Amina wasn’t sure that she was going to be any actual help to Markos at all. She’d brought him up the elevator and delivered him to the service floor without him really needing to take much in the way of directions at all. And now. Well. Now Amina’s entire usefulness has run completely out. She mostly strives to stay out of the way while Markos bounces from terminal to terminal, grumbling all the while about missing software updates and excessively long up times.

The carpenter grabs a spare desk chair and makes herself as comfortable as she can. She slowly wheels the chair further away from Markos’s frantic busyness. She has no interest in getting in his way. She has even less interest in

Markos, for his part, hasn’t been idle. No, not even momentarily, though there has been plenty of opportunities to do so while waiting for a diagnostic screen to load, or for a service to restart. He doesn’t want to do a total system reboot, but it certainly does look like that will be necessary.

Something, somewhere has completely fried in both the main system and its redundancies. Without being able to get even a diagnostic result from the barely functional system he can’t even begin to resolve the problem. And without that information he can’t give any sort of time line for when to expect even a progress update.

It breaks his analyst’s heart, it does.

So instead of giving his project manager timely updates, he chews his fingernails some, panics some more, and hops between terminals so that he can kick off additional tasks without having to wait for the first progress bar to complete before starting the next thing on the list.

His activity is driving Amina more than a little bit mad.

The event monitoring service has failed, and Markos finally notices a secondary problem.

Tertiary problem, maybe.

With life support offline, the controllers for the data center’s active cooling are also offline. And here in the main control room, the temperature is already rising.

Stagnant air, smelling of sweat and ancient plastic finally drives Amina out of the room entirely. She rides her wheeled chair right out into the hallway.

An overhead light flickers ominously in the hallway.

At the far end, barely hidden by the concave curve of the floor beneath and spin-ward of her, Amina spots the shadow of a person.

Not one to interrupt vitally important work in progress, she leaves Markos to his work and wheels her rolling chair further down the hallway. Acting as casually as she can, she attempts to approach the stranger without startling them.

The overhead light flickers again.

Not one to really want to end up on the bad end of a horror movie’s villain, she wheels her chair beneath the light, stands up on it carefully, and corrects the cross-threading on the fixture. She plops back into the chair, dramatically flips out her clipboard, and quickly creates a work ticket, assigns it to herself, and marks it as complete. Paperwork powers the Moldy Donut’s consistent spin, or so one might be inclined to assume.

As expected, when Amina looks up from her chore, she’s gained an audience.

On the inward levels of the station, the curvature of the floor increases perceptibly from that of the spin-ward levels of the station. And that means that to look straight at a person from down the hallway, one must, in fact, look slightly up.

And that is how Amina finds herself being introduced to a young lady who is most definitely taller than her when placed on a level surface. The younger woman’s ashen, almost blue face peers up at her across the distance. She wears a loose gray dress over an all-concealing black unitard that’s more tight than some individuals’ own skin. Over one shoulder, she carries a very heavy looking satchel.

“Sup?” the carpenter shouts, trying to sound friendly. She must have missed the mark by some distance. The lady takes off in a run down the hallway with its sadly peeling wallpaper and its stained ceiling tiles.

Amina isn’t a runner, but she certainly has won a few desk chair races back from her time in the cubical farm on her home planet. She kicks off the floor, building speed she wouldn’t have just by running. How could she have ever guessed that this fairly pathetic skill set would ever have come into any use at all?

Despite the other woman’s head start, she catches up before they run out of hallway. The end of the sector has come into view, though, and Amina can see from here that the thick metal isolation doors are still solidly shut.

“So…” Amina drags the syllable out longer than it is required. “Why’re we racing again?”

The monochromatic adversary gives an exasperated sigh and hurls the satchel down the hallway with a heavy thud. It skids from the force of the throw, but not very far. The spin gravity of the station has many such odd effects.

“You’ve locked us in,” the answer comes with a light accent, “obviously you’re here to exterminate the vermin.”

Amina opts to feign a shiver and look repulsed.

“Vermin? I sure hope we don’t run into any rats or centipedes or tribbles while we’re here. That would be super gross.” She’s aware that the woman is referring to herself, but she’s also aware that this space was supposed to be completely unoccupied already. And she doesn’t want to start any kind of panic.

“Tribbles?” The woman looks extremely confused.

“Sorry, Old Earth reference, couldn’t help it.” Amina shrugs, much more honestly this time. “Nah, they don’t even give repair techs any actual weapons.” She pauses to point at the tools on her belt. “See? Just carpentry.”

