“Okay,” Nic said, “there’s a staircase to your right. Go down. There should be a control panel in there. You’ll need to shed the suit. We’re going to play with some wires.”

Mitzi turned to her right, where the metal stairwell waited. “Why’s that?”

“The final door, the one that opens onto the bridge, has a billion forms of protection on it. A simple code won’t work; it only opens for two forms of identification and a retina scan. You can’t blast through, either. The wall’s reinforced, plus it’d put it into lockdown. However, Central has given me a package on how to disarm the door’s locking system, and they assure me it will probably work.”

“Probably?”

“Fingers crossed, doll.”

“Wait here,” Mitzi told her team as she turned towards the dark stairwell. The steps seemed flimsy and narrow, and the end wasn’t visible. “Stand guard, and yell if you see anything moving.”

“I’ll come with you,” Franc said. “You might need an extra pair of hands.”

Mitzi nodded, grateful that she wouldn’t be alone, and began climbing down the stairs. The metal rang with every step, and her night vision turned on halfway down.

“Can you see all right?” Mitzi asked her companion.

“So far.”

Mitzi zipped open the utility pouch on the suit’s hip and riffled through it until she found the lipstick-sized torch, which she twisted to turn on and handed to Franc. “We’ll need that to see the wires, anyway.”

The stairs continued for what felt like forever. Mitzi soon lost sight of her crew waiting at the top of the stairwell, and the echoes built until she felt as though she were walking through a cathedral. Franc, without the assistance of his suit, started panting.

Then the door at the end of the stairwell appeared. Mitzi guessed they must have gone down at least four stories. It looked unused, even more so than the other sections of the station, and dust—true dust, not the pulverised concrete that covered other parts of the station—coated the doorhandle and access pad.

Mitzi typed in the code, and the light turned green. Unlike the upstairs doors, it didn’t automatically open, and she had to turn the handle to get through. The door stuck in its frame, and its hinges were stiff, but the suit enabled her to shove it open without too much effort. Pipes, gauges, and crates filled what was obviously a maintenance room. Franc’s torch jittered over the jumble of shapes, making the shadows dance. It wasn’t a large room, and Mitzi saw their target—an electrical box—before Nic even started talking.

“Take the cover off the grey box at the back. There’s a bunch of switches inside, but we want to get to the wires behind. You should have a pocketknife in your pouch to cut the plastic shield off.”

“On it,” Mitzi said, already digging her blade into the white plastic that held close to a hundred switches.

“Be careful. Cut the wrong cable, and our entire mission’s blown.”