No one was in sight. Just a deck that looked like a machine shop with tool lockers and workbenches and a ladder set into one wall. Bookending the ladder were two hatches, one going toward the front of the ship, the other toward the back. Anna was thinking that she was most likely to run into crewmembers by going toward the front of the ship when there was a loud bang from the back and the lights went out.
Yellow LEDs set into the walls came on a moment later, and a genderless voice said, “Core dump, emergency power only,” and repeated it several times. Her helmet muffled the sound, but there was clearly still air in the ship. She pulled the helmet off and hung it from her harness.
Anna was fairly certain you only ejected the core in emergencies related to the engine room, so she moved to that hatch instead. With the constant rumble of the ship gone and her helmet removed she could hear faint noises coming through the hatch. It took her several long moments to figure out how to access it, and when she finally did the hatch snapped open so suddenly it made her almost yelp with surprise.
Inside, Melba was murdering someone.
A Belter woman with long dark hair and a greasy coverall was having her throat crushed by the mechanical arms Melba wore. The woman—Anna could see now that it was James Holden’s second-in-command, Naomi Nagata—looked like Melba had beaten her badly. Her arm and shoulder were covered in blood, and her face was a mass of scrapes and contusions.
Anna drifted down into the vaulted chamber. The reactor room’s walls curving inward like a church, the cathedrals of the fusion age. She felt an almost overwhelming need to hurry, but she knew she’d only get one shot with the taser, and she didn’t trust herself to fire on the move.
Naomi’s face was turning a dark, bruised purple. Her breath the occasional wet rasp. Somehow, the Belter managed to raise one hand and flip Melba off. Anna’s feet hit the decking, and her boots stuck. She was less than three meters behind Melba when her finger pressed the firing stud, aiming for the area of her back not covered by the skeletal frame of the mech, hoping the taser would work through a vacuum suit.
She missed, but the results were impressive anyway.
Instead of hitting the fabric of Melba’s suit, the taser’s two microdarts hit the mech dead center. The trailing wires immediately turned bright red and began to fall apart like burning string. The taser got so hot Anna could feel it through her glove, so she let go just before it melted into a glob of gooey gray plastic. The mech arced and popped and the arms snapped straight out. The room smelled like burning electrical cables. All of Melba’s hair was standing straight up, and even after the taser had died her fingers and legs continued to twitch and jerk. A small screen on the mech’s arm had a flashing red error code.
“Who are you?” Naomi Nagata asked, drifting in a way that told Anna she’d be slumping to the floor at the first hint of gravity.
“Anna. My name’s Anna,” she had said. “Are you all right?”
After the third injection, Naomi took a long, shuddering breath and said, “Who’s Anna?”
“Anna is me,” she said, then chuckled at herself. “You mean who am I? I’m a passenger on the Thomas Prince.”
“UN? You don’t look like navy.”
“No, a passenger. I’m a member of the advisory group the secretary-general sent.”
“The dog and pony show,” Naomi said, then hissed with pain as Anna tightened the bandage and activated the charge that would keep it from unwinding.
“Everyone keeps calling it that,” Anna said as she felt the bandage. She wished she’d paid more attention in the church first aid class. Clear the airway, stop the bleeding, immobilize the injury was about the limit of what she knew.
“That’s because it is,” Naomi said, then reached up with her good hand to grab a rung of the nearby ladder. “It’s all political bullsh—”
She was cut off by a mechanical-sounding voice saying, “Reboot complete.”
Anna turned around. Melba was staring at them both, her hair still standing straight out from her head, but her hands no longer twitching uncontrollably. She moved her arms experimentally, and the half mech whined, hesitated, and then moved with her.
“Fuck me,” Naomi said. She sounded annoyed but unsurprised.
Anna reached for her taser before she remembered it had melted. Melba bared her teeth.
“This way,” Naomi said as the hatch slid open above them. Anna darted through it, with Naomi close behind using her one good arm to pull herself along. Melba surged after them, reaching out with one foot to push off the reactor housing.
Naomi pulled her leg through just in time to avoid being grabbed by the mech’s claw, then tapped the locking mechanism with her toe and the hatch slammed shut on the mech’s wrist. The hatch whined as it tried to close, crushing the claw in a spray of sparks and broken parts. Anna waited for the scream of pain that didn’t come, then realized that the gloves Melba used to control the machine were in the mech’s forearms, several centimeters behind the point of damage. They hadn’t hurt her, and she’d sacrificed the use of one of the mech’s claws in order to keep the hatch open. The other claw appeared in the gap, gripping at the metal, bending it.
“Go,” Naomi said, her voice tight with pain, her good hand pointing at the next hatch up the ladder. After they were both through, Anna took a moment to look around at the new deck they were on. It looked like crew areas. Small compartments with flimsy-looking doors. Not a good place to hole up. Naomi flew through the empty air and the dim shadows cast by the emergency lights, and Anna followed as best she could, the feeling of nightmare crawling up her throat.
After they’d passed through the hatch into the next level, Naomi stopped to tap on the small control screen for several seconds. The emergency lights shifted to red, and the panel on the hatch read security lockdown.
“She’s not trapped down there,” Anna said. “She can get out through the cargo bay. There’s a hole in the doors.”
“That’s twice now someone has done that,” Naomi replied, pulling herself up the ladder. “Anyway, she’s wearing a salvage mech rig, and she’s in the machine shop. Half the stuff in there is made to cut through ships. She’s not trapped. We are.”
This took Anna by surprise. They’d gotten away. They’d locked a door behind them. That was supposed to end it. The monster isn’t allowed to open doors. It was fuzzy, juvenile thinking, and Anna became less sure that all the drugs had actually passed through her system. “So what do we do?”
“Medical bay,” Naomi said, pointing down a short corridor. “That way.”
That made sense. The frail-looking Belter woman was getting a gray tone to her dark skin that made Anna think of massive blood loss, and the bandage on her shoulder had already soaked through and was throwing off tiny crimson spheres. She took Naomi by the hand and pulled her down the corridor to the medical bay door. It was closed, and the panel next to it flashed the security lockdown message like the deck hatches had. Naomi started pressing it, and Anna waited for the door to slide open. Instead, another, heavier-looking door slid into place over the first, and the panel Naomi was working on went dark.
“Pressure doors,” Naomi said. “Harder to get through.”
“But we’re on this side of them.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there another way in?” Anna asked.
“No. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Anna said. “We need to get you in there. You’re very badly hurt.”
Naomi turned to look at her, frowned as if she’d only really seen Anna for the first time. It was a speculative frown. Anna felt she was being sized up.
“I have two injured men in there. My crew. They’re helpless,” Naomi finally said. “Now they’re as safe as I can make them. So you and I are going to go up to the next deck, get a gun, and make sure she follows us. When she shows up, we’re going to kill her.”