Mack shrugged. “Well, whatever. We need to get you guys introduced and settled in, then—”

  “Mack, we don’t have time for this. We need to fix it now.”

  Mack bristled. “We’ll fix it when I’m good and ready. First, you folks follow me—”

  “Mack, don’t be an ass. We need to fix it now. Where’s the air exchanger? We need to go there now,” Nadine said. “Everybody, follow me.”

  Mack stepped forward and grabbed Nadine by the shoulders. He lifted her right off the floor and brought her to his eye level. Jake was impressed. Nadine wasn’t small.

  “I said we’ll go there when I’m ready,” he snarled and glared at her.

  Jake hurried up next to them. “Mack, she’s right. This is a major emergency. The life support may already have failed. We need to fix this before we have to suit up and use backup air.”

  That got Mack’s attention. He dropped Nadine. She recovered, but looked surprised.

  “Suit up?”

  “Mack, too much carbon dioxide can kill us in minutes once it gets above a certain percentage.”

  “How do you know that’s it?”

  “Those are standard symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning. And combined with the extra water vapor, it means the life-support system is being overrun. We need to see it. Now.”

  Mack looked at Jake for a moment, then at the others. They all nodded. He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, turning to a corridor. “Follow me.”

  Mack led them out of the docking area past two more ship locks and then through an airlock. The asteroid was rotating, so ‘up’ was actually toward the surface. They approached a ladder. Mack went first, followed by Nadine, Jake, Rick, and Riley. Through the viewports, Jake could see a full mining mill—grinder, solar mirrors, evaporators, condenser, and storage. The equipment showed a lot of wear from use, and lots of micro-meteorite damage. He could see a fuel plant that could crack H and O from water, and a water-ice asteroid parked within visual distance.

  “Look at all those ships chained to the surface,” Nadine said, gesturing at the viewport. “That’s a Militia cutter, but with no engines or power plant. What are those three wrecks next to it?”

  “Tugs,” Jake said. “Or at least they used to be tugs. They’re missing a lot of stuff. No cages or control rooms. No engines either.”

  “That’s a freighter chained down on the far side. The one with all the cables. Mack, what are the cables on that freighter for?” Nadine said.

  Mack stopped climbing and looked out the viewport. “We use its fusion plant. My people said it’s better than the in-station one.” He resumed his climb.

  Jake kept looking at the ships. Three derelict tugs, a busted cutter, a grounded freighter, and another grounded freighter at the end. It looked like a shuttle without wings. He stopped and used his comm to take a picture. Rick bumped into him.

  “Jake?”

  “Sorry, Rick, just checking something I need to look at later,” Jake said. He checked that the picture was clear enough, and continued climbing.

  They entered a control room. Inside, two people were staring at screens. It had a military look about it. The console operators wore revolvers, and there were shotguns chained in a cabinet. Mack stepped into a bunk room visible on one side, and spoke to the people in there. He returned and gestured the four spacers into another airlock. Mack staged them through and they entered another corridor. Each side was lined with standard habitat modules. Jake did a quick count and figured there was room for perhaps sixty people. That was a reasonable crew for the mining equipment that he had seen, especially if they ran three shifts. They walked to the end of the corridor, and entered the life-support area.

  The life-support system had four cryogenic distillers that were supposed to freeze water, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide out of the air. One was disconnected, two had tripped their breakers and gone into emergency shutoff, and the remaining one was operating at only 20 percent efficiency. Also, both heating systems in the vents were offline. Jake ran through the control screens, assessed the issues, and took charge.

  “Rick, you and Riley suit up, get some crowbars and heaters. Go outside. Some of the vents are frozen shut. The system can’t push the air through, so crack them open. Nadine, get a heater, come back here and find the pipes on the inside, melt the dry ice out of them. See if there is any frozen nitrogen there as well. Suit up first and seal the compartment. There might be methane in there as well. In fact, if you can, vent the whole compartment to space first. Mack, show Rick and Riley the lock, then go with Nadine and help her get an electric heater, then meet Riley and Rick at the lock and help them get outside. I’m going to trace the electrical line and see why those other systems tripped the breakers, and I need to trace why the heating system is offline. Mack, do you have an emergency O cracking system on your fusion reactor?”

