Murdock shuts one eye to aim. Heart pounding, I pull my blaster away from Orion’s head and point it at the bottom panel. I shove Orion to the floor as we both fire. Pain sears the side of my head as the lights go dark.

I fall to my knees, gasping in pain, warm blood splattering from the left side of my skull. It hurts too badly for me to tell exactly where I’m hit, but I’m still alive. If I want to stay that way, I have to focus.

Captain Murdock fires again, a flash of light in the darkness, but it goes wild as I scramble to the side. I clap a hand across my mouth to stifle my breathing.

“Stop, stop,” Orion cries out, still on the floor somewhere. “You almost hit me, Dad!”

“Oh, shut up,” Murdock says, but doesn’t shoot again. I remove the hand from my mouth and grab the goggles still dangling around my neck. As I slip them on, they jostle the injured side of my head, and I bite back a cry of pain. That shot must have caught me right in the ear.

Once the goggles are on, I see Orion still pressed against the floor but unharmed as far as I can tell. Murdock swings his blaster back and forth, searching for me. I hold my breath and straighten up, taking aim at the panel for the main deck lights. I fire off a shot and immediately duck into the outside hall. Out here, the dim glow of a few emergency light sources remains, but not nearly enough to provide reliable sight. The reinforcements Murdock called are stumbling around in the darkness, swearing and calling for their captain.

The Red Baron’s corridors are dim and green-tinted, but visible with my goggles on. Hopefully this darkness will give us an edge, and hopefully Lyre can get her own job done so we can get off this piece-of-shit ship and back on course.