Under the circumstances, they were reasonable questions. Get to Medical, I told her. I didn’t want to answer any reasonable questions. If I was wrong, I’d probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse.

But what— Amena began, and I backburnered the channel.

8

Running through ART’s corridors, I didn’t have a lot of time to plan. The way the MedSystem’s platform had activated in response to Eletra’s medical emergency told me the ship’s operational code, or at least large fragments of it, was still intact. And targetControlSystem was going down under my barrage of contacts, allowing more of ART’s systems to come back online. This was technically a good time to try to breach the control area, but I’d be doing it even if I had to fight through an entire task group of Targets and their stupid semi-invisible drones.

I took the corridor up through the central module and passed a targetDrone bobbing in midair and one bumping along the lower bulkhead. As targetControlSystem went down, it was flooding them with garbage code.

Back in the quarters module, Amena and the others were finally clumping down the corridor toward Medical. They encountered the targetDrone that Amena had disabled with fire suppressant, still floating aimlessly, and Overse bashed it with a cutting tool brought from the safepod.

Scout Two showed me the control area foyer, barely three meters ahead, was empty which meant I’d lost track of Target Four. I just had time to run back its video to see Target Four leave through the forward doorway. Then an energy/heat blast hit me from behind. It struck me in the lower back and I lost traction and fell forward and slid halfway across the deck toward the control area hatch.

My performance reliability dropped to 80 percent.

In the corridor outside Medical, Amena jerked to a halt and yelled, “No, no!”

“What?” Arada demanded.

“They got—They shot—” Amena waved wildly at the Medical hatch. “Stay here with them!” and bolted away. Her drone squad careened after her.

I’ve been hit by projectile and energy weapons a lot more times than I can remember (literally, because of the memory wipes) and it’s not that it doesn’t hurt. But I had tuned down my pain sensors earlier, so it was a surprise when I rolled over and saw the big smear of blood and fluid on the deck.

I could only last so long like this. I needed to move faster.

But at least this solved the problem of how I was going to get the hatch open. Target Four ran toward me because assholes love to see your face when they kill you. He stopped what he thought was far enough away and fired, but I rolled onto my side so the blast hit the deck next to me. I shoved with my feet, used my hip as a pivot, and spun myself around so I could grab his ankle. He shrieked and fell backward, and I climbed up him and snapped his neck.