Fracture

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