Date: September 20, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Benny Letcher, Dax, Bernard, Arnold Wilkerson, Jackal, Marge, Etna Sola, Gaal
The fire suppressant ran dry in the forward corridor and the fog began to thin, and with it the shimmer in the air that had been Tanya folded back into nothing. Marge kept the barrel pointed at the empty hallway a while longer. There was blood on the deck where she had put rounds into a woman she could not see, and two of her crewmates on the floor past it, breathing but not much more. From the bridge came a scrape of metal on metal, deliberate, unhurried, and then nothing at all.
The comm network clicked. Listen, I don’t want to die out here. I know when I’m beat. Come talk to me. The pirate in the med bay — Zeid, cigarette lit, cybernetic arm across his knee — had decided to be reasonable. At almost the same moment the telemetry on Jon’s feed went soft on Weaver, then flat to unconscious, and Jon put out a call for somebody to go see what engineering had done to him now.
Outside the hull, none of that mattered yet. The stolen dropship was straining against the salvage arm hard enough to make the metal creak and spark, and the arm had never been built to hold a ship that wanted to leave. Dax found a rail meant for people who did not want to spend eternity drifting, clipped his carabiner to it, walked the anti-materiel rifle out to the stern and settled on the dropship’s engine housing. The round went through the containment field. The engine flared, guttered and went dark, and inside the cockpit two pilots began fighting each other and the maneuvering thrusters at once. He also noted, without much liking it, the device welded crudely onto the dropship’s flank, and the blue light beginning to build inside it.
Jon took a salvage pod out and puttered around the hull until he could see through the dropship’s forward window — two men in the pilot and copilot chairs, swearing at each other. He decided that pirates were a problem and that this was, on balance, a stupid ship with windows. One claw took hold of the hull, the other lit a cutting torch, and the transparent aluminum began to bubble and run. He was through the first layer, feeling the breath of escaping air, when the two men looked up from the console and the blue device let go.
The pulse washed out over everything. The salvage pod died around Jon, every system going dark at once. The arm’s servos seized with the claws locked shut around the dropship. And Bennett II, who had been running the length of that arm a second earlier, simply stopped — mid-stride, arms out, rifle drifting loose on its strap — and began floating gently out into the dark at the end of his tether, bouncing off the ship’s plating each time the line went taut. Dax’s suit stuttered and came back, still feeding him oxygen, though for how long was anyone’s guess.
Below decks the ship had begun quietly poisoning itself. Benny Letcher came down the engineering stair and found Arnold and Dixie Doss working at the reactor and no sign of Weaver at all — only his tools on the deck beside the safety rail, and his spanner lying where it had fallen. Benny leaned over the rail, saw Weaver crumpled at the bottom of the reactor pit, swore magnificently, took the ladder down, and stopped speaking halfway. Up above, the others heard the sound of a dropped weapon and then silence. Arnold dropped a dead rat into the pit to see what would happen to it, learned nothing, and went down after them with a rebreather strapped on; three-quarters of the way down, the badge on his collar had already gone black and he had begun to feel pleasantly sleepy. He and Jackal rigged a hoist out of paracord and hauled both men up out of the sink of carbon dioxide. Benny woke as soon as he hit clean air. Weaver stayed under. Then the alarms started — not in the pit, but everywhere.
Gaal had come aboard as cargo, more or less: one of the monks lifted off Siddhartha’s Peace, a scientist who studied how sickness moves through crops and through people, with no particular business in a gunfight. When Etna started for the med bay to talk to a man with a gun, Gaal followed her, because she was not going to sit in a corridor and watch someone go alone. Zeid looked at the two of them through the gap of the sticking door, took in the rigging gun in Gaal’s hands, and asked whether she even knew how to use it. His terms were simple, he said. Passage. Cryo. Delivery to any station at all. He was a man of his word, in it for the money, and killing wasn’t really his thing unless someone was paying. Gaal, who had no authority to promise anything and said so, held her ground. Etna told him they would relay his terms to the captain. He flicked ash onto the deck and observed that they had a great deal of expensive equipment in this room and probably needed it working within the hour.
