And, almost without her knowing it, they’d become her family. She still had brothers and nieces and nephews back on Mars related to her by blood, but she rarely spoke to them. Even then it was always in a recorded message fired across space on the end of a laser. Instead, she had Amos, the gruff big brother who’d let her fuck up on a repair job and just laugh at her, but then fix it later and never mention it again. And she had Clarissa, the annoying know-it-all little sister who wrapped herself in rules and procedure lists and formality like a shell around her fragile center.
And then Holden and Naomi, who couldn’t help but become the parents of the ship. Alex, the best friend she’d ever had, and the person she’d realized recently she had every intention of growing old with, in spite of never having seen him naked. It was an odd group of people to fall in love with, to adopt as your own kin and tribe, but there it was, and she wasn’t ever going back.
And now Payne Houston was threatening them.
“You fucked up, man,” she said to herself as she drifted to a stop over the reactor-bay emergency-access panel. “You just fucked all the way up.”
“Repeat?” Alex said quietly in her ear. Bobbie realized she’d left the channel open and the volume low as she’d made the climb down from the crew airlock to the rear of the ship.
“Nothing,” she said, turning the volume back up. “I’m in position.”
“Patching you back into the master channel,” Alex replied, and then suddenly there were half a dozen voices breathing in her ear.
“Sound off,” Holden said.
“We got through the machine shop door okay, and Peaches says no alerts were triggered. Breaching charge is ready. Just call it.” Amos’ voice, calm and faintly amused. He could have been reporting football scores.
“I’ve got the Roci in diagnostic mode, so she’s asking me to verify any orders coming from the engineering console,” Naomi’s voice said. “But that can’t last. Pretty soon he can just start breaking things the old-fashioned way.”
“Draper here. I’m outside the emergency-access hatch.”
“How long once that door opens?”
Bobbie ran through the layout in her head. It was an old habit, beaten into her by years of training in the toughest military outfit humanity had ever created. Plan it through before you go in, because once the bullets start flying, the time for thinking is over. All you can do is move and react.
“Fifteen seconds to cycle the hatch closed. A few seconds to squeeze past the reactor housing; it’s a tight fit. But a good thirty seconds to equalize the pressure, so that’s our speed bump. Once the atmo in the crawlspace is equalized, I can be through that inner hatch in less than five.”
“Naomi? Can you keep our guest out of the controls for the next minute so we don’t cook our only good Martian?”
“Hey, Cap, that’s low,” Alex said with a laugh. Bobbie found it reassuring and terrifying that they could joke at a time like this.
“Bobbie,” Naomi’s voice said, gentle but firm. “No way he gets that reactor on while I’m alive.”
“Copy that. Draper is a go on your mark.”
Holden simply said, “Okay.”
The hatch in front of her vibrated under the palm of her vacuum suit’s glove as Naomi cycled it open. A faint puff of vapor escaped as the hatch popped open. Bobbie pulled herself inside, squeezing into the curved space between the inner hull of the ship and the outer shielding of the Roci’s reactor core. The hatch began to cycle closed behind her.
“Governor Houston,” Holden said over the radio. “I’m sending this over the 1MC so I know you can hear me. It won’t compromise your position at all to at least open a dialogue.”
Bobbie pulled herself around the curve of the reactor to the inner hatch. The panel glowed red with the lock symbol, and the status read, NEG ATMOSPHERE. The timer in her HUD showed only ten seconds had elapsed, so the outer door wasn’t even finished cycling. Almost forty seconds, then, before she could pop the inner hatch and go kick this Houston’s ass up one side of the ship and down the other. She pulled the heavy recoilless pistol from the harness on her chest and double-checked the ammo counter. Ten self-propelled high-explosive antipersonnel rounds. If Houston forced her to shoot him, they’d be cleaning up red stains for a month.
Bobbie had served on ships most of her life. She wasn’t scared of a little mopping.
“Come on, man,” Holden said. “At this point, we can keep you from doing just about anything. Sooner or later, you’ll need a snack.”
To her surprise, Houston’s voice answered. “Naw. Found your mechanic’s beer fridge down here. Had a big bag of sesame sticks in it. Jalapeño-flavored. Bit spicy for me, but still tasty.”
“Better not be drinking my fucking beer,” Amos said in that same nonchalant voice.
“Anyway,” Holden cut in, “we still have a situation. You’re not going to be able to take the ship, and I’d really like to start using it again. How do we come to some sort of agreement?”
Bobbie heard the first hiss of the atmosphere system outside her suit. The pressurization was almost done. She held the pistol in her right hand and gripped the door with her left. The second it showed green, she’d be in the room with that asshole.
The asshole said, “I don’t know that we do. You’re right. I can’t get past that diagnostic lockdown. That was smart work, by the way. But I figure I can probably get the reactor back online from in here, and then I figure I can collapse the bottle if I just find the right wires to pull. You figure the same way?”
“Well,” Holden started, but the light on the inner hatch clicked green and Bobbie yanked it open.
The main console for the reactor would be to her left as she entered the compartment. It was likely that Houston was using that workstation, so that was her first target. If she pushed off hard, she’d come out of the small hatch like a missile, do a quick flip to land feetfirst on the opposite bulkhead. From there she’d have open sight lines to the entire engineering deck. Nowhere for Houston to hide.
Bobbie gripped the edge of the hatch and pulled with all her strength to launch herself into the room. She had to—
Something crashed into the side of her helmet and sent her into a flat spin through the air. She tried to get her hands up to keep from crashing facefirst into the bulkhead, and only half succeeded. Her left arm crumpled under her, and she felt something tear with a wet heat in her shoulder. She bounced off the wall and saw Houston standing on the bulkhead above the access hatch, mag-booted in place, and holding a heavy fire extinguisher with a dent in the bottom.
Miraculously, the gun was still in her hand. Blackness creeping in at the edge of her vision, Bobbie tried to line up a shot. Houston launched himself off the wall with one strong kick and brought the extinguisher down on her hand in a baseball-bat-style swing. She felt two of her fingers break, and the gun and extinguisher flew off in opposite directions across the room.
The deck seemed to swim up to meet her. She caught a glimpse of Houston spinning off toward the ceiling. She managed to turn on the mags in her glove and pull herself down long enough to get her boots locked onto the deck plating. If this was going hand-to-hand, she’d want leverage, and that meant planting her feet. She turned the boots’ mags almost up to full, and watched Houston catch himself on the ceiling.
She spread her arms wide, though from the tearing sensation in her left shoulder, she didn’t think that one was going to be much use. And the broken fingers in her right hand made grappling or throwing a punch problematic.
“You’re lucky you’re wearing that suit,” Houston said, gulping to catch his breath. “I put a dent in that helmet woulda knocked your brains out without it.”