Still keeping her voice low, she said, “Which way to the shuttles?” The ship mind ought to know where the aliens were and how best to avoid them.

A line of green arrows appeared along the top of the wall, pointing deeper into the ship. She followed them through a maze of rooms to a ladder that led toward the center of the Extenuating Circumstances.

The apparent gravity lessened as she climbed past deck after deck of the rotating hab section. Through open doorways, she heard screams and shouts, and twice she saw the muzzle flashes of machine guns reflected around corners. Once, she heard an explosion that sounded like a grenade going off, and a series of pressure doors slammed shut behind her. But she never saw whatever it was the crew was fighting.

Halfway up, the ship lurched—hard—forcing Kira to grab the ladder with both hands to avoid being thrown off. A weird, swirling sensation caused her gorge to rise and bile to flood her mouth. The Extenuating Circumstances was spinning end for end, not a good situation for a long, narrow ship. The frame wasn’t designed to withstand rotational forces.

The alarms changed tone, becoming even more shrill. Then a deep male voice emanated from the speakers in the walls: “Self-destruct in T-minus seven minutes. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. Self-destruct in T-minus six minutes and fifty-two seconds.”

Kira’s insides went cold as ice. “Bishop! No!”

The same male voice said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Navárez. I have no other choice. I suggest you—”

Whatever else he said, Kira didn’t hear, wasn’t listening. Panic threatened to overwhelm her, but she pushed it aside; she didn’t have time for emotions. Not now. A wonderful clarity focused her mind. Her thoughts grew hard, mechanical, ruthless. Less than seven minutes to reach the shuttles. She could do it. She had to.

She scrambled forward, moving even faster than before. She’d be damned if she was going to die on the Extenuating Circumstances.

At the top of the ladders, a ring of green arrows surrounded a closed hatch. Kira pulled it open and found herself in the spherical hub that joined the different hab sections.

She turned aftward, and vertigo gripped her as she saw what seemed to be a long, narrow pit dropping away below her. The shaft was a terror of black metal and stabbing light. All the hatches in all the decks that stacked the stem of the ship had been opened, an offense that normally would have been worthy of a court-martial.

If the ship fired its engines, anyone caught in the shaft would plummet to their death.

Hundreds of meters away, toward the stern, she glimpsed troopers in power armor grappling with some thing: a mass of conflicting shapes, like a knot of shadows.

An arrow pointed into the darkness.

Kira shivered and launched herself toward the distant fight. To keep her stomach from rebelling, she chose to view the shaft as a horizontal tunnel rather than a vertical pit. She crawled along the ladder bolted to the floor/wall, using it to guide her path and keep her from drifting off course.