Only one of the buildings was airtight to regulation standard. When they clambered inside, through a temporary airlock hastily patched into a hole in the wall, they found themselves in a cavernous hollow. Bots crawled over the floor and roof, patching up defects. But even the bots looked old and worn out, and the engineers who supervised them weren’t much better. There was no gravity in here—or rather, only the microgravity of the asteroid, just a feather touch—and the light, cast by a few hovering globes, was misty, the air a shining silver-gray.

Pirius cracked his faceplate and took a deep breath. The air was stale, so lacking in oxygen his chest ached, and it stank of oil and metal, and of the burning smell of raw asteroid dust, oxidizing busily. As the irritating dust got to work on his sinuses he started to sneeze.

“Lethe,” he said. “Is this it?”

“Nothing works but the inertial deflectors,” Torec said. That had to be true, or else the whole Rock, plummeting through the complicated geometry of Arches, would have been a hazard. She sighed. “Don’t they realize we are trying to save the Galaxy? How are we supposed to do that if the toilets don’t work?”

But there was nothing to be done about the strange internal politics of Arches, the Navy, the Coalition, and humankind in general. So they got to work.

For the next few days they wrestled with ancient air and water cyclers, balky nano-food systems, and hovering light globes that wouldn’t stay still. Even the machines didn’t seem to like them: they resisted being fixed, and developed faults and quirks that simply seemed perverse. Their social life didn’t get any better, either. If they had been outsiders in the Barracks Ball, they were definitely not wanted here, by engineers who clearly believed they had better things to do than labor over a lump of shit like Rock 492.

But in another way it was fun, Pirius thought. Getting immersed in the guts of a broken pump or a clogged air-filter system was dirty, hard work, but it was a job that was finite and understandable and something you could finish, unlike the diffuse politicking of Earth.

The systems came online one by one. As they heard the laboring of air pumps, and felt the shuddering of water pumping through the pipes, the place started to seem alive. And because they had worked so hard over it, Pirius and Torec thought of it as theirs. Before he had gone to Earth, the only homes Pirius had ever known had been one Barracks Ball after another. Now Rock 492 was starting to feel like home—though he and Torec only dared discuss such thoroughly non-Doctrinal matters in whispers, and they would never have mentioned it to Captain Seath.

The ensigns were summoned to regular meetings with Nilis.