Текст книги "Caliban;s war"

Автор книги: James S.A. Corey

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Chapter Sixteen: Holden

Beyond the door lay a long hallway that looked, to Holden, exactly the same as every other hallway on Ganymede: ice walls with moisture-resistant and insulated structural plates and inset conduit, rubberized walking surface, full-spectrum LEDs to mimic sunlight slanting down from the blue skies of Earth. They could have been anywhere.

“We’re sure this is right, Naomi?”

“That’s the one we saw Mei go through in the hacker’s footage,” she replied.

“Okay,” he said, then dropped to one knee and motioned for his ad hoc army to do the same. When everyone was in a rough circle around him, he said, “Our overwatch, Naomi, has intel on the layout of these tunnels, but not much else. We have no idea where the bad guys are, or even if they’re still here.”

Prax started to object, but Amos quieted him with a heavy hand on his back.

“So we could conceivably leave a lot of intersections at our back. I don’t like that.”

“Yeah,” said Wendell, the Pinkwater leader. “I don’t like that much either.”

“So we’re going to leave a lookout at each intersection until we know where we’re going,” Holden replied, then said, “Naomi, put all their hand terminals on our channel. Guys, put in your ear-buds. Comm discipline is don’t speak unless I ask a direct question, or someone is about to die.”

“Roger,” said Wendell, echoed by the rest of his team.

“Once we know what we’re looking at, I’ll call all the lookouts up to our position if needed. If not, they’re our way out of here if we’re in over our heads.”

Nods all around.

“Outstanding. Amos is point. Wendell, you cover our asses. Everyone else, string out at one-meter intervals,” Holden said, then tapped on Wendell’s breastplate. “We do this thing clean, and I’ll talk to my OPA people about putting a few credits in your accounts in addition to getting you offworld.”

“Righteous,” the thin woman with the cheap armor said, and then racked a round in her machine pistol.

“Okay, let’s go. Amos, Naomi’s map says fifty meters to another pressure door, then some warehouse space.”

Amos nodded, then shouldered his weapon, a heavy automatic shotgun with a thick magazine. He had several more magazines and a number of grenades dangling from his Martian armor’s harness. The metal clicked a little as he walked. Amos headed off down the hallway at a fast walk. Holden gave a quick glance behind, gratified to see the Pinkwater people keeping up the pace and the spacing. They might look half starved, but they knew what they were doing.

“Cap, there’s a tunnel coming off to the right just before the pressure door,” Amos said, stopping and dropping to one knee to cover the unexpected corridor.

It didn’t appear on the map. That meant that new tunnels had been dug after the station specs had last been updated. Modifications like that meant he had even less information than he’d thought. It wasn’t a good thing.

“Okay,” Holden said, pointing at the thin woman with the machine pistol. “You are?”

“Paula,” she said.

“Paula, this is your intersection. Try not to shoot anyone that doesn’t shoot at you first, but do not let anyone past you for any reason.”

“Solid copy on that,” Paula said, and took up a position looking down the side corridor with her weapon at the ready.

Amos pulled a grenade off his harness and handed it to her.

“Just in case shit goes down,” he said. Paula nodded, settled her back against the wall. Amos, taking point, moved toward the pressure door.

“Naomi,” Holden said, looking over the door and locking mechanism. “Pressure door, uh, 223-B6. Pop it.”

“Got it,” she said. A few seconds later, Holden heard the bolts retract.

“Ten meters to the next mapped intersection,” he said, then looked at the Pinkwater people and picked one gruff-looking older man at random. “That’s your intersection when we get there.”

The man nodded, and Holden gestured at Amos. The mechanic took hold of the hatch with his right hand and began counting down from five with his left. Holden took up a position facing the door, his assault rifle at the ready.

When Amos hit one, Holden took a deep breath, and he burst through the door as Amos yanked it open a split second later.

Nothing.

Just another ten meters of corridor, dimly lit by the few LEDs that hadn’t failed in the decades since its last use. Years of micro-frost melt had built a texture over the surface of the walls like dripping spiderwebs. It looked delicate, but it was mineralized as hard as stone. It reminded Holden of a graveyard.

Amos began advancing to the intersection and the next hatch, his gun aimed down the hallway. Holden followed him, his rifle tracking right as he kept it aimed at the side passage, the reflex to cover every possible ingress point to their position having become automatic over the last year.

His year as a cop.