Then Marge came down the corridor with Carl over one shoulder and Bernard over the other, deposited them, listened to about half the summary, and shot through the doorway. Monitors burst behind the bed in a shower of sparks and Zeid took the rest across his side; he went over a med bed, dragged it down for cover, pulled something off his belt and rolled it through the stuttering door. The corridor went white and deafening. Marge got an arm up in time. Etna and Gaal did not, and lay there holding their ears while the world rang.
Jackal arrived into that — blood, smoke, three people down, his own shotgun empty since the last fight. He dug out a tennis ball, painted it, with a steadiness that surprised him, into a credible likeness of a thermal detonator, and bounced it through the doorway. Zeid’s cursing came clear through the wall. Jackal timed the door, rolled through it and put the muzzle against the man’s head while he was still braced for an explosion that never came. I was waiting for the boom, Zeid said, and dropped the gun. Marge took him by the collar and walked him to the brig, where the bars lit up and he told them, pleasantly enough, that when he got out he would make sure they paid — he was just a businessman — and then lay down on the bench, folded his hands behind his head, and whistled.
Out on the hull, Dax shot the first EVA pirate through the faceplate and watched him tumble away, one hand jammed against his own thruster, spinning into the distance with his air fanning out behind him. Jon worked over his dead pod like a man beating a vending machine, and found a battery deep enough in the shielding to have survived; he hardwired it into the control circuits and the pod came back, thrusters and claws alive, torch dead. He was still congratulating himself when the second pirate — tattooed to the eyes, teeth filed to points, pierced like a tackle box — landed on the front of his pod, grabbed a handhold and started cutting into the windscreen. Jon caught the torch arm in a grabber and held it there while the man howled silently at him, then lit the thrusters and drove him into the side of the ship until the claw went through him and the suit came apart. Dax took the last round he had, put a stim into his arm and sent it through the dropship’s cockpit window. The decompression blew the window out entire and took both pilots with it. The dropship stopped fighting and simply hung there, dead in the claws.
Inside, Dixie Doss was gone. Arnold turned from the reactor to find her station empty, her goggles on the deck, blood beside them, and a vent cover leaning against the wall. He went in after her — shoulders wedged, arms pinned, torch-lit blood smeared the whole length of the duct — and discovered somewhere in the second bend that he had been wrong about not being claustrophobic. Where the shaft turned upward there were scratches in the smears: narrow, deep, the kind fingers do not make. He scraped a sample into a container for Bernard, decided that going up alone was a fool’s errand, and found out that backing out of a duct is considerably harder than going in.
The trail pointed at Arnold’s own workshop, and the workshop had been made ready for them. The keypad took Jackal’s code, displayed a skull and crossbones, and overloaded — he pulled his hand back an instant before the panel blew. Marge set her crowbar and could not shift the door; someone had reinforced it from the inside. Gaal came back from the armory with an acetylene torch, having found no explosives there at all — the Marines had long since stripped it — lit it, worked out from the way the metal answered where the welded bars lay behind it, and began cutting through them one by one.
Meanwhile the arithmetic of the air kept getting worse. Bernard, awake again and hauling an oxygen line with him, learned that the environmental monitoring had been slashed apart and that the system was reporting nothing at all. He went to the controls themselves and read the truth off them: the scrubbers were intact but three of four filters had been cut, and the ship was rated for twelve people and currently carrying thirty-two. So he began closing the ship down — guest quarters, the captain’s quarters, the galley, the pantry, the utility bay, the lift — announcing each section over the comms as he pulled its air out into the compartments that still had people in them. He did not announce the brig. Zeid was still in it, and had been promised passage in exchange for his surrender, and nobody went down to look. The whistling had stopped some time before anyone thought about him again. Etna went out into the open cargo bay in a vac suit to her hydroponic container, the salvaged cargo box she has been coaxing crops out of since the day it came aboard, and plumbed it into the scrubber loop as a living filter, buying the ship roughly a day at the cost of every plant in it. Gaal got Weaver and Carl onto beds, onto oxygen, and onto a machine that scrubbed their blood clean of what they had been breathing; neither of them was dying anymore, and neither of them was going to be any help tonight.
