His body armor afforded more protection than their barricade, but he crouched down to their level anyway. Twenty meters farther on a wall of wet, gray steel blocked the corridor. Three of his shipmates were sprawled promiscuously over each other just in front of it. Their blood had pooled beneath them, prevented from running down toward McAllister and Ntini by the slight dip of the ship’s bow.

A man-sized opening had been blown through the iron curtain.

“How’d they do that?” asked Nix.

McAllister answered in a hoarse whisper.

“A shaped charge.”

“Nice work. The captain in there?”

“You should be able to pick up her locator chip once you’re inside. Head right for two minutes. It’s a fucking mess like you wouldn’t believe in there, but they’re trailing tape. You should pick them up. Point-to-point’s scratchy once you get in, so let them know you’re coming up. They’ve been hit from behind twice already. Chris Gregory got wasted like that. Clancy blew him away when he popped up without warning.”

“Got it.”

Nix patted the shoulder of McAllister’s old Kevlar vest and leapt the overturned table in one bound.

That’s five now, she thought.

She’d lost five of her crew since stepping into this twisted nightmare, one of them to friendly fire.

“You okay?” she asked Clancy.

“Fine for now,” he replied. “Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t mine, either.”

“That’s right.”

Captain Daytona Anderson knew the tremors and the nausea would come later for Clancy. Along with the guilt.

Couldn’t be helped.

She repeated that mantra to herself, like a Zen koan meant to exhaust the intellect and prepare the mind for an intuitive response.

Because Christ knows, there’s nothing for the rational mind to hold on to in here.

She was wedged into a crawl space created by the intersection of the Gulf’s rail gun control room with what looked like an old galley of some sort. Her features creased as she contemplated the sight of two members of her own crew and five strangers who had . . . What, materialized? . . . inside each other, and within a Gordian knot of metal, plastic, and wooden fixtures.

The shooting, which had slackened off for a few minutes, picked up again. A few rounds ricocheted by her head, off a butcher block that had been fused with a flatscreen workstation, showering Anderson with splinters of wood and plastic. Clancy fired without hesitation. She had no idea what he was shooting at, but somebody screamed. Whoever it was almost cried out loud enough to cover the sick, ripping thud that was the signature note of a ceramic bullet striking unprotected flesh. Then another voice called out, but it was controlled and steady.

“Specialist Nix, coming through, Captain!”

Anderson checked her flexipad. It was working again. The screen displayed icons for the locator chips implanted in the necks of her crew within a twenty-meter radius.