Kazra cut himself off when the ever-present hum of the station went dead silent, taking the lights with it. Thanson, stuck in the privacy booth behind a decently heavy mechanical door, knocked against the metal.

“Kazra, a little help?”

He wanted to help, but with his feet floating several inches off the floor, he wasn’t going to have much luck getting around the corner to Thanson. Anything that hadn’t been nailed down was drifting lazily near him in midair, forcing him to acknowledge that he really needed to clean the office.

Several sluggish moments dragged by before the groan of a tiny generator filled the air, fading as the machinery resigned itself to the task of running the temporary life support. Kazra came back down to the deck gently, still feeling too light for his body. The smaller items from his desk landed in a haphazard mess.

A single light flashed past the frosted polyglass window next to the door, the beam sweeping across the office, bobbing up and down with someone’s steps as they came down the corridor. Kazra clapped a hand against the door of the booth to get Thanson’s attention, though now that the white noise machine in the privacy booth had kicked off, he didn’t need to raise his voice.

“Someone’s coming. Probably some idiot who thinks I can get an emergency call out when there’s no fucking power in the whole station. Shut up for a minute, until I find out how bad this is.”

He already knew it was bad, both because he’d long since given up on the ’verse buying him a drink before it fucked him over, and because no power meant limited life support while they were full beyond capacity with belt miners waiting to transfer out. The station could limp along on barely scrubbed air for a while, but eventually they’d all be stewing in their own poison.

He tripped over the bag Thanson had left sitting outside the booth, kicked it out of the way under his desk with little care of the contents, and managed to knock his favorite mug to the floor in the process. The ensuing crash made him flinch, and he crunched his way across the small office toward the door, dead crockery in pieces under his boots. He tried to peer through the window, speaking loudly enough to be heard through the closed door, but could only make out that someone was standing nearby, not who it was. “There’s no backup generator hidden in my comm array, so don’t bother asking if I can get an emergency line out.”

“Is there anyone in there with you?” An unfamiliar voice wasn’t so strange, what with the influx of miners, but he knew everyone who worked the station, and this wasn’t a soul he recognized. He was certainly a suspicious man by nurture, if not by nature, and he stepped away from the line cut by the flashlight.

“Why?”

“Station head count.” Not a beat of hesitation, which might have sold it to someone who didn’t know better. Except he did; Kazra was a vital part of the emergency drills, and head counts didn’t happen in hallways. Anyone who was able made for the largest holding bay, where the shuttles and emergency suits were stored. Everything fanned out from there. There was no way, seconds after lights out, that someone was already crawling the halls for stragglers.

“I’m stuck in here until the power comes back up. You can pass that along to the crew in the central bays.” A beam of light aimed directly through the window again, and he caught the shadow of a weapon as whoever it was shifted positions for better cover. Not for the first time since coming to Station 43, he questioned the official company policy that barred him from being armed on the clock.

“I think between us, we can probably get the door pried open.”

“I appreciate the help, but I have to be here in case the station power core kicks on again. It’ll take me hours to restart the comm system. You’d better get on with the rest of the head count.”

The long pause grew more awkward by the second, but he’d had years to practice waiting them out. Eventually, the light moved again. “You have something in there that we both know doesn’t belong to you. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

Thanson hadn’t made a sound yet, but Kazra was suddenly even more aware of his presence, even though Thanson was still locked in the privacy booth. “There’s nothing in here but useless comm equipment and a transmission manager who’s getting more pissed by the second.”

His gaze fell on the bag he’d kicked out of the way earlier, notebook sticking out of the front pocket. A tiny flash of red light strobed in the unnatural darkness. “And a bag some asshole dropped off earlier, like this is a storage locker for the damn bar.”

He wasn’t a psy, but even he could read the change in tone when the erstwhile intruder spoke again. “Tall guy, kind of ferrety? Dark skin?”

Hoping his snort of grudging laughter made it believable, he answered. “I guess. Ran in here, dumped his bag, and said he’d be back for it later. Figured he was on his way to waste a paystub in the bar and didn’t want to forget his bag somewhere once he was drunk.”

