I was flat on the deck, and all I could hear in the feed was humans yelling from the cockpit, humans yelling over the comm from the Port Authority, and the shuttle’s emergency siren making sure everyone knew the air had just explosively vacated due to lock breaches. The core cutter was on top of me and I pushed it off and sat up. I knew at some point I had heard Abene scream in anguish, but I wasn’t sure when it had happened.

The combat bot still stood, but it was unmoving, joints frozen. The core cutter had gone through its torso from one side to the other and extracted a neat cross-section of the protective shielding and the bot’s processors. The core had been ejected from the back of the cutter and had fallen to the deck. I realized that was what had hit me in the head. I guess despite the instructions I had been holding it wrong.

Miki was crumpled in front of the bot, and something looked wrong. I was climbing to my feet, trying to see how Miki was damaged, when I froze. Something looked wrong because Miki’s chest was crushed, its processor, memory, everything that made it Miki squeezed to nothing in one flex of the combat bot’s hand.

*   *   *

I just sat on the deck. The shuttle neared the station, and the humans were on the comm, talking to the PA from the cockpit. They couldn’t lower the flight deck hatch because of the lock breaches, and I hadn’t answered their attempts to call me on feed or comm. I had still been sending visuals from my camera to the team feed, and they had seen the fight and Miki’s last moment from my point of view. Before I cut my feed connection to them, I’d heard Abene sobbing, Hirune trying to comfort her, the others murmuring in shock.

I need air, too, though not nearly as much as humans, and maybe the lack of it was what made me feel so slow and disconnected. I used the station feed to ping Ship again and told it to unlock from the station, and I gave it a rendezvous position. Its calm acknowledgement felt strange, like everything was normal and nothing disastrous had happened.

Vibol knocked on the other side of the flight deck hatch, calling, “SecUnit, are you there? Please answer!”