Bull’s head was swimming. He felt like he’d just run twenty miles in the hot New Mexican sun. He clapped his hands together less to command the attention of the people in the lock and more to bring himself back to awareness.

“That shaft’s in vacuum,” he said. “If that’s the way we’re going, we need to get suited up. Lockers are over there. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.” A massive blow rang against the airlock door. Then another. “Might want to hurry,” he said.

“You aren’t going to fit,” Verbinski said. “Not with that contraption.”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “Okay.”

“Come on, big boy,” the sergeant said. “Let’s get you out of that.”

No, Bull wanted to say. I’m all right. But Juarez and the other marine were already shucking him out of his brace, then out of the mech that Sam had made for him. He was a cripple again. That wasn’t true. He’d been crippled ever since the catastrophe. Now he just had one fewer tool.

He’d worked with less.

The banging on the airlock door was getting louder, more intense. Along with the impact, there was something that sounded like tearing. He imagined the powered armor picking up handfuls of steel between massive fingers and pulling back, ripping at the skin of the ship. He clambered over to his mech, his body flowing out behind him, useless as a kite. He popped open the storage and took what was left of his pistol’s ammunition and his hand terminal. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the flat black package that he took out next. And then he did.

“If we’re not staying, we’d best leave,” Verbinski said.

“Let’s go,” Bull said, pushing the grenades into the pouch on the EVA suit’s thigh.

Naomi cycled the door to the shaft. The sounds of the attack grew fainter and farther away as the air leaked out, and then the shaft was open below them. A full kilometer’s fall to the trapped elevator, and then another past that toc what? Ashford? Certain death? Bull didn’t know anymore what he was running from. Or to.

One by one, they pushed off, pulling themselves through the vacuum. Verbinski and the security man, Naomi and the marine, then Bull and Juarez. Without discussing it, they’d all paired off with someone who wasn’t theirs. In Bull’s sagging mind, that seemed important.

“Juarez?” Verbinski said on the radio, and Bull was surprised to hear his voice.

“Sir.”

“If you get a good shot, you think you could crack the visors on those suits?”

“Your suit, maybe,” Juarez said. “I keep mine in pretty good condition.”

“Do your best,” Verbinski said.

Bull felt it when the enemy force breached the airlock. He couldn’t even say what it was exactly. Some little press of a shock wave, a whisper-thin breath of atmosphere. He looked down past his dead feet, and there was light at the bottom of the shaft where there shouldn’t have been. There were probably about a thousand safety measures slamming down in engineering right now. He hoped so. Far below, he saw a muzzle flash, but they were so far ahead, the bullet almost certainly hit the sides of the shaft and spent itself before it could reach them.

Juarez turned, his rifle steadied between his feet. The man’s face went calm and soft and the rifle flashed silently.

“Got one, Verb,” he said. And then, “Sergeant?”

Verbinski didn’t answer. He was still floating, skimming along the steel tracks that would guide the elevator, but his eyes were closed. His face was slack, and foam flecked his lips and nostrils. Bull hadn’t even known the man was injured.

“Sergeant!” Juarez yelled.

“He’s gone,” Cass said.

The rest of the trip to the elevator was a thing carved from nightmares. Bull’s body kept drifting wildly behind him, and his lungs felt full and wet. He’d stopped coughing, though. He didn’t know if that was a good thing. Just as they reached the elevator, a lucky shot from their pursuers took the security man in the back, blowing out his air supply. Bull watched the man die, but he didn’t hear it. The hatchway Corin had burned through the elevator’s base seemed too small to fit through, but he got one arm in and Naomi pulled him the rest of the way.

In the body of the elevator car, Juarez took a position firing down the hole at the pursuers. Bull didn’t know how much ammunition the marine had, but it had to be getting close to the end of his supply. Bull would have slouched against the wall if there had been any gravity. Instead he shifted his suit radio to the channel for Naomi.

“Give me a gun,” she said before he could speak. “Give me something.”

“You keep going,” he said. “Get to the top of the shaft.”

“But—”

“Maybe you can get the hatch open for them. Get into command.”

“You can’t access the controls from inside the shaft.”

“In this piece-of-shit boat, you never know,” Bull said. “Someone might have put a self-destruct button there. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“That’s your plan B?”

“I think we’re pretty much on plan Z at this point,” Bull said. “Anyway, you’re the engineer. There’s fuck-all you can do here. And I heard you with Holden before. You might as well get to see him again. Not like it costs us anything.”

He watched her face as she decided. Fear, despair, regret, calm, in that order. Impressive woman. He wished he’d had a chance to know her better. And if she was able to ship with Jim Holden and love him, maybe he wasn’t as bad as Bull thought either.

“Thank you,” she said, then turned and launched herself along the elevator shaft toward command and her lover. That was sweet, Bull thought. Juarez’s rifle flashed again and Bull shifted his radio frequencies to include the two marines.

“You two should go too. Head up top. See if you can storm the command.”

“You sure?” Cass said, her voice calm and professional. “We’ve got cover here. There won’t be a better place farther up.”

“Yeah, pretty sure,” Bull said.

“What about you?” Juarez asked.

“I’m staying here,” Bull said.

“Okay, bro,” Juarez said, then he and Cass were gone too. Bull thought about looking down through the shaft to see how close the enemy had come, but he didn’t. Too much energy, and if he got shot in the eye at this pointc well, that would just be sad. The little box of the elevator was a monochrome non-color, lit only by the backsplash from his own suit light. He took as deep a breath as he could. It was pretty shallow. He drew the grenades out from his pocket, one in either hand, and carefully dialed them down to the shortest fuse.

So he was going to die here. Not what he would have picked, but what the hell. It probably beat going back and having his spine grown back wrong. He’d seen guys who lived their whole lives in a drug haze fighting the pain of a bad regrowth. He hadn’t really let himself think about that before. Now it was safe to.

He tried to decide whether he regretted dying, but the truth was he was too fucking tired to care. And he couldn’t breathe for crap. He was sorry he hadn’t killed Ashford, but that wasn’t new. He was sorry he couldn’t avenge Sam or find out if Pa was alive. Or whether Ashford would actually be able to destroy the Ring. If he was sad about anything, it was that everything that was in motion now would keep on being in motion without him, and he’d never know how it went. Never know if anything he’d done had made a difference.

His hand terminal blinked. A connection request from Monica Stuart. He wondered for a moment what she wanted with him, and then remembered that Ashford had stopped the drum. Things had to be for shit in there. He routed the request to his suit. No pictures, but the voice connection would be enough.

“Bull,” the woman said. “We’re being attacked up here. I think Anna’s dead. What the hell’s going on down there? How much longer?”

“Well, we lost engineering,” he said. He felt a pang about Anna, but it was just one of many at that point. “Pretty much everyone in the attack party’s dead now. Maybe five folks holed up in the elevator shaft, but the bad guys got the top and the bottom of that, so we’re kind of screwed there. Managed to dump the core, but the grid’s still up. It’ll be enough to fire the laser. Ashford’s guys are probably in engineering putting that back online, and I don’t see we’ve got any damn way to stop him.”