Victor watched as Ayan was boosted into the shaft that would lead her directly into the ruined communications hub of the station. According to what she said it had been severely damaged well before they arrived. His forensic scanners couldn't so much as penetrate the bulkhead so he took her word for it.
"Vic, you're following her," Alaka told him.
It wasn't like him to hesitate or question, but being singled out to protect the darling of the Triton alone wasn't exactly what he expected when he followed Alaka off the Cold Reaver back into the station proper. He also couldn't agree with her need to make some kind of diplomatic appeal to the people who were keeping them locked in.
"You're the narrowest, get on up there," Alaka reinforced, offering him his big cupped hands to step into.
"Sorry, just taking the situation in," Victor replied as he handed his rifle off to another soldier and unholstered his side arm. He tucked his handgun into the back of his belt then stepped into Alaka's waiting hands and was boosted up to the narrow service shaft entrance at an alarming speed. He didn't get his arms up in time and had to wriggle in head and shoulders first.
In the narrow dark passage he could hear Ayan ahead, but without the enhanced vision of his visor he wouldn't have been able to see her. She had gotten several meters ahead and was already at the point where the shaft widened.
He couldn't help but feel as though the station was pressing down on him, however. When he moved his shoulders to wriggle ahead his shoulder blades grazed the top of the shaft. It felt as though he was crawling through a long, shallow coffin. Panic threatened to grip him as he tried to get his hands up in front of him but failed.
"Are you all right Victor? Your stats are climbing," Ayan called back.
"I'll be fine as soon as I catch up." He redoubled his efforts and pushed ahead, using his knees, chest and feet to push his way along the shaft. Finally he came to the portion of the shaft where it widened and got his hands in front. Victor sighed in relief as he squeezed in beside Ayan, making sure she still had enough space to work in.
She had fine tools out and was just finishing bridging two wires with a clamp. "Now that the station has power in these sections, we can force doors open by powering their locks manually."
"Maybe you can. I'm not exactly a tech."
"This is the easy stuff. I bet I could teach you how to get past most locking mechanisms in an afternoon. The challenging part is finding a way to get at the wiring." A pair of wires sparked and something in the bulkhead in front of them clicked. "Bloody hell," she muttered. "The bolt drew back, but I have to hotwire the hatch so it'll move."
"This is the hatch here?" Victor pressed against the metal plate between them.
"Yes, but it's on a rail that won't move without the motor."
"Where do you see that?" Victor asked, looking around.
Ayan reached up and pushed her fingers into a narrow crack. "You can feel the rail right here." She withdrew them and went back to carefully tracing wires, figuring out what each was attached to.
Victor almost confirmed for himself but stopped. "Oh, I believe you, I just-" he shrugged.
"Haven't been in many maintenance corridors?" Ayan smirked. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it well enough, especially with her light Britannia accent.
"I wouldn't call this a corridor. Tunnel fighting could be a bit like this, but there's normally more breathing room. Completely different if you ask me, except for the claustrophobia."
"You did tunnel fighting even though you're claustrophobic? That's well beyond the call."
"Well, it was either go with Alaka into the tunnels or fight in the open where we made half the progress and lost twice as many people."
"I remember. Pandem was bad for everyone. I had to hang upside down over a docking pit with nothing but my wits and a vacsuit. My fear of heights nearly did me in."
"You're a starship engineer and you're afraid of heights? What do you do for space walks?"
"You're a trained soldier with claustrophobia," Ayan retorted with a rueful chuckle.
"Good point."
Ayan worked in silence as Victor watched her strand different uncut wires together while tugging others to the side. "Actually, I don't know."
"Don't know?"
"What I'd do for space walks. It hasn't come up since I realized I was afraid of heights again. I was hoping I'd be all right on a space walk, but as you know that's rarely the case."
"I suppose you'll find out when they install the new engine pods."
"I was hoping to give it a go well before that, but from the way things are going, you might be right. Not like I should supervise that sort of thing from a distance."
"Most senior starship engineers would, from what I've seen on past tours."
