Once we near the cargo bay, Drom and I fight our way through what feels like a never-ending flood of pirates. There’s a veritable army of them blocking each route we try. For every enemy we dispatch by laser-fire or grav-grenade or my black Primus knife, two more pop up to take their place. And they’re not easy to get rid of, either. Each of them is clad in top-notch body armor that would’ve made my comrades on Titan green with envy. Nothing other than my blade and direct headshots are able to do any damage. Soon enough, we’re each left with a single emergency grenade, and my pulse rifle is starting to overheat.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Drom pants when we retreat into a side corridor to recover. She leans against the wall, catching her breath, while I clean my knife. “Why the hell are there so many of them?”

She’s right. The Red Baron’s crew is bigger than ours, but nowhere near this big. We’ve tried three separate approaches now, and each one was swarming with unfamiliar faces. They must have picked up new recruits.

“We can’t fight them all,” I say. My hand roams to the pocket on the inside of my jacket, touching the Primus vial nestled there—my last resort. If we’re going to lose—if my family is going to die anyway—then the pirates and these alien weapons will go down with us. As I pull my hand away, I glance at Drom to see if she noticed anything, but she’s watching the entrance to the corridor.

“So what do we do?” she asks.

The question makes my nerves flare up. After everything that happened on Titan, I never thought combat would scare me again. But being here reminds me of the war—the crushing responsibly of being in charge of other peoples’ lives, the losses I suffered because of my choices. Uwe, who died to defend me. Ivennie, who I let die for the sake of the objective. And so many more, an endless parade of faces to populate my nightmares. I won’t let my siblings join them.

Once more my thoughts return to the vial in my pocket, and the last grenade I kept to detonate it and the other vials all at once if necessary. It reassures me. If all else fails, at least I won’t have to live long with my mistakes.

“Corvus?” Drom asks, dragging me from my thoughts. “What the hell do we do? We need to pull enough heat that Lyre can get to the systems room.”

“Let me think.” I need to come up with something other than using the vials, but my mind returns to them again and again, as if already resigned to that end.

“We don’t have time,” Drom snaps. “We need to—”