  Everybody except Mack nodded and moved off. Mack looked at Jake. “Cracking system? Nitrogen? Methane? You sound like a chemistry professor.”

  “Mack, this is really serious. Stations expose their air to near-vacuum for very precisely calculated times. The vacuum cools the air so much that the water, the carbon dioxide, and some other gases freeze out. The gases condense on these heating elements—look here in this diagram.” He showed Mack a screen. “Then, they take the cold air and reheat it so that we can breathe it again. And then they turn the heating elements back on, which re-gasifies the precipitants and vents them to space. That’s not happening here. The heating system is offline. The pipes are blocked with frozen gases. If we can’t get them heated up, the whole system will fail, then we’ll all die once the air in our suits runs out.”

  “Oh,” Mack said, holding up his hands. “Okay, professor, you are in charge on this one. What do we need to do?”

  The team worked a full day without stopping. At first Mack was bemused, but he began to respond to everybody’s serious-as-a-heart-attack mien. The four of them were so concerned that he began to doubt his former insouciance. Except he’d said he was ‘doubting his former insurance.’ Either way, when Jake showed him some of the pipes that were almost totally blocked with frozen precipitants, he looked troubled.

  “This could have caused me all sorts of troubling things.”

  “Indeed,” Jake said. “But we’re okay now. We just need to make sure that we have a regular maintenance and flushing schedule. The four of us can do it, and we’ll teach some of the other workers to do the regular stuff. Should we include some of your guys in the training?”

  “No, no. My guys have other things to do,” Mack said. He looked at Jake. “You did a good job, professor. I’m happy. I think I will make you that operations manager after all.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “You’ll be in charge of all the maintenance on the station, your three friends, and the indents that you need.”

  “That’s fine, Mack, but I’ll need to give your guys some instructions from time to time. There are a few things that need doing in the security office, and other places, and I’ll need free rein there.”

  Mack looked at him for a moment. “I’ll consider that, professor. For now, you are in charge of just the maintenance.”

  Jake coughed. “Uh, Mack, I worked on a mining station. I can do things there too.”

  Mack laughed. “Already looking for a promotion. Okay, give me the ideas on the mining part, and we’ll see what happens there. Congratulations on your promotion.”

  Jake proved to be a decent administrator. He came up with a list of things that needed fixing, divided them up by skillset, and put the station staff to work. They were in so much danger that they dropped their previous talk of rebellion for a few days to get things done.

  On the third day after their arrival, the group sat together, each drinking a cup of basic and discussing the day’s tasks.

  “What is this place?” Nadine asked

  “How do you mean?” Rick asked. “It’s a station. A mine.”

  “But who built it? It’s so different. Look at the styles. The basic spouts are different—oval rather than round. The furniture and fittings are all legos, but not any type I’ve seen before. They are Empire standard—these chairs would bolt onto the deck of any station I’ve ever been on—but they have a metal mesh at the back, not spindles.”

  Everybody twisted and looked at their chairs. The station, ship, and furniture was standard. Chairs, tables, lockers, beds, and all fittings were standardized. Everything was designed to be fitted to a ten-centimeter-by-ten-centimeter grid. A chair’s floor space could be forty by forty centimeters, or sixty by sixty centimeters, but always on the grid. Floors, walls, and ceilings were all one-meter or two-meter square panels, with standard bolt holes. Every station or ship had a bag of hundreds of standard nuts and bolts to attach items. The whole system was called legos for some unknown reason.

  “And look at the colors. They’re more formal,” Riley said.

  “More formal? Colors can’t be formal,” Nadine said. “They can be blue or bright, or something like that. Not formal.”

