“Shoot it, damn you!” the doctor screamed, specks of froth flying from his mouth.

“Self-destruct in T-minus four minutes and thirty seconds. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

Fear narrowed Kira’s vision, constricted her world to a tight cone. “No!” she shouted—a panicked rejection of everything that was happening.

The gun went off, seemingly of its own accord.

The alien darted across the ceiling of the equipment room as it dodged. It was terrifyingly fast, and each tentacle seemed to move with a mind of its own.

Kira yelled and kept squeezing the trigger, the recoil a series of hard smacks against her palm. The noise was muted, distant.

Sparks flew as the grasper’s laser shot two of the bullets out of the air.

The creature swarmed over the skinsuit lockers and paused while clinging to the wall by the red feed pipe—

“Wait! Stop! Stop!” Carr was shouting, but Kira didn’t hear, didn’t care, couldn’t stop. First Alan, then the xeno, and now this. It was too much to bear. She wanted the grasper gone, no matter the risk.

Twice more she fired.

A patch of red crossed her line of sight, beyond the end of the muzzle, and—

…

Thunder cracked, and an invisible hammer slammed Kira against the opposite wall. The blast shattered one of the xeno’s spines. She could feel the fragment spinning across the room, as if she were in two places at once.

As her vision cleared, Kira saw the ruins of the supply room. The grasper was a mangled mess, but several of its tentacles still waved with weak urgency, blobs of orange ichor oozing from its wounds. Carr had been thrown against the shelving. Shards of bones stuck out from his arms and legs. The orphaned piece of the xeno lay against the bulkhead across from her: a slash of torn fibers draped across the crumpled panels.

More importantly, there was a jagged hole in the hull where one of the bullets had hit the oxygen line, triggering the explosion. Through it, the blackness of space was visible, dark and dreadful.

A cyclone of air rushed past Kira, dragging at her with inexorable force. The suction pulled Carr, the grasper, and the xeno fragment out of the ship, along with a stream of debris.

Storage bins battered Kira. She cried out, but the wind stole the breath from her mouth, and she struggled to grab a handhold—any handhold—but she was too slow and the walls were too far away. Memories of the breach on Serris flashed through her mind, crystal sharp.

The split in the hull widened; the Extenuating Circumstances was tearing itself apart, each half drifting in a different direction. Then the outflow of gas sent her tumbling past the bloodstained shelves, past the breach, and into the void.

And all went silent.

CHAPTER VIII

OUT & ABOUT

1.

The stars and the ship spun around her in a dizzying kaleidoscope.

Kira opened her mouth and allowed the air in her lungs to escape, as you were supposed to do if spaced. Otherwise you risked soft tissue damage and, possibly, an embolism.