This part never got any easier. She'd grown confident and ferocious in close combat, and fear of death was a constant and familiar companion at this point, but she still hated this moment. Standing on unsecured ground, hearing the approaching footfalls of your enemy like the clatter of celestial dice in one more senseless, lethal crapshoot. These could be the last ten seconds of her life. She'd made the throw often enough and she was still alive, but the house always wins, doesn't it?

Take cover, then? Or charge? No choice there, really. If there was any advantage to be had here, it was in the hope that the Rebels burst in hoping that Brant had suffocated already, or perhaps without even realizing that the air had gone rotten in here. The best odds were in hanging back, letting them come in and fill their lungs with inert gas, letting oxygen deprivation kick in before closing with full brutality.

The footfalls came closer. Brant waved Killer back and crouched behind the targeting console, taking the fallen Rebel's side arm with her. Killer slinked back behind a supply crate in the back corner of the room. They waited. The footfalls approached.

Brant wondered if they'd take cover and this would just become an extended shootout. She realized, with an audible "Damn it," that she'd taken cover on the wrong side of the room, that the console was fixed to the wall on her right and her left eye was gone, so she'd have to poke her whole head out of cover to see anything. Well that was no good…

She grabbed the fallen Rebel's body and pulled him into cover with her.

The hatch hissed open, boots slapped against the floor in a sprint, energy weapons discharged with a gentle fwip. Brant kicked the fallen Rebel out of cover for at least one split second of distraction, at least one shot directed away from her. Brant vaulted over the console, firing over it as she went and leaping at the Rebels with baton thrumming in her hand.

The waiting never got easier. This part, with time and practice, had almost gotten too easy.

The Rebel captain, tall and broad-shouldered and looking every bit the stereotype grunt soldier that he'd seemed on the vid screen, was leading the charge. He cut an imposing figure, muscular and powerful, and Brant would not have wanted to close with him; fortunately, no amount of time at the gym builds resistance to directed energy blasts, and the laser round that took him in his chest brought him spluttering to the ground before he could take another step. He got off one shot on her, only an inch or so off from where she'd hit him, but an inch or two made the difference between singeing her armpit and rupturing his arteries and lungs.

The mousy communications officer had been charging in behind the captain, of such a wildly different build that Brant hadn't even seen her until the hulking captain fell. By that point, they were practically on top of each other. The officer had been firing at the corner where Killer lurked, and swung her gun around to Brant at the last possible moment. The one shot she was able to get out would have taken Brant in the neck if the dead Rebel's gun hadn't been in the way, but instead it just shot the gun out of Brant's hand.

Brant was in close quarters with the comm officer now, and on instinct, she reached out with her now-free hand and grabbed the officer's wrist, pushing it up and pointing the gun away from her. The officer grabbed Brant's other wrist as Brant tried to strike out with her baton, and the two stayed grappled like that, each struggling to disarm and murder the other.

Then the bad air kicked in. The officer's breaths became shallow and quick. Her eyes were wide with the animal panic of suffocation, and her arms quavered in desperate, useless struggle. Brant saw her eyes dart to the corner, where Killer slunk out with phase axe alight.

"Drop your gun," Brant hissed. "Disable the weapons and give us run of the ship, and I promise, we will…"

The officer looked back at Brant. Something changed in her face, but Brant couldn't read it. "T-t-take your p-promise…" The officer paused, gasping for breath.

Killer crept up. Perhaps, Brant thought, she'll take the offer. Perhaps I can sleep at night with one less death on my conscience. And do I actually feel good about that thought, or am I just patting myself on the back for even thinking it in the first…

"…and shove it." And the officer gave up, letting Brant push the gun all the way back until it was pointed right in the officer's face. And the officer pulled the trigger.

Her body went limp immediately, almost dragging Brant to the ground. Brant staggered back.

"She…" Brant started.

Killer walked up, extinguished her axe, and poked at the officer's body with the haft. There was no movement.

"Captain Killer expresses confusion. This behavior is entirely inconsistent with the human self-preservation instinct as she's observed it in other soldiers," said Translator.

"Yeah, no kidding," Brant said. Brant had seen plenty of people die, and she knew the appeal of suicide in the face of a hopeless situation. Few better. But no one had ever killed themselves at her before. She was surprised how much it stung. "Well, let's get finished over here. Onboard computer's still active, so we need to disable the offensive systems and neutralize whatever it is they've got charging over here. How long have we got before you decloak?"

"Several minutes yet. Killer should have no difficulty disabling the main guns before the ship's computer gets off a volley, and she suggests you disable their shields. Our guns, light though they are, should be able to knock out their drone control and this mystery system in fairly short order then."

Brant looked over at Killer and nodded. "I was thinking the same. I'll meet you back here when it's offline, and let me know as soon as the Kestrel shows up, right?"

"Of course. Good luck to you."

