The going was tight and awkward, but Callie knew how to crawl. She’d had sniper training, and part of that was learning to move silently and stealthily, on elbows and knees and toes, centimeters at a time if necessary. She was moving rather faster than that now, and though she had a lot of worry and anger bubbling away under the surface, she’d compressed those feelings down and put them aside and kept them ready to draw on as a source of energy, but not a source of distraction.

After wriggling through the tunnel, which had the size variance and wandering geometry that seemed typical of the organic Axiom aesthetic, she faced a seemingly impassable dead end. She clucked her tongue, twice, signaling Uzoma, who would use her back-door into the station systems to–

The blank roundish wall in front of her developed segments, a series of triangles arrayed in a circle, and they irised open, but only partway, and slowly. Callie had asked for a spy hole, and a gunport. She didn’t have a sniper rifle. She owned a very good one, but it was tucked away in Shall’s belly, way the hell back on her ship. What she had instead was two sidearms and a wrist-launcher with an array of exotic lethal options, but none of them were particularly reliable at long range. She had one ballistic sidearm and one that fired magnetic pulses of plasma. The latter didn’t need to be very accurate: superheated plasma hitting you even glancingly tended to be disabling. But it wasn’t enough to disable her enemy. If Sebastien could even shout a command, that might spell her doom. He thought Callie was harmlessly locked away. If he realized she was roaming free (and shooting at him, no less), and turned the station’s defensive systems against her, she didn’t think she’d survive long. She had to take him out, clean, quick, a shot to the head. She decided to use the ballistic weapon. On a practice range, she could hit a target pretty accurately at a hundred meters, but in real-world conditions, anything more than twenty-five meters away would be pushing it, and there was no reason to think she’d get more than one shot.