Amina’s chair pitches at an odd angle as the floor beneath her crumbles and gives way. She falls through a rip in the thick metal shielding between the technical control structures and the pipelines below. With no grace at all, she loses her seat on the chair and lands with a thud onto a massive pipe, thicker than her waist, catching it directly across her stomach.

The chair sails, much more gracefully in fact, through the hole rent by the collapse of the pipeline into the spin-ward level below. As the pipeline continues to sag beneath her, the rip widens and she spots her coworkers on the floor below. She resists the urge to wave farewell to her rolling chair.

The hallway just outside the data control room on the technical floor collapses slowly as the gray water return pipe sinks slowly away from its mooring points. Water bursts from the seam that rips across its belly where the bend becomes too sharp for it to flex and maintain integrity.

Dirty, non-potable water hits Tiphany in a wave, and washes her out of Amina’s view. The carpenter clings for dear life to the pipe she’s landed on. Dangling loosely in space rekindles the sense of vertigo that’s a poorly remembered nightmare from her adjustment period to the gate’s spin gravity. Her inner ear is currently having a tiny riot all by itself, and her stomach heaves in protest.

Amina refuses the request for permission to vomit. Emesis is not the solution to this problem. She repeats this mantra. Emesis is not the solution to this problem. Emesis is not the solution to this problem. It got her through some of the darker days of her second pregnancy, and she swears it will hold her through today. Emesis is not the solution to this problem.

Damaged carbon fiber and steel alloy dig splinters into her palms, but Amina does not let go of the pipe as it sways beneath her. Instead of looking spin-ward to the floor below, she opts to look up and inward to the floor she involuntarily left behind. Tessa clings to the edge of the hallway that hasn’t collapsed downward. With eyes as big as saucers, she stares down past Amina. It’s obvious that she’s shouting something, but Amina cannot hear her words over the sound of rushing water.

Normally, Amina would be surprised by how much dirty water is currently running passed her at high velocity. Normally, it would seem strange for there to even be this much water inside a vessel in space. But the Moldy Donut has a six mile diameter across the gate it supports. It is large enough to consider its oxygen recycling algae part of a complex designer ecosystem. The water recycling process is just one efficient part of the tightly wound web of life that makes the ring gate a habitable location.

And normally, Amina notes, the pressure sensor would have automatically flipped the emergency shutoff valve and stopped the water from continuing to flood out of the massive pipe by now. But the system is currently in the process of rebooting. Until it finishes, none of those sensors are able to be read by any event listener that could be used to shut the water off automatically.

Someone will have to fix this manually.

Emesis is not the solution to this problem.

Amina looks up the length of the pipe she clings to. The gap between it and the floor that she had been much more comfortably situated on before this chain of events is only about two feet wide. If she climbs up the pipe, then she will be able to get back up onto the maintenance and control floor. From there, she will be able to take much better directions from the subject matter expert than she can from here, clinging desperately to not fall to her very soggy doom below.

At least, she hopes the subject matter expert will be able to give directions to her. She does not have the desire or courage to actually look down the hole to try and find Tsim on the floor below. Amina determines that she will continue forward as if he most definitely is available to assist in the resolution of this crisis event that thoroughly requires his expert knowledge and will not engage in defeatist harmful thoughts that do not serve to completing the objectives at hand.

Besides, she well knows that emesis is not the solution to this problem.

The only thing for it is to put one hand in front of the other and climb the pipe. The stressed metal splinters into her fingers, but a little blood certainly beats whatever broken bones await at the bottom of that fall. Amina pulls herself slowly forward, struggling for each inch on the unstable terrain. She fears that the pipe could fall further if she moves too much or too quickly.

When she finally reaches the edge of the damaged section, a bent support strut grants her the leverage needed to clamber back over the edge. At the top of the damaged portion of pipeline, she can now hear the encouraging things Tessa shouts in her direction. Words of encouragement were not what she imagined the squatter to be hurling in her direction.

Tessa is being very generous with her positive responses to great danger at the moment. The damaged floor has her stuck on a ledge that is barely wide enough for her toes to fit on what remains of the tile while her heels are pressed against the protective plastic baseboard on the wall behind her.

Apparently, Tessa has very much taken to heart their earlier discussion about how everyone on the ring gate is always at risk if damage to the ring gate has put anyone at risk. And in this moment, work crew F, the Feisty Fossa, are the ones in place to mitigate that risk.

Drenched in sweat, Amina parks her tail on the cool tile of the floor and starts to pull the worst of the metal splinters out of her hands, one agonizing yank at a time.

Through the ear wire she hears Markos speaking, but her heart pounds so heavy in her ears that it’s momentarily hard to comprehend what he’s saying.

“Amina, talk to me,” Markos begs the wire to produce an answer. “The door’s jammed shut. I can’t see if you’re okay out there.” He pushes again on the thin plastic skin over the hardened foam core of the cheaply produced pocket door. His sweaty hands slip and fail to find purchase. The temperature in the room continues to increase with time.

The tiles that run under the door have cracked. The frame is very obviously no longer a trued fit. Markos is trapped inside. The latch holding the door open failed when the floor gave way.

“I’m fine,” Amina’s voice through the wire is a breath of hope. He exhales a sigh of deep relief. “Tessa’s fine too.”

Markos does not confess that he had nearly forgotten that the other woman existed at all. The heat is getting to him. He could really use some nice, cold water right about now. Ice would be even more nice, to be honest. That crystalline lattice formation with its utterly improbably less dense solid form is such a wonder of physical science to even exist. It should really exist right here in a few cuboid chunks, collected together in a cup with the more dense liquid form of the molecular substance, so that he could splash the whole lot directly over his head to cool his overheating gray matter.

Outside the room, Amina points a laser measuring tool at likely spots on the door, the missing section of the floor, and other important gap locations. By the measurements, which would not dare lie, the door should be very slightly taller than the hall is wide. Very slightly.

The little electric saw is still in its case on her belt. She very definitely could trim off the edges of the door, pry it door free of its broken track, have Markos push it out from the inside, and lay it across the hole in the floor. If she were on the correct side of the hole in the floor to actually reach it. This, she recognizes, is a bit of a tall order.

Tessa helpfully reminds her that she can do anything she puts her mind to.

She hasn’t vomited.

Amina puts her mind to the task of releasing Markos from his overheating prison.