She slipped through the hole into the shaft, orienting herself so it felt like she was swimming down, and kicked off hard. She had a small amount of propellant in her suit, enough to send her cruising rapidly through the gravity-less vacuum. In moments the pinprick of the distant opening to the bio-drone’s tunnel grew to the size of a beach ball, and then a hot tub, and she was through. There was gravity inside that tunnel, but she was prepared for that, so she ducked and rolled and bounced to her feet.

The bio-drone was waiting, and if Ashok’s estimate was right, she had about eight minutes of travel ahead of her, and ten minutes to cover it. Plenty of time. The drone was supposed to scoop her up, and run, and when her timer hit zero, she was supposed to teleport right out of its belly, straight out and away to maximum range.

Then the walls of the tunnel began to flash various colors, red and orange and indigo, and instead of picking her up and carrying her to safety, the bio-drone turned and ran the wrong way down the tunnel.

Callie stared after the drone as it disappeared around a curve. Shit. Some kind of “the sky is falling” emergency protocol probably, overriding its programming. The timer clicked on in her heads up display. Just over nine minutes now, to travel a distance that would take eight minutes by bio-drone. She could not run as fast as a kaiju, especially in an environment suit.

I promise not to die.

She started running.

The tunnel vibrated, and continued to flash warning colors. Titanic and terrible things were happening in the station all around her, and the trauma was transmitted through the walls and ceiling and floor, with vibrations shaking her boots. The gravity suddenly stopped working, right in mid-stride: Callie took a step, and then she was flying, launched up and forward instead of merely forward. Her trajectory was bad, and she had to twist to avoid hitting her head on the tunnel ceiling, catching the blow painfully on her shoulder instead. She spun and scrabbled and tried to find a way to propel herself along the tunnel, trying to figure out if she could go faster in weightlessness than she had in gravity, and if she could go fast enough for it to matter, as the timer in the corner of her eye clicked down and down and down.

She knew she couldn’t possibly make it, but Callie was who she was, so she caught her fingertips on a seam in the tunnel ceiling and hauled herself forward, launching herself along the tunnel.