The charges I'd set were not exactly going to bring the house down around us - especially since the damned thing was built of two foot thick local granite - a really nice close-grained dark…

Yeah. Focus… Right. Anyway, the best I'd been able to come up with was a nice mixture that would be incendiary, noisy, and smokey. Perfect for distraction, not so great for demolition. That had been the captain's brief when we talked this over, based on what I could reasonably expect to find, and to a point, I'd agreed with him, nodding and smiling. But I'm also a tricksy bastard, and so's he, so I didn't think he'd mind too much that I'd taken a few liberties with those basic mission parameters when I'd spotted a couple of places where even a nasty home-made mix could cause a few problems. Especially since we'd loaded our improvised explosive devices with any shrapnel to hand, and he'd handed over the cutlery with a cheeky grin.

Remember that. It'll be important later.

'How many did you set?' he asked, with a sidelong glance at the satchel I carried, which bulged in interesting places. I just grunted at him and shrugged.

'I kept a few back,' I told him as we rounded a corner after checking for wandering strays. I flexed my fingers around the knuckle duster I'd slipped on. Thanks to Yattaran's incredible skills (and I'll never bloody let him hear me say that, or the fat lazy tosser will never shut up about it…) the miniaturised electronics in it would also double as a remote detonator - five frequencies, each one reachable by curling over a finger to touch an almost imperceptible button once the safety was off. We really do get the best toys… 'When do you want the fireworks to start?' He held up a hand and I almost slammed into his back, he stopped so fast. We were approaching another crossroads.

I waited a moment, then opened my trap to ask him what the hell was going on. then I heard what he had: voices with a slight metallic twang.

'Two guards, to the left,' he whispered. I'd take his word for it. I took a better grip on my pistol.

'Want me to take them out?'

He shook his head and we slithered back down the corridor a ways. 'That's the holding area. Beyond is the barracks, unless that blueprint was a pack of lies. We start anything here, we could be up to our ears in drones.'

I waggled the fingers adorned with my new man-jewellery under his nose. 'Time for a few fireworks?' I asked. He just grinned at me.

Hell, I didn't need telling twice. I followed him into a small side-room and waiting behind the door as he kept his good eye on the crack. Mentally I went over the route I'd taken, and worked out roughly where the best place to start would be. I do have pretty good spatial awareness, even if I do say so myself. You need a pretty good sense of direction underground and in space - and I've worked both in my time.

Hey - I wasn't always an heroic cosmic corsair. Once upon a time I'd been a highly paid, highly sought-after consultant on various geological surveys and mining operations. Until I pissed off the wrong people.

So… figuring that we'd need something up a floor, and close enough to draw the guards away, I triggered the third set of charges I'd set.

This was one of the incendiaries - within seconds, the alarms were going off, and we were both gritting our teeth and longing to stick our fingers in our ears because we'd picked a room right next to one of the damn sirens, and we couldn't close the damn door fully on it because we needed to keep an eye on the headless chickens.

Even through the piercing shrieking in our ears though, we could hear heavy booted steps running hither and thither outside, and tinny electronically modulated voices squeaking and squawking orders at each other.

'Another one for luck?' I mimed at the captain. When he gave me a puzzled shrug wondering what I'd said, I thought: to hell with it. We'd need all the distraction we could get.

So I blew one of my secret little additions on the other side of the building, inside the kitchen we'd worked in. The one that would take out the power to that section and the main utility hub. The one that would feed back into the area marked "lubricant storage" that I'd noticed in passing..

Flammable, that stuff.

The resulting blast shook the entire building and the next thing I knew, we were on the floor, coughing, as dust and grit floated down on top of us. The alarms had stopped though.

And it was pitch dark.

'Ali…'

Even in the darkness I could picture the look on his face. Oops.

'Did you set a charge on the power hub?' His mouth was right up against my right ear and he was yelling.

I nodded a bit sheepishly, and then remembered it was still dark. Funny that; I was still seeing stars. 'Might have done,' I said nonchalantly. Though I had to shout - my ears were still ringing.

Or maybe the alarm was still going?

The red emergency lighting came on, thankfully, and I took a look around. In the dim red light I could make out the captain, looking a little the worse for wear, face and hair covered in dust, a deep cut on his head bleeding rather nastily. He looked a little green around the gills and far too late I remembered that he wasn't too fond of having rocks land on his head. Comes of having being hurt in an accident years before he was our captain, though we've all had a go at dropping things on his head over the years - Yattaran and Maji started the trend within a week of him becoming captain; I almost managed it only a couple of years back on an asteroid.

Of course it could have just been the lighting…

'Up you get!' I went for chirpy denial. I figured he couldn't be mad at me when I'm being so helpful, now could he? I helped him to his feet and brushed off some of the dust and stone chippings before he slapped my hand away. Some people can just be so rude…

'Leave it.' His tone should have left a breath trail in the air, it was so frosty. 'Let's move - I want those people out of this place. Assuming of course anyone survived that attempt to bring down the building…'

And he didn't even say thank you.

