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The pain in her body was so profound and inexplicable that it didn’t feel like pain; it was only the sense that so a spray of blood across the roolands in her sleep, that rong was only her, but the ship alar worse She reached for her hand ter half ain the air A star-shaped fracture in the resin case shohere it had hit soh to break The network access displayed a bright red bar No status System down

Melba pulled herself to the door and cycled it open

The dead wo in the corridor had her arms out before her, her hair splayed around her like someone drowned The left side of her face was oddly shaped, softer and rounder and bluer than it should have been Her eyes were half open, the whites the bright red of burst vessels Melba pushed past the corpse Farther down the corridor, a sphere of blood the size of a soccer ball floated slowly toward the air intake with no sign where it had come from

In the wider corridors toward the s orse Bodies floated at every door, in every passageway Everything not bolted down floated now by the walls, throard the bow The soft gray walls were covered with dents where hand terminals and tools and heads had struck the else, deeper and more inti sealant foa the bodies like cordwood

“You all right?” one of them said It took Melba a second to realize that the wo to her

“I’m okay,” Melba said “What happened?”

“Who the fk knows? You’re one of the maintenance techs, yes?” the woman said sharply

“I am,” Melba said “Melba Koh Electrocheet your ass to environ they need you there”

Melba nodded, thea little until the woman put out a hand to steady her

She’d never been in a battle or at the scene of a natural disaster The nearest had been a hurricane that hit São Paulo when she was eight, and her father had hidden the faone She’d seen e on the newsfeeds than in person The Thomas Prince was a scene fro frantically, but the dead and dying were everywhere Droplets of blood and chips of shattered plastic forether In zero g, blood pooled in the wounds and wouldn’t clear Inflas filled with fluid more easily However many had died already, more would Soon If she hadn’t been in her crash couch, she’d have been thrown into a wall at six hundred meters per second, just like all the others No, that couldn’t be right No one would have survived that