There’s a knuckledragger matriarch keeping to a corner just like ours. Her overalls don’t give much sign of who she is, but you can see her clout in every tech and greaser that passes by, in sketched salutes and tipped helmets and paths taken the long way ’round. Her name is Mer Sah, and she hasn’t said much so far. When she does speak, it’s full of rust and smoke and hidden depths, like she speaks for the ship itself. Locke is doing a good job of rubbing her up the wrong way, though, and even Andrade earns the odd glare here and there. She doesn’t belong to anyone but her crews.

The last person at the table is clothed in a med tech’s covers and stinks of blood. She’s called Jerea: the one whose nurse I damaged. I earn a glare from her as well, but it’s short-lived, and quickly lost to fatigue.

“We need to make for the keelside lifeboats,” says Locke. “Get as many out as we can and regroup in the froth.”

“And then what?” growls Mer Sah. “There is no guarantee that those boats will release when you tell them to; and if they do, what will that get us?”

“Some breathing room. And maybe a line on the other companies.”

Mer Sah knits her fingers. “And what good will that do?”

“Someone on the Demiurge did it.” Locke sets her eyes on us—on me. “They put out a distress beacon, used it as a warning.” Her voice drops low. “We ignored it.”

“Didn’t help them, either,” says King. He unfolds to his full height—barely level with Locke’s chin—but he’s used to holding ground. “NorCol only found that beacon by chance, and that was only after they were dead and gone.”

“You don’t know that.”

He spreads his hands. “It came to the same thing in the end, didn’t it?”

Locke doesn’t retreat. “What about the other companies? You think they’ll just stand and watch us die?”

“No,” says the ground-pounder, full of grit. “They’ll sell tickets to the show.” He offers her a nasty grin. “It sounds like you’ve spent a little too long in your own waters, colonial. This is corporate space.”

“Not technically.”

King shrugs, thumbs in coat-pockets. “Possession is law, and that makes this corporate space. Spend a little longer in it, and you’d think twice before suggesting something like that.”

“We can’t leave them in the dark.”

“We can, and we should,” mutters Mer Sah. “Christs, if they understood half of what happened here, what is happening, they’d jump in.”

“All of them?”

King tags in. “Every single one of them. How much do you think they’d give to sink the biggest ship in NorCol’s fleet?”

Locke rolls her shoulders. “Just like that?”

“Just like that. They can learn plenty from the ashes.”