I swung my legs up just in time for the manikin’s lunge; it missed, grabbing where I had been a second before. Then it crouched on the floor below me and bared its weird, human teeth. I was significantly taller than it—it couldn’t reach up as easily as I had.

I’d solved my immediate problem only to introduce another. I hung from the ceiling and stared upside-down at the calculating eyes of the manikin as it prepared to leap.

I knew what to do right before it jumped. Instead of thinking about what I was about to do, I simply let go of the pipe I’d been holding on to, and let myself fall down onto the manikin just as it reached up to meet me. My weight slammed it into the ground, off-balance, and I used my momentum to jam the knife all the way through its throat. The manikin jolted, spat dark blood, and stopped moving.

That had worked surprisingly well. I looked over to see how my companions were doing and found Tamara beating her last opponent into a bloody pulp while Indigo faced down a particularly large manikin, eyes glinting in the dark blue of Indigo’s collar-light and snarling sharpened teeth.

I stood up, found another handhold in the ceiling, and swung up again. It had been a while since I’d swung around on monkey bars, but I’d had to do hull repairs on a starship recently, and that required a lot of crawling around upside-down, too.

My feet crashed into the manikin’s face, knocking him away from Indigo, my full weight smashing the monster against the ground. “Sean—” said Indigo, and his language might not have any designated swear words but he sure made my name sound like one, and before the manikin I’d stunned could dig its claws through my spine I heard the crunch of Indigo driving his sword through bone.

I rolled off the corpse. “How are we doing?” I asked.

Tamara was panting, leaning on her club, splashed with dark blood. Indigo, untouched, looked past me down the hall—and behind me, I could hear more skitter-scratch of claws. A lot of them.

“So, the left fork, then,” I said.

“I think we need to gamble, lieutenant,” Indigo agreed with me.

“I hate gambling,” Tamara said, but it was a complaint, not disagreement.

Indigo took the lead down the left fork, since he was a searchlight and first line of defense all in one. I followed, light shining all around us, checking walls and ceiling and floor. It had been a while since I’d gone somewhere on this ship where Tamara hadn’t had an idea of what was waiting for us. I hadn’t realized how much security that had given me until we were going in blind.

And then the path ended. I swung my flashlight around wildly and found that the hallway should have branched out to our right, but at some point—somehow—the ceiling had collapsed into a mess of metal and debris.