“Jim, open the emergency locker!” she screamed.
She was pointing at a small red-and-yellow panel on the bulkhead near his crash couch. Years of shipboard training made a path through the anoxia and depressurization, and he yanked the tab on the locker’s seal and pulled the door open. Inside were a white first aid kit marked with the ancient red-cross symbol, half a dozen oxygen masks, and a sealed bag of hardened plastic disks attached to a glue gun. The emergency-seal kit. He snatched it.
“Just the gun,” Naomi yelled at him. He wasn’t sure if her voice sounded distant because of the thin air or because the pressure drop had blown his eardrums.
Holden yanked the gun free from the bag of patches and threw it at her. She ran a bead of instant sealing glue around the edge of her three-ring binder. She tossed the gun to Amos, who caught it with an effortless backhand motion and put a seal around his dinner tray. The whistling stopped, replaced by the hiss of the atmosphere system as it labored to bring the pressure back up to normal. Fifteen seconds.
Everyone looked at Shed. Without the vacuum, his blood was pouring out into a floating red sphere just above his neck, like a hideous cartoon replacement for his head.
“Jesus Christ, Boss,” Amos said, looking away from Shed to Naomi. He snapped his teeth closed with an audible click and shook his head. “What… ”
“Gauss round,” Alex said. “Those ships have rail guns.”
“Belt ships with rail guns?” Amos said. “Did they get a f**king navy and no one told me?”
“Jim, the hallway outside and the cabin on the other side are both in vacuum,” Naomi said. “The ship’s compromised.”
Holden started to respond, then caught a good look at the binder Naomi had glued over the breach. The white cover was stamped with black letters that read MCRN EMERGENCY PROCEDURES. He had to suppress a laugh that would almost certainly go manic on him.
“Jim,” Naomi said, her voice worried.
“I’m okay, Naomi,” Holden replied, then took a deep breath. “How long do those patches hold?”
Naomi shrugged with her hands, then started pulling her hair behind her head and tying it up with a red elastic band.
“Longer than the air will last. If everything around us is in vacuum, that means the cabin’s running on emergency bottles. No recycling. I don’t know how much each room has, but it won’t be more than a couple hours.”
“Kinda makes you wish we’d worn our f**king suits, don’t it?” Amos asked.
“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Alex said. “We’d come over here in our enviro suits, they’d just have taken ’em away.”
“Could have tried,” Amos said.
“Well, if you’d like to go back in time and do it over, be my guest, partner.”
Naomi sharply said, “Hey,” but then nothing more.
No one was talking about Shed. They were working hard not to look at the body. Holden cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, then floated to Shed’s couch, drawing their eyes with him. He paused a moment, letting everyone get a good look at the decapitated body, then pulled a blanket from the storage drawer beneath the couch and strapped it down over Shed’s body with the couch’s restraints.
“Shed’s been killed. We’re in deep peril. Arguing won’t extend our lives one second,” Holden said, looking at each member of his crew in turn. “What will?”
No one spoke. Holden turned to Naomi first.
“Naomi, what will keep us alive longer that we can do right now?” he asked.
“I’ll see if I can find the emergency air. The room’s built for six, and there’re only… there are four of us. I might be able to turn the flow down and stretch it longer.”
“Good. Thank you. Alex?”
When the hatch opened, Holden expected all the air to rush out. Instead, there was a loud crack and the pressure dropped slightly for a second. Outside in the corridor, thick sheets of plastic had been sealed to the walls, creating an ad hoc airlock. The walls of the new chamber bowed out dangerously with the air pressure, but they held. Inside the newly created lock, Lieutenant Kelly and three of his marines wore heavy vacuum-rated armor and carried enough weaponry to fight several minor wars.
The marines moved quickly into the room, weapons ready, and then sealed the hatch behind them. One of them tossed a large bag at Holden.
“Five vac suits. Get them on,” Kelly said. His eyes moved to the bloody blanket covering Shed, then to the two improvised patches. “Casualty?”
“Our medic, Shed Garvey,” Holden replied.
“Yeah. What the f**k?” Amos said loudly. “Who’s out there shooting the shit out of your fancy boat?”