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the ready. The all-purpose magazine clipped in the long barrel allowed her a number of diverse selections; before turning the corner, she set it for scatter.
    EVA control was empty. The outer airlock to Lander Three stood open. Beyond the airlock was the lander bay— a round antechamber roughly three times the size of her room—then a steep ramp that curved upward to the lander, doubling back on itself once along the way. The manual controls for the outer airlock were next to the entrance to the ramp. Roche inched forward through the airlock, into the bay. It too was empty, so she kept moving.
    Cane’s hand gripped her forearm, bringing her to a sudden halt only meters from the ramp. Instinctively she tried to pull the arm free, but found she could not.
    “What?” she hissed, uneasy in his firm grip.
    His gaze was fixed on the open doorway, and for the first time she noticed that his head was cocked slightly. He was listening to sounds coming from within the lander.
    “Someone’s coming,” he said. “Down the ramp.”
    “Are you sure?” She could hear nothing.
    Instead of answering, he pulled her away from the entrance to the lander, back into EVA control. Moments later, the sound of soft footsteps padded toward them.
    Cane let go of her arm and put his mouth close to her ear. “Only one. I’ll draw that one’s fire while you shoot from here. Can you do that?”
    “Of course I can,” she said with some annoyance, although whether that annoyance came from his questioning her ability or from his suddenly taking charge of the situation, she wasn’t sure. “But you’re putting rather a lot of faith in your speed, aren’t you?”
    “No,” he said, the faint trace of a grin splitting his dark features. “I’m putting it in your ability to hit them before they hit me.”
    She opened her mouth to voice her doubts, but got no further. An explosion shook the ship, the shock wave slamming through the bulkheads and snapping her head back into the wall. Cane maintained his balance and caught her with astonishing ease, held her until she regained her footing.
    The tang of smoke in the air thickened almost immediately, and the lights dimmed.
     said the Box.
    As though he had heard the Box’s words, Cane let her go and inched sideways to the entrance of the bay. “We haven’t got time to play it safe, Commander,” he whispered back to her. “We have to go in now, while they’re still reeling from that explosion.”
    Raising the pistol to her chest, she nodded once. Cane immediately leapt through the door with a speed and agility she would not have believed possible—so fast that her own movements seemed belated and slow in comparison.
    Following the small of his back with her eyes and swiveling her entire body to face the airlock, she covered the interior of the bay with one sweep, gun held at shoulder height in her right hand.
    The first thing she saw was the light: the flash of blue laser fire from somewhere to her left, slicing through the air toward Cane’s back. Only his speed saved him, kept him ahead of the beam.
    Then she was through the door herself, the Box tucked up against her rib cage, cushioned from the Armada-trained roll that she executed with a sureness her instructors would have been proud of. All the time her eyes were focused left, her free hand and the pistol clear of the floor, tilted toward the expected target—
    —a thin figure in a grey transportee uniform, definitely an Exotic Caste, Eckandi perhaps, with white hair, a gaunt face, and an industrial laser held in a double-handed grip, arms swinging to follow Cane’s progress across the open bay floor, the trigger held tightly down, blue light arcing lethally toward Cane’s retreating back—
    Roche’s scatter-fire took the transportee full in the chest. The man crumpled where he stood, then fell forward onto his face. The blue beam