“Dialing down,” said Jackson, after a brief pause.
The lights blinked out. Anders stopped. His film projected a faint blue light but everything beyond ten feet was darkness.
“The ship won’t drop core function,” Gilly said. “It’ll always maintain thermals and air pressure as a priority. But disabling the rest might let it skip ahead to systems we really need, like Weapons and Armor.”
“Thank you,” Jackson said. “How’s Beanfield?”
“She’s breathing. I don’t know. She needs Medical.”
“Can you leave her?”
Gilly hesitated. “How close is Anders?”
“Close,” he said.
“I’ll leave Beanfield when Anders gets here.”
“Armor is still unmanaged,” Jackson said. “Weapons unmanaged. Physical contact in two minutes.”
“Okay,” Gilly said.
Anders saw a red glow ahead and it turned out to be a ring around a small-arms locker. He hadn’t known they had emergency lighting. He tugged on the release. “Can I get a cycle on a weapons locker?”
“Where are you? I thought you were coming!”
“There’s a locker on the way.” He ran his hand across its surface. “If we’re getting boarded . . .”
Gilly cursed. There was scuffling. “I’ll take her to Medical myself.”
Jackson: “Anders, you’re off mission. Go to Beanfield.”
He exhaled. Salamanders at the front door and guns beneath his fingertips that he couldn’t reach. But he turned his back on the locker. The darkness ahead seemed thicker. It was a blanket poised to wrap around his body and squeeze tight. He’d prepared for this, though. Sometimes he ran around the ship with his eyes closed just to see if he could do it. Drove his knee into a bulkhead once and it sounded like a bag of peanuts and felt like hot knives and he had to drag himself to Medical. The ship gave him hydrexalin, which was the start of a whole thing. Another time he’d cannoned into Jackson and she said, “What are you doing?” like there was no good answer, and he couldn’t think of anything to say except the truth, “Running to station in the dark,” and Jackson looked impressed, like, Bravo, training for an emergency.
“We have a gravity well situation,” Jackson said.
“What?” said Gilly.
“We’re getting close enough to a planet to have to care about it.”
“Maybe the ship wants to use it to evade.”
“Has it taken control of Engines yet?”
“I don’t think so. Are we on an impact trajectory?”
“Negative.”
Ahead was a faint blue glow like an itching on his eyeballs. It resolved into a mess of shit, broken beams and twisted metal and dark holes in everything. In the middle of all that was Gilly, a blue glowstick in his hand. Beanfield was slumped across his legs. Her eyes were closed. In the blue light, her skin from her chest to her chin was black. There was a first-aid patch on her left side and that was black, too.
“She got impaled,” Gilly said. “A piece of the ship went through her.”
Anders knelt and saw that she was alive. The patch wrapped around her side, and as terrible as it looked, it would be performing the essential function of preventing Beanfield’s insides from leaking out. “Go fix the ship,” he said.
“Her leg is stuck. I can’t get her out.”
He hadn’t even noticed that. Her left foot was trapped beneath a slab of rubber and metal. “I can do that. You need to go do your thing.”
Gilly hesitated, then pressed the glowstick into Anders’s hand. “Okay. Take this.”
He nodded. Gilly eyed him and left. He bent to inspect Beanfield. Her hair was covering her face; when he pushed it aside, her face was dark with dust and dirt. “Hell of a day, Beanfield,” he said. He explored her leg until he found the place she was caught. When he tugged, she gave a low, guttural groan. He peered into the wreckage and saw immediately that there were two ways to free her: the way that required him to lift ten thousand pounds of busted ship, and the way that would snap her ankle.