“Sir. Yes, sir.” And then, when I said nothing further, “If I may ask, sir. Where are you staying?”

“Level four of the Undergarden,” I replied, my voice bland. She tried valiantly to keep her surprise and dismay off her face, but it was obvious she hadn’t expected that answer, and didn’t like it.

6

Station AIs were built—grew—as their stations were built. Shortly after Athoek Station had been finished, when resentments from the annexation had still been fresh, there had been violence. A dozen sections on four levels had been permanently damaged.

Installing an AI into an already existing construction was a dicey business. The results were rarely optimal, but it could be done. Had been done, quite a few times. But for whatever reason—perhaps a wish to forget the event, perhaps because the casts hadn’t been auspicious, perhaps some other reason—the area had not been repaired, but blocked off instead.

Of course, people had still managed to get in. There were several hundred people living in the Undergarden, though they weren’t supposed to be there. Every citizen had a tracker implanted at birth, so Station knew where they were, knew those citizens were there. But it couldn’t hear them or see them the way it could its other residents, not unless they were wired to send data to Station, and I suspected few of them were.

The section door leading to the Undergarden was propped open with the crushed remains of a table missing one of its legs. The indicator next to the entrance said that on the other side of that (supposedly closed) door was hard vacuum. It was serious business—section doors would close automatically in the event of a sudden pressure drop, to seal off hull breaches. We were likely not even close to hard vacuum, despite the indicator on the wall by this door, but no one who spent much time on ships—or who lived on stations—took such safety measures lightly. I turned toward Captain Hetnys. “Are all the section doors leading to the Undergarden disabled and propped open like this?”

“It’s as I said, Fleet Captain, this area was sealed off, but people kept breaking in. They’d just be sealing it off over and over to no purpose.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged, gesturing the obviousness of her words. “So why not just fix the doors so they work properly?”

She blinked, clearly not quite understanding my question. “No one’s supposed to be in this area, sir.” She seemed completely serious—the train of reasoning made perfect sense to her. The ancillary behind her stared blankly ahead, apparently without any opinion on the matter. Which I knew was almost certainly not the case. I didn’t answer, just turned to climb over the broken table and into the Undergarden.