Naomi had said this wasn’t him. He’d left the Navy without seeing live combat outside pirate hunting from the comfort of a warship’s operations deck. He’d worked for years on the Canterbury, hauling ice from Saturn to the Belt without ever having to worry about something more violent than drunken ice buckers fighting out their boredom. He’d been the peacemaker, the one who always found the way to keep things cool. When tempers flared, he’d keep it calm or keep it funny or just sit for a shift and listen to someone rave and rant whatever it was out of their system.

This new person he’d become reached for his gun first and talked second. Maybe she was right. How many ships had he slagged in the year since Eros? A dozen? More? He comforted himself with the thought that they were all very bad people. The worst kind of carrion eaters, using the chaos of war and the retreat of the Coalition Navy as an opportunity to pillage. The kind of people who’d strip all the expensive parts off your engine, steal your spare air, and leave you adrift to suffocate. Every one of their ships he’d shot down had probably saved dozens of innocent ships, hundreds of lives. But doing it had taken something from him that he occasionally felt the lack of.

Occasions like when Naomi had said, This isn’t you.

If they tracked down the secret base where Mei had been taken, there was a good chance they’d have to fight to get her back. Holden found himself hoping it would bother him, if for no other reason than to prove that it still could.

“Cap? You okay?”

Amos was staring at him.

“Yeah,” Holden said, “I just need a different job.”

“Might not be the best moment for a career change, Cap.”

“Fair point,” Holden said, and pointed to the older Pinkwater man he’d singled out before. “This is your intersection. Same instructions. Hold it unless I call you.”

The older guy shrugged and nodded, then turned to Amos. “Don’t I get a grenade too?”

“Nah,” Amos said, “Paula’s cuter than you.” He counted down from five, and Holden went through the door, same as last time.

He’d been ready for another featureless gray corridor, but on the other side there was a wide-open space, with a few tables and dusty equipment scattered haphazardly around the room. A massive 3-D copier emptied of resin and partially disassembled, a few light industrial waldoes, the kind of complex automated supply cabinet that usually lurked under desks in scientific labs or medical bays. The mineralized webwork was on the walls but not the boxes or equipment. A glass-walled cube two meters to a side sat off in one corner. One of the tables had a small bundle of sheets or tarps piled on it. Across the room another hatch stood closed.

Holden pointed to the abandoned equipment and said to Wendell, “See if you can find a network access point. If you can, plug this into it.” He handed Naomi’s hastily rigged network bridge to him.

Amos sent two of the remaining Pinkwater people up to the next hatch to cover it, then came back to Holden and gestured with his gun toward the glass box.

“Big enough for a couple kids,” he said. “Think that’s where they kept ’em?”

“Maybe,” Holden said, moving over to examine it. “Prax, can you-” Holden stopped when he realized the botanist had gone over to the tables and was standing next to the bundle of rags. With Prax standing next to the bundle, Holden’s perspective shifted and suddenly it didn’t look like a pile of rags at all. It looked very much like a small body under a sheet.

Prax was staring at it, his hand darting toward it and then pulling back. He was shaking all over.

“This… this is…” he said to no one in particular, his hand moving out and back again.

Holden looked at Amos, then gestured at Prax with his eyes. The big mechanic moved over to him and put a hand on his arm.

“How’s about you let us take a look at that, okay?”

Holden let Amos guide Prax a few steps away from the table before he moved over to it. When he lifted the sheet to look under, Prax made a sharp noise like the intake of breath before a scream. Holden shifted his body to block Prax’s view.

A small boy lay on the table. He was skinny, with a mop of unruly black hair and dark skin. His clothes were bright: yellow pants and a green shirt with a cartoon crocodile and daisies. It wasn’t immediately clear what had killed him.

Holden heard a commotion and turned around to see Prax, red-faced and struggling to get past Amos to the table. The mechanic was restraining him with one arm in a grip that was halfway between a wrestling hold and an embrace.

“It’s not her,” Holden said. “It’s a kid, but it’s not her. A boy. Four, maybe five years old.”

When Amos heard that, he let the struggling Prax go. The botanist rushed to the table, flipping the sheet over and giving one quick cry.

“That’s Katoa,” Prax said. “I know him. His father…”

“It’s not Mei,” Holden repeated, putting a hand on Prax’s shoulder. “We need to keep looking.”

Prax shrugged his hand off.

“It’s not Mei,” Holden said again.

“But Strickland was here,” Prax said. “He was their doctor. I thought if he was with them, they’d be…”

Holden said nothing. He was thinking the same thing. If one of the kids was dead, they could all be.

