The confined space roared with a tribal savagery. Men and women from both ships were mixed in together, punching, biting, kicking, swinging wildly. Slim Jim saw a guy he recognized from the Astoria, one of the apes from the boiler room, turn and swing at Ensign Carver. The much smaller officer was knocked right off his feet, and slammed into a bulkhead. His attacker, a brute with arms like tree trunks, grinned and pushed him back into the wall.

Maloney, that’s his name, thought Slim Jim. Stupid fucking mick.

Stoker Maloney grabbed hold of Carver’s throat and pinned the ensign down. He cocked one giant fist back behind his ear, ready to drive it right through the man’s head, just as Slim Jim reached him.

“Hey, asshole,” Davidson called out.

Maloney smiled at Slim Jim, who raised the crowbar and whipped it down on the arm that restrained Carver. The smile disappeared as the man’s bones broke with a sick, wet crack. His dark features turned gray, then white. A look of terrible confusion came into his eyes just before Slim Jim lashed him across the forehead with the heavy iron bar. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he started to slump to the floor. Moose grabbed hold of him and heaved the deadweight down the corridor. The three sailors who’d followed Davidson and Molloy out of the office nearly tripped over the body.

“You all right, sir?” asked Slim Jim.

Carver coughed twice and struggled to draw breath, finally settling on a quick nod.

“Let’s break ’em down, Moose,” Davidson yelled, as he swung the crowbar at yet another of his own shipmates.

Moose commenced laying in to the heaving mob with great, looping swings of his fists.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Slim Jim flinched and turned quickly at the sound of Chief Eddie Mohr’s bellow.

“I might have fucking known,” he growled, as Slim Jim caught his eye.

Mohr had arrived with Captain Anderson, her own chief—Conroy or Condon, or something—and a couple of those scary-looking bastards in SS outfits. They weren’t toting those weird guns of theirs, but they had something just as worrying—long black sticks with a small metal prong at the end. Slim Jim’s eyes bulged a little when he realized that there were sparks jumping between the prongs.

Anderson’s CPO calmly touched his baton to a tall, muscular sailor off the Astoria. He jerked rigidly, as though he’d been electrocuted, then dropped to the deck, unconscious before he hit. Or maybe even dead.

The two black-clad storm troopers started zapping people at the edge of the fray. The result was the same every time. They’d go stiff as a board and then fall in a heap.