Killer approached the console, fingers snaking out like wires and tunneling into the machinery. The sight was mesmerizing to Brant, but time was critical and she forced herself to look away and start jogging down the corridors.

Something was off about this. Something was way off. But in her experience, no matter what ugly surprises an enemy might have prepared, it was always a good idea to take out their shields. This was a fully equipped Rebel warship, better armed than any the Kestrel had yet faced, but its basic layout was familiar to Brant. She checked her wrist unit to be sure she was heading the right way, and there were no surprises. The shields room was just up ahead, and one of the main laser batteries had gone offline.

"How am I getting read-outs of the ship, by the way? Is this from you guys?" she asked.

"Quite. I've patched you through to our sensor array. Is it coming through in recognizable format?"

"Uh, yeah – it looks…"

Then the mystery system flickered, as a discharging weapon might. And she noticed something even more menacing about the strange system.

She stopped dead in her tracks, looking it over to make sure. "We have life signs!" she hissed into the wrist unit. "We've got fracking life signs over here, and they're mobile!"

"I…don't believe that is possible, Captain Brant. Captain Killer assures me that the human crew were eliminated with definite finality, and…oh. Oh, I see what you're talking about now. Oh…"

Three blips were scurrying out of the mystery system, and heading in the direction of the weapons bay. This could be a lot of things – the Rebels had been working on a variety of secret projects that could transport or even rapidly produce human combatants, and she wasn't sure which one had more dire implications, both right now in this situation and in overall strategic terms. Not that it mattered.

"Killer, can you hold out? If they can keep up the pressure like this, I don't think we can win without taking their shields out."

A pause. The faint clang of footsteps echoed down the corridors. Translator came back on, sounding doubtful.

"The captain concurs. She is confident she can kill several more 'savages', but it will be very slow going in disabling their weaponry. Our ship is likely to take fire, and she urges you to be ready when these combatants inevitably divert to protect the shields."

Brant nodded, and kept running. She didn't like being split up, but there wasn't much to be done about it – if they could keep new combatants coming at this rate for any length of time, the only way to do noticeable damage to the ship systems would be by splitting up. She had little doubt that Killer, a literal scholar of combat and murder, could hold her own. What would happen in five minutes, when the Rebels decided the shields needed protecting more than the weapons, was another story.

The shields room looked very much like her own on the Kestrel, and that was probably no accident. The shield generators, humming columns of steel and ceramic lined against the wall, looked like modern Federation standard, probably built on a captured federal manufacturing world. These things were built to last; you could hit this room directly with a Hermes rocket and they would keep on ticking. It would take her at least half an hour with her baton to get even one of these generators offline, assuming her baton didn't break first.

So she took out her multitool, flicked to the number three hexdriver, and got to work unscrewing the armor-plated paneling on one generator. Katarek had often left the screws a little loose on their own shield units, the better to quickly access them if they ever needed quick repair in a fight, and Brant found that these Rebels were of a similar mind. The screws came out easily, one, two, three, four; but there were a lot of them, four to a side on one panel on one unit. Five, six, seven, eight.

"Captain Killer has made contact with the enemy. She reports that these humans are just as brutally ugly as those you just…no, apologies, she more precisely says that they are brutally ugly in exactly the same manner as those you just killed."

Nine, ten. "Do you mean they look the same? The ones we killed and the new arrivals?"

"Ah, yes. That would be a better way to put it. Theories?"

"The Rebels were working on flash-cloning technology. I guess they've fielded a prototype. My guess, they can keep these copies coming as long as they can spare the power. What's the plan?"

"The captain is heavily engaged at the moment. She advised me to defer to your judgement in such a situation. You are the only one of us with any knowledge of contemporary ship tactics."

Eleven. That was powerfully strange. Why would this alien trust some random hominid with her whole ship and crew? "I'll have their shielding down by twenty-five percent in a minute." Twelve. "As soon as you decloak, focus all your firepower on…" The clone bay to stop the waves of hostiles? The weapons bay to protect the Lanius ship? The shields to ensure they could disable everything else soon? The bridge to paralyze the ship? "…the shields. And if you could let me when you fire so I can clear the room, that would be great."

Thirteen, fourteen.

"Acknowledged. Captain Killer has dispatched two of her opponents, but I am already detecting one fresh life sign coming from this 'cloning bay.' We can only maintain our cloaking field for another thirty seconds or so."

Brant worked out the last two screws and hefted the thick, reinforced panel away, exposing the wires, circuits, and intricate heat sinks of the generator's power feed. She stepped back a few paces, aimed her side arm, and blasted away. Sparks belched out in a great gout of orange, the generator flickering and going quiet a moment later. One down, three to go.

"I'm clearing the room. Fire when ready, and switch fire to that cloning bay if you can get another layer of shielding down."

"Acknowledged. What if, uh, we are not able to get another layer of shielding down?"

