Then there is the way that mutinies actually happen, involving weapons, violence, sudden death, the officer ranks turning on each other like animals, the crew trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Then, depending on the way things go, the captain being murdered and tossed out into the void, and then everything backdated after the fact to make it look all legal and pretty, or the mutinous officers and crew being shown the other side of an airlock and the captain filing a Notice of Extralegal Mutiny, which cancels the mutineers’ survivors benefits and pensions, meaning their spouses and children starve and are blackballed from guild roles for two generations, because apparently mutiny is in the DNA, like eye color or a tendency toward irritable bowels.

On the bridge of the Tell Me Another One, Captain Arullos Gineos was busy dealing with an actual mutiny, not a paper one, and if she was going to be really honest about it to herself, things didn’t look like they were going very well for her at the moment. More to the point, once her XO and his crew burned their way through that bulkhead with their hull welders, Gineos and her bridge crew were on their way to being the victims of an “accident” to be named later.

“Weapons locker is empty,” Third Officer Nevin Bernus said, after checking. Gineos nodded at that; of course it was. The weapons locker was coded to open for exactly five people: the captain, the officers of the watch, and Security Chief Bremman. One of the five had removed the weapons on a previous watch; logic pointed to Executive Officer Ollie Inverr, who was currently cutting his way through the wall with his friends.

Gineos wasn’t entirely unarmed. She had a low-velocity dart pusher that she kept in her boot, a habit she picked up when she was running with the Rapid Dogs gang in the warrens of Grussgott as a teenager. Its single dart was meant for close-contact use; from a distance farther than a meter, all it would do is just piss off whoever got hit with it. Gineos was not under the illusion her dart pusher was going to save her or her command.

“Status,” Gineos said to Lika Dunn, who had been busy contacting the other officers of the Tell Me.

“Nothing from Engineering since Chief Fanochi called in,” Dunn said. Eva Fanochi was the one who had first raised the alarm about her department being taken over by armed crew led by the XO, which had caused Gineos to lock down the bridge and put the ship on alert. “Chief Technician Vossni isn’t answering. Neither is Dr. Jutmen. Bremman has been sealed into his quarters.” That would be Piter Bremman, Tell Me’s security chief.