"Well, I'm not most engineers. I supervised the build on those engine pods, I'd rather see they get installed properly." Ayan cut four wires, stripped the insulation off and pinched them together. Her Vacsuit protected her from the raw current as a loud crack sounded. The small, thick hatch was drawn aside swiftly, giving them a clear way into one of the station's comm rooms. "You go first. I'll make sure these don't come loose."
The sound of the motor clicking and whining as it continued to run, stripping its gears with the door as far along the track as it could go was loudest as Victor pushed his shoulders through the opening. There was no graceful way down.
Once most of his torso was hanging in the open air above the communications room he let himself fall past the nearest console. With a violent crash he narrowly missed a chair on wheels, sending it spinning across the room as he fell face first on the floor. The vacsuit's armour and inertial dampening systems kept him from physical harm, but his pride was a little injured as he listened to Ayan burst out laughing. "Three point five!" she called after him.
With him out of the way, and her lesser size, she had just enough room to turn around before lowering herself down feet first.
He stood and moved to the deactivated console she was slowly lowering herself down to. Victor could see her feet feeling in the air for the top of the console so she could carefully step down and put his hand reassuringly on her leg. "I'll catch you, just drop out."
She pushed off more quickly and he caught her perfectly in his arms. Even through the overlapping slats of the vacsuit armour she felt much more feminine than she looked.
"You don't weigh a thing, my suit didn't even kick in."
"Flatterer," Ayan waited a moment then kicked her feet a little. "Ahem,"
He stepped away from the console and gently put her down.
"Thank you."
Her gaze scanned across the dimly lit oval room. In the centre was an island with six chairs, the walls were covered with two dimensional displays and seating. It was a long counter top, broken by two inset track doors. "Do you see anything that's displaying something?" she asked quietly, beginning a slow walk along the oval room.
Vincent did the same in the other direction and then it struck him. There was nothing he understood on the screens, nothing coming out of any of the older holographic projectors. He traced one of the circular emitters with his finger and snickered softly.
"See something?" she asked.
"No, sorry. These holographic displays are ancient. My sister and I saved our allowance for three months when we were kids so we could get one for the rear cabin of the family cruiser. She'd have a laugh at seeing one being used in a room like this."
Ayan didn't reply, she kept inspecting the control panels, what she was looking for exactly, he couldn't tell.
"She made it off Pandem with her husband after the bots went homicidal."
Ayan looked at him, mild relief plain on her face. "Oh, I forgot transports escaped that mess."
"A few dozen. Some of us old soldiers were able to help the police get them away from Damshir early on. The first time we got control."
"I never heard what exactly happened during the early days of the virus."
"Well, most of the Andies, that's the police androids, managed to resist long enough for deactivation. Then something reactivated them while most of the police force was inside the Mount Elbrus police station. A few of us retired military types ran into Alaka and we got more organized. Then the real fight began."
"I'm sorry."
They were walking in a slow circle, inspecting the screens closely. There was nothing to see, even Victor could see most of the computers were stuck in a diagnostic loop or frozen altogether. "Don't know why you're apologizing. Even Alaka said without you people we may not have made it off Pandem."
"You give us too much credit. I couldn't imagine doing what you did for weeks. When I remember Pandem I think about the people who we couldn't save."
"Can't do that. Survival is about small victories. Is this something? Looks like some kind of terminal ID."
Ayan walked over, withdrew her faceplate, leaving the armoured hood of her vacsuit up and looked at the lower corner of the wall display. He was pointing at an unchanging square with EL-147 blinking inside. The rest of the screen was streaming thousands of seemingly random numbers, letters and device symbols. She touched it and the whole screen froze. "I wish Jason were here, he might understand what half this says."
"Didn't they teach you about this in some engineering program?"
"Well, I can read it, but it's just a fragment of some sort of software package. These are hardware identifiers, storage, power, backups, comm lines, gravity and thermal sensors but what's between what this computer does with it all is still a mystery. Reading it like this could take a while and it still might not tell us how to get the doors open or if the hallways outside have pressure."
