Free Mutiny in Space by Rod Walker Page A

an eye, and for all we knew, his friends were getting ready to murder the entire crew.
    “Here,” said Murdock, passing me a black pistol he had taken from the dead commando. “Better firepower. We’re going to need it.” The gun was a lot heavier than my burst laser pistol, probably because it held actual projectiles instead of a capacitator. I didn’t know how many rounds a gun like that held. Twenty? However, the safety lever and the trigger were in the same place, so I figured I could use it.
    “The collision alarm,” I said as Murdock helped himself to the dead man’s K7.
    “Exactly,” said Murdock. “Those rounds hitting the hull will have showed up in the system just the same as debris hitting from the outside. That’s hard-wired into the system, and even Williams couldn’t lock it out.”
    “Which means,” I said, “they know exactly where we are now.”
    Murdock nodded. “Move. And stop pointing that thing at me! Last thing I need right now is to get shot in the back.”
    We hurried down the walkway, the metal grill clanking, the gun’s grip cold and heavy against my hands. At last we came to a T-junction, and Murdock went left around the corner. The corridor terminated in another ladder. If I remembered the ship’s layout properly, we just had to climb up, make our way twenty or thirty meters to the generator room, and Murdock could do a hard reboot of the computer system.
    He came to a stop.
    I started to ask what was wrong, and then I heard the noises coming from above. Boots clanked on the deck, and I heard the sharp metallic clank as the end of a gun bounced off the wall.
    Someone had noticed the collision alarm, and sent more than one Social to investigate.
    Murdock spat out a furious curse, raised his K7 up the ladder shaft, and started shooting. The gun’s chattering roar sounded deafening in the enclosed space, the muzzle flash throwing stark shadows against the maze of wiring and pipes on the wall. I heard someone shout above, and then something metallic bounced off the floor near my foot. It was a cylinder of black metal about four inches long, capped on either end, and the commando we had killed had been carrying a bunch of them.
    Grenade.
    My first thought was that the idiots were blast open a massive hull breach.
    My second thought was that the grenade was going to blast open a massive hull breach right after it had finished ripping me to bloody shreds.
    I drew back my foot to kick the grenade away, hopefully further down the maintenance walkway.
    There was a brilliant flash, and a noise so loud that it seemed to feel it across my entire body. Then something hard slammed into my back and the back of my head, and I realized that I had just hit the wall with considerable force.
    I felt the metal grillwork of the floor pressing into my face, and then everything went black.

Chapter 5: Hardball Negotiation From the Weaker Position
    I was pretty hazy for a while after that.
    I think I dreamed. Like, fever dreams, you know? Everything was all disjointed and out of place. For a while I thought Sergei and were working on the
Rusalka
’s maintenance drones, except that didn’t make sense because Sergei was dead and had been dead before I had ever set foot upon her.
    Then I was talking to my mother. We were standing at a colony
Rusalka
had visited a few trips back, a hellish desert world only habitable near the poles. She stood in the blazing sun and was eagerly lecturing me about the future, but then, without warning, she melted in the sun, her skin and muscle and fat turning to burning slime and sliding from her bones. She stood in front of me, still talking, even though she was nothing but a blackened skeleton. Then the desert caught fire, burning the way that building in New Chicago had burned the day the bomb had gone off, and I heard her screaming for me out of the flames.
    I screamed with her.
    There were a half-dozen more nightmares. I don’t remember them all, which is probably