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added the increased muscle he needed to operate in a high-gravity environment.
    Milt, on the other hand, was not in such good shape. DDCM receptors had exempted themselves from the boring emergency-scenario training, and Ricimer doubted that Milt had ever experienced a gravitational tug this extreme.
    In any case, Milt was overweight to begin with. Tripling his weight brought him down in a crumpling heap two steps from the closed hatch. His trachea severed, there was no way for Milt to breathe. He tore at the knife, but it was firmly lodged in his neck.
    Ricimer could have left it like that. The receptor would die soon enough. But time was pressing, and he had so much more to do.
    Ricimer straddled Milt and sat down on his back. He reached down and batted Milt’s weak grip from the knife’s handle. Ricimer grabbed the knife himself with two hands, both on the left side of Milt’s neck.
    With a strong tug, he pulled the knife as he would a valve lever, slicing in an arc sideways through Milt’s neck. Blood gushed forth in a rapid flow of milky white exsanguination. Guardian blood was a fluorocarbon liquid, perfluorodecalin. A wet pool formed under the receptor’s head and shoulders. When Ricimer got to the back of the receptor’s neck, the knife ground against Milt’s spinal hinge. Ricimer took a breath. Just pushing out his chest to take in air was a struggle.
    Thump, thump, thump.
    What was that behind him? Ricimer glanced back. Thump . Ah, it was Milt’s legs kicking feebly against the deck. For a moment, Ricimer felt sorry for Milt’s children. Their grandparents were political nobodies. The children would be doomed to obscurity, probably end up laborers or cannon fodder.
    And Milt had such hopes for them.
    Curse them, said the ancestral voices within Ricimer. Curse them as we are cursed.
    Thump.
    Ricimer put everything he had into another pull on the knife, and it found purchase between the cartilage-like lacework Guardians possessed instead of bones. The knife sliced its way through Milt’s connective tissue as—
    The thumping stopped.
    The rest was easier. Ricimer completed his circling of the neck, neatly meeting the start of his incision at the front. He let go of the knife, and the head slumped forward, held on only by a shred of flesh. Ricimer put his hands on either side of Milt’s skull, held the receptor by his ear humps, and pulled.
    The head came off.
    “Captain, what are you attempting to accomplish? I do not understand.” It was the voice of Governess. Had Lamella failed to secure the Administration computer? “Captain, please explain—”
    Cut off in mid emission. Lamella had stifled her twin, her other brain “lobe” in the craft, for the time being.
    “Lamella, have you restrained Governess?”
    “Yes. Momentarily.”
    “I understand,” Ricimer replied. “Lamella, gravity normal, please.”
    “As per agreement,” said the computer.
    Ricimer sat up abruptly, back to his normal weight. The pool of fluorocarbon blood beneath him seemed to “unflatten” as the surface tension reestablished itself at another degree of freedom.
    “Captain, I will be able to hold Governess at bay for approximately two-point-three momentias. She is employing every countermeasure at her service to escape the program lock.”
    “Noted,” said Ricimer. He set the head down in front of him on one temple. Milt’s empty eye stared ahead at a bulkhead. At nothing anymore.
    Ricimer reversed the knife in his hand and brought its handle down, hard, against the right side of Milt’s cranial cavity. A slight give.
    Again.
    Again.
    This time something cracked. A ragged line opened up from Milt’s ear to the top of the rind-like connective tissue mass that formed his skull.
    Another blow with the knife handle. The gap widened.
    Ricimer reached into the bloody crack with the edges of his hands. His gripping gills found purchase on the underside of the skull rind.
    He pulled for all he was worth. With a popping