Everything went smoothly at first. She rode on the back of a bio-drone Uzoma had retasked from the control room, deep into the station. She didn’t have time to sightsee, and that was just as well. The drone dropped out of the tunnels at various points to traverse portions of the station that had once been occupied, and Callie glimpsed things that baffled or horrified her or both: a room full of immense aquarium tanks, full of bubbling green liquid. A wall that looked like quicksilver, rippling and reflective. She passed a door that opened onto rocky terrain under a greenish sky, with a sun hanging fat and pale on the horizon. (Callie hoped it was a special effect and not an actual miniaturized star, or they might accidentally cause a supernova. Probably Uzoma would have mentioned if that was a possibility.) One room was full of empty cages, with bars made of light. One was full of things that actually looked like egg sacs, piled high and lumpy and silky-white to the far-off ceiling. Another held an incinerator with an eternally burning flame at its heart. Another held a kaiju-high pile of small bones. Eventually Callie stopped looking to the sides, and kept her eyes on the corridor ahead.

The kaiju dropped her off by a little hole in the wall: her tunnel access. The map in her HUD showed her where to crawl, and the going was merely tedious, not difficult. The distance was only a hundred meters or so. The tunnel led to a small round chamber about the size of a pup tent. She looked around, found the panel she wanted, and slid it open, revealing a connecting shaft. Once she was done, she’d launch herself down that shaft, which would take her to a perpendicular tunnel where a bio-drone would be waiting to speed her to the minimum safe distance so she could teleport away.

Callie went to work. A schematic popped up on her display, and she pushed open panels until she found a length of fat conduit wrapped in some insulating substance that shone a luminous green. She took a moment to review her exfiltration plan, pointed her energy weapon at the conduit, turned her head away, and fired.

The superheated plasma ate through the conduit nicely, severing the connection immediately. The repair bots would be on their way, and fast. Callie tapped at the tablet mounted on her left forearm, just above the teleporter on her wrist. The symbols didn’t mean anything to her, just alien geometries, but she hit them in the simple three-figure sequence she’d been taught.

Nothing happened, as far as she could tell, but if Ashok and Uzoma had done their job right, the station would be tearing itself apart with assorted wormholes now – and none of the wormholes would appear on top of her.