The alarms stop. Adah gestures wildly for Tsim to shut off the water. It takes a minute to get his attention, his focus is so throughly glued to the task of directing his appropriated water source into the ashy puddle. Markos not so politely reminds her that the emergency vacuum hood is muffling her speech.

Tsim stops, panting, and applies an emergency cap to the severed water line. The sound of inoffensive popular music several decades out of date does not quite cover the pitiful dripping sound of water spiraling away from the soggy mess that was previously the front portion of a perfectly nice place to eat. Adah sighs, and begins damage assessment once more.

Markos doffs his spacesuit’s hood and peers down the hole after Tiphanie. He spots her still seated on the couch, absolutely soaking wet and staring in pure confusion. For her part, Tiphanie appears to be unharmed.

Unharmed but for the surprise of the fall, Tiphanie stares across the cozy room at a man in tattered green coveralls. He wears a hat with a logo for a ship manufacturer stitched in bright red threads on its darker green base and holds a mostly empty pouch of cheap alcohol. The straw dangles from his lips as he sits in frozen surprise.

With no prior warning that the sector might be inhabited, Tiphanie is not sure what this person could possibly be doing here, but she’s pretty sure he’d not be listed on any crew lists as an authorized employee. Which indicates that there could be other unauthorized individuals within the sector. And that possibility drains the remaining blood from her face, as she blanches in the certain panic of not knowing how many lives were at risk in the fire the repair crew most likely caused.

The man with the alcohol wordlessly reaches out his arm to offer it to her.

Tiphanie accepts the pouch and expertly presses her lips to the hole left by the absent straw to slurp out a quick sip. It tastes like bad decisions and burns like regret as she swallows.

She hands the pouch back to him.

Looking around the room, she observes that the space is configured as a waiting room for a clinic of some sort. Aging pamphlets advertise a variety of different therapeutic courses, including, for maximum situational amusement, a class on defeating alcoholism. She’s landed on her tail end in a therapist’s office. Not where she wanted to be, not when she wanted to be there, but she’s thankful for the comfortable sofa either way.

Tiphanie sighs and looks up and in toward the gate.

Markos looks down at her with deep concern.

“There are tenants,” the electrician states quietly over their communications link. The thin wire applied to her jaw transmits the sound to similar wires around her coworkers’ ears. It’s not intended for stealth communications the way a similar device could be configured for sub-vocalizations, but it is discreet enough.

And tenants is a much more polite term than homeless squatter, as she strongly suspects is much closer to the truth. Though if they’re squatters, they might not be able to truly be considered homeless anymore. Tiphanie opts not to dive into the semantics of impolite things to call the lovely gentleman who shared his distilled fermented potato water with her.

Markos tries very hard not to think about how many people could potentially have been murdered by one careless electrostatic discharge in the wrong atmospheric circulation vent. Steam from the still hot edges of the plastic tiles catches his eye. The vent should be circulating air again now. The steam should not be so still.

The computer technician scoots away from the edge of the separation between the two levels and seeks out Adah.

The project manager has been occupied with the task of talking the plumber down off the ladder. Tsim is a bit shaken, to say the least. Adah wipes cold sweat from her face. Nobody could come so close to painful death and be unaffected.

Meanwhile Amina is dancing and doing cartwheels around the tram station in celebration of their miraculous survival.

There are different ways to be affected.

Adah stops to listen to the concerns Markos voices about the vents and the steam that is not moving as it should. She nods and agrees that it most certainly requires further investigation, and directs Amina to show him to the control room on the next level. The computer technician should be able to get some information on general system health through the remote sensors there.

Markos is unconvinced by this, but he follows the carpenter to the surprisingly clean elevator and up to the control room. In areas with this little routine maintenance being performed on schedule, the technician is not sure that the sensors themselves will be functioning as well as the human experience can detect in person. But he trusts that the project manager’s experience will have valid things to offer.

And Adah trusts that her expert will have an expert’s judgment. While those two head out, she and Tsim sit at the edge of the gaping hole to the next floor to better see what Tiphanie is talking about.

There is, in fact, a man in the room with her who should not be there. Adah does not have remote access to the station’s security feed. That, of course, would be a security risk as privacy of legitimate tenants must be maintained by granting access to data only to those who truly need it. Adah is slowly building a mental case to bring to the risk management team to grant that access to her in advance of any additional work in this area. She feels that there is a valid need for the maintenance crew to know what they are getting in to.

