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“We can use the ship’s system. Get me radio contact. I don’t care how, and I don’t care who: Benti, Burgundy, raise the Red Horse, hell, raise that damn Covenant ship. Just get me someone to talk to.”

MacCraw spun suddenly, taking aim at a corner in the ceiling, jerked to check another corner, looking for giant angry boils, snotbags, infection forms.

Lopez couldn’t blame him, but they didn’t have time for it. “Private! Get to it!”

“Yessir.” Training overrode his fear. He brushed broken plastic and green dust off the glass atop an undamaged console. “What are you gonna do, Sarge?”

Lopez righted a chair, ignoring the foam bulging from the slashed seat. She’d been counting rosary beads again. So many lost. Thinking about that thing wailing on the door, that had been one of her Marines. Thinking about why.

“I ever tell you I can touch-type?” She pulled Smith’s security pass from her pocket and waved it at him as she sat. “Old school, I am. Now get cracking.”

>Benti 1608 hours

Somehow, against the odds, they’d reached the engine room.

Now what? Benti hadn’t a clue.

They were crouched down, peering over dead consoles on the control platform mounted two flights up, and they had a fine view of the main engine deck below.

The space engines dominated, sinking beneath the floor and looming high above them, the shielding around the thrusters looking to Benti like giant centipedes, stretching back through the rear of the ship. Nestled between them, oddly innocuous, the slipspace engine, a standard Shaw-Fujikawa translight, nothing more than a six-pack of boxes propped against each other. A melange of grease and oil and rancid hydraulic fluid mostly snuffed out the pervasive mold smell.

The floor was crowded. It was busy. It was Flood Party Central. No surprise there.

Details began to leap out at her. Covenant strode huge among the turned humans, most of them trailing scraps of prison garb, some in official uniform, and there, in the middle of them, Maller still in Marine armor. He was warped out of shape, limping, dragging an appendage of gristle behind him. Maller crossed paths with a Covenant Elite ruptured like a huge septic bruise, and they almost seemed to nod at each other. All of them, the prisoners and guards, humans and Covenant, united, in total harmony. Of one mind.

Better to think of it as a party, and they were the rogue DJs who’d crashed it.

But, no, that didn’t really help. She had to look away, up at Henry, who was checking, kept checking, the catwalk behind them. He met her eyes, unhappy but in control, too much the warrior.

Clarence swallowed, his lips parted, gaze fixated on something below, and swallowed again. The muscles in his jaw worked as he clenched his teeth. He looked a question at her. Their orders didn’t seem to apply anymore.

Rimmer had been partly right. This wasn’t all the ship’s dead. On the slipspace engine, the Flood had fixed a giant clot of mucus. Not mucus, Benti corrected herself, some sickly membrane, throbbing and quivering, odd shapes distorting its skin, half caught in it, as if something were moving within, and suddenly the picture resolved itself, and those odd shapes against the membrane became arms and legs dressed in uniform, the crew caught and suspended in the glob. Struggling. Alive.

Benti raised a numb hand and covered her mouth, not sure if she was holding in a sob or vomit.

A squeak that might’ve become something louder and Benti snapped around. Clarence was faster, one arm around Rimmer’s head, the other hand clamped firmly over his mouth, expression dour. Rimmer gripped the arm around him, not struggling but holding on like a drowning man to a life preserver. Benti bit her lip and hoped he wouldn’t release Rimmer until they were well out of here. There was too much terror in Rimmer’s eyes.

A new sound cut above the shuffle and murmur and held the full attention of all the Flood below. As one they turned blindly toward the sound, a horrible synchronicity in the way they raised their heads to sniff, claws and nails flexed, ready to attack. Benti could almost taste