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When the elevator didn’t arrive after several minutes, she thumped over to the panel and hit the button a few more times A small display said OUT OF SERVICE

“Da us”

She’d left the external speakers on, and the harsh voice co out of her suit echoed around the room Avasarala didn’t look up from her drink but said, “Re attention She climbed aardly up the crew ladder to the deck hatch above her head and hit the button The hatch slid open Thatthat this wasn’t a kidnapping They could explain away the elevator Explaining why the undersecretary was locked out of the rest of the ship would be harder Maybe they figured a woman in her seventies would be reluctant to cliood enough They ht Avasarala certainly didn’t look like she was up to a two-hundred-foot cliravity

“None of these people were on Gany non sequitur

“You won’t be able to kill enough of the off the last of her gin, then pushing away fro off to her room

Bobbie didn’t reply She pulled herself up to the next deck and let the hatch slide shut behind her

Her arned for exactly this sort of inal Goliath-class scout suits had been built for Marine boarding parties in ship-to-ship engagened for ood the ar it couldn’t cliracefully in ravity

Bobbie climbed the ladder to the next deck hatch and hit the button The console responded with a red warning light A fewat the menus revealed why: They’d parked the crew elevator just above the hatch and then disabled it, creating a barricade And thatwas up

Bobbie looked around the rooe, nearly identical to the one she’d just left, until she found the likeliest place for them to have hidden their cauys

She climbed back down and went into the luxurious bathroom space On a ship this nice, it couldn’t properly be called the head A fewfound the fairly well-hidden bulkhead service hatch It was locked Bobbie tore it off the wall

On the other side were a tangle of piping and a narrow corridor barely large enough to stuff her ar the pipes for two decks, then kicked the service hatch into the room and clialley, with a bank of stoves and ovens along one wall, several refrigeration units, and lots of counter space, all in glea targeted, and changed the HUD so that the normally invisible infrared beams ai her chest, all co from compact black weapons held by Mao-Kwik security personnel at the other end of the roooons didn’t back up Her HUD ran through the weapons database and inforuns with a standard ammo capacity of three hundred rounds and a cyclic rate of ten rounds per second Unless they were using high-explosive arht behind her, the suit rated their danger level as low

Bobbie made sure her external speakers were still on and said, “Okay, fellas, let’s—”

They opened fire

For one long second, the entire galley was in chaos High-impact plastic rounds bounced off her armor, deflected off the bulkheads, and skipped around the roooods, hurled pots and pans off theirsmaller utensils into the air in a cloud of stainless steel and plastic shards One round took a particularly unlucky bounce and hit one of the security guards in the center of his nose, punching a hole into his head and dropping him to the floor with an almost comic look of surprise on his face

Before two seconds could tick by, Bobbie was inherself across the steel island in the center of the roouards with her ar in for a tackle They were hurled against the far bulkhead with a round n indicators on her HUD for the She didn’t want to know One of the ently shoved hiainst the far bulkhead He didn’tfor cameras She couldn’t find one but hoped it was there anyway If they’d seen this, maybe they wouldn’t throw any more of their people at her

At the keel ladder, she discovered that they’d blocked the elevator by ja the floor hatch open with a crowbar Basic ship safety protocols wouldn’t allow the elevator to move to another deck unless the deck above was sealed Bobbie yanked out the crowbar and threw it across the room, then hit the call button The lift climbed up the ladder shaft to her level and stopped She jue, eight decks up Eight ht htened her hands into fists until the knuckles stretched painfully inside her gauntlets Bring it

Three decks up the elevator stopped, the panel infor her that all the pressure hatches between her and the bridge had been overridden and forced open They illing to risk a hole in the ship e out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression

She climbed off the lift onto a deck that appeared to be h it ht A quick tour revealed twelve small crew cabins and two bathroo on the fixtures for the crew No open bar No twenty-four-hour-a-day food service Looking at the fairly Spartan living conditions of the average crew ht home Avasarala’s last words to her These were just sailors None of them deserved to die for what had happened on Ganymede