“Carpentry? Are you for real?” The taller woman relaxes visibly. “I guess you must be to be stuck in here too.”

“Yep!” Amina responds brightly, “Life support has got some damage that has to be fixed before the sector doors will open again, so we’re pretty well stuck until the work’s done.” She pauses to hopefully ease some of the tension between them. “I’m Amina Bint Hafs, since we’re going to be working here for several rotations, might as well get to know folks.” She offers a hand to shake.

“Hey Amina, can you come back? I need your help with something.” The ear wire whispers to the carpenter before the lady can respond.

“Oh drat.” Amina drops her hand and turns to roll back the way she came. “I’m summoned. My people need me. I must away!” She mocks herself as she scoots off away again at a much more relaxed pace. And to the wire she adds, “On my way, Markos, just making friends.”

And true to that suggestion, the lady grabs her heavy satchel again and follows.

“Hey wait! What was that you said about life support?” the woman calls, hurrying after the wheeled chair as it rolls onward.

“Not a huge deal,” Amina answers mildly, “there’s plenty of air to hold us out until the fix gets complete even without the out of control shrubbery downstairs doing its job keeping things fresh. So what’s your name?”

“Tessa.” She’s caught off guard and responds automatically.

“Just Tessa?”

“Just Tessa.”

The pair arrives at the control room where Markos is halfway underneath a terminal, trying to locate the screw heads with his tiny manual screwdriver in the dark. Amina had completely forgotten that his hard hat ate the dust when the fire caught it. Markos no longer has a flashlight.

Or safety gear.

But that can’t be helped right now. And truthfully, with his position on the team as a computer specialist, they’re in seriously dire straights if he actually needs the protective headgear.

Amina briefly asks what he needs, and he gives her instructions on getting the access panel open with only the quickest nod toward Tessa as an acknowledgment. The professional carpenter brings to bear her headlamp flashlight and her highly specialized toolkit’s very important powered drill. She finishes the job with swiftness and accuracy unrivaled in the field.

She likes to hear compliments, even when they exaggerate to the point of insult.

With the panel open, she sits next to Markos so that he can use her headlamp to see what he’s doing in the internal guts of the monitoring system. The compliance monitoring in Amina’s hard hat does not permit her to simply take it off and let him use the light. She’s been caught too many times without it where the protection is mandatory to be granted the freedom to lend her hat to anyone else now.

And Amina knows better than to ask Markos what he is doing. His answer is bound to be wrapped in the crunchy foil of distraction with no sweet caramel center of useful skill transfer beneath it. Markos appreciates being left to work without interruption.

He replaces a circuitry cluster in the system health monitoring system with a known good common component from the customer experience node. Ambient music, reactive signage, and mood lighting are not priorities right now. He can order the replacement for that node once life support is back in order. For now, the lower floors will have to make due with silence, blank signs, and plain white light.

Several quiet minutes later, Markos has the replacement in and temporarily closes the hatch back over the guts of the computer. With held breath, he begins the complete system reboot process.

And then the computer technician flops into his now very much sweat-stained chair and writes down all of the steps he completed in the work ticket on his clipboard. While doing the documentation, he notices Adah creating a task and linking it as a child of the original ticket. He adds the part replacement process to this new child ticket. It’s a clever trick, but that might be what it will take to out-pace the Busy Buffalo at the game.

“So, ah, Markos, was it?” Tessa gives the computer tech a nervous glance from just outside the doorway. The interruption derails his train of thought. “Are we really all trapped in here until you’re done?”

“Um,” he stutters, “ships don’t usually dock where there’s a bad oxygen exchange. So unless we can do an extravehicular activity hop outdoors in the cold there’s not a way out of this slice.”

“We can’t force any ship to dock,” Amina adds, attempting to be helpful, “any rescue effort would have to be willingly offered out of pure altruism. We can’t make demands on their air.”

“Even the military?” Tessa looks surprised. She hadn’t considered the logistics demands of an evacuation before.

“Especially the military,” Markos answers. “They can’t be pulled off their traffic control routes and are only allowed access to one side of the gate. Anyone in the Anzion phase is untouchable to the Venkyke Confederate military, and there’s no immediate way to directly make requests of the Anzion military. That would have to go through proper chains of command.”

“So there’s no way to evacuate?” Tessa’s surprise morphs visibly into fear. “Are we all going to die?”