“Ehhhh.” Ashok seesawed his hand. “We don’t know how to talk to the station, really. But the bio-drone is pretty simple. It has external light receptors, and internal ones, here on the body cavity wall. Lantern figures these drones were used as transport by the Liars back in the old days. That way they could travel around the station in style, right? There are no levers or switches or buttons, so we thought, maybe they drove them with pulses of light. We started flashing light at the receptors, and, well, you saw. We started lurching around like crazy. A little trial-and-error and we figured out how to make it move. There must be a transmitter in the bio-drone’s head that makes the aperture in the glass cage open up. That was lucky.”

“So now we have a ride?” Callie said. “We can roam around the service tunnels or whatever until we find the rest of Elena’s crew?”

“Better,” Ashok said. “We can get to the master control room. Lantern thinks from there we can get a look at the station as a whole, and find out exactly where her people are, control the security systems, the whole deal. Maybe even dispatch bio-drones to fetch any other survivors.”

“Sounds easy. And therefore unlikely.”

“You’re a cynic, cap.”

Callie glanced at Elena. “People keep telling me that. We need to get Ibn to safety first, though. He’s dehydrated and starving and in various kinds of shock.” She cleared her throat. “Did you, ah, feel strongly about recovering your friend’s body, Elena?”

Elena thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I suppose it’s not worth the risk to recover him. My crew all expected to die alone in space far from anyone.”

“No,” Lantern said. “We shouldn’t leave any trace of humankind here. If the Axiom ever wake, or some of their machines do, and they discover evidence of another spacefaring race, in one of their own facilities? They might dispatch hunter-killer probes all over the galaxy to track you down. From the control room, I hope to be able to destroy all the records stored on this station since the Anjou’s arrival, but covering our tracks that way is wasted if we leave a body behind. Even the blood should be burned off the wall. It would be good if the stray bullets were collected too, but that is less urgent – the discovery of a few bits of brass or steel would not lead inexorably to the conclusion that unknown aliens were ever here.”

Callie cocked her head. “That’s good thinking, Lantern. You would have been a good security officer, if you hadn’t gone another way.”

“I didn’t go another way. I am a security officer.”

“I can collect Hans’s remains, and the guns left behind, and I have blowtorches to erase the physical evidence,” Shall said.

“Go ahead,” Callie said. “But go fast.”