  “They can. They can be whatever they want,” Riley said. “The colors on our ship are happy. Regular station colors are businesslike. TGI corporate colors are thoughtful. Castle Transport is staid. These colors are formal.”

  “Okay, merchant girl, you mean they are gray and brown,” Nadine said. “That’s formal, is it?” She frowned and looked around. “But you know, merchie, you are on to something. These colors are different than anything I’ve seen before.”

  “More formal,” insisted Riley.

  “It’s old,” Rick said, “at least this side. The frames of those exterior floodlights I repaired yesterday had actually started to oxidize from the air that leaked out of the lock. Imagine how long it takes for that little bit of air to actually oxidize something.”

  “Imperial Scout Service,” Jake said.

  “Who is?” Rick said.

  “This is an old Imperial Scout Service station,” Jake said. “Look at the way it was designed. A secure loading dock for the scout ships, and secure station area for the scouts. It has its own dock and fusion reactor, completely self-contained. I’ve seen pictures in the vids. The scouts built them by the hundreds to handle communication and survey ships. It was usually the first station in a system. This could be the original scout station built here hundreds of years ago. Before the Abandonment.”

  “But why up here?” Nadine asked. “All the resources are in the lower belts, and this station goes very high. You’ll need to dump a lot of velocity to get off this and down low.”

  “That’s what they wanted. This wasn’t set up to service anything on Delta. It was set up to service passing jump ships. When the jump ships stopped coming, after the Abandonment, it wasn’t worth keeping up. I’ll bet it was abandoned years ago, and only reactivated recently. I’ll bet the Militia had it in their records, and secretly opened it up,” Jake said.

  They all contemplated that.

  “But why would the Militia do that? They don’t need a mine. There are lots of better mines lower. The corps will sell them all they need,” Rick said.

  “And why the secrecy?” Riley asked.

  “They don’t want anybody to know they have a source of metals,” Jake said. “An independent source. Separate from the corps. The emergency charter of the Delta corporation says the corps keep their own resources and control their own stations and settlements, and they have their own internal police forces. They own the monorail in common, but the Militia owns the shuttles, the mass driver, and the maintenance stations. It provides the policing for shared settlements, like Landing. But the corps didn’t want the Militia to get too much power, so it’s prohibited from owning any sort of factory or resource-producing station.”

  Everybody looked at Jake. “What does that have to do with the price of oxygen, then?” Nadine asked.

  “Well, if the Militia can get its own source of metals, fuels, water, etcetera., it doesn’t need to listen to the corps. They could do what they want. They could stage a coup.”

  “How would that work?” Nadine asked.

  “The Militia controls ground-to-space access. They could interdict that. The space-based corps would run out of food, and the ground-based corps would lose access to resources. If the Militia could keep an embargo going for a while, the corporations would be forced to let them take control.”

  “But won’t the Militia be affected as well?” Rick asked. “Won’t they run out of stuff?”

  “Well, this is a mine, and they’ll have access to at least some materials here. Metals for parts for sure. And there is fuel, H, and O right here. They don’t have a tanker, but they could jury-rig one.”

  “What about food?” Rick asked.

  “It’s in the warehouse,” Jake said. “First thing I looked for when I got here. They’ve been stockpiling it here. There are about fifty containers full of food. That’s not a lot for a busy station like TGI Main, but it will keep the whole Militia going for a while.”

  “Where did it come from?” Riley asked.

  “The Militia stole it. Some of it was marked as lost during orbital boost by the source corps, but it’s here now. The Militia control the mass driver. They must have arranged to steal it.”

  “But there are no Militia people here. There is Mack and his guys, but they are, like, contractors or something. Why not use Militia people?” Rick asked.

  “Because almost all of the Militia people have a secondary job with one corp or another. The number of purely Militia people is very small. If you sent any Militia person here, somebody corporate would notice. They would notice that somebody had been transferred, and this wouldn’t stay secret for long,” Jake said.