“I thought that meant they’d keep them alive,” Prax said. “But they let Katoa die. They just let him die and they put him under this sheet. Basia, I’m so sorry…”

Holden grabbed Prax and spun him around. The way he imagined a cop would.

“That,” he said, pointing at the small body on the table, “is not Mei. Do you want to find her? Then we need to keep moving.”

Prax’s eyes were filled with tears and his shoulders shook in silent sobs, but he nodded and walked away from the table. Amos watched him carefully. The mechanic’s expression was unreadable. The thought came unbidden: I hope bringing Prax was a good idea.

Across the room, Wendell whistled and waved a hand. He pointed at Naomi’s network access rig plugged into a port in the wall and gave the thumbs-up.

“Naomi, you in?” Holden said while he pulled the sheet back up to cover the dead boy.

“Yep, I’m in,” she said, her tone distracted as she worked with the incoming data. “Traffic in this node is encrypted. Got the Somnambulist started on it, but she’s not nearly as smart as the Roci. This could take a while.”

“Keep trying,” Holden replied, and signaled to Amos. “But if there’s traffic on the network, someone’s still here.”

“If you wait a minute,” Naomi said, “I might be able to give you the security cameras and a more up-to-date floor plan.”

“Feed us what you can, when you can, but we’re not waiting.”

Amos ambled over to Holden and tapped the visor of his helmet. Prax was standing alone by the glass cube, staring into it like there was something to see. Holden expected Amos to say something about the man, but Amos surprised him.

“Been paying attention to the temperature, Cap?”

“Yeah,” Holden replied. “Every time I check it says ‘cold as hell.’”

“I was just over by the door,” Amos continued. “It went up about half a degree.”

Holden thought about that for a moment, double-checking it on his own HUD and tapping his fingers on his thigh.

“There’s climate in the next room. They’re heating it.”

“Seems likely,” Amos said, shifting the big auto-shotgun into both hands and thumbing off the safety.

Holden motioned the remaining Pinkwater people over to them.

“It looks like we’ve come to the inhabited portion of this base. Amos and I go in first. You three”-Holden pointed at the three Pinkwater people who weren’t Wendell-“follow and cover our flanks. Wendell, you cover our asses and make sure we can get back out in a hurry if things go bad. Prax-”

Holden stopped, looking around for the botanist. He had quietly slipped over to the door into the next room. He’d taken the handgun Amos had given him out of his pocket. As Holden watched, he reached out and opened the door, then walked deliberately through.

“Fuck me,” Amos said conversationally.

“Shit,” Holden said. Then, “Go, go, go,” as he rushed toward the now open door.

Just before he got to the hatch, he heard Prax say, “Nobody move,” in a loud but quavering voice.

Holden burst through into the room on the other side, going right while Amos came through just behind him and went left. Prax stood a few feet past the door, the large black handgun looking improbable in his pale, shaking hand. The area itself looked a lot like the one they’d just left, except that this one had a small crowd of people in it. Armed people. Holden tried to take in everything that could be used as cover. A half dozen large gray packing crates with scientific equipment in various states of disassembly in them squatted around the room. Someone’s hand terminal was propped up on a bench and blaring dance music. On one of the crates sat several open boxes of pizza with most of the slices missing, several of which were still clutched in people’s hands. He tried to count them. Four. Eight. An even dozen, all of them wide about the eye and glancing around, thinking about what to do.

It looked to Holden very much like a room full of people packing up to move, taking a short lunch break. Except that the people in this room all had holsters at their sides, and they had left the corpse of a small child to rot in the next room over.

“Nobody! Move!” Prax repeated, this time with more force.

“You should listen to him,” Holden added, moving the barrel of his assault rifle in a slow scan across the room. To drive the point home, Amos sidled up to the nearest worker and casually slammed the butt of his auto-shotgun into the man’s ribs, dropping him to the floor like a bag of wet sand. Holden heard the tramping of his Pinkwater people rushing into the room behind him and taking up cover positions.

“Wendell,” Holden said, not lowering his rifle. “Please disarm these people for me.”

“No,” said a stern-faced woman with a slice of pizza in her hand. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Excuse me?” Holden said.

“No,” the woman repeated, taking another bite of her pizza. Around a mouthful of food, she said, “There are only seven of you. There are twelve of us just in this room alone. And there are a lot more behind us that will come running at the first gunshot. So, no, you don’t get to disarm us.”

