I passed him one of the pistols, closing my hand around the phantom thing, feeling the shape of it better than my eyes could make out its shifty outline.

Trusko took the gun. He looked down at the sly thing with a sort of deadened wonder, blinking at it the way a drunkard will blink at something that won’t come into focus, and then he turned in his seat to aim the pistol at Bosa Sennen.

‘No,’ I said, guessing what he meant to do next. We were holed in a dozen places and the lungstuff was bleeding out fast, but that wasn’t the same as blasting half the ship away.

Bosa started backing away, retreating into the bridge, the mirror of her face still turned to us.

Trusko looked back at me. It was impossible to hear anything now, and I was starting to feel a blackness clogging the edge of my thoughts. But Trusko mouthed words anyway and the wonder of it was that I got his meaning.

Quarters, he was saying.

His personal quarters.

I didn’t have the strength to scream, and barely enough to move myself. I grabbed Prozor by the scruff and mimed for her to follow me into the quarters, and Strambli, Surt and Tindouf got the message smartly enough. By then we were swimming against the rush of lungstuff fighting its way out in a dozen directions, but none of that flow going in the way we needed, and by the time we got over the threshold into the room my lungs felt like they were sucking on vacuum. I didn’t have much more to give, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking back.

Bosa had backed all the way into the bridge. She was turning from us.

Trusko couldn’t have had much more breath in him than the rest of us. But he still hung onto enough consciousness to level that Ghostie gun and fire, and if that was his last living act as captain of the Queenie, it wasn’t a bad one.

A thousand times I’ve sifted through my recollection of what happened in the instants that followed, trying to find some sense or order to it that I can live with. There was the pull of the trigger, the discharge of the weapon, and what it did to every single thing that was caught up in the widening cone of that shot, and there was the violent slam as Trusko’s quarters sealed itself up, pressure doors closing on both the galley and the bridge, and us seeing him for the last time, that gun in his hand even as the life raced out of him.

That’s how it should have been, anyway.

But it wasn’t.