Something clattered far above her, and Callie doused her light instantly and froze. The noise had sounded like metal-on-metal; like a wrench, maybe, dropped from a hand, except that was an unlikely cause for the noise, in this place. The sound meant there must be an atmosphere in here, for the sound to travel through. She checked her environmental readouts and grunted. There was breathable atmosphere inside the station, but she didn’t pull her helmet off. The atmosphere would be sucked out when she got the hangar door open, and besides, taking off your helmet around here apparently made you vulnerable to attacks by cybernetic brain-spiders.

Callie counted to three hundred, slow and steady, and when there was no further sound, she decided to proceed. Maybe it was nothing: some old part of a mostly dormant station clattering against another part. She turned on her wrist light and continued her search for a control panel, the wall curving so gradually it looked almost straight. She ducked beneath metal struts and wires that extended from the floor and wall up into the darkness. The only sound was her own breath in her helmet. Just like when she’d clambered into the wreck of the Anjou, except that time Ashok was by her side, and this time she was very much alone.

Something clattered again, and this time she doused the light and turned on her active camouflage, which would hide her heat signature, among other things. She moved a dozen meters away from her last position, then scanned around with her thermal vision, looking up, this time, into what could be a many-stories-high forest of platforms and scaffolding.

She saw a flash, yellow and orange, which abruptly vanished, probably hiding behind something dense and cold. There was something moving around up there, maybe two stories high, and it was giving off heat. Not something the size of a bus, either, so probably not the kaiju bug. So maybe…

Callie considered. It was risky, if Elena’s crew was compromised by the station’s neural implants, but it was a risk they were going to have to take soon regardless. She switched her suit radio away from the White Raven’s frequency, over to the one Elena’s crew had used. “I’m on a rescue mission looking for the crew of the Anjou. Are you in distress?”

No reply but static. Callie kept her eyes locked on the place where she’d seen the flash of heat a moment before. The heat didn’t reappear, but after a moment a voice crackled in her earpiece: “Who the hell are you?”

“A friend of Elena’s,” Callie said. “She came back to get you. Do you know where the doorknob is in this place?”

“I should try to cut my way in,” Shall said.