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 the passage two minutes later, a boxy structure used to transport station engineers, their bots, and equipment. We stepped inside and I made the doors shut before I let it bring up the interior lights. I checked its map system and sent it toward the port.

Mensah swayed as it started to move and grabbed my arm above the gun port, squeezing hard enough that the organic part of my arm felt it. The racing heartbeat seemed normal under the circumstances, but she still hadn’t let go of me. I asked, “Are you all right?” What if they’d tortured her? Everything in my emergency med/psych assistance module involved accessing a MedSystem so it could tell me what to do. (My company-supplied education modules were crap, I may have mentioned.)

She shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m just … very glad to see you.”

She still sounded unsteady. She looked the same, dark brown skin, short light brown hair. There were definitely more creases at the corner of her eyes, something I confirmed with a comparison of my earlier recordings of her. And I was looking at her now.

In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this. I had never wanted that and I still didn’t. (Touching while rendering assistance, shielding humans from explosions, etc., is different.) But I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

She started to laugh, then her face did something complicated and she hugged me. I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid.

Except it wasn’t entirely awful. It was like when Tapan had slept next to me in the room at the hostel, or when Abene had leaned on me after I saved her; strange, but not as horrific as I would have thought.

She stepped back and rubbed her face, as if impatient with her own reaction. She looked up at me. “That was you at the GrayCris terraforming facility.”

They must have questioned her about it. “It was an accident,” I said.

She nodded. “What part was an accident?”

“Most of the parts.”