A moment later the light dropped away entirely, and he suspected the solitary thump was his overly curious friend kicking the corridor wall. “Sorry for the confusion. I don’t have to tell you that this never happened, right?”

“I’d prefer it that way myself.” He got no answer, but the familiar scrape of the loose walkway about ten meters from his door told him enough. The slight change in gait as someone stepped over the hatch into the next section of hallway confirmed it, and he felt safe enough to knock on the door of the privacy booth. “You hear any of that?”

Thanson’s muffled voice didn’t convey much beyond a muttered, “Most of it.”

There was no manual override for the privacy booth door, but it was finicky enough that Kazra kept a pry bar leaning against the wall behind the cabinet. Slipping it into the dent near the magnetic latch, he pushed forward, popping the door and using the hook to pull it open. Thanson was quiet, emerging from the booth fast enough to brush against him on the way by. Sheer force of will kept him from flinching away from the contact.

The only ambient light in the office came from the flashing alert on Thanson’s notebook, and a matching one on Kazra’s own, shoved to the corner of his desk to charge while he worked. It was a pitiful sort of glow—red, then green—and none of it enough to illuminate anything. Thanson’s eyes caught the light, and Kazra tried not to see the ghosts reflected there—an eerie reminder of days gone by, looting abandoned starseed mines and saving for a way out.

“So? Got anything to contribute to the conversation?”

“I don’t look like a ferret.”

He couldn’t see Thanson’s expression, but the inflection spit across the short distance between them was clear enough. Kazra’s face actually hurt when he grinned—such a distantly recalled event he was surprised he could still do it. “Only a little around the eyes. And maybe the nose. Makes you seem like you’re up to something.” Time was wasting, and he had a station to watch out for, no matter how unsettling and unexpected his company was, so he skipped the niceties. “Thans, what the hell is going on?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Though hesitation colored the words, they were still infuriating. He hadn’t seen Thanson in a decade, but some things never changed.

“Of course you can’t.” Kazra grabbed for his tablet, blinking away from the harsh light that flooded the screen until it adjusted to the dark and dimmed automatically. “You might want to keep to the floor, in case your friend comes back for you. I’ve got work to do.”

He shouldn’t have given so much time to a shadow man in the hallway, but that wasn’t something he could fix now. Besides, unless he’d intended to toss Thanson to the wolves, tempting as it might have been, he hadn’t had much of a choice.

As soon as the power came back up, he’d need to send a distress signal, boosted as far and as fast as possible. Until engineering told him otherwise, any problem with the power supply had to be treated as a potential failure in the plasma core. The duty vessel for the mines wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another three days, delayed by a provision shortage on Holman. That meant Station 43 was full of people fresh off the asteroid belts, drinking away their pay while they waited for transport back to the civilized side of the Empire. The fail-safe program sent a distress signal as it powered down, but that didn’t mean there had been enough juice left to boost the alert to the satellite relays. There was a chance the minister’s vessel had caught the brief cry for help, but they’d probably jumped the minister away as soon as they’d undocked from the station. Passenger ships didn’t come to 43 unless they were in distress, and the mines had just sent out the cargo haulers a week past. Nobody was there, nobody was coming.

Since CommCorp had failed to respond to his repeated requests for a dedicated comm system generator, he needed to get to the core and see if he could redirect power to the communications array long enough to make definitive contact with the closest ship. If it was a breach in the plasma core, someone was going to have to round up their escape pods.

Commander Sorjen had told him once, half-joking, that official policy regarding Station 43 was “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it is, see if they can make do.” Kazra wasn’t sure the ancient system grid could manage a fully automated reboot. If the power didn’t come back on, if the life support systems didn’t kick over, if a ship couldn’t get to them in time . . . If, if, if.

He had backup access to all of his systems on the notebook, but with the power down, he had no way to connect it to the satellites. Keeping them in the correct orbit around the station and free of collisions with space flotsam took up more of his work time than anything. Without the guidance programs and his watchful eye, he’d be lucky if any of them were in one piece when he got enough power to send anything.

