‘Jekri!’ Ngiri shouted in the sudden near-darkness. Bars of acid-yellow light strobed past outside as the exterior lumens of the hab blocks began to rise past them, faster and faster.

‘Acknowledged,’ Sef Lentzen said a second later, and set off across the deck towards the rear of the craft with the mechanical clanking of mag-enabled feet. Chetta, struggling up into a sitting position, took a moment to work out that he must be responding to Jekri’s instructions over his comm-bead.

The reason for Lentzen’s clumsy, magnetic running became clear a moment later as the deck began to tilt away from her. The gun-cutter was in uncontrolled freefall, and ‘down’ no longer had any particular relationship to the angle of the craft. Chetta clawed desperately at the deck as it yawed beneath her, and the other occupants of the hold began to slide with various yelps of alarm. She had neither their strength nor their durability: she’d be dead before they even hit the ground.

Light suddenly flooded the hold, and the start of her fall was intercepted by the grav-chair of Kennevario Xudine. The Xudine Novator had turned his chair’s lumens on, and Chetta blinked as she grabbed desperately at his seat. He took hold of her wrists and heaved, grunting with the effort.

‘Climb aboard,’ he puffed, as the gun-cutter rotated further around them. Chetta forced her legs to assist, and she ended up sprawled half across his lap. He floated backwards as a wall of storage lockers accelerated towards them, and his chair bobbed and wobbled as the sensors controlling its anti-grav motors attempted to adjust to the constantly shifting environment around them.

‘How does this work when we hit the ground?’ Chetta asked him above the panicked shouts of their companions. She could feel the thin bones of his skeletal thighs under her, and knew she must be causing him pain.

‘I don’t know,’ Xudine admitted. There was a resounding thump, and Chetta grunted in pain as the chair jolted and jarred her. One of her TriStar guards rebounded off the back, having struck it while tumbling.

‘Carmine! Get us stable!’ Sef Lentzen shouted from beyond the hatchway at the rear of the cargo bay.

‘I don’t know which way is up!’ Carmine replied desperately, trying to hold on to some crash webbing as the gun-cutter rolled again.

‘Just do it!’ Ngiri yelled at him. It seemed the inquisitor had managed to activate mag-clamps in her armour’s boots as well, as she was now anchored to what was, at least nominally, the ceiling.

Carmine let out a great groan of effort as he exerted his psykana gift. The air temperature plummeted… and the gun-cutter levelled out.

There was a moment where, had it not been for the dark, dirty clouds rushing up past the portholes, Chetta might have thought that they were floating peacefully in the air.