"Right, so we open the wrong door and we end up getting sucked out and falling to the planet surface."
"Exactly."
"Isn't this a navnet symbol?" he pointed to lopsided plus sign.
"You're right," Ayan tried pressing the square again and let the screen scroll through several thousand characters before tapping it once more, pausing the program. "This shows a dead comm line with a safety warning."
"Probably warning the operators to repair the communications array before they end up with a hundred ship pileup at the docks."
She scrolled to the next screen and was rewarded with an eyeful of electronic schematics. Ayan smiled brightly and laughed to herself. "Repair instructions."
"Isn't the comm tower a slagged mess?"
"It is, but it also shows me how to rewire console three so we can speak over the intercom in an emergency."
Victor looked around and found a worn number 3 painted on the edge of the counter several meters down. "There it is."
Ayan pulled a narrow screwdriver from her thigh pocket as she walked over to the console. With no effort at all she had the main panel open and several connections on an ancient main circuit board bridged and shorted. "Good thing this place's computers were built on the cheap. Looks like they spent all their money on the superstructure and the gravity mill."
"How exactly does that work anyway?"
"Do you have two days?" Ayan asked him with a crooked grin. "Let's just say it's a little like a water wheel only not."
"Right, I'll stick to soldiering, you can keep trying to get in touch with someone."
"Ayan!" Called Alaka through the shaft.
"Yeah, we're just a few meters in."
"Oh, good. Contact anyone?"
"No, just figuring out the intercom now. How is the other team doing?"
"Finn just updated me. He says it would take at least twenty hours to cut through the hangar door without using explosives. I think he's leaning towards using the Cold Reaver's weapons to blast through."
"At that range? We'd be lucky to have half a ship left."
"He said he'd work on the math, see if there was something he could do to minimize blow back."
Ayan thought a moment before shaking her head. "Tell him he's welcome to do the calculations, but if he actually gets somewhere he has to run it by me before putting it into practice."
"Will do, good luck in there."
"Thank you, I hope this lock down is some kind of big misunderstanding."
"You and me both." Ayan looked into the open control panel, pulled a short wire free and pressed it into a tiny black box. The terminal display flashed red for several moments and then started displaying a large audio symbol: a white dot with increasingly large concave lines emanating from it.
"Does that mean it's working?" Victor asked in a whisper.
Ayan stared at the screen for a moment, started to say something then shrugged. "It's a little vague." As an afterthought she accessed the colour controls for her armour through her command unit and changed it to white. The black horizontal overlapping metal slats and the vacsuit material beneath shifted to match her request. "I'd rather not be dressed head to tow in black if they can see me. White's a better colour for negotiations."
"Hello? Who is this?" asked a husky female voice.
Ayan smiled and cleared her throat before replying; "This is Commander Ayan, I'm with the repair team from the Triton that restored power earlier."
"Oh my God, thank you. I've been looking for a way off the station since the trouble started. You don't know how good it is to hear from you. You have to get me out of here!"
"I'm afraid we're trapped, that's why I had to hot wire this terminal."
"So you have no control? This is just a hack?"
"I'm afraid so. Who are you?"
"I'm Larissa Ferris, the last surviving medic on the station."
"Get away from the comm system Larissa," warned another woman.
"It's the repair team! They found a way to-"
"You've said enough. Confine her to her quarters Bradley."
There was a long pause, during which Victor pulled his side arm free of his belt and checked the energy clip. It was fully charged.
Ayan noticed and shook her head, indicating quietly with a wave that he should put it away.
"Now, who are you?" asked the woman on the other end.
"I'm Ayan, leader of the team that restored power to your section of the station. It seems we're locked inside."
"Yes, I'm holding you until your ship turns over all the raiders you've taken captive. They'll be held accountable."
"It was a slave crew acting under the direction of a few senior crew members."
"That doesn't make a lick of a difference. They could have mutinied."
"They had controller implants embedded in their breastbones, I'm afraid they didn't have a choice. The Captain of the Triton, my home vessel, killed two of the senior officers, but there's one left. They called her the Doctor Thurge and I'm sure Captain Valance would trade her for us."