Marge took the other route to the workshop, through the med bay vents, and stopped with her light on a thread of wire stretched across the duct and a grenade taped to the frame beyond it. She got the tripwire off, got her thumb on the pin, taped it down and kept the grenade. At the grate she finally saw the thing that had been living in their walls: a woman with almost nothing left of her that was flesh, stealth field down, cybernetic hands — one of them closed around the back of Dixie Doss’s neck while Dixie, alive and wretched, worked on the cybernetic arm. The grate came free with a clatter Marge could not prevent. Tanya spun, the door came open at the same moment under Jackal’s crowbar, and the corridor filled with automatic fire; Jackal took it across the body and went down rolling, and Marge and Tanya shot at each other through a vent grate at arm’s length until Marge’s arm broke under the impacts. Gaal, at the door with nothing useful to shoot, emptied a fire extinguisher into the room until the whole space was white and neither side could see anything at all.
It was Dax who finished it, from the wrong side of the ship. He crossed to the airlock that opened onto the cargo bay — still wide to space — warned the handful of people who could hear him, and hit the override. The computer asked him if he was sure. The door opened onto vacuum and the workshop emptied itself: tools, smoke, and Tanya with Dixie still locked in her grip, both of them tumbling out end over end. Dax and Gaal caught hold of the airlock frame and held on while the air went past them and the bulkhead doors slammed all down the corridor; Jackal, already on the floor, was bounced off the ceiling for his trouble. Jon brought the salvage pod around, matched their tumble exactly, closed a claw on Dixie’s leg and tore her out of the cyborg’s arms. Tanya went past him spinning, fired her grapple line at the pod in a last effort, missed, and her expression changed from triumph to something much more human as she cartwheeled away into the dark. Get away from her, Jon said, you bitch.
Dixie was unsuited in vacuum for as long as it took the cargo bay doors to grind shut — a half minute, maybe, that nobody aboard will describe that way. She had been trained for it; she kept her mouth open so her lungs would not tear, and the capillaries burst across her face while they watched, and she passed out just as the pressure came back. Arnold, out on the arm in mag boots with his tools tethered to his suit, replaced the blown servos; the arm woke, remembered the last order Dixie had given it, and began dragging the captured dropship into the bay — with Arnold still standing on it. His boots let go and he floated off the end of his own line, and Jon waved to him through the pod window as he went past.
Afterwards they counted what they had. The trees were still aboard the captured dropship, still in cryostasis, undamaged. There was no jump fuel anywhere on it, and none left in their own tanks. Dixie went under sedation; Marge had her arm set; Jackal was carried to the med bay in pieces and put back together. Arnold pulled the environmental filters out of the captured dropship, found them built to a different standard entirely, and spent an hour turning them into one filter of the right shape with spacers cut from their own ruined units and a great deal of sealing tape. He carried it up to Bernard, who turned it over in his hands — it looked like garbage — and installed it anyway. The scrubbers came up to three-quarters, and everyone aboard took a slightly easier breath.
Gaal went down to the shuttle bay where the colonists were packed in, thinking about how much of the problem was simply the number of chests rising and falling, and offered them what a monastery had taught her: a slow, measured breathing pattern to spend less air and be less afraid. The colonists, who had spent the last day being shot at by cultists and pirates in turn, were having absolutely none of it, and told her so at volume, and breathed faster out of sheer indignation.
With Carl unconscious there was no pilot, and the only port in reach was the station at the top of the space elevator — the one that had built the colony’s parts and terraformed its soil before it fell silent, and the one the pirates had presumably been running out of. Jon took the helm himself on the theory that he had watched Carl do it enough times, and told everyone to strap in. The engines lit, the ship changed orbit, and the station grew in the forward screens. Then every display on the bridge came alive at once with the burning sword, and the voice: the adherents of this mountain will lead humanity to a new era by giving up independent thought to the will of Bishamonten. By allowing the godly intelligence to lead, humanity will be brought to the next level of evolution. You have chosen wisely. Please dock and report for purification.
The docking arm reached out and took hold of them like a jetway. Stabilization clamps closed on the hull fore and aft, and locked, and it was immediately clear that nothing aboard The Second Chance was going to release them — that would have to be done from inside the station. The airlock cycled open. The Marines who could still stand were waiting on it with their weapons up, and what they found on the other side was silence, and lights, and no one at all.