Now, as time ran out, Tasia saw that his suit powerpack had been linked up incorrectly, the plugs inserted with reverse polarity. She grabbed the control unit on his suit and yanked at the cables. Robb turned in alarm, sending a question through the suit radio.

“Come on, trust me.” Tasia slapped his gloved hands away, working like a surgeon, linking the systems properly. “I know what I’m doing.”

She withdrew just as the dome overhead cracked open. Magenta lights shifted to red danger beacons, and the armored ceiling split apart like the beak of a hungry baby bird. Air gushed out, forming frost crystals in a faint fog that was sucked upward in a whirlwind cascade.

Must be nice to have so much air to spare, she thought.

Tasia looked over at Robb, giving him a relieved explanation on the suit channel. “Your powerpack wasn’t connected right. Your suit wouldn’t have pressurized.”

The other recruit looked alarmed, then deeply grateful. “Hey, thanks—”

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “And don’t you dare get all blubbery on me. Shizz, if you popped from explosive decompression, the sarge would probably assign me the job of scrubbing all the goop out of your suit.”

From across the hangar bay, one of the recruits began howling over the open crew channel, his words indecipherable. Air and mist sprayed from a breach around his wrist, and he flailed his hand, as if that might help. The idiot hadn’t sealed his left glove properly. Three recruits pressed around him, trying to help, telling him to calm down—which would do no good, because with a loss of suit integrity like that, he’d lose all his air and body heat within seconds.

Tasia remembered him as one of the spoiled rich kids from Earth, Patrick Fitzpatrick III. He had been rude to her, but she couldn’t let him die, even from his own cluelessness. “Tasia to the rescue,” she said, mostly to herself.

Pushing off against the floor in the low gravity, she arrived at the scene in seconds and shouldered the others aside. She grabbed the young man’s arm and wrestled the glove into place. Fitzpatrick swatted at her, and if his helmet hadn’t been in the way, Tasia would have slugged him hard in the jaw just to stun him for a minute. His hand was already swollen purple from the decompression, and the cold vacuum had probably damaged the tissues. Well, he’d be too sore to write postcards to his mommy for a while.