She smiled a greasy smile at Holden, then took another bite. Holden could smell the cheese-and-pepperoni smell of good pizza over the top of Ganymede’s ever-present odor of ice and the scent of his own sweat. It made his stomach give an ill-timed rumble. Prax pointed his handgun at the woman, though his hand was now shaking so badly that she probably didn’t feel particularly threatened.

Amos gave him a sidelong glance as if to ask, What now, chief?

In Holden’s mind, the room shifted into a tactical problem with an almost physical click. The eleven potential combatants who were still standing were in three clusters. None of them were wearing visible armor. Amos would almost certainly drop the group of four to the far left of the room in a single burst from his auto-shotgun. Holden was pretty sure he could take down the three directly in front of him. That left four for the Pinkwater people to handle. Best not to count on Prax for any of it.

He finished the split-second tally of potential casualties, and almost of its own volition, his thumb clicked the assault rifle to full auto.

This is not you.

Shit.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said, instead of opening fire. “No one has to die here today. We’re looking for a little girl. Help us find her, and everyone walks away from this.”

Holden could see the arrogance and bravado in the woman’s face for the mask it was. Behind that, there was worry as she weighed the casualties her team would suffer against the risks of talking it out and seeing where that went. Holden gave her a smile and a nod to help her decide. Talk to me. We’re all rational people here.

Except that not all of them were.

“Where’s Mei?” Prax yelled, poking the gun at her as if his gesture would be somehow translated through the air. “Tell me where Mei is!”

“I-” she started to reply, but Prax screamed out, “Where’s my little girl!” and cocked his gun.

As if in slow motion, Holden saw eleven hands dart down to the holsters at their belts.

Shit.

Chapter Seventeen: Prax

In the cinema and games that formed the basis of Prax’s understanding of how people of violence interacted, the cocking of a gun was less a threat than a kind of punctuation mark. A security agent questioning someone might begin with threats and slaps, but when he cocked his gun, that meant it was time to take him seriously. It wasn’t something Prax had considered any more carefully than which urinal to use when he wasn’t the only one in the men’s room or how to step on and off a transport tube. It was the untaught etiquette of received wisdom. You yelled, you threatened, you cocked your gun, and then people talked.

“Where’s my little girl!” he yelled.

He cocked his pistol.

The reaction was almost immediate: a sharp, stuttering report like a high-pressure valve failing, but much louder. He danced back, almost dropping the pistol. Had he fired it by mistake? But no, his finger hadn’t touched the trigger. The air smelled sharp, acidic. The woman with the pizza was gone. No, not gone. She was on the ground. Something terrible had happened to her jaw. As he watched, her ruined mouth moved, as though she was trying to speak. Prax could hear only a high-pitched squeal. He wondered if his eardrums had ruptured. The woman with the destroyed jaw took a long, shuddering breath and then didn’t take another. With a sense of detachment, he noticed that she’d drawn her pistol. It was still clutched in her hand. He wasn’t sure when she’d done that. The handset playing dance music transitioned to a different song that only faintly made it past the ringing in his ears.

“I didn’t shoot her,” he said. His voice sounded like he was in partial vacuum, the air too thin to support the energy of sound waves. But he could breathe. He wondered again if the gunfire had ruptured his eardrums. He looked around. Everyone was gone. He was alone in the room. Or no, they were behind cover. It occurred to him that he should probably be behind cover too. Only nobody was firing and he wasn’t sure where to go.

Holden’s voice seemed to come from far away.

“Amos?”

“Yeah, Cap?”

“Would you please take his gun away now?”

“I’m on it.”

Amos rose from behind one of the boxes nearest the wall. His Martian armor had a long pale streak across the chest and two white circles just below the ribs. Amos limped toward him.

“Sorry, Doc,” he said. “Givin’ it to you was my bad call. Maybe next time, right?”

Prax looked at the big man’s open hand, then carefully put the gun in it.

“Wendell?” Holden said. Prax still wasn’t sure where he was, but he sounded closer. That was probably just Prax’s hearing coming back. The acrid smell in the air changed to something more coppery. It made him think of compost heaps gone sour: warm and organic and unsettling.

“One down,” Wendell said.

“We’ll get a medic,” Holden said.

“Nice thought, but no point,” Wendell said. “Finish the mission. We got most of them, but two or three made it through the door. They’ll raise an alarm.”

