"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 symboclass="underline" 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.