“While you’re over there not telling me anything, maybe think on how there’s 347 other people on this floating pile of crap, and most of them probably don’t deserve to be suffocated by the black just because you like holding things over people’s heads.” Thanson had never been stupid, but Kazra didn’t give much pause to his anger these days. It was probably plain enough that his righteous defense of innocents wasn’t much more than a veneer over his own guilt. He should have protested more over the lack of emergency precautions, but he’d grown less willing to stick his neck out after his “promotion” to Station 43. “Seems a little like Corve luck, you wandering in with someone on your tail, and the station core dumping us in the black.”

“Corve luck isn’t,” Thanson murmured, voice coming from somewhere nearer the wall. “Instead of asking me, why not set your mind to wondering why Minister Rannah is hanging around a mining way station on the fuzzy edge of Imperial space? You’re a smart boy—”

“Shut up.” Kazra could’ve asked, but the lean, decaying memory of his father’s voice wouldn’t let him give that kind of ground. He hadn’t thought of the old man in years, but trust Thanson to stir up a whole mess of things he was better off forgetting. He cocked his head, picking up a distant hum. His fingers stilled on his screen for a moment. “Do you hear—”

Lights blazed to life from every corner, followed a second later by the wailing sirens fanning out from the station core, picking up the alarm cry in concentric layers. Kazra hit the first satellite relay a few seconds later, pushing the connection through as quickly as he could, and sent the distress call just as the second relay point appeared on his open channels. Thanson scrambled up from the floor, darting into the privacy cupboard.

“Can you get me back on the same channel?”

“I can barely get to the basic comm frequencies in the closest system, so no, your secured channel . . .” Kazra trailed off as the second relay connected and a secured incoming channel flashed for his attention. “Huh. They propped it open from their end. Go ahead and finish your little chat. Not like there’s anything important going on.” Too busy to filter the channel, he pulled it up with a flick of his fingers, the echo of voices from the booth becoming an annoyance as he worked.

“Mr. Nez—”

“My secrets are as heavy as any ever borne. My contract is terminated under duress. I need a Head of House to share my burden. Do you understand? If you don’t, find me someone who does, sharp-like.”

It was the Corve coming out in Thanson’s voice that caught Kazra’s attention—the fleeting twang of an accent slipping into the syllables of misplaced words. The manners of their childhood, not the graceful maneuverings of a discretionary, or even the obsequious commerce of a station-bound prostitute. The plain demands of someone with knowledge that could buy something better. He wondered if Thanson had any idea how close the family resemblance to Gustus Nez ran, but only for a second. Whatever their issues, he hated Thanson’s father too much to acknowledge that kind of similarity. He glanced to the upper corner of his screen, catching the moment of ruffled shock on the woman’s face.

“Your discretion will save your life,” she replied, a promise and a warning both, and then he hit the third relay, finally, working around the Imperial block that wanted hours of dedicated relay confirmations. He sent the blast again—a collection of station life support readings, current population, and anything else he’d been able to cobble together while unstringing the encryption—

A rolling shimmy seemed to overtake the station, and then a scream of klaxons that were eaten up by the thunderous roar as an explosion breached the hull. The signals shut down as the station shuddered around them, probably turning his data into a useless cry for help, silenced by the black.

He lunged for the floor and grabbed the emergency kit stored next to his desk. Warning alarms drowned out everything but the empty, gaping inhale of space, and he caught Thanson’s arm, both of them tipping end over end and banking hard against the wall.

Instinct had him curling around Thanson, pulling their heads down as he fumbled for the rebreathers in his kit. For a second they were worlds away and years younger, the growling earth trying to swallow them in the tamaracite mines on Corve. Then Thanson’s arm looped across his chest, the stern, cultured voice ordering him to hold still, and brought him back to their reality.

Buried in an abandoned mine shaft was bad. Deep in the drift, running on partial, backup life support in a space station crippled by an explosion . . . that was probably worse.