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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 Ganyun

She found another access hatch in the head and tore it open But to her surprise, the service corridor ended just a few feet above her head So her off Having never seen the Guanshiyin froht be But she needed to get another five decks up, and she wasn’t about to let this stop her

A ten-h the outer hull She’d torn off two inner hull hatches on two different decks, so if she got it open, those two decks would lose their air But the central ladder corridor was sealed at Avasarala’s deck, so her people would be fine And the whole reason she was doing this was the sealed hatch to the upper decks, which seeht about the sixSure, they’d shot first, but if any of them were still alive, she had no desire to asphyxiate them in their sleep

It turned out not to be a problem The hatch led into a small airlock chamber, about the size of a closet A h and she climbed out onto the outer hull of the ship

Triple-hulled Of course The lord of the Mao-Kwik e that wasn’t the safest hun of the ship extended to her outer hull as well While most military ships were painted a flat black that made them hard to spot visually in space, ray or were painted in basic corporate colors

The Guanshiyin had a mural painted on it in vivid colors Bobbie was too close to see what it was, but under her feet hat appeared to be grass and the hoof of a giant horse Mao had the hull of his ship painted with a rass When almost no one would ever see it

Bobbie h to handle the quarter-g thrust the ship was still under, and started cli up the side She quickly reached the spot where the dead end between the hulls began, and saw that it was an empty shuttle bay If only Avasarala had let her do this before Mao had run off with the shuttle

Triple hulls, Bobbie thought Maximum redundancy

On a hunch, she crawled across the ship to the other side Sure enough, there was a second shuttle bay But the ship in it wasn’t a standard short-flight shuttle It was long and sleek, with an engine housing twice as large as that of a normal ship its size Written in proud red letters across the bow of the ship was the na pinnace

Bobbie crawled back around to the eo bay and used the airlock there to enter the ship The military override codes her suit sent to the locked door worked, to her surprise The airlock led to the deck just below the bridge, the one used for shuttle supply storage and ein it were the captain of the Guanshiyin and his senior staff There were no security personnel or weapons in sight

The captain tapped his ear in an ancient can you hear esture Bobbie nodded one fist at him, then turned the external speakers back on and said, “Yes”

“We are not military personnel,” the captain said “We can’t defend ourselves fro to turn this vessel over to you without knowing your intentions My XO is on the deck above us, prepared to scuttle the ship if we can’t coh she didn’t know if he could see it through her helh-levelin my role as a member of her security team, I have come to demand that you deliver her i, at best possible speed”