The tank was too deep for her to save Wren from the same fate, so she had to stand by and watch her slide down the same way, groaning as she went.
“How does maintenance on this stuff usually get done?” Fallon helped Wren up so they were both standing in a metal tank the size of a large house.
“Bots. Now we need to run!”
Fallon chased after Wren to the other side of the tank, where a red emergency button was next to an access ladder. She didn’t know how much of the two minutes they had left when Wren smacked it, but she doubted it was much.
“There! Easy!” Wren said through gasps for breath. She wasn’t much of an athlete.
“Now what?” Fallon eyed the ladder.
Sure enough, Wren pointed to it, too winded to talk.
“I’m guessing there’s a time element involved with that too.”
Wren nodded, waving at the ladder.
“Nope,” Fallon answered. “You’re going first.”
Wren stepped onto the ladder and hauled herself up.
“You need to work out more. Hurry up, or I’ll start poking your ass with my harpoon gun.”
Finally they reached the top and stepped up onto a walkway. A small maintenance door stood between them and safety from whatever inhospitable reaction was about to occur in the tank.
Wren tried to activate the door but it remained closed. “Locked,” she gasped.
Fallon stepped in and looked at it. The door wasn’t exceptionally reinforced, and it had only a basic code unlock. “It’s low security. I can probably crack it, but it may take more time than we have.”
“I got it. Old engineer’s trick. The wall alongside a door is usually far less reinforced than the door itself. That’s definitely the case here.” Wren dropped her backpack, rummaged around in it, and pulled out the laser torch Colb had given her. At least the thing had turned out to be useful to them.
Wren cut a roughly circular shape in the wall beside the door. The cutter went through with relatively little resistance. When she had a hole big enough to get her shoulders through, she returned the torch to her bag and pulled out a thermal blanket. She shoved the cutout circle to the other side, then laid the blanket over the bottom of the hole.
“Careful. It’s hot, and the metal’s sharp.”
After pushing their backpacks and weapons out the other side, Fallon helped Wren go through head first, arms up so she could catch herself as she tumbled to the floor. Then it was Fallon’s turn. She ignored the bite of the metal digging into her stomach, grateful for the durable fabric of her jumpsuit.
As she got to her feet on the other side, Fallon heard the whir of a turbine starting. A red light began flashing above the door.
Wren grabbed the blanket and dropped it, then reached for the metal cutout. “Hurry, help me!”
They shifted it around to find the right fit for the irregular shape, then slid it into the hole. Wren used the same laser cutter to fuse the metal. It warped and bubbled unevenly, but she achieved a seal on their side of the wall.
“There.” Wren turned off the cutter.
“What would’ve happened if you hadn’t sealed it?” Fallon put her weapon belt back on as she asked. She felt naked without it.
“That’s the batch tank for the air supply. Since we averted a decontamination cycle when we hit the emergency button, it’s now preparing a fresh supply of the perfect formula of air. If we hadn’t sealed the hole, the unmixed gases would have leaked into this corridor, causing a potentially dangerous mix.”
“Which would have set off an alarm and informed Colb of our location. Gotcha.”
“Also, we might not have been able to breathe.” Wren picked up the blanket and returned it to her backpack, then put on the pack. “But yeah, the alarm thing too.”
Fallon consulted the station’s schematics in her head. “Where do we need to go next?”
“The service conduit next to the air distribution duct. You’ll have to get past the security though. That’s a highly restricted area, since it goes right to crisis ops.”
“Right. That’s this way.” Fallon went to the left.
“So this is what you really do?” Wren asked as they went.
“More or less. There’s often a lot more shooting involved.”
“And you like that?”
Fallon took a left, and a right, which led them to the conduit they needed. “Yeah.”
There were a lot of things she could say to add to that, but she stopped herself. Most of those details would probably not be helpful in seeing Wren through this experience.
They kneeled next to the entrance to the conduit. While Fallon worked on getting it open, Wren said, “We could adjust his air mix and kill him. That would make it easier to take crisis ops.”
“It would.” Fallon frowned at the code sequencer, which was proving harder to crack than she’d hoped, even with the small device running Raptor’s program. “But if he’s dead I can’t get the answers I need about what he’s done.”
The right code finally came up and she sighed with relief as she got through that layer. Next, she input a master command authorization code, which Krazinski had given her. Nope. Colb had changed that too. She reset Raptor’s device to work on that code.
“Not to mention that you want to ask him why,” Wren added.
“Why what?”
“Why he’d do all this. Why he chose you.”
Fallon frowned at the device, still running through thousands of possible codes every tenth of a second. “It would be nice, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a lot of people are dead because of him. You saw some of the bodies, but there are a lot more that you didn’t see. Most were probably good people who had been led astray by someone they trusted. Those were our people, and if they were largely innocent, their records should reflect that. And their families should know it.”
“Yeah.” Wren sounded sad.
“And he had an entire station of scientists doing research
