Lucky found himself hanging with his upper torso shoved sideways at an awkward angle into the side of the dropship. His legs were dangling out.

“Rocky, why am I feeling g-forces here?”

“Beats the shit out of me, but we better figure something out. I can’t keep you alive bent over like this.”

Lucky could already feel numbness starting to run up the side of his leg. He looked around and saw Malby completely crushed into the side of the ship, the g-forces holding him upside-down and pinned against the side wall. Clawdius was completely gone, which was concerning, but Lucky was selfishly interested in not dying at the moment.

Something flashed by him, and Lucky realized it was a detached hammerhead. He turned to see the woman with a mouthful of stim shriek, before she slipped further out the side of the dropship. For a moment she was floating in space, tumbling backwards, and Lucky could see that just beyond the edge of the dropship the space was normal again. It was like they were in some kind of bubble of kinetic energy that ended at a soft edge, where normal space resumed. He could already see the first couple of divers that had made it out before the impact to the dropship. They were flying away at top speed, their hammerheads on full.

And then they were gone. A bright green energy cannon swept past, creating a tall plane of energy that swept across space; wherever it contacted one of the divers, they simply vanished.

The sweep of energy abruptly stopped; then another sweep began. There were at least two of the flat planes of energy sweeping the space around the dropship, as far as Lucky could see.

The woman without the hammerhead tumbled around, and Lucky registered shock on her face. When he looked again, her bottom half, just below her stomach, was gone. Just disappeared where one of the energy planes had sliced through her.

Someone grabbed Lucky by the shoulder, and he looked up to see Dabs yanking him upward. Jiang was beside her, and reached down and grabbed him by the ass. Normally, not a bad afternoon, but this one wasn’t quite what he had in mind. But the two of them together managed to drag him back into the dropship. Something in his dive suit ripped along the way, and Rocky hit him with more combat stims as he felt the suit automatically reseal with the help of his own bots.

It would be several minutes before the medbots would be able to get him back to full use of his left leg, but at least it was still attached. He’d take that.

Malby had finally crawled down from the side of the ship, but they were all still being shifted around, up, and down for the crazy gravity swings within the bubble, like kids in the back of a bus on a bumpy road.

“What the hell is going on!” Malby screamed at them.

Lucky looked forward to where the cockpit had been, but he could just see open space. The front half of the ship had been completely ripped open by the initial blast.

“Did we get too close to that beam?” Lucky was thinking of the divers he’d witnessed blinking out of existence before it.

Dabs was already shaking her head as Rocky answered him in his head.

“Internal blast,” she echoed. “The spiders are sure of it.”

The little pattern-recognition shits would be the ones to know. Lucky wasn’t going to question them.

“Those bastards!” Dabs roared over the deafening noise of the dropship falling apart around them. “Those little deserting bitches.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jiang asked.

“They must have rigged the dropship to blow when the jump doors opened,” she said.

“Why the hell would they—”

“They assumed we’d launch a raid to catch them!” Dabs said.