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station. But as such he’d been given a few minor chores, including demolition sign-offs for each section, as well as a list of station modules already packed away that he had to cross-check against the master manifest. It was stupid, really. They were the kind of checks that the demolition crews would be doing anyway, so all Ida was doing was duplicating the paperwork and, no doubt, pissing off the skeleton crew who were doing their best to get on with their difficult and dangerous work without him slowing them down. King too—the provost marshal hadn’t been exactly thrilled to welcome him on board and had been a little frosty ever since. Perhaps he thought that by sending Ida here, Fleet Command were butting in, questioning whether the marshal was capable of running a tight operation.
    So far, the one adjective Ida thought of when describing the marshal was exactly that: tight.
    But this? Either his pad was bugged or they’d sent him on a wild goose chase to get him out of their hair. One of the greatest heroes of the Fleet, stuck down a maintenance access tunnel on the toilet deck of the station with a glitching computer pad.
    Ida frowned at the notebook-sized screen and thumbed the station layout again. The two-dimensional map sprang into life, showing an area of the Coast City Ida was pretty sure was nowhere near where he was. He was right out on the far edge of the station torus, as far from the inhabited section as it was possible to get. This whole segment of the base was not only unused but in the process of being dismantled as well. The walls and flooring were bare metal grilling, revealing a mess of cables and pipes behind the façade. It was also cold, the life support automatically cycled down to minimum just to keep atmospheric integrity with the rest of the station.
    Ida turned, but as with the life support, the lighting was also on auto-minimum. As he’d passed each section of corridor, the next section lit in front of him, and the one he’d just been through turned off. Which, when you’re lost with a bugged map and no corridor markers, in a station you’ve been in only a few cycles, was a real pain in the ass. There weren’t even any comms boxes—or at least Ida couldn’t see any, being stuck in a bubble of light between two near-black envelopes ahead and behind. And they hadn’t given him an internal comms badge and ident tag yet either.
    Ida took a deep breath and coughed, his throat catching on the cold air. He took a few paces forward, and the next corridor section faded into view as the lighting powered up. Satisfied, he set off to try to retrace his steps.
    Now that he thought about it, this was a rather interesting section of the Coast City hub to be in, away from where the rest of the crew were installed. He wondered if there were any empty berths nearby, or whether the cabins had all been stripped by the demolition drones. If not, it wouldn’t be a bad place to haul his gear and set up camp.
    Ida walked on for a few minutes, following the grilled but otherwise featureless corridor, then slowed as he noticed his breath steaming even more in front of his face. Perhaps he was taking it too fast for the atmospherics to power up and keep the corridor heated. Ida stopped and, holding the pad firmly in one hand, patted his arms around his body to try to warm up.
    No, it was too far around the hub, and the section was in too fragile a state to be comfortable. He’d settle for the regular crew quarters, but he could at least shift right to the end of the berths, put a little distance between him and the rest of the crew, even if it was just a handful of empty cabins. Better than nothing. Out here, the cold made his knee hurt.
    Then the lights went out, and Ida was in darkness punctuated only by the glowing screen of the station control pad in his right hand.
    “Well, that’s nice,” said Ida. He flicked the pad back to the home screen and selected the notepad feature. The screen lit with a