The glass was as totally impervious to their sensors as the exterior walls of the station itself, and none of Callie or Ashok’s fancy visual enhancements did any good, either. The wall was glass-like enough to have its own thermal profile, and appeared as an opaque wall in their heat vision. Their image-enhancing night vision mode could suck up all the available light, but it was blinding in there anyway, and just as glass was the Achilles heel of thermal imaging, smoke and fog were the great weaknesses of night vision technology.

With remote viewing useless, that left only direct observation, so they had to get in there. The glass was too smooth for anyone to climb, even Ashok or Shall, but Shall was capable of great leaps, and he jumped up until he could snag the edge of the opening with several hooked limbs, then extended a sensor proboscis beyond the glass. “Rich and aromatic, full of unknown chemicals.”

“Probably a sedative gas,” Lantern said.

Callie nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing. Throw recalcitrant slaves in a terrarium full of ether, knock them out or at least get them loopy, then do whatever needed to be done to make them behave. The slaves wouldn’t have been wearing environment suits, though: her team didn’t have to breathe the gas. “Drop us a line, Shall.”

The drone unspooled several meters of cable, detached one of its manipulators to form something like a grappling hook, and quickly spot-welded the hook to the line. Then it dropped the hook over the edge of the hatch and let the cable dangle.

While Shall fashioned the grapple, Elena stood by the glass, looking at a smear of what was probably blood on the other side. “What color is Liar blood? Is it red, like ours?”

“Blue, usually,” Lantern said. “Barring modifications.”

“Like squid, on Earth.” Elena’s voice was perfectly flat. “The blood contains hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin. Copper instead of iron.”

“Yes.”

“Is that human blood, Shall?” Elena asked. “Can you find out?”

“Go ahead and check,” Callie said. “But watch yourself in there.”

The repair drone dropped through the irised opening and crouched for a moment inside. “My radar is picking up a couple of objects, low to the ground, but they aren’t moving.” The drone traveled slowly at ground level, along the wall. The far half of his body was invisible, hidden in the mist. “I am also picking up two of the Anjou’s vacuum suit transponders. Their positions correspond with the objects I detected, unsurprisingly. One is fifty meters away, one more like two hundred meters. No visual confirmation. The fog is too thick.”

“Hans and Ibn,” Elena said. “They’re in there!” She pressed her hands against the glass and stared into the mist.