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reach
us.”
    He donned his headset. “This is the shuttle Heimdal . Endurance , do you read?”
    No signal. He tried again, then threw off his
headset. His sigh told Stephanie everything she needed to know.
Instantly she turned and hit a switch marked EPIRB. It was old tech
but it would broadcast their position for as long as the ship had
power. The Endurance might not be in range for some hours
yet, but they could just sit tight and wait for pickup. She thanked
her ancestors that the Heimdal had held together, coming
down in one piece. It might even be salvageable. Whether it was
testimony to Pål’s skill as a pilot or divine intervention was
moot. She would light a joss stick once they were out of this
mess.
    “How’s Jensen?” Knutsen asked, with a nod towards
the hold.
    “Broken rib, looks like,” Stephanie replied. “Might
have pierced a lung. Not good.”
    Knutsen levered himself out of his chair with a
grunt and flexed his shoulders. “The gravity is higher than I
expected.”
    “It’s only a little more than Earth normal. We’ve
been running on three quarters gee for too long.”
    Knutsen shrugged noncommittally and crawled through
the hatch into the fuselage. Stephanie followed and clambered down
into the hold. Knutsen stopped in shock at the sight of the mutant
and the two dead crewmen, hanging limp from the wall.
    “What the hell is that?”
    Jensen had used some of the strapping to wrap around
his chest. He was pulling it tight, wincing with the pain.
Stephanie stepped forward, helping him tie it off. He had evidently
come to the same conclusion as she had; broken ribs. Knutsen
glanced in his direction, giving him a quick once over, before
returning his gaze to the mutant.
    “You going to be okay, Jensen?”
    “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
    “These things attacked you?” he asked, nodding
towards the alien. “Unprovoked?”
    “We didn’t even know they were there until they
started killing us.”
    Knutsen shook his head in wonder. The Argoss was known to have had a major tech failure, but to find out that it
had been caused deliberately made sense only if the mutants had
posed a serious threat to the mission. The captain may have
reasoned that it was better to preserve the arc for the other
colonists, than let it fall prey to the mutated crew. If every
living thing on board was killed, then the ship would arrive at its
final destination and wait there, hale and whole until the other
arcs arrived. And this was just what had happened. Except the
mutants had evidently survived.
    From the cockpit, a shrill siren sounded. With a
nod, Knutsen ordered Chu to check it out. Stephanie crawled back
into the cockpit. Almost immediately she was back, her face drained
of its natural color.
    “Pål! You’d better get in here, now.”
    Knutsen crawled back into the cockpit. Stephanie
pointed to a series of readouts on the port side of his station
where the lights had changed from green to yellow. The drive was
not dead. It was going critical.
    His eyes widened at the sight, but he wasted no time
trying to reverse the problem. There was no fix for this. He leaned
in towards Stephanie, speaking loudly in order to be heard over the
incessant siren.
    “Get everything out that we can carry. We need to
make it to the minimum safe zone. I don’t know how much time we’ve
got, but I’m not taking any chances.”
    Stephanie nodded, pulling a medkit from a bulkhead.
She made her way into the hold where she punched in the code to
open the weapons locker. Knutsen followed, pushing two emergency
kits with him. The kits contained basic field rations for three
days, a small amount of water and foil blankets.
    Stephanie slung the heavy multigun—the same she
had used to defend the airlock against the mutants—over her
shoulder. It was designed to be used in any situation and could be
configured for a variety of lethal and non-lethal payloads. She
checked to ensure that it was set to  High-Charge ,