Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“I’m weirdly at peace with this,” he said.

“Probably a good sign,” she said, and a fresh round of shooting started. Havelock gestured for her to stay and pushed forward.

All the major corridors on the Israel had decompression hatches: thick circles of metal with hard polymer seals. Most of the time they were bumps in the walls, larger than the ship designs a generation or two later, but easy enough to ignore. If something holed the ship, the hatch would close with the speed and amorality of a guillotine. If someone got caught in it, one loss was better than venting the air. Havelock had seen training videos about misfires, and he’d been nervous around them ever since. One man was pressed to the wall, eyeing the corridor ahead anxiously. Havelock cleared his throat, and the man spun, pistol at the ready.

“Mfume,” Havelock said, his palms up. “Where’s Boyd?”

“He went forward,” Mfume said, gesturing with the gun, but not lowering it. “The chief’s getting shot at. And he told me to stay here. And I stayed, but —”

“It’s all right,” Havelock said, moving closer slowly, not making eye contact. He kept looking down the corridor, trying to shift the man’s attention there. The raised pistol made his chest itch. “You did the right thing.”

The radio crackled back to life, and the chief engineer spoke. He sounded winded. “We’ve locked the little bastard down. He winged Salvatore, but it’s not bad. I need everyone up here. We’re going to rush him.”

“That’s probably not a good idea,” Havelock said on the open channel.

“It’s all right,” the chief engineer said. “We can take him.”

“Not without casualties that you don’t have to take,” Havelock said. “Is he in armor?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got one hit on him,” another voice said, its tone high and tight, like a kid on his first hunt who thinks he shot a deer.

“Everyone check in,” the chief said.

“Jones and I are in the brig, chief. Everything’s quiet.”

“Prisoner giving you any shit?” the chief asked.

“I moved her,” Havelock said. “She’s fine. I need you to pull back now. We have to do this by the numbers.”

Another half dozen gunshots peppered the air. Mfume twitched with each of them. Havelock gently pushed the barrel of the man’s gun away until it pointed at the wall. Mfume didn’t seem to notice he’d done it.

“No can do,” Koenen said. “If we let up, this Belter sonofabitch is going to get loose. We’ve got to finish this thing. Honneker! Walters! Get your nuts in your palms and head forward, boys. This piece of shit is going down.”

The silence on the radio was eerie.

“Walters?” the chief engineer said.

Havelock took Mfume’s wrist and twisted, bracing one leg against the wall for leverage. Mfume cried out, but he loosened his grip on the gun enough for Havelock to bat it away. The black metal spun down the corridor, and Mfume yelled and tried to push him away. Havelock shifted his grip, pulling out and down, peeling Mfume away from his bracing wall. The engineer screamed again, and Havelock fired the Taser into his back. Mfume bounced against the far wall, limp as a puppet, and Havelock pulled the shotgun off his back and shifted to jam one knee against the lip of the decompression hatch and the other foot behind him against a handhold.

“Nagata,” he shouted. “We’re about to have company.”

Down the corridor, the chief engineer boiled around the corner and slammed into the wall, firing his pistol wildly.

“Cease fire!” Havelock called. “You’ve got one of your own floating outside cover. Cease fire!”

“Fuck you!” Koenen shouted, and Havelock pulled the shotgun’s trigger. The bag round took the chief in the side and sent him spinning. Havelock landed the second shot in the man’s back just as three more engineers caromed around the corner in a clump. Havelock shot each of them once, then shifted himself to the other side of the hatch and pushed off, stowing the shotgun and pulling the Tasers. The low-charge one was already dead, and he dropped it. One of the men was bleeding; a droplet of blood the size of a fingernail floated in the air. All four men were gasping in pain. Two of them had dropped their weapons, and the other two – the bleeding man and Koenen – seemed unaware Havelock was there at all. Havelock Tased the first of the floating men, then grabbed the one who was bleeding, Salvatore.

“You. Kemp.”

“You shot me.”

“With a bag round. The other guy shot Salvatore with a bullet. You need to get him to the medical bay.”

“You’re a traitor,” the chief engineer shouted, and Havelock Tased him before turning back to Kemp.

“I’m taking your gun away, and I’m giving you Salvatore. You’re helping him get to the medical bay now. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Kemp said, then looked over Havelock’s shoulder and nodded. “Ma’am.”

“Everything under control?” Naomi asked.

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Havelock said, putting Kemp’s hand on Salvatore’s arm and giving them both a little shove back up the corridor. “I’m fairly sure the two from the brig are on their way down here.”

“We should leave, then.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

The short stretch of corridor between the corner and the airlock had a sealed door to secondary storage, a low access panel to the power conduits in the walls, and the entrance to the maintenance airlock’s locker room. The space was narrow and cramped. Bullet holes pocked the cloth. One of them had penetrated the wall and hit a hydraulic tube. The safety hydraulic fluid was polymerizing in the air, a hundred tiny greenish dots slowly turning white. The original leak was probably already sealed with a hunk of the stuff. The washroom was the standard utility size, so small that squatting on the vacuum seat meant pressing back to one wall and knees to the other. It wouldn’t have been much for cover in the first place, and the narrow door stood open. A dozen bullet holes scarred the walls and the doorway.

“Okay,” Havelock said, and a gun popped out, firing blind down the hallway. He pushed Naomi behind him, shouting, “Stop! Stop! I’ve got Nagata right here!”

“Stay the hell back!” a man’s voice shouted from the washroom. It sounded almost familiar, but Havelock couldn’t place it. “I swear to God I’ll shoot.”