  “It’s the Empire Rising people,” Nadine said. “Those weirdos who want to return to Old Empire values.”

  “Those strange ones who braid their hair, and don’t drink,” Rick said.

  “They say they don’t drink on duty, and they’re always on duty till the old Emperor says otherwise. And since the old Emperor isn’t around to let them go home, they just hang around and make pests of themselves,” Nadine said.

  “There isn’t enough of them. You think they set up all this?” Rick said.

  “Somebody did,” Nadine said. “And we’ve been kidnapped to here in a secret mining station that’s been hidden for hundreds of years, crewed by slaves, controlled by criminals—hired by rogue Militia elements—that have been receiving stolen goods. Have a better explanation?”

  Chapter 24

  “You can’t help yourself, can you?” Nadine asked Jake during breakfast the next morning. The four of them were alone in the lounge. They had their own lounge, separate from the others.

  “What?” Jake said.

  “You can’t help yourself from fixing things. You see something that isn’t being done the way you want, and you tweak a schedule or suggest a maintenance change. Whether it’s your job or not.”

  “I lived on a station for most of my life. Maintenance is important. People get hurt when you neglect it.”

  “That’s true,” Riley said. “But you gave suggestions about the mining as well. Those suggestions about tuning the mirrors have helped them out.”

  “Why not give them suggestions that help them out? I gave your dad suggestions that helped him out.”

  “He did,” Rick agreed. He munched on his low-calorie breakfast tray. Since they were stuck there, he had implemented a regime of gym work and tried to cut down on the number of trays he was eating. And he’d actually lost a kilo.

  “Yes, but my dad isn’t walking around with a gun on his hip and throwing people out an airlock like Mack is,” Riley said.

  “It didn’t bother you when you were selling them stolen goods before,” Nadine said.

  “We didn’t know about the workers. I thought it was just a scam. I’m sorry I got you into this, sweetie,” Rick said, looking at Riley.

  “What about me?” Nadine asked.

  “You brought yourself along,” Riley said. “As did Jake. Jake, why are you helping Mack so much?”

  “Mack’s lazy. If I have a suggestion that involved work for Mack, he turns it down. But if I’m willing to do the work, or better yet, just do the work, Mack usually approves. So, I make efficiencies.”

  “You make efficiencies? Did you take the same language course Mack did?” Nadine said. “But why help him, Jake? He kills people. These folks are slaves. I’m a slave. I don’t like that. We need to get out of here.”

  “Nadine’s right,” Riley said. “We need to get out of here.”

  “They let me back on the R&R a few times,” Rick said. “For tools and clothes and things like that. They always keep an eye on me, but they do let me go there. I think I could get us back on.”

  “Great—the four of us get on the R&R, fire it up, and I’ll fly us out of here,” Nadine said.

  “Won’t they be able to catch us with their ship?” Riley asked.

  “It’s a passenger launch. It’s fast but short-ranged. We can’t outrun them from a standing start, but if we get some time, we can get far enough away that they can’t catch us before they run out of fuel,” Nadine said.

  “Does it have weapons?” Rick asked.

  “Probably not. Launches don’t usually. It’s too small for a mass driver. They could have a laser mounted somewhere, but I didn’t see one.”

  “They didn’t empty the ship’s locker,” Rick said. “They took the keys from me, but the guns are still there.”

  “Good,” Riley said.

  “Why is that good?” Nadine said.

  “You don’t keep a spare master set of keys hidden somewhere secret on your ship? That’s not very smart,” Riley said.

  “Bite me,” Nadine said.

  “Girls,” Rick said. “I could get them to let me on board the R&R again. I can get the keys without them seeing, no problem. A few hours of messy environmental maintenance and they are bound to leave me alone long enough for me to grab a few guns. When I come back with the tools, I’ll hand them out, we could grab the guards, force our way back onto the ship, and get out of here,” Rick said.