Oh, great. How long was that going to take?

By the time I caught up to realtime, they had already decided to do it, they were just arguing about specifics.

I stood there watching the glowing shapes on the display as Kader took the shuttle closer to the zipper. I admit, I did watch a little more of the episode I had paused while this was going on. (It was only six minutes, but it was a boring six minutes, okay? Also, Miki had walked over to stand sadly next to Abene and stare at me, and I was ignoring it. Abene thought Miki was sad about the missing hand, and kept patting it and telling it they would get it fixed as soon as they got back to the station.)

(It’s a good thing I don’t have a stomach and can’t vomit.)

Finally the shuttle bumped the zipper off its course, dramatically saving the tractor array and GoodNightLander Independent’s investment with forty-five seconds to spare, yay. The humans congratulated each other, and Abene and Brais helped Hirune stand so they could take her to the medical unit. There was still one combat bot left on the facility, but that sounded like somebody else’s problem. The shuttle had altered course to head back to the station and we were close enough already for me to ping Ship through the feed. It pinged back, still waiting for me. That was a relief.

And I heard a clank from the hatch.

I’m not an expert on space, but I was pretty sure stuff wasn’t supposed to knock on the hatch. It might have been debris from the zipper, but I knew. I just knew it wasn’t. I checked the hatch camera, and got a wide-angle view of combat bot face.

The next connection overrode the station feed, temporarily blotting out all my channels: [Objective: kill intruders.]

Oh, shit.

I blocked the bot out of my feed and yelled, “Emergency! Lock breach imminent!” I sent the images from the hatch camera to Miki and through it into the rest of the team’s feed. The humans froze and it felt like forever, it felt like they weren’t going to believe me. But I had forgotten how slow humans seemed to move when I actually had all my attention on what I was doing. Kader hit the all-ship alarm and sealed the two interior hatches between the lock and the crew area. Great, that would buy me a minute, maybe two.

I told Abene, “Get everyone into the flight deck.” There was another hatch there and it might buy another minute. I turned for the access to the compartment just below us where Gerth and Wilken had stored their gear.

As I climbed out of the access I heard Abene yelling, “Go, go,” and I knew from the team feed that the shuttle was heading toward the station and Vibol was tersely explaining to the Port Authority that we were about to be torn apart by a combat bot.