One of the Pinkwater soldiers stood up. Blood was running down his left arm. Another lay on the floor, half of his head simply gone. Holden appeared. He was massaging his right elbow, and the armor showed a new scar at his left temple.

“What happened?” Prax asked.

“You started a gunfight,” Holden said. “Okay, let’s move ahead before they can set up defenses.”

Prax started noticing other bodies. Men and women who had been eating pizza and listening to music. They’d had pistols, but Holden’s people carried automatic shotguns and assault rifles and some had military-looking armor. The difference in outcome hadn’t been subtle.

“Amos, take point,” Holden said, and the big man moved through the doorway and into the unknown. Prax moved to follow, and the head of the Pinkwater people took his elbow.

“Why don’t you stay with me, professor,” he said.

“Yes. I’ll… all right.”

On the other side of the door, the nature of the rooms changed. They were still clearly in the old tunnels of Ganymede. The walls still had their webwork of mineralized frost, the lighting was still old-fashioned LED housings, and the gray walls showed where ice had melted and refrozen during some climate system glitch years or decades before. But walking through that doorway was walking from the land of the dead into something living. The air was warmer, and it smelled of bodies and fresh soil and the subtle, sharp scent of phenol disinfectant. The wide hall they entered could have been the common room in any of a dozen labs where Prax had worked. Three metal office doors were closed along the far wall and a rolling metal freight gateway hung open ahead of them. Amos and Holden went to the three closed doors, Amos kicking each in turn. When the third flew open, Holden shouted something, but the words were lost in the bark of a pistol and Amos’ return shotgun fire.

The two remaining Pinkwater soldiers who weren’t Wendell scuttled forward, pressing their backs to the wall on either side of the freight gateway. Prax started toward them, but Wendell put a restraining hand on his shoulder. The man on the left side of the door ducked his head into the doorway and then out again. A bullet gouged a streak in the wall where it missed him.

“What can you give me?” Holden asked, and for a moment Prax thought he was talking to them. Holden’s eyes were hard, and the scowl seemed etched into his skin. Then Naomi said something to make him smile, and he only looked tired and sad. “All right. We’ve got a partial floor plan. Through there, we’ve got an open room. It drops down about two meters, with exits to our ten o’clock and one o’clock. It’s built like a pit, so if they’re setting up defense here, we’ve got the high ground.”

“Makes it a damned stupid place to set up a defense, then,” Wendell said.

Gunfire chattered, three small holes appearing in the metal of the freight gateway. The people on the other side were nervous.

“And yet the evidence suggests…” Holden said.

“You want to talk to ’em, Cap?” Amos said. “Or do we head straight for the obvious thing?”

The question meant something more than Prax understood; he could tell that much. Holden started to say something, hesitated, and then nodded toward the doorway.

“Let’s get this done,” he said.

Holden and Amos jogged toward the gateway, Prax and Wendell close behind. Someone was shouting orders in the room beyond. Prax made out the words payload and evac, his heart going tight. Evac. They couldn’t let anyone leave until they found Mei.

“I counted seven,” one of the Pinkwater soldiers said. “Could be more.”

“Any kids?” Amos asked.

“Didn’t see any.”

“We should probably look again,” Amos said, and leaned out the door. Prax caught his breath, expecting to see the man’s head dissolve in a rain of bullets, but Amos was already pulling back when the first shots started.

“What are we working with?” Holden asked.

“More’n seven,” Amos said. “They’re using this as a choke point, but the fella’s right. Either they don’t know what they’re doing, or there’s something in there they can’t pull back from.”

“So either panicking amateurs or something critical to defend,” Holden said.

A metal canister the size of a fist rolled through the gateway, clanking. Amos picked the grenade up casually and tossed it back through the doorway. The detonation lit the room, the report louder than anything Prax had ever heard before. The ringing in his ears redoubled.

“Could be both,” Amos shouted conversationally from very far away.

In the next room, something shattered. People were screaming. Prax imagined technicians like the ones from the previous room shredded by shrapnel from their own grenade. One of the Pinkwater soldiers leaned out, peering into the haze of smoke. An assault rifle blatted, and he pulled back, clutching his belly. Blood poured between his fingers. Wendell pushed past Prax, kneeling by his fallen soldier.

“Sorry, sir,” the Pinkwater man said. “Got careless. Leave me here and I’ll guard the rear as long as I can.”

“Captain Holden,” Wendell said. “If we’re going to do something, we’re better off doing it soon.”