"I'm afraid that wouldn't be enough. The company wouldn't accept that one person could be held accountable for disrupting our operations."
"I'm led to wonder how handing us over would help if you didn't get the slave crew?"
"You mean the raider crew. According to the company, the Triton crew are wanted too, so either way I win."
"We must be able to find a middle ground. We have supplies, we can offer more help if you'd allow us more access and the freedom to come and go. In trade we could use a safe harbour for a few days."
"That would be tempting if there weren't a small fleet of rescue ships and a military escort already on their way. You're not going anywhere until they get here either. Not unless your Captain hands over those raiders."
Ayan's fair complexion started to betray her, even in the dim light Victor could see she was starting to turn red. She fought through it, taking a deep, slow breath before speaking. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."
"Forewoman Amanda Dimitri."
"All right, I understand being in command of a station this size must be a massive undertaking, but I didn't see any kind of company markings on my way through or on the hull outside. You're independent, right?"
There was a pause preceding the answer. "We have investors."
"I imagine those investors, or the men they hire to represent them, don't really care about you or your staff. They're here to get things running smoothly again. Whatever promises they've made, you've got to realize they won't matter once they see the state the facility is in."
Victor's eyes went wide. The woman Ayan was speaking to seemed immovable, frustrating, and he would have already given up. Instead Ayan took a completely different approach and he couldn't help be impressed at how calm she sounded as she did so.
"They wouldn't replace me, I'm essential staff."
"There are always other experts. Investors have a tendency of getting their way, especially when things start falling apart. There's a lot we can do for you if you let me communicate with Triton."
"For reasons I can't get into there's no way I can allow you to directly contact your ship."
"How can I demonstrate to you that we are here to help? The Triton and crew have taken care of your raider problem at a great cost. We lost several crew members during the fight. That must gain us a little goodwill, a little trust."
"How do I know that you didn't follow the raiders here? That defeating them and taking this slave crew and their ships for yourselves wasn't the plan from the beginning?"
"We're not pirates, and if we were the last target we'd take on is a small raider fleet."
"Your ship doesn't fly a flag, there are no sponsors listed, how could you be anything but pirates? Maybe this station is just a bonus prize you stumbled into and now that you've become trapped here you don't have any other choice but to speak to us?"
Ayan rolled her eyes. "If you won't allow me to speak to my ship directly, let's speak to them together. Simply open a channel with them and we can all sort this out."
"Actually, they're sending a message right now, you just hold that thought," said the woman on the other end.
Ayan closed her eyes and shook her head.
Several moments passed before Amanda clicked her end of the intercom back on. "They're bringing the raiders in now. We'll be opening the prison processing doors and walking them straight into the holding facilities. The machines killed all our workers when they contracted a virus, now we can replenish our workforce and start repairs as our rescue fleet arrives."
"Oh shit," Victor muttered under his breath. "How the hell did I miss that?"
Ayan shook her head quickly. "Listen, you seem fairly bright, so you must know that-"
"This could be some kind of reverse trap? Of course I do! You've seen this place though, how well it keeps its people inside."
Ayan nodded mournfully and adjusted a wire inside the console. "You're going to want to put your headgear on." she said.
"What?" Amanda asked, confused.
"Not you," Ayan replied.
Victor realized she was speaking to him, brought his headgear up and sealed it.
She did the same and pressed a tiny daub of adhesive putty down over the lead end of a wire and the circuit board. A high pitched whine screamed over the intercom, their vacsuits protected them from the harsh sound. "If this intercom is their primary means of communication inside the station, they'll have to find a way to cut this room off from the system entirely before they can use it again."
"What did you do?" Victor asked, noticing that their suits were using a laserlink to communicate.
"I created a feedback loop on the circuit board. I can't believe I didn't see this coming when we first arrived. I should have suspected something was going on when there was no one here to meet or direct us," Ayan scolded herself. "We have to get back and regroup. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think Jake and the others will realize it's a prison until it's too late."