And clearly, they did not.

This is not, in Adah’s professional opinion, a small oversight. This sector was supposed to be unoccupied.

She calls up the general schematic map of the sector on her clipboard again, and adjusts the zoom to get a wider view. Adah switches to a simple cross-sectional view and toggles the labels. Yes, here, this is much more useful. It is time to fly over the forest instead of inspecting the roots of one specific tree.

From the tram level, one up toward the center is maintenance and service. Two up is medical services. Three up and above are all technically out of the sector - those are all the technical workings of the gate itself. Without the gate there would be no Moldy Donut. Its workings are inaccessible in most circumstances.

Going down with the spin, there’s a level of “professional services,” which Adah understands as offices for rent. Two down is residential. Three down commercial, which usually translates to a mix of shopping venues and workshops. Four down is short-term residential, hotels and the like. Five down is ship docks.

Ship docks could explain how there could still be people in the sector where there should not be any. Adjacent sectors are most definitely not populated. Sector 31 has already completed their repair phase and is in the process of being reconfigured completely. Sector 33 is full dark, and has had all but emergency trickle power cut to save costs until it can be repaired correctly.

Adah parses this information while waiting for Tiphanie to say something, anything else.

This is most definitely not some kind of first contact scenario. But, it seems, that as the leader of this team she’ll need to make the first move.

“Is everyone down there okay?” Adah asks, settling on something neutral.

Tiphanie responds with a thumb’s up. The space-bound hobo mimics the gesture, but follows it with a shrug and points roughly toward the far wall of the room. More fire damage in that direction reveals that a whole wall section has collapsed.

“Were you alone?” Adah asks the man directly now, aiming for professional concern in carefully selected tone of her voice.

“Sorta,” is the slurred reply. He coughs a bit to clear his throat. “I’m not the only person to live in here if that’s what you mean, but this is my room and I’m the only one in it.”

“Do you know how many people there are here?” Adah asks, with growing concern.

“Nah,” he responds immediately, “People come and go, you know? Not like you can’t just walk round the ring if you’ve got the time and the tread to do it.” He points at the bottoms of his very worn boots. Adah recognizes them as having been intended for actual terrestrial terrain at one point in their lifespan, with tread very much unlike the smooth soles of her dedicated spacer’s shoes.

Tiphanie struggles her way into a more appropriate seating position and abandons her haphazard sprawl.

“What should we do now?” the electrician asks, sounding significantly nervous. The schedule and their ticket list have been completely fried.

Adah looks around the tram station briefly. She notes that the sealed emergency isolation doors are still solidly locked shut. They should have opened automatically by now. She notes that she will have to ask Markos about that later.

“We’ll need to regroup,” Adah answers, “and we’ll need to figure out how many people are here with us.” She doesn’t say it out loud, but Tiphanie senses that her boss is contemplating the potential of an evacuation effort. There is always a chance of something else going wrong.

“Critical atmospheric circulation fans are offline.” Markos’s voice is a whisper in their ears over the link.

“Say again?” Adah blinks rapidly to resettle herself from the confusion.

“Main life support is nonfunctional.” Markos doesn’t have an accent that identifies him as belonging to either side of the gate. But his word choice is that of someone who deals with cold computational machines more than the people who breathe the air those machines recycle.

“Ms. Gascho, we’re not getting any fresh air.” Amina’s voice, so starkly serious after he triumphant revelry through the tram station, brings home the reason the sealed doors have not yet reopened. This sector is about to get very unpleasant.

Adah eyes a small aloe plant spilling out of its undersized pot on the counter of what was previously a receptionist’s desk below her. At least the overwhelming greenery in this part of the Moldy Donut will mean that they won’t be starved for oxygen too quickly. So that is one good thing that can be said about it.

And she has a competent team who have now proven themselves capable of handling a crisis. And her team includes multiple subject matter experts in a diverse set of fields. And they are here to make repairs and create a better and safer place for others to live and work. She can create work tickets and assign them to the team to restore their potentially deflating completion count. Adah psychs herself up by rolling a snowball of positive thoughts together.

“Alright,” she says, ready to continue now, “Let’s get to work.”