When she’d finally met him, Saul was older and had a few new scars, but his grey eyes had been just as captivating as they had been in the video she’d watched more than a decade before.

“Damn it,” Maren snapped, dropping the wrench off the stuck bolt. She didn’t have a choice; the bolt was fused in place, and the only person on the station with any hope of moving it was Saul.

She stalked down the hallway, rubbing her oily hands on her discoloured jumpsuit. The vast station had supposedly been designed for maximum efficiency, but to Maren, getting anywhere seemed to take an eternity.

Saul normally spent his days in the rec room, reading while he watched the security system he’d relocated out of the dark defence section. Maren had at first assumed it was his way of pretending to be busy without actually doing any work, but she’d quickly discovered nothing on the screens got past Saul.

“He’s trained to be constantly aware of his surroundings,” Gin, who had been working with Saul for years, explained when Maren asked her about it. “Just watching the screens would be our equivalent of staring at a blank wall. So he reads books to keep himself from going insane from boredom.”

Maren pushed into the spacious recreation room. When the station was out of hibernation, the room was usually filled with clusters of off-duty workers watching movies, playing table tennis, and napping on the curved chairs. With their reduced crew, it felt unnaturally hollow.

The dozen surveillance screens in Saul’s corner were turned on. Some showed key parts of the inside of the station, a couple showed the hangar, and still others monitored the outside of the station. But Saul’s seat was empty. That usually meant he’d seen something and had gone to check it out.

Maren squinted at the screens and found what must have attracted the defence technician’s attention. A buggy had pulled into their hangar.

“Huh,” Maren said, smirking as she turned to jog down the hallway that took her to the other corner of the station, where the ships and vans docked. “Three guesses who that is.”

The small screens fixed in the corner of every room were red, signalling the approach of a gamma flare, with a countdown of less than an hour. Maren had to admit, Holly had impeccable timing.

She paused just outside the hangar and leaned against the window to watch the sandy-haired woman fill out the paperwork to dock her buggy in the station. Saul stood beside her, arms crossed. He would be following protocol, Maren knew, to confirm the woman’s identity and grant her clearance to be there, even though her presence wasn’t a surprise to anyone.

Holly worked at the station on the first section of Cycern, 488. The drive between the stations was a two-hour haul across barren, red-dirt planes, and while it wasn’t uncommon for teams to make the trip if they needed to redistribute supplies, pass on equipment, or exchange crew members when one of the stations went into hibernation, Holly easily accounted for the bulk of their visits.