to act against us with all its resources but also be kind of a shitty thing to do.) I sent Mensah an alert in her feed—this was happening so fast I didn’t have time to verbalize it to myself, let alone tell her what I was doing—and wrapped an arm around her waist. She knotted her hands in my jacket and buried her head against my shoulder. I folded my free arm over her head. Then I sent the slow command.
The capsule dropped speed as it entered the station and I was already moving as I gave the doors an emergency signal to open. The pipe door made it open in time but the inner station door didn’t. Fortunately I only clipped it and it just altered my trajectory as I spun across the platform floor.
The capsule had already slid its door shut and accelerated to the speed needed to make its merge window. I deleted us out of the recordings, deleted various buffers and logs, and removed the capsule’s memory of the incident.
I’d managed to roll to a stop with Mensah on top, but that couldn’t have been comfortable. The last time we’d done this, I’d been in armor and also jumping off a steep slope, and this was a smooth synthetic stone floor and nothing was exploding at close range. So this was better, is my point, I think. I lifted her off me, shoved upright, and then pulled her to her feet.
She waved me off. “I’m all right.”
I let go of her cautiously, but she stayed up. I pulled maps from the building’s feed to look for transportation options. Aha, there was a good one.
I led us off the platform and down the ramp to the building’s pods, using my code to delete us from the security cams. At the junction we stepped into the first pod to arrive, and I told it to override its rules and take us all the way to the maintenance level, which was listed on the map as a closed floor and wasn’t an option on the pod’s normal menu.
We stepped out into a low-ceilinged space, and once the pod shut behind us it was completely dark. I could see via infrared and used my scan to create a physical map. Mensah couldn’t see at all. She grabbed my jacket and shifted behind me, letting me pull her forward.
The air circulation and quality wasn’t great but at least there was air. I navigated a path through currently offline maintenance and hauler bots over to an open ramp that led down. We hit two changes in gravity, one gradual, and one not so gradual, when the wall to the right abruptly became the floor.
We were headed toward a branch of an access backbone, which was a space for moving cargo to and from the port and between station levels, and was also an access and transport system for station engineering bots and teams. There were strips of emergency lighting here and lots of marker paint, giving off bursts of light and feed signals, mostly temporary instructions and guides for bots and human workers. Mensah’s grip on my jacket relaxed and I could tell from her breathing the light was a relief.
We walked into a strong breeze coming from the access backbone. I picked up human voices on audio not far away. From the feed activity, there was a lot of traffic about two hundred meters to the right, toward the plaza and the hotels. None of it sounded like emergency or security operations, just normal support system work. In six more steps the ramp reached the backbone, a shadowy cavern lit by low-level navigation beacons. Things whooshed by in the dimness, mostly lift platforms and automated carriers coming from or heading back to the port cargo depots.
It wasn’t like there was no security, since if you were going to steal cargo or do something terrible to a competitor’s station structure, this was the place to do it from. I was deflecting the scans for weapons and power sources, and we had five minutes and counting before the next drone squad came through.
Mensah had gripped my jacket again, maybe nervous at the height and depth of the backbone. Despite the lighter gravity, I wasn’t keen on it, either. I was scanning for an empty carrier and found an idle one up toward the area of activity. I teased it out of the herd and told it to come to us.
It slid up to