Clarissa died.