'Rock paper scissors to see who goes first?' I was perfectly prepared to take point - not out of any intrinsic bravery. Quite the opposite: if anything happened to him, Kei would tear my junk off with her bare hands and nail it to the ship's wheel.

That's if I was lucky. She's previously threatened to do the nailing before ripping my pride and joy off. And yes, I'm more scared of her than I am of him, why would anyone ask? Especially when she's pregnant. Watching that terrifying form waddle up to you, that icy glint in her blue eyes… Yeesh. I shuddered at the thought.

He ignored my suggestion and slipped past me, leaving me to flail around in his wake as usual. All you can do is just hoist up your underwear and follow him. 'Cept we weren't wearing any, so what can you do? Not much, except cover him and hope you don't get shot by whatever's shooting at him.

It's hard to bring down machinners without our Tochiro-designed weaponry. They're hard to crack, and hard to disrupt. The chassis are a hardened tectite alloy created with an ancient Nibelung process thanks to the help they got from Loki and his body-hopping renegades. Their "brains" are protected physically and are energy shielded. Short of a lucky hit to a power source, they just keep on coming.

But you can disable the buggers. Blow their arms and legs off and they ain't going anywhere and sure ain't going to be shooting at you. I mean - what they gonna do - wriggle along the floor and bite yer ankles? So that was our tactic - go in, shoot low, and hit the legs, which were always a weak point. Then when they go down, they're too busy to shoot straight.

Great plan - except for the bit where we're just human, unarmoured - without even our flightsuits and jackets, which can disperse most weapons energy blasts. And in an enclosed corridor, with blasts firing wildly everywhere, even wild shots stand a chance of hitting home.

I yanked hard on the captain's collar and hauled him out of the way of one shot that almost took his damn fool head off. Which would have been great, except it put me in the way of a stray ricochet off the floor that would have taken out the bit of my anatomy I was trying so damn hard to save from our enceinte XO's dreadful wrath, if not for the captain throwing himself around like a power forward and slamming us both into a brick wall. After that we were trading shots at ankle height with our foes, at least until I could get my hand into the bag I was still carrying and lobbed a former water bottle at them.

Cutlery: at high speed, it's a great leveller. But not exactly safe for the bystanders.

'Maybe that wasn't such a great idea,' I muttered, as we were pelted with bits of hot metal. I wasn't sure if what singed my ear and my left sideburn was a fork or a finger. 'Guess I didn't judge the time on target that well,' I added sheepishly.

'No shit, was the response, as he brushed something's foot away from his leg - realising his mistake when he burned his fingers. 'I'm blind in one eye and have sod all depth perception - what's your excuse for getting the distance wrong?' he snapped.

'Got the job done, didn't I?' I retorted. No gratitude. I really don't know why I bother some days. 'And where did you learn to hit like a freighter?'

'School rugby team. Full back. When you're slightly built and far too pretty, you learn to tackle on the rugby pitch. And make yourself useful by -' he punted a still smoking piece of a double-dialled head down the corridor some considerable distance - 'kick like it's going out of fashion.'

His improvised ball trickled to a halt missing the dial-head I assumed he'd aimed it at by two clear feet. I shot the writhing thing a couple of times in the head and it at least shut up and stopped moving - either because I got something vital, or it realised discretion was the better part of survival.

We seemed to have succeeded in keeping the rest of the guards occupied for now, because no reinforcements were forthcoming. So we limped towards the door of the holding area, keeping a weather eye out for trouble - and making sure nothing would be shooting at us, by means of blowing their damn hands off. The captain signalled to me to hold back, but why should he have all the glory? I nipped past him. 'This one's on me. Sir.'

'Sir? Since when do you call me sir?' But he stayed put and covered me whilst I fumbled with the lock. And "fumbled" is the right word. I can hot-wire a keypad, but I was all thumbs on this one - partly because I'd taken shrapnel to my right arm, and it wasn't working as well as I'd like. I bowed out gracefully after the third heartfelt sigh from over my shoulder, and let the former spy get to work, and he had it open in seconds.

However I still insisted on going first. Which whilst it wasn't my worst mistake over the past forty-eight hours, proved to be the messiest, because I did the gun-first, check for a trap routine, and totally forgot to look at anything below knee height. Consequently I went flying as my feet skidded out from under me, landed on my arse in a sticky, wet, slightly warm puddle and tipped forward onto my face to find myself looking straight into the glassy, opaque eyes of a dead girl barely older than Emmy.

Her throat had been cut.

I looked around, feeling those bloody crackers heading up my gorge, and the beginnings of one of those cold, sweaty headaches rolling over me as I realised I was sitting in a large pool of congealing blood, in a room full of corpses.