“Glad you could make it, ExCom,” Pirra said to Urle as he led his team into Engineering.

“Same,” he replied, taking her hand and shaking it. “You did good work securing this place, Lt. Commander. Any attempts by them to retake it?”

“No sir. We’ve been pinging the hall, but we’ve detected no movement.” She looked around, annoyed and antsy. “It doesn’t make much sense. There should be thousands of pirates on this ship, yet we’ve encountered only a fraction of that. Those ones dogged us every step of the way, but I was expecting ambushes of dozens, not handfuls. Where are they?”

“We haven’t seen many, either, they barely contested our landing.” Urle shrugged. “But we need to press on. My team will hold this area, your team will be our escorts.”

“Aye,” Pirra said, giving him a salute. She turned to round up her troops, and Urle ordered the leader of his squad to take up their positions. Team Four were not Team One in terms of skill or experience, but they could handle this, he had no doubt.

Apollonia was squatting next to a dark console, staring off into space when he approached her.

“Hey, Apple, you doing all right?” he asked, then mentally chided himself on using her nickname.

She took several moments before she looked up. “I’m fine,” she said. Her face, through her transparent face shield, was blank.

She might have been in shock, he thought. She should never have been sent here . . .

But she was here and so he would keep her safe.

“We’re going to move out,” he said. “Do you feel anything strange?”

She took a long time replying again. “Yes,” she finally said.

Urle considered. “Can you tell if it’s near the hostages?”

She gave him a slightly confused look, as if to ask how she might know such a precise detail, but to his surprise she said again; “Yes.”

He felt his heart sink. “So if we find this . . . strangenes, we’ll find them? Do you think you can tell where it is?”

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She nodded.

Pirra approached from behind him. “We’re ready.”

Urle turned and gave her a nod, but then looked back to Apollonia. She still seemed so distracted and it was concerning him.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, looking up at him, her expression quizzical, as if she was noticing him for the first time. She got up to her feet. “This armor sucks, though.”

Urle felt a little relieved to hear her sounding more normal. “Okay, point us the right way, and we’ll be off.”

Apollonia pointed towards one of the sealed doors. “We should go through there.”

“Open it,” Pirra ordered. She turned to the other squad commander. “Seal it again behind us.”

“Are you sure?” the commander asked. “What if you need to pull back?”

“I want to make sure this position stays secure,” she told him. “It’s a priority.” She glanced to Urle, who nodded in agreement.

“We’ll be fine,” Urle said.

Kiseleva and two others went forward, breaking the door seal. The rest of the squad took up positions in case it opened on unfriendlies.

“There’s no one out there,” Apollonia said.

Urle was glad to hear that, but found himself disinclined to ask her more.

The door opened. The room beyond was empty.

“Move out!” Pirra said.

Pirra took the fore with one of her soldiers, the bulk of the dozen Response officers around them. Kiseleva and Suon stuck by them as a personal guard.

The room, a prepping area for artillery shells, had several more doors, and Apollonia indicated one that would lead them deeper into the ship.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, sounding weary.

They took positions and opened the door, but like the prepping room, it was empty.

Urle could understand why the room was empty; no one wanted to have a firefight around explosives. But this hall had no such problem, and that bothered him.

The lighting down it was dim, and he scanned it through multiple spectra. The lights grew dimmer in every way the deeper they went. Even in infrared, which didn’t make all that much sense.

“Move,” he said. “Be cautious.”

Drones swept in, pinging and searching for ambushers.

“Scan’s coming up negative,” Kiseleva told them.

They moved swiftly down the hall. Apollonia directed them through more doors, sometimes cutting through small rooms and using makeshift doors that the pirates had added themselves.

She was unerring, Urle thought. She wasn’t just leading them randomly, he realized, they were moving in a direction, and she knew where all the doors were even before they saw them.

A chill went down his spine and he checked his logs. There were a growing number of errors. Minor, his system was correcting them, but the number was far above the norm, even when he was running extra equipment.

As was known to happen when hardware was exposed to krahteons.

“Switch to K-Mode,” he ordered his system.

Hard-gotten experience had taught the Union that the more powerful and complex a computer system was, the more vulnerable it was to krahteonic interference. So he shut down as many extraneous systems as he could, switching portions of his code to simpler and more robust forms. It cut down his processing power by nearly a third, but . . .

He had a feeling he was going to need the protection.