“And you opened the doors—”

“I tried to get through them first, but they were locked. There’s a body behind the big control panel back there, and he had a card around his neck.” Franc raised the white plastic square and shrugged. “It worked, I guess.”

“Ha!” Mitzi slapped his shoulder again, sending him reeling. “It’s good to have you back, Franc. All right, gather up, ducklings. We’re on the home stretch now. Since Franc lost his armour, he’s vulnerable. Skye, Mir, bring up the rear of our party and keep your weapons at the ready. Eoin, stick by me. Franc, hang in the middle and try not to die.”

Once they’d lined up in formation, Mitzi led them through the door and into the control panel beyond. Hundreds of desks were spaced throughout the vast room, most of them facing a wall with a dead projection screen, but some were clumped together as though their owners had been working on joint projects. A raised platform at the back of the room held five chairs and a long silver desk. Mitzi guessed it must be for the commanding officers, so they could watch over the work. A hand was draped over the edge of the desk: the officer Franc had gotten the card from.

Mitzi slowed her pace. There didn’t seem to be any parasites in the science section, at least none that had woken up, but the multitude of desks provided almost infinite hiding places, and the emergency fluorescent lights weren’t much help at dispersing the shadows.

On almost every desk, something caught Mitzi’s eye that gave a sliver of insight into its owner. There were the neat ones, with papers categorised and stacked perfectly, and messy ones, with papers and litter coating every non-essential surface. Mugs sported witty phrases or emblems of their owners’ favourite sports teams. Someone had taped the date of his service leave to the top of his screen as motivation. One desk held a photo of the worker’s family: a plump, beaming wife and a bronze-haired toddler. Mitzi hoped the family had been off the station when the Cymics arrived.

The room was like a small pocket of life inside an ocean of death. Mitzi was relieved when they reached the other side of the room and faced a large, thick-paned door with a bright-yellow hazard sign posted above it.

“Through the doors?” Mitzi asked.

“Yep. You’ll be in the outer circle of the reactor. You’ve just got to disarm the door beyond that, which gives access to the bridge crossing the reactor. Get on that bridge, drop the charge, and I can lead you out. Easy.”

“Easy,” Mitzi echoed, trying to sound more confident than she felt. She keyed the code into the control panel and felt the gust of cold air squeeze between the chinks in the armoured suit as the gates opened.

A long steel passageway waited for them beyond. The path curved gently, so that Mitzi could see only a few dozen meters in each direction before the slope cut off the rest of the tunnel from view. The concrete walls were back, but the floor had dark-red metal grates. The interior walls were reinforced with metal brackets, and warning signs hung every twenty meters. It must be curving around the outside of the reactor. I wasn’t expecting it to be so big.