“Well… fine.” Quincy cleared her throat. “Are we… still expecting boarders?”

“No. Let me put this on all-ship—” Ky switched channels. “Status report, everyone. Osman tried to double-cross us, have someone carry a limpet mine aboard. We won the toss. Our mine detonated his, both of them in his air lock. His ship’s disabled, losing air out the open air lock, and some of his crew are… gone. We’re in pursuit now, trying to match courses and rotation; we still have his allies to worry about, but we have a couple of hours’ grace. Stay in your pressure suits, but you can open up and have something to eat.”

A moment’s silence, then a cheer from somewhere back down the passage. “Does this mean I don’t get to shoot anyone?” Rafe asked.

“Not at the moment.”

“Too bad. What are your next plans, Captain?”

“I’m working on them,” Ky said. “I didn’t expect what did happen.”

“Don’t admit that,” Rafe said. “I was admiring your prescience. I expected treachery, but not that he’d mine our ship before he got you and the implant.”

“He wanted the mine in place,” Ky said. “That was easy to figure. He could have set it off later. But I failed to consider that both mines might detonate together in his ship… and I should have.”

“Ma’am, with your permission I’ll go remove the booby traps I set up before someone bumps them.”

“Of course, Martin,” Ky said.

“I’d have thought the EMP from one would’ve turned off his,” Stella said. “Don’t all mines have electronic controls?”

“Yes,” Ky said. “But the limpets like his are also pressure-sensitive—it’s what keeps you from prying them off your ship if you find them before they go off. I got just a glimpse, but it looked like ours hit the limpet square on, with enough force to knock the man carrying it back into the air lock… and then it was just the usual few seconds’ delay.”

“Well, food sounds good to me,” Stella said. “I’ll be in the galley if you need me.”

“We have a problem,” Lee said. “Their ship’s moving more irregularly… I can still match it, but until something smooths out their motion, our artificial gravity’s going to be hard put to cope with the irregularities.”

“Try it,” Ky said. “I’ll let everyone know to expect some problems.”

Minutes crawled by. Ejecta from the other ship’s air lock flashed against their defensive screen, but nothing penetrated. The scans showed the other ship’s complex motion. The air lock was forward of the ship’s center of mass, so its effect as a maneuvering reaction engine had created an erratic rotation rather than a smooth roll about the center axis. Lee edged Gary Tobai in slowly, using the nav computer to model and then match that eccentricity.

“If we aren’t matched exactly, their greater mass could give us a fatal whap,” he said. “The least relative motion’s close to their center of mass… that’s where we should grapple. Nearscan’s accurate enough, but there’s too much data with all that junk she’s spewing.”

“You think it’s too dangerous?” Ky asked.

“Dangerous, yes. Too dangerous… compared to what, I’d have to say.”

“I don’t want to lose that ship,” Ky said. “If it keeps losing atmosphere and tumbling, it could be ruined… or Osman might find a way to get it back in operation.” If only she’d had a trained boarding team… the military could do it; if she’d had a squad of Slotter Key marines… but nobody on her ship—except her, and she could not leave the ship—could go out there, board a tumbling ship, and deal with whatever was inside. If the sturdy traditional Vatta systems reset themselves—and they might—Osman could regain control, and then… then things would be far worse.

And time was ticking away. The enemy warships would be in range in a few minutes.

She had the other mine. She had the skills herself… or she had had them, what was now a year and a half ago, standard. Her scores on EVA maneuvers had always been clears, no faults.

On maneuvers she had practiced repeatedly, in the zero-g gyms. Standard maneuvers, in standardized conditions. This was… this was nonstandard.

A dull clank reverberated up the main passage. From the hull? Something had made it through the screens?

“Helmets!” Ky said, before analysis had begun to catch up with instinct. She’d forgotten, she’d turned the exterior analysis module off. “The hatch—” She was moving now, down the passage, boosting the implant feeds, grabbing for pickups as she went.

Air lock in use, the implant told her. Outer hatch open, inner hatch shut… “Shut outer hatch,” she said, to the implant.

UNABLE TO COMPLY. PHYSICAL BLOCK OF OUTER HATCH, came up on her display.

Jim had closed it. She knew she had secured both hatches. But emergency hatches could be opened from either side—

A blinding flash of insight: not all those hurtling bodies out of Osman’s air lock had been casualties. His crew was trained in boarding techniques, and she had not sent anyone outside to be sure their hull was clean… idiot that she was, with that misplaced sympathy for the crew she’d assumed was dead or dying. After a moment, her heart steadied again, and she felt an icy calm.

“Enemy aboard,” she said. “Everyone get your suits sealed; section seals coming down.” Her implant showed who was where… scattered, since she’d given them permission to relax from the first alert. Two in the head, one in the galley, some at duty stations, some in their bunks. The icons moved now, but not quickly enough… the section seals came down, securing them wherever they were, with whatever weapons they had in hand at the moment.

“Expect decompression,” she said. It was the simplest way for the enemy to disable them; they were probably rigging a way to shut the ship up again quickly. She herself was now cut off from the bridge, from her cabin, from the other mines in cargo 3; the elegant little handgun she’d bought at Lastway, loaded now with frangibles, was the only weapon she had. Other than the one between her ears.

That one stopped her before she entered the last stretch of the passage to the air lock, still out of sight of the enemy. Her implant’s display gave her a visual of the air lock… two figures in pressure suits. What blocked the outer hatch was a suit of space armor, apparently immobile. Through the implant controls, she zoomed the image. Inside the faceplate of the armor, a ghastly image—a face blue-gray, mouth open, eyes wide with horror, dulled with death. She changed the focus of the pickup, and saw that the two pressure-suited figures were indeed working on the inner hatch, attaching the ends of a hydraulic cylinder… they did not appear to be safety-lined in yet, though she saw coils of line around the shoulders of one of them. She didn’t recognize the weapons they were carrying, but the tool set they were using on the hatch would certainly open any other hatch in the ship, in time.

If there was enough pressure—and she opened the inner hatch—then they could be blown out themselves… if that armor wasn’t stuck too tightly. It probably was; they wouldn’t have left themselves in that vulnerable position. The implant gave her a quick calculation of the amount of force needed to dislodge the armor… no, they’d wedged it in well. It would take another fifty kilograms of mass, and she didn’t have that handy, not with the mines now sequestered behind a compartment lockdown, where they could do no good. She could manually open and shut each one, but she knew that would take too long.

Well… she did have fifty kilos of mass, but if she let go the safety grabons and used her own body to blow them out the lock, then she’d be out there, accelerating away from her own ship. Not where she wanted to be… not a good tactical choice.

She found another vid pickup just inboard of the air lock and aimed it up-passage. The packing cords that had launched her mine lay in a tangle. She could tie onto them as safety anchors; they’d pull her back. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. But neither would letting Osman and his crew aboard. How many of them were there outside? She didn’t have enough external pickups; the implant couldn’t give her that information.