Then we'll probably all die, she thought. If these clones keep coming, we won't last long over here. We need fire support, and that's going to be way too unreliable as long as their shields are still high. I could rejoin Killer to get their weapons down, but that's putting a lot of faith in you guys' crappy guns. I could stay here, make sure the job gets done, but that's putting a lot of faith in Killer standing up to three vs one.

"Depends. How much heat from this ship do you think you can handle?" Brant asked.

"Three or four volleys, five at the absolute maximum. As I said, we are poorly equipped for combat. Even now, if all of our guns connect, we will be doing minimal damage."

"Then..." Man, Charlotte. And to think you could have married that boy from the water filtration plant back home. What would you be doing now, if that's how things had gone? But no. You have a fiancé already. His name is Death. And he might have set a date for you two after all. "Go for the clone bay regardless. If we can't take it out soon, we've got no chance of taking their weapons out before they do serious damage; and if they take out your weapons, we've got no chance without fire support."

"I follow you. Cloak is dropping in several seconds. It may be prudent to clear out of the shields room in…"

Brant was already outside. "Just say 'Get out' next time!"

"Ah. Yes, uh…firing now!"

Brant jogged down the corridor, not at all sure how much confidence to put in the Lanius gunners. She put her hands over her ears, checking her wrist unit to make sure no clones were about to ambush her. Killer was still in the weapons room, facing off against one Rebel, with another on the way from the cloning bay. How many had she killed by this point? Five? Six?

The ship shook, a loud roar barking out from the shield room as one shot – just one, from the sound of it – pierced the shields and struck home. That in itself was not good news, a single laser round unlikely to have done much damage, but Brant's spirits rose when she checked her wrist display.

"We've got fire in shields!" she reported. They must have lucked out and hit an oxygen pipe or something else that would blaze, harder and hotter than the ship could respond to automatically. It would probably gutter out in a few minutes if the bulkhead could keep it contained, but with any luck it would overheat and knock out the other shield pylons before it burnt out. "Lucky break. Monitor the shields, wait until you've got an extra level down, then take down that clone bay. I'm going to meet up with Killer and keep the pressure on there."

She ran down the corridor the way she'd just come, baton crackling and sidearm leveled on halls ahead of her. The sounds of footsteps and combat echoed from the chambers ahead, and she swept around the corner ready to open fire at the first thing that moved.

There was a heavy thud up ahead, then quiet. Brant checked her wrist unit. Killer was the only thing still alive in the weapons room. Brant dashed forward and went in.

The room was an abattoir. The three corpses they'd made here earlier were still where she'd left them, dressed in their uniform grays, and each of those corpses now had two extra twins dressed in loose-fitting gowns. The first boy had his hair in a top-knot and his clones' just hung loose around his shoulders, and the clone captains' heads had some fuzzy growth where his original was shaven clean, but they were the same people.

It had not gone great for Killer. There was a patch in her left side that looked shattered and noticeably less shiny than the rest of her silvery body. She saw no blood, but small flakes of metal were periodically slipping off of the wound and drifting to the floor like ashes. Brant couldn't make sense of it and certainly couldn't say how serious it was, but the xenobiology course could wait for later.

"You all right?"

Killer made a fist with one three-digited hand and struck herself in the wound. A sound like a gong rang out, a flurry of metal flakes showered down, and the Lanius captain looked at Brant without a single change in her facial expression. It was a clear show of determination and resilience, but as the Lanius lumbered over to the weapons computer, she nearly toppled over. Apparently even a master warrior had a rough time going one against six. She righted herself, her movement drunken and slow, then looked accusingly at Brant.

"Captain Killer suggests that there may be a time for chit-chat when there isn't…"

The line went dead amidst a squeal of static. Killer's head twitched, and Brant checked her wrist. The Lanius ship had been badly hit, with damage to shields, weapons, and sensors, but the unit warned that it had lost connection with the ship.

"Translator? Translator, are you there?" she shouted.

Her readouts of the Rebel and Lanius ships fragmented, shuttered, and went blank. Brant cursed.

"Translator!" she shouted, shaking her wrist. She growled, then gave it up. Killer slammed on the weapons computer next to her, seemingly more out of frustration than any honest desire to do damage, then gripped at her wounded side and went quiet. She looked up at Brant.

"Don't suppose you know sign language?" Brant asked.

Footsteps charged down the hall. Killer pointed at the door, then hunched over the weapons computer and let her fingers snake into it. Sparks began shooting out of it.

"Well, good enough." Brant turned to face the door, readying her weapons. Killer would try to take out the weapons, then, hopefully before they blew up the culture-ship, and Brant would play bodyguard. They'd come three at a time, endlessly, until either Brant was overwhelmed or the Lanius gunners took out the clone bay.

Brant spat. She didn't really know why, but it felt right.

"Let's dance."