Anderson heard one of her junior officers, Ensign Rebecca Sparrow, mutter that some Navy SEALs would have been nice. The captain dropped her pace marginally to fall in beside Sparrow, delivering a hearty slap on the shoulder. “Damn right, Ensign. A SEAL team would have been a thing of beauty! But this morning we’re going to work with what the good Lord provided. And I have faith in Specialists Clancy, Cobb, and Brown here. Don’t you?”

Sparrow seemed more unsettled by her commanding officer’s unexpected appearance and exuberance than by the King Hell madness of the day. Her eyes widened in surprise as they thundered down the passageway, but she recovered her composure quickly. “Hell yes, ma’am.”

“Glad to hear it.” Anderson smiled, her gleaming white teeth shining out of her coal-black face. “Specialist Clancy!” she called over her shoulder. “You think you can justify Ensign Sparrow’s confidence in you?”

Clancy, nine years in service and a veteran of more than seventy forced vessel entries, smiled at his commanding officer and called back, “Anything for a lady, Captain.”

They trotted past the brig and came to a halt in front of the armory. Chief Conroy yelled over the buzz of voices and the harsh, industrial sounds of battle, ordering them to form up in two lines and stand at ease. The boarding specialists hurried forward into the armory to suit up and arm themselves, along with two seamen ordered to grab weapons and stand guard back down the passage through which they had just run. The two men took body armor and helmets, a couple of pump-action shotguns, and hustled back past the lines of their shipmates to establish a hasty defense.

While Conroy saw to the arming of the specialists, Anderson tried to raise the other decks on shipnet via her flexipad. Two windows on screen responded to her page. Lieutenant Matt Reilly on A deck had gathered twenty-three personnel in the chopper bay. They had already armed themselves from the air division’s own arsenal and were awaiting orders.

“Good work, Lieutenant. Stand by,” said Anderson. She shifted her eyes to the other functioning pull-down window, where she found CPO Borghino’s phlegmatic features. A thin film of static obscured his face, but otherwise the connection seemed fine. The third window, the link to D deck, was a small square of white noise.

“Chief, I can’t raise D deck on shipnet or P-to-P,” said Anderson. “How about you?”

Anderson watched as Borghino’s eye line shifted within the window. He was obviously manipulating his pad, trying for some sort of alternate link to D. After a few long seconds, he turned his eyes back to the microlens mounted in his pad’s shockproof rubber casing, rather than looking at Anderson’s own image on screen. This created the impression that he was staring directly at her.