“I am in the house of my race’s most ancient and feared enemy,” Lantern said. “Betrayal is the last thing on my mind.”

“Go ahead.”

Lantern climbed on Shall’s back, and the drone hurried to a gantry and began to scurry up the cables and lattices, spiderlike. There were friction pads and magnetic clamps and retractable hooks in the drone’s legs, so Shall could navigate just about any terrain. Soon the drone and the alien disappeared into the gloom above.

They waited a minute. Then two. “Anything?” Callie said.

“There is a sort of glassed-in pod here, attached to one of the cranes,” Shall said. “What a fantastic array of machinery. What I wouldn’t give to have a few of these saws and drills and torches attached to my body.”

“Jealous,” Ashok said. “Want.”

“I am attempting to enter the overseer pod.” Lantern’s voice was followed by a scrabbling sound, and then a click. “I’m in.”

“Shall, show me what’s happening up there.” Callie was seized by a vision of Lantern pushing a button and dropping the force field over the hangar door, venting the station and laughing an alien laugh as Callie and Elena and Ashok were sucked out into deep space.

A quadrant of her helmet went opaque and became a viewscreen, displaying a slightly distorted image streamed from one of Shall’s onboard cameras. The drone and the Liar were on a platform that bristled with robotic manipulator arms, topped by a bulging goldfish-bowl-shaped assemblage of metal and glass (or something transparent, anyway; probably the same stuff the Liars sold as starship windows). The Liar was inside the fishbowl, fiddling with levers.

“The interface is designed for overseers, with neural implants,” Lantern said. “It is not an intuitive system. But there are manual overrides, and bringing up a map is relatively simple, there. The ingress portal to the rest of the station is located near the top of this chamber.”

Ashok whistled. “That’s a hell of a climb. Can we do something about this gravity? Otherwise Shall’s going to have to carry us up there like a mama koala taking her babies up a tree.”

“I am attempting to access artificial gravity controls. I think… yes, here it is. Let me know when you’re ready for weightlessness.”

They all moved toward the gantry Shall had clambered up and grabbed onto the struts. “We can use this to guide ourselves up when the gravity goes,” Callie said. “This place is too big and full of sharp spiky things to go free-flying. I’m talking to you, Ashok. We’re ready, Lantern.”