"For the next half hour or so I can understand anyone, there's a separate spell that only works in that direction," he mentions, after he's cast a Guidance on general principle.

“If you can delay that, you should—”

A railgun round piercing your ship at 2,000 kilometers per second isn’t as loud as you might expect. It doesn’t have time to deposit most of its kinetic energy, and ships’ hulls are very good at dissipating vibrations. There is a thunk, and then a whoosh, and a second or two later you might notice that where there used to be a man sitting in one of the crash couches, there is now a headless corpse, a stream of blood being drawn from its neck through the new hole in the wall into the vacuum of space. Along with, of course, all of the air in the room.

(Shed Garvey, previously ship’s medic for the ice hauler Canterbury, notices nothing at all.)

- can't heal that. "Is there a way to patch that!" he shouts.

"I'm looking for one!" she shouts back, unbuckling herself and moving toward the room's small supply cabinet, back to the wall in case of sudden changes in the ship's acceleration. "I don't suppose any of your magic powers would help!"

"I can get you five minutes of air if you can use them to fix it!" He holds out his hand.

She takes it.

"Air Bubble."

The pressure in the room hasn't dropped enough that she's suffocating without it, but it's noticeable nonetheless. She takes a deep breath and starts digging through the supply cabinet, coming up with a hard-sided binder big enough to cover the hole. The seal is far from perfect, but it blocks most of the airflow.

"That should get us, uh—" she takes out her phone and pulls up a barometer app*, runs a quick calculation—"about twenty minutes before the oxygen concentration in the room is too low to keep us conscious. Maybe longer if I can convince the ship's ventilation system to keep sending us air instead of sealing off the room—oh. Wait. How does the air magic work? Will it stop working, or stop working faster, if I do something to share it with other people?" She's found a roll of plastic tubing and is cutting it into four shorter lengths.

(*) Obviously in space your pocket everything would have barometer hardware.

"Sharing it is generally understood not to work well but will not end the spell early," says Blai. "Guidance - would you like one of those too -"

"If you think it'll help." She holds one end of each of the four tubes next to her face. "Everyone take the other end of one and try to breathe through it," she says, first in English, then in Taldane.

He Guidances her. Can he reach anyone else from here?

The three other people in the room who are still alive have all gotten out of their crash couches and are coordinating with Naomi on trying to find something more permanent to patch the hole. They are in Blai's reach, but haven't been following Naomi's conversation with him because they don't speak Taldane.

"I'm going to give them all Guidances," he reports to Naomi, "they don't have to spend them." He casts and boops them each and himself around and around.

It doesn't really feel like anything, but—

"Mars needs us alive," he says to Naomi. "We're the only ones who can tell the world that they didn't blow up the Cant." If in fact they didn't, which he still isn't fully convinced of. "They're not going to leave us to die on purpose. Forget about the ventilation system, get me intercom access."

It's a lot easier to hack than the ventilation system, because you can kill people with root access to a ship's ventilation system and you can't do that with the intercom.

"Hey dustfuckers," he says into Naomi's phone, and the entire ship hears it, "we're slowly suffocating to death in crash room 4B. If you want us to recant that statement about how you destroyed the Cant you should consider rescuing us."

Two minutes later the door slides open to reveal Lieutenant Lopez flanked by a squad of armored marines.

"Get through," he says, far too professional to sound noticeably annoyed. "The ship's losing air."

Blai still has Comp Lang so he unbuckles and goes through.

"We were coming to rescue you already," he says. Now he sounds just a little bit annoyed. "I have orders to get all of you off this ship alive; follow me." He sets off at a brisk walk, just shy of a jog.

When they're halfway down the hallway the whole ship shudders and they're suddenly weightless. The lights go out for a moment before returning, much less bright.

Lopez and the marines are wearing mag boots and stay grounded; everyone else's inertia sends them flying.

Blai pops his Guidance attempting a grab for a handhold. If he manages that he'll try to catch whoever else he can reach too.

There are handles on the ceiling for this very reason! Everyone is able to get back to the "ground" (what even is up right now) fairly quickly, but there's no way they're going to continue moving forward at their previous pace.

Hopefully the reduced pace is sufficient. At least he isn't wearing armor. If... armor would even... matter in this situation. He re-guidances himself while they proceed.

"They need your mag boots," he tells his marine escort. He is not actually, in expectation, ordering them to stay here and die; even from this point there are still several things that have to go very unexpectedly wrong for the Donnager to be completely destroyed. It's just that enough things have gone unexpectedly wrong already that he has a sickening feeling about it anyway.

The marines take off their boots and each hand them to one of the evacuees.