Callie shook it off and disembarked the ship. The hangar was more chaotic than normal, with far more remote worker-drones in use than usual being operated by the governing AI of Meditreme Station. Probably necessary to take up the slack left by the mysterious departure of all the Liars. Some of these ships were going to have trouble getting back into space without the alien technicians. There was nothing on Callie’s ship that she or Ashok couldn’t service themselves – except maybe the bridge generator – because she was majorly into control, but some of the ships used Liar tech that resisted human intervention. A lot of Liar technology was barely understood, and many of their devices were set to fuse their inner workings to glass if human engineers pried them open to figure out how they worked. Of course, most of the Liars claimed they didn’t have any proprietary technology: when one of their machines bricked itself, they just blamed human negligence, or rare technical faults, or gremlins, or ghosts, or simply looked at a heap of smoking carbon and said, “What do you mean? It looks fully operational to me.”

Callie wove her way around cursing mechanics, nodded to the customs inspector – she worked with the woman fairly often, investigating and apprehending smugglers who didn’t want to pay the TNA their cut of commerce – and took a transpod over to the Spoke.

Things got weird as she left the spinning false gravity of the outer rings and moved toward the still center, but the transition was gradual, and her inner ear was pretty accustomed to this kind of abuse. Her boots kept her mag-locked to the floor, and when the pod’s doors slid open she disengaged her soles and pulled herself along the grabrails and out into the shaft.

The Spoke was a glittering cylindrical tower of zero-gravity that extended hundreds of meters above her and hundreds below. A central pole with an endless conveyor belt of handholds running up one side and down the other made moving up and down the shaft easy. Each level was clearly marked by large red numbers – she’d come out on level 273 – and dotted with balconies, discreet meeting rooms obscured with smoked glass, and various offices and shops.