Runstom found Jax lying on top of a crate, about three meters up. With the low gravity, he must have been flung up there, and now he lay unconscious, one arm dangling off the side. Runstom crouched and then sprang his legs, thrusting himself up to Jax’s level, and then beyond. He had to stick his arms up to keep from banging into the high ceiling, and he angled himself so that he’d land on top of the crate on his float back down. He slung Jax over his shoulder and lightly dropped off the side of the box. They landed with a soft jar, and Jax made a quiet whimpering grunt as they did. “Still alive,” Runstom breathed.

Halsey came bounding over to them, carrying a small bundle of thin, black rods. “Fuckin’ stun-sticks was all I could find. Oh, and this med kit,” he said, unhooking a white plastic case from around his shoulder. “We could keep looking.”

“No, let’s not waste time. I have an idea.” Runstom popped open the med kit and started rummaging through it. Fortunately, it was the consumer model. Everything was clearly labeled and marked with icon-laden instructions. He grabbed a case labeled Insta-Wake. He had no idea what this stuff was, but he’d seen it used before more than once while on the job. He popped open the case and pulled out the single-shot needle-gun.

“Hold him down,” he said, and Halsey braced Jax as best he could. Runstom put the needle-gun up to the operator’s neck (as per the icon on the inside of the Insta-Wake box) and pulled the trigger. Jax coughed and his chest heaved, and Runstom quickly covered his mouth. His eyes fluttered open, slightly at first, then suddenly they were wide and intense.

“Shh. Jax. We’ve got a bit of a situation here, and we need you to be calm.” Jax’s eyes were still wide, but he nodded. They took their hands off him and he sat up and rubbed his head. “We don’t have time to explain everything, so just trust us on this …”

There were so many things that Dava loved about a low-grav fight. The sheer panic that accompanied the loss of control. The recoil of firearms working against their shooters. The majestic deadliness of someone trained to use acrobatics and blades in such a situation.

She was the first one of the Wasters to come out of the kitchen and into the yard, a massive open cube in the largest part of the barge. The tables around the room were bolted to the floor, but just about everything else wasn’t and there was debris everywhere. She scanned up the sides of the cube at the walls lined with cells, stacked up for five levels. Guards and prisoners bounded clumsily about the space, each body with its own trajectory and intention, none of them aligned. She spent a tenth of a second drinking in the pure chaos and then went to work.

The plan to target the artificial gravity pump at the bottom of the barge and then penetrate the rear corridors had worked as well as they could have hoped. Now all that remained was to find Johnny Eyeball and Captain 2-Bit.

A stun-stick came her way, with a bulky uniform in tow. She drew her short, curved scimitar and snapped the stick in half with a quick cutting motion. The guard stumbled backward, half-falling, half-floating. She braced one foot against a nearby table and launched herself at him, her sharp blade slicing clean through the midsection of his cheap armor.

She moved on without bothering to finish him off, making her way toward the starboard-side wall of cells. Another guard flew over her head, arms and legs flailing, before slamming into the back wall with a crunch. She looked toward the source of his trajectory to see Eyeball wrestling with another guard, both of them trying to gain control of a low-end ModPol pistol.

With a few long leaps she got close enough to witness Eyeball bring one of the guards’ bare hands close to his face. She caught herself between a grin and a grimace as the man howled in pain while Eyeball sank his teeth into the soft flesh just above the thumb. The gun came free and Eyeball grabbed it with one hand and with the other, shoved the guard into a sprawling tumble across the space.

“Hey Dava,” he said with a dripping-wet crimson smile. “They fly pretty good in this gravity, eh?”

“Johnny,” she said. “Seven minutes left, then you better be at the rear corridor just beyond the kitchen.”

“Right,” he said, checking his newly acquired weapon.

“Where’s 2-Bit?”

“Third level, opposite side.”

They’d come for both, but she knew Eyeball could take care of himself. The higher priority was getting 2-Bit out of there. Her boss had made a big stink about how important it was to bring 2-Bit back home, how much the others looked up to him, how critical his experience was to the gang. It was that last bit that made Dava wonder. She always thought 2-Bit was an idiot, but he did have experience, which may have been another way of saying he knew things, things that Space Waste didn’t want to turn over to ModPol. Locations of caches, plans for upcoming operations, informants sprinkled around the galaxy, those sorts of things. Secondary, everyone seemed to think that there was an advantage to having a couple of Wasters get arrested: recruitment. And 2-Bit was just the right man for the job. They knew that if they rescued him, he’d have a cartload of fresh meat to bring home as well.

She headed for the opposite wall. When another guard raised his pistol at her, she kicked to her right and balled up to avoid the shot. The kickback threw his arm up high and her scimitar swept across it, severing the hand soundlessly. The shocked victim was almost as soundless with his gasp and before he could fall to his knees, she planted one boot on his helmeted head and vaulted herself up, grabbing the railing along the edge of the second-level walkway. From there, she got to the top of the railing and leapt high enough to grab the floor of the third-level walkway, pulling herself up quickly and easily in the low gravity.

“2-Bit,” she called out. “Captain, where are you?”

A yellow-gray hand appeared through the bars a few cells down. “Down here!”

She approached and saw the old man standing tall and healthy as always. She couldn’t tell if he was exceptionally cool-headed given the situation, or if he was just oblivious to the imminent danger. Of course, 2-Bit had only gotten arrested because he was trying to rescue Eyeball from the mess he’d created back on B-4. She had to admire his ability not to lose his shit over the mistakes of his kin.

“Dava, boy is it good to see you,” he said with a genuine smile. “The force fields went off when the gravity took a hit. Safety and all that.” He tapped on the bars. “But then these came down.”

With a laser cutter and enough time, she could get through them – they weren’t more than cheap steel, probably designed for keeping things from flying out of the cells more than actually keeping prisoners in for any length of time – but the clock was ticking.

She switched her RadMess to voice mode. “Thompson, I need the cell doors on the third floor opened up.”

The reply crackled over the tiny speaker a second later. “Which one on the third floor?”

“Just open all of them.”

“Right, you got it, Dava. I’ll get someone on it.”

“Dava.” 2-Bit gestured to a form huddled at the back of the cell. “I got a man in here with me. He’s from B-3, but was runnin’ some racket on B-4 where he was selling cheap vacation getaways to naïve B-foureans. He would get them aboard his ship, rob them, and drop them in the next dome over.”

“Sounds like a real charmer,” she muttered.

“Point is, he’s a pilot,” 2-Bit said. “Claims to be a pretty good one. And you know we always need more flyboys.”

Her bosses were right, only 2-Bit could turn a jail term into a recruiting opportunity. She half-laughed at the thought. “Alright, bring him along.”

A buzzer sounded and 2-Bit flinched and took his hands off the bars as they slid upward. “Come on,” he said to the back of the cell.