Anderson smiled wearily. “I remember. I spoke to him when he first came on board. Said he’d had his fill of crazy ragheads getting in his face. Okay. We’ll take Clancy’s team. Get Sessions and Nix topside for a quick look, then straight back to me with a report. They can link up with Reilly in the chopper bay and take point for them on A deck. Send the other suits down to C with half a dozen standard kits, flaks, shotguns, helmets. Chief Borghino will decide on distribution from his available personnel.

“Send two shotguns down to engineering, but load them with jelly bags and pull everyone else out. Seal that section. Everybody outside of engineering packs ceramic rounds, powder puffs. We’ve got real problems in the missile bays. I don’t know why we’re not all pleading our case with Saint Peter right now. So let’s not push our luck.”

“Aye, Captain,” Conroy said before turning his head slightly to shout into the armory. “You heard the woman. Ammo check now. Ceramics only. No penetrator or flechette rounds. We’ve got sick missiles on the forward decks.”

“One step ahead of you, Chief,” Clancy called in reply. The three specialists made the last adjustments to their body armor, each turning slowly as his buddies tightened a Velcro strap here or snugged down a ballistic pad there. The suits, which looked like padded SWAT coveralls, came out of their lockers a dark charcoal color, but after a few minutes they began to change, taking on a slightly reddish hue, as they reacted to the ship’s emergency lighting. While the three men worked quickly to prepare themselves, the suits drank up the kinetic energy of their sharp body movements, and the adaptive camouflage reaction accelerated.

Within two minutes the superdense intelligent matrix of monobonded carbon nanotubes that gave the coveralls their padded look was fully powered up. The team’s Remington G4s were each loaded with sixty rounds of 33mm caseless ceramic, and each man was carrying another three hundred rounds in strip form. Being specialist boarders, they were all neck-chipped, and as they strapped into their powered combat goggles and helmet, a micronet was activated, biolinking Clancy, Cobb, and Brown to their suit systems, and to each other.

They then supervised the “B team” gear-up, hurrying Sessions, Nix, and the others through their preparations.

Captain Anderson, tightening an old Kevlar vest and checking the load on a Glock, struggled against a small spasm of rodentlike panic that had begun twisting inside her chest. Too long. They were taking way too long, and her people were dying because of it. The terrible sound of human combat was drawing closer.