The screaming in the other room got louder. Someone was roaring inhumanly. Prax wondered if they’d had livestock in there. The bellowing sounded almost like an injured bull. He had to fight the urge to put his hands over his ears. Something loud happened. Holden nodded.

“Amos. Soften them up, then let’s head in.”

“Aye, aye, Cap,” Amos said, putting down his shotgun. He took two grenades of his own, pulled the pink plastic strip-pins, rolled the live grenades through the gateway, and scooped his gun back up. The doubled detonation was deeper than the first one had been, but not as loud. Even before the echo faded, Amos, Holden, Wendell, and the one remaining soldier ducked through the gateway, weapons blazing.

Prax hesitated. He was unarmed. The enemy was just beyond the threshold. He could stay here and tend to the gut-shot man. But the image that wouldn’t leave him was Katoa’s still body. The dead boy wasn’t more than a hundred meters away. And Mei…

Keeping his head down, Prax scuttled through the doorway. Holden and Wendell were to his right, Amos and the other soldier to his left. All four were crouched, weapons at the ready. Smoke stung Prax’s eyes and nostrils, and the air recyclers groaned in protest, fighting to clear the air.

“Well now,” Amos said, “that’s fucking queer.”

The room was built on two levels: an upper catwalk a meter and a half wide, and a lower floor two meters below it. A wide passage led away at ten o’clock on the lower level, and a door on the upper level stood open at one o’clock. The pit below them was chaos. Blood soaked the walls and had sprayed up to stipple the ceiling. Bodies lay on the ground below them. A thin steam rose from the gore.

They had been using equipment for cover. Prax recognized a microcentrifuge smashed almost out of its casing. Inch-thick slivers of ice or glass glittered among the carnage. A nitrogen bath was tipped on its side, the alarm indicator showing it had locked down. A massive blot array-easily two hundred kilos-lay at an improbable angle, a child’s toy thrown aside in the ecstasy of play.

“What the hell kind of ordnance are you packing?” Wendell asked, his voice awed. From the wide passage at ten o’clock came shrieks and the sound of gunfire.

“I don’t think this was us,” Holden said. “Come on. Double-time it.”

They dropped down to the killing floor. A glass cube like the one they’d seen before stood in shattered glory. Blood made the floor slick underfoot. A hand still wrapping a pistol lay in the corner. Prax looked away. Mei was here. He couldn’t lose focus. Couldn’t be sick.

He kept going on.

Holden and Amos led the way toward the sound of fighting. Prax trotted along behind them. When he tried to hold back, let Wendell and his compatriot go first, the Pinkwater men gently pushed him forward. They were guarding the rear, Prax realized. In case someone came up from behind. He should have thought of that.

The passageway opened out, broad but low. Industrial loading mechs, amber indicators showing idle, stood beside pallets of foam-coated supply boxes. Amos and Holden moved down the hall with a practiced efficiency that left Prax winded. But with every turn they reached, every door they opened, he found himself willing them to go faster. She was here, and they had to find her. Before she got hurt. Before something happened. And with every body they found, the sick feeling that something had already happened sank deeper in his gut.

They moved forward quickly. Too quickly. When they reached the end of the line-an airlock four meters high and at least seven across-Prax couldn’t imagine that there was anyone behind it. Amos let his automatic shotgun hang at his side as he tapped at the airlock controls. Holden squinted up at the ceiling as if something might be written there. The ground trembled and set the hidden base creaking.

“Was that a launch?” Holden said. “That was a launch!”

“Yeah,” Amos said. “Looks like they’ve got a landing pad out there. Monitors aren’t showing anything else on it, though. Whatever that was, it was the last train outta here.”

Prax heard someone shouting. It took him only a second to realize it was him. Like he was watching his body move without him, he dashed to the sealed metal doors, pounding them with his clenched fists. She was there. She was just out there, on the ship lifting away from Ganymede. He could feel her like she had a rope tied to his heart and every moment pulled it out of him a little more.

He blacked out for a second. Or maybe longer. When he came back to himself, he was slung over Amos’ wide shoulder, the armor biting into his belly. He pushed up to see the airlock receding slowly behind them.

“Put me down,” Prax said.

“Can’t do it,” Amos replied. “Cap says-”

The stuttering of assault rifle fire came, and Amos dropped Prax to the ground and squatted over him, shotgun at the ready.

“What the fuck, Cap?” Amos said.

Prax glanced up in time to see the Pinkwater soldier cut down, blood spraying out of his back. Wendell was on the ground, returning fire around a sharp corner.