“Start looking for issues,” Suriya instructed as Saul leapt over the ledge and landed next to them. “Maren, work on the left section. Saul, you take the right. I’ll begin in the middle. Look for obvious stuff first. Gin, how long do we have?”

“Countdown reads just under fifty minutes.”

“That’s okay. It’s faster to get down than it is to get up. Let’s go.”

Maren jogged into the heart of her section and started pacing through it, looking for anything out of place. She didn’t see anything obviously wrong, such as a broken dish or large lifeforms covering the sensors, but the system was bulky and complicated. If the fault was in a small section—if one of the smaller connections had been severed or a chip had come loose—it could take them hours to find it. Luckily, the problem ended up being easy to identify. She was on her second walk-through of the equipment when she saw that one of the large tubes carrying a bundle of cables from the main part of the system into the station had been severed.

“Hey, hey, there’s a cut cable here.” She knelt beside it as her companions ran to her side. “Damn, what a pain. This has to be one of the main cable groups.”

“No,” Saul said, crouching beside her as Suriya picked up one end of the tube and examined it. “This is the main cable group. And it’s not an accident.”

“What?”

“He’s right,” Suriya said. She sounded angry. “Someone cut this. Deliberately.”

“Shoot,” Gin whispered.

Maren picked up the end that Suriya wasn’t holding and looked into it. The outer tube, which was about as thick as her arm, held a bundle of twenty multicoloured wires. The ends had been sliced through cleanly. “Jeeze. Who?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Suriya said. “Holly.”

“She wouldn’t!” a male voice barked through their headsets. Maren had forgotten Gin’s promise to stay with Mark while they were out of the station. “She’s not that sort of person!”

“Quiet,” Suriya snapped. “We’ll deal with your friend later. Gin, how long do we have to get this fixed?”

“Countdown is at forty-eight minutes. I don’t think you’ll have time.”

“We’ve got to.” Suriya had turned to look at Saul. Her helmet’s glass was too dark for her face to be visible, but Maren could hear the desperation in her voice. “The bare wires won’t survive a flare, even with the shields over them. And that could irreparably fry the entire system.”

Saul’s sigh was slow and deep. “Work fast,” he said. “I won’t let my team stay out here for a second beyond what I feel is safe.”

Suriya had already disconnected her tool pack from the back of her suit and unzipped it. “Maren, start stripping the wires’ ends. I’ll bind them together.”

“Right.” Maren grabbed the strippers from the pack and fitted its end over the first wire, a brown one. She squeezed the handle so that the specialised scissors cut through the wire’s plastic sheath, leaving the copper cord inside intact, then she stripped off the last half-inch of plastic. She quickly found the matching brown wire on the other half of the cable bundle and mimicked the motion. Suriya swooped in, pulling both cables out of the sheath, and coiled the internal copper cords together before binding them tightly with stretching plastic tape.