She ran past more cells. Some were open. Bodies, red and wet, lay on the floor inside. She heard hands hammering and muffled shouting from others. The floor lurched again. She could see a sealed door across the corridor ahead, yellow and black chevrons painted across it. She was thirty paces from it. Her run faltered.

The yellow-and-black door slammed open. Mersadie froze. Guards in red-and-black armour with silver masks came through, alarm lights flashing from their visors. Shouts filled the air. She could see a wider space beyond the door, metal, blinking light filling a wide, vaulted junction.

‘Help!’ The shout came from beside her. The first guard through the door had a quad-barrelled cannon braced in his arms. Mersadie had a second to see her reflection in the guard’s mask. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

The space beyond the yellow-and-black door vanished. The shriek of shearing metal tore through the air. The guard with the quad-cannon flew back through the doorway as though yanked by a rope. Mersadie lunged for an open cell to her left. A howling wind poured down the corridor. Her hand caught the edge of a door as the deck pitched down. She cried out as her full body weight wrenched her arm. Debris streamed past her. Where the end of the corridor had been, there was now starlight and flame. For a second she stared down at it, unable to look away.

She could see the pale blue orb of a planet hanging against a field of stars. Shapes glimmered in the dark, light catching on the hulls and prows of ships, and the towers of void-stations. It was beautiful, a serene and terrifying image. Fire streaked across the view. Explosions burst into being. Lines of flame and energy latticed the void. A piece of debris spun across the view, blocking out the sight of the planet and stars. Dust scattered into the vacuum from the chewed metal.

No, the thought flashed through Mersadie’s mind. Not dust. Those are people.

An emergency blast door slammed shut over the breach. The howl of evacuating air stopped. The red alarm lights still flashed, their rhythm stuttering. The sirens had silenced. Ash drifted past Mersadie as she hung, panting, blood draining from the open cell doors in the corridor above to patter on the wall below like rain. Mersadie could suddenly hear her own heaving breaths. Gravity lurched again, and the corridor pitched back to near-true. She half fell to the floor and then pulled herself upright.

The sudden quiet was somehow worse than the noise it had replaced – as if she had been plunged into water and was waiting for the air in her lungs to run out.

‘Help!’ The shout came again, louder now, echoing off the metal surfaces. She looked around. ‘Here! Over here!’

She saw it then – an eye pressed against an open view hole in a sealed cell door.

‘Get me out!’ called the voice.