Judas unlocked the hatch just as Dara-6 and two others shoved their way inside. The control room was barely large enough to fit them all, its walls lined with outdated interfaces, manual overrides that hadn’t been touched in decades. Dust swirled in the microgravity, dislodged by the frantic movement of bodies.

  Dara didn’t waste time. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”

  Judas barely spared her a glance. “I know the math.”

  Dara snorted. “Yeah, well, math doesn’t mean shit if you can’t work a manual burn. Move.”

  She shoved him aside, taking the lead at the primary thruster controls. The others—Tariq and Ibrahim—moved to the auxiliary stations, hands flying over switches and dials.

  Judas didn’t argue. He was here to think, not to steer. He clung to a handhold, watching the readouts, barking out numbers.

  The station began to move.

  It was slow at first, imperceptible. But soon, the deep groaning of Caliban’s ancient structure made itself known, a long, reverberating sound that set Judas’s teeth on edge.

  Then came the nausea.

  Centrifugal gravity was predictable, even comforting, when it was constant. But they were changing it now, and that meant for the next several hours, “down” was an extremely variable proposition, only the erratic tug of motion dragging blood into unfamiliar places. Judas’s stomach twisted.

  “Lateral drift increasing,” Samson reported from the tablet. “We’re on course. Adjustment nominal.”

  “Keep it steady,” Judas ordered, barely above a whisper.

  Dara kept her hands steady on the controls. “Aft thrusters engaging at ten percent… fifteen… holding at twenty.”

  Judas recalculated. “Hold.”

  Outside, beyond the sealed doors, the station was descending into chaos.

  The plan had been simple: clog up the hallways with bodies. As many as possible. The NSS Buddies could push, shove, even tase, but they couldn’t physically remove that many people at once. So people threw themselves into the halls, latched onto railings, tangled their limbs with one another, forming an unyielding human dam between the thruster controls and the rest of the station.

  The NSS Buddies did not like this.

  The characteristic shunt of a cattle gun went off in the distance. Then another.

  Judas clenched his jaw. He had told himself he wouldn’t listen—he couldn’t afford to listen—but the sound carved through him anyway. The gun was non-lethal if aimed below the chest, but people were still dropping. That was evident. The occasional ragged yell, a body hitting the bulkhead, the dull thud of a person yanked out of the way.

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  But no one was screaming in that distinct final way.

  No one had died.

  Yet.

  “Security breach at D-ring,” Samson reported. “NSS Buddies are attempting to push past the blockade.” A pause. “They are escalating.”

  “Escalating how?” Judas demanded.

  “Switching to lethal targeting,” Samson said. His voice did not change. It didn’t need to. The words alone made Judas’s hands go clammy against the console.

  “They won’t,” Dara muttered. “Not yet. They’re still following protocol. They always escalate one step at a time.”

  Judas gritted his teeth. That won’t last.

  Twenty degrees.

  The station hated this. The shift in mass, the redistribution of inertia—it was fighting them every step of the way. The thrusters were burning, the gyroscopic torque was dragging, and the habitation ring’s stubborn spin kept throwing them off course.

  “Unintended yaw increasing,” Samson said. “The station’s moment of inertia is destabilizing.”

  “Yeah, I fucking noticed,” Dara snapped, trying to wrestle the manual controls.

  Judas exhaled, forcing himself to think past the nausea. He had accounted for this. It had been in his notes. But that didn’t make it feel any better when the whole station groaned like an animal being dragged somewhere it didn’t want to go.

  “Trim portside thrust down by three percent,” he said.

  “Three?”

  “Do it.”

  Dara complied. The shaking eased—marginally.

  The station was still shifting, still creaking under the strain.

  Thirty degrees.

  “Brace,” Judas ordered. “We need to counter-burn now.”

  Dara was already flipping switches. The entire station lurched as the aft thrusters flared, counteracting their momentum.

  The next hour was a terrifying, painful brace of skull against metal as they forced this wild beast to cooperate, come hell or high water. Judas had accounted for the asteroid locked in the mass driver, but his simplified assumptions about its shape weren’t compatible with the strange cylinder it was carved in. By the time things began to decelerate in a predictable way, he felt like his brain had been used more than a shower rag. This was more thinking in the past four hours of hell than he had done in his entire life beforehand, he could swear.

  The gravity flickered wildly. Judas felt his organs flip inside him, blood rushing from his head to his feet in a sickening pulse. His ears popped, and for a terrifying moment, he had no frame of reference for up or down.

  Then—

  Stillness.

  The numbers settled. The station was locked.

  Dara exhaled, shaking. “Holy shit. We did it.”

  Judas swallowed, staring at the numbers. They were real. They were true.

  They had done it.

  The NSS Buddies had to know. Had to understand.

  Judas unlocked the hatch.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Dara hissed.

  Judas ignored her. He wrenched the door open.

  The corridor outside was a battlefield. People were crammed together, some barely conscious, bodies floating slack in zero-g from the residual effects of non-lethal takedowns. The NSS Buddies were still trying to push forward, their heads twitching in that machine-precise way, recalibrating, assessing.

  Judas grabbed the nearest rail, pulled himself up, and shouted.

  “LISTEN UP, YOU NSS SHITS!”

  The station groaned around them. The asteroid sat waiting in the mass driver, a bullet in the chamber.

  “WE ARE NOW AIMED EXACTLY AT SYCORAX,” Judas bellowed. “AND IN T-MINUS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MINUTES, UNLESS YOU TRANSMIT A MESSAGE BACK TO MARS, JUPITER, OR WHOEVER THE HELL HAS AUTHORITY OVER THIS STUPID OPERATION, WE ARE FIRING. I HOPE YOU LIKE KESSLER SYNDROME, BECAUSE THIS ORBIT IS ABOUT TO BE UNUSABLE FOR GENERATIONS.”

  A silence settled over the corridor.

  The NSS Buddies didn’t move. Their heads flicked, subtly, like they were receiving data. Calculating. Thinking.

  Then, for the first time, one of them finally spoke.

  A synthetic, toneless voice, rippling through the comms:

  “Please wait for further instructions.”

  Judas bared his teeth in something that wasn’t a smile.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “That’s what I thought.”