“If they are?” Surit said. “There’s no way for us to check.”

Tennal pushed himself away from the wall and turned toward the clean air of the station dome. “I’m a little drunk,” he informed Surit, “and I have a great idea.”

CHAPTER 20

The hatch cover came off with a muffled clang. Light flooded the tunnel. Surit prudently dropped back down the ladder a couple of rungs; Tennal wrestling with a manual lever was not a picture of carefulness, and his feet were in Surit’s face.

“Sorry.” Tennal peered down. “Did I get you?”

“I dodged,” Surit said.

“You know, your poker face is uncannily good,” Tennal said, “for someone breaking several regulations at once.”

“Thank you,” Surit said mildly. Tennal gave a quiet, surprised choke of laughter as he squeezed through the maintenance hatch. Surit was now used to the way Tennal went for weak points when he was nervous.

It was the middle of the night. The archives building was quiet, nearly deserted. Surit would be lying if he said he weren’t also uneasy, but something had changed in his thinking over the past two weeks. There were no answers, the divisions were fighting—why not do what was needed? After hours, the archive lighting was dim and blue-tinged, washing out the walls of the corridor. Surit climbed through the maintenance hatch after Tennal and shut it behind them.

“It may be an oversight,” Surit added quietly, “but there aren’t technically any regulations that forbid us from checking whether some galactic remnants are where they should be. And we have a valid pass.”

Tennal twirled the pass on his finger. It was an emergency electrician’s pass that they had discovered, as a captain, Tennal could authorize to himself. “I’ll tell them you told me that.”

“You’re the commanding officer, Captain Halkana. It’s your responsibility to know the regulations.” Surit counted off doors in his head. Tennal had inveigled a reference number out of Captain Fari, and there were plans of the archive available on the station’s government network. “Fifth door to your left, up ahead.”

Tennal was halfway down the corridor before he froze and held up a hand. Surit stopped. He heard it too: loud footsteps ringing on a metal floor.

There must be a security guard on patrol. The floors up here weren’t metal: the footsteps sounded like the guard was on a catwalk on the warehouse floor below, where they kept the supercooled data cores. Surit trained his hearing on it for long enough to ascertain they weren’t on the same floor, then gestured for Tennal to start moving again.

“At least that means there’s no one looking at the cameras,” Tennal breathed. “Unless that guard has a friend.”