I fire, miss, and run.
Darkened hallways and empty rooms flash past. I heave myself around them, gripping girders to tighten my turns around corners.
“The Ascomanni corvette’s docked on 1C,” Pytha says. “Dead ahead.”
I skid to a halt. I hear them ahead of me, their tribal voices echoing as they move into the ship through the transfer causeways. Their boots rattle the metal. Each half again my weight, maybe more. They’ll cut off the route to the lift. I turn back the way I came, checking my gun’s display. The energy cartridge has seventeen pulls in it. I feel naked without my razor. But fighting isn’t the answer today.
“Pytha. Hallway to lift 11A is closed. I need you to guide me.”
“Take your next left,” she says without missing a beat. Conscious that Cassius is listening, judging, I take the left. “Two hundred meters.” I dash the distance, slow in my EVO suit. “Maintenance lift is on your second right.”
I reach the lift and press the call button. It doesn’t respond. A little sign’s been affixed to the door itself, apologizing rather crudely for the broken lift by means of a talking phallus. “Lift’s out,” I say, making efforts to measure my breathing.
“Back twenty meters, left, stairs are right there. Twenty down.”
“Back?” I ask, hoping I heard wrong.
“Now!”
I backtrack without running into the Obsidian and find the stairs to begin my descent. Two levels down the stairwell, I pause. I hear them. Their boots beat the stairs two levels above me. Through the metal grating I see their dark shapes, their milk-pale hair. The chant, called the khoomei, groans through the hall. It is a plea to Hel, Obsidian goddess of death, to receive her offerings. I clear the whole next flight of stairs with a single jump, racing down the levels as fast as I can. Behind me, like a dark avalanche, gaining, rumbling, and threatening to swallow me up, rush the raiders. Can’t see their numbers. Can’t hear what Pytha and Cassius are saying. My body is distant and numb and my mind still and focused.
I lose my footing on a rusted stair and nearly fall as the weight of the suit pulls me toward the ground. I stumble up, firing two quick shots with my pistol. I score a lucky hit. Someone grunts and a shadow of blood sprays on the wall as the green energy bolts hit meat, giving me time to reach the docking level.
I race through the metal door and close it behind me, cranking on the hatch as hard as I can to seal it. But the wheel stops and then turns against me as someone stronger on the other side begins to open it. I backpedal and fire three shots into the hatch, turning the metal wheel into red-hot slag and jamming the door. The muscle fibers of my arm tremble from the pistol’s recoil. They’ll be through the door in a moment, but I bought myself precious seconds.
“Hundred meters straight. Fifth left. Straight twenty meters. First right.”
I follow Pytha’s instructions, but as I turn to flee the door, I slam into someone and we both go down, hard. I roll as I fall and aim my pistol back up at my assailant. But it’s not an Obsidian. It’s the Gold girl. She’s limping to her feet, bearing half a dozen new wounds on her oil-slick skin. Her jacket is in tatters. She carries my razor in her hand. It is bloody to the hilt. Clumps of white hair cling to the gore.
How she is standing is a miracle. At her stomach, layers of skin and fat pull back along a six-inch gash to the right of the belly button. Looks like an axe wound. She hunches there, listening to the Obsidians hammering on the door.
“Give me my razor,” I say.
“Move.” She lunges toward the door with her razor and sticks it through the molten metal. A raider on the other side screams and she draws the razor back. Blood hisses as the molten metal turns it to vapor.
“Where’s your ship?” she asks, turning on me with wild, incandescent eyes. The door wheezes as the Obsidians knock half of it off its hinges. “Where is your gorydamn ship?” The Luna accent falters under the adrenaline in her voice, replaced by something very different. The wound in her gut is leaking blood badly.
“This way.” I move to help her walk, but she flinches away. “Don’t be a fool. You can barely stand,” I say. Glancing back at the bending door, she relents with a hiss of air between her teeth and throws her arm around mine. We hobble fast as we can, putting the door behind us, passing through the cargo level, containers and cranes to every side.
We take a right. Cassius stands guarding the interior of the transfer bridge that connects our ship to the Vindabona, clad in his EVO suit and helm. He fires his pulseRifle over our heads at the pack that rounds the corner behind us. The distorted energy screams past my ears. There’s a howl. I glance back and see an Obsidian’s head disappear, neck spouting blood. Magnetically shot bolts as long as my forearm rip past us and embed themselves into walls. Then we’re past Cassius and stumbling into the narrow causeway. He follows behind me, his pulseRifle roaring as he unloads the last of its battery into an Obsidian warrior who jumps into the causeway after us. The man’s torso tears in half and spins backward, leaving his legs behind on the causeway. Cassius kicks the legs off the ship.
“Disengage!” he shouts to Pytha. Our bulkhead door seals, closing off the causeway as I spill with the Gold girl to the transfer bay floor inside the Archimedes, panting and soaked with sweat and blood. The girl leans her forehead against the metal floor and coughs in pain. Pytha pulls an emergency disengage from the Vindabona and we bank away. Cassius stares down at me. I feel his rage, despite his helm’s smooth visage.
There’s silence except for weeping from the crew we rescued. They’re sprawled like us on the floor, huddled together, some in exaltation, others still in fear, not yet believing that they could possibly be safe. They’re not.
“You idiot,” Cassius says down at me. “What the hell were you thinking?” Before I can answer, he kicks my razor from the Gold’s hands. He bends, as if to grab her face to look for the dread mark on her cheek, when the floor of the Archi opens up between us. He twists back and away as a fist-sized gray blur shrieks through and then goes out through the ceiling with a monstrous gasp of air. A hole has been ripped in the ship. Depressurization sirens scream. Red pulses from the overhead lights. Another railgun slug pierces our hull, slamming through the floor up through the body of the paunchy Red man we rescued, spraying us with his blood. Pytha shouts something in our coms. Pressure screams out of the holes. Then the cellular armor slides over the external damage and the mad gout of air stops. The sirens cease their wailing, but the warning lights continue to throb.