Alex was up and heading toward his crash couch before he fully registered what was going on. Bobbie was beside him. They both threw their breakfast trays and drink bulbs into the recycler on the way out, long training identifying anything that wasn’t bolted down as a potential projectile if the ship’s vector changed too suddenly. The staccato vibration of the PDCs was already ringing in the decks, but Alex couldn’t imagine what could have gotten near enough for that kind of close combat without being noticed. The alarms were still going off when they reached the corridor and one of the marines – Sergeant Park, his name was – gathered them up.
“No time to get you to your quarters. There are some spare couches we can put you up in over here.”
“What’s going on?” Alex said, trotting to keep up.
“The relief ships are firing on us,” Park said.
“What?” Bobbie snapped.
Park didn’t break stride, opening a hatch into an empty meeting room and ushering them in. Alex dropped into the embrace of a crash couch, strapping himself down with an efficiency of long habit and deep training. His mind was tripping over itself.
“Someone faked military transponder codes?” he said.
“Nope, they’re our birds,” Park said, checking Alex’s straps.
“Then how —”
“We hope to beat that answer out of them when the time comes, sir,” Park said. He switched to Bobbie’s chair and checked her straps too while he spoke. “Please remain in your couches until we signal that it’s safe to get out. Not sure what we’re looking at, but I expect this may get —”
The ship lurched hard, snapping the gimbals of the couches forty-five degrees to the deck. Park shifted, bracing just before he hit the wall.
“Park!” Bobbie shouted, reaching for the straps that held her in. “Report!”
“Remain in your couch!” the marine shouted from behind Alex and below him. The press of thrust gravity sank him deep into the gel. A needle slid into his leg, pumping a cocktail of drugs into his bloodstream that would lessen the danger of stroke. Jesus, this was more serious than he thought.
“Park!” Bobbie said again, and then a string of obscenities as the marine stumbled out the door and into the corridor, leaving them behind. “This is fucked. This is so fucked.”
“Can you get anything?” Alex shouted, even though she was only a meter and a half away. “My control panel’s locked out.”
He heard the sound of her breath over the distant vibrations of the PDCs, the deeper tones of missiles launching. “No, Alex. I’m getting the stand-by screen.”
A loud fluting groan passed through the deck, rattling the couches as they shifted again. Whoever was at the helm, they were putting the ship through its paces. Along with the deep, recognizable reports of the ship’s weapons, there were other sounds, less familiar ones. Alex’s mind turned all of them into damage from the enemy, and at least some of the time, he was sure he was right. His throat was tight, and his gut hurt. He kept waiting for a gauss round to pass through the ship, and every second it didn’t happen made it feel more likely that it would.
“You doing all right?” Bobbie said.
“Just wish I could see what was going on. Or do somethin’ about it. Don’t mind fighting, but I hate being spam in a can.”
His stomach lurched, and for a long moment, he mistook the sudden weightlessness for nausea. His crash couch shifted to his left, Bobbie’s to her right, until they could almost see each other.
“Well,” Bobbie said. “They got the drive.”
“Yup. So that thing where you and Avasarala thought maybe someone was appropriating MCRN ships and supplies?”
“Look pretty smart now, don’t we?”
The couches shifted again as maneuvering thrusters on the ship’s skin fought against the massive inertia of steel and ceramic. The throbbing of PDCs and report of missile launches made a rough background music, but it was a quiet that caught Alex’s attention.
“The bad guys,” he said. “They stopped shooting.”
“Huh,” Bobbie said. Then a moment later, “Boarding action, then?”
“What I was thinking.”
“Well. How long do you want to stay in these couches before we go try to scare up some weapons?”
“Five minutes?”
“Works for me,” Bobbie said, taking out her hand terminal. “I’ll set a timer.”
The door of the meeting room cycled open at three minutes, twenty-five seconds. Three marines floated through in light battle armor, bracing against the doorframe and holding assault rifles at their sides. The first one – a thin-faced man with a scar running down the side of his nose – moved forward. It struck Alex that if the bad guys, whoever they were, had Martian warships, they probably also had Martian armor, but the thin-faced man steadied himself against the desk.