Four hubs—and twenty-three steps—brought Kandara to a long, tubular airlock designed for ten people. The hatch swung shut behind her, and she triggered the emergency vent. Air screamed around her, turning to white vapor; she could even hear it through the helmet insulation. The noise barely lasted a couple of seconds as the vanishing atmosphere buffeted her with the ferocity of mountaintop wind. Fifteen seconds later, she was in a hard vacuum. The circular hatch in front of her unlocked and swung open, revealing a star field above the crinkled gold surface of Bremble’s huge industrial station.

“Low-gravity environment ahead,” Zapata warned.

Kandara raised her left arm and fired a wide-pattern fusillade of smart sensor pellets at low velocity. The image they splashed across her lens showed the different industrial modules arranged like city blocks, with a grid of deep metallic canyons between them. The airlock was on top of a storage sector, with fifteen big spherical tanks bunched together, along with their piping and heating mechanisms. They were crowned by a broad circular platform, used as a landing and parking bay for small engineering pods. Five of the little craft were docked to it, their systems plugged into stumpy umbilical pillars.

“Jessika, disable those engineering pods.”

“Way ahead of you. Three are locked down, and I have secure remote access to two of them if you need it.”

“Thanks.”

Half of the smart pellets had struck the refinery module walls, sticking to the flimsy foil surface. They scanned back across the gulf, seeking the signature of Niomi Mårtensson’s space suit.

“Looks clean,” Kandara said. “Moving out.”

“Just—” Jessika hesitated.

“What?”

“Be careful,” Tyle said.

“Always am.” Kandara moved to the back of the airlock, then ran at the open hatch—and jumped. The airlock itself was still inside Onysko, while its hatch opened into a portal door that was on the top of the Bremble storage tanks. As soon as she crossed the threshold she was immediately subject to the asteroid’s minute gravity field. She grinned savagely at the sensation of flying superhero-style above the platform and out across the gulf between the tanks and refinery. When she passed over the edge, tiny thrusters on her suit torso flipped her upright and pushed her course down slightly. She released two mini-grenades from her left bracelet.

The refinery module was built around a cluster of long, cylindrical material processor cores and their ancillary equipment, all encased in a thin shell of gold-skinned metallocarbon that was discolored from more than two decades of vacuum exposure. It was almost fifty meters tall, and seventy wide, sitting on top of a squat extractor rig the same size. Struts and odd mechanical protrusions stuck out into the dark canyons surrounding it, illuminated by tiny lights that drove down to a black vanishing point where the asteroid’s surface was hiding.