Margaret waves goodbye to the helpful sphere and swipes her omnitool on the panel.

At the swipe, the airlock control flashes to PROCESSING, and the pumps and equipment comes to life. The outer door swings closed again, and with a slight klaxon sound, the water starts pumping down into a grating at the bottom. She can look up and watch the water level coming down above here, then it's over her mask, and then below her neck. As soon as the waterline passes, the klaxon proves it wasn't quiet, just muffled. Now it's really loud. After another few seconds, the last of the water swirls down the grating in the floor, and the klaxon cuts off as the inner door slides open with the sound of a locking bolt releasing. She's made it to the Shuttle station.

Margaret is not sure why pumping out an airlock is dangerous enough to justify that much klaxon but presumably someone who knew a lot about it thought it was. Now, does this shuttle station have a shuttle in it, and ideally also a route map?

As Margaret steps across the threshold, a flashlight snaps on on her helmet. It looks from its beam like the tunnel leads down a small distance onto an island platform between two tracks, each hosting a small shuttle car, about the size of an airport tram. The lighting is dim, and someplace in the background there's the omnipresent drip of water.

Automatic headlight: cool. Automatic headlight that somehow failed to turn on until just now: less cool, but maybe getting water dumped on it jostled something back into place.

Now, does it make more sense to try to turn on the shuttle cars or to just walk along the tracks? She doesn't seem to have gotten any more tired since waking up, but it's been less than a day and it could be hundreds of kilometres to Lambda for all she knows. Probably somewhat less, since the whole complex was one pin on the big map, but it's still worth trying to get train service for a bit before giving up and walking. So it's time for another round of "follow cables back and forth looking for the on switch".

At the far end of the platform, where the shuttle tracks vanish into tubes in the wall, trying to hop the platform-edge fence shows that just down the tunnel, there's some kind of automated doors sealed over the tunnel--maybe they're subdivided, to stop water from flooding back along the tunnels if part of the system floods? There's a control box for track power, but the little screen built into it shows "insufficient power", so indeed following the cables seems to be the order of the day. However, looking back towards the right-side platform, there's a communications panel on the wall showing a buffered message, and an open door leading to some tracks back the way Margaret arrived from, to the side of the tunnel down from the surface airlock she used.

Buffered message get. Is it weird that she's getting used to this? Probably everyone is used to this and it's not any weirder than getting used to, like, smartphones.

The call quality was awful, but it sounds like Amy made it here, and ran into the same problem Margaret has with track power being off. She was worried if the power wasn't stabilized, the train could cut out halfway to Theta. It sounds like she meant to go fix the power, maybe why the door is open.

That might have been the first one of these to be immediately practically useful. Margaret follows in Amy's presumable footsteps, hoping her apparent failure doesn't mean she died on the way.

The tunnel leads back a distance long enough to hold more than a few trains--apparently it goes to some kind of maintenance facility. The whole place looks like it could use maintenance--some of the cables hang down and spark, and there's breaks in the casing of the power rails along the walls that the shuttles look like they ride. Just before a closed end door, a small set of steps lead up to a door off on the left side. From around the corner as Margaret gets close enough to see the light spilling out the door into the tunnel in front of her, she can hear a hissing sounds--hissphiss. Hissphiss. Hissphiss.

She tucks cables back into their overhead racks where she can do so safely but she can't do anything about the rail casings. When she sees the light and hears the hissing she approaches cautiously, expecting another leaky steam pipe.

It's not a steam pipe, more of a pumping noise. Rounding the corner...there's a woman lying motionless on a pile of the structure gel. A pair of cables lead from a power box into some kind of gel structure on the wall, which is pumping like a bellows and making the noise. It's connected by a disturbing nest of tubing and cables to different spots on the woman's body. It takes a moment to realize the woman's turned her eyes and is blinking at Margaret. "Don't hurt me!" she cries out weakly.

NOPE NOPE NOPE this is NOT what she wanted

Margaret can't bring herself to make eye contact; she talks to the opposite wall. "I'm not going to hurt you. What do you need? Can I help? What happened to you?"

"I...fell, working on the power relays," the woman--Amy?--gasps. "This thing...it saved me and wouldn't let me die, but it can't let me go. I've been here...I don't know how long."

"I don't know--what to do--even if I could get you out, there's no food here . . . "

"If you see Masters or Holland, tell them I need help," she gasps. "Tell them Amy needs help."

"Okay. I'll. I'll tell them." Why is a misplaced college student murderer suddenly the only hope for way too many people (okay, two people, but that's still way too many).

She keeps walking, heading off to finish the job Amy started.

The power board is right next to Amy in the maintenance room. There's two cables from Amy's...involuntary life support into two ports on the electrical box on the wall, which is recessed into the power lines to the track guides. The screen on it is flickering, but displays "insufficient power--drain detected--systems offline."

Fuck. Not this again, this shouldn't have happened once, why is it happening again, why?

(I need those . . . I was okay)

At least this time she can just walk to Lambda. 

She should probably go back and ask Amy how far it is, before she sets out.

She doesn't want to talk to Amy. Honestly she doesn't want to look at Amy. Or think about Amy. 

(Why did you do that? I was okay . . .)

But if she dies on the way to Lambda because she didn't get some important piece of information, she and Amy and Carl are all doomed.

She walks back to Amy and stares at the floor again. "I can't turn on the shuttles. I'm going to try to walk to Lambda and get help; I know there's someone there. Do you know how far it is, or which track to take?"

Amy manages a few words per breath. "Either track...goes to...Lambda. Three...klicks...or so. Never make it....outside, mountain's in the way...have to climb it. No way...a ductile suit...lasts that. Might be able...to override...tube doors? Jimmy...proxies...like a train."

'Inside the train tube, trick the doors into thinking there's a train there to get in and out. Got it. Thank you. Um, hang in there? It's going to be okay?" She has heard less convincing assertions but mostly in YouTube comments.

"You too. I wish...I was home," Amy gasps. "Tell Theta I'm here."

"I will."

Margaret turns away and goes back to the shuttle station, climbs over a fence to get down to the tracks, and starts walking. Three klicks isn't far; even in the suit it shouldn't take much longer than an hour, maybe two.

Without the track power on, the track bed forward to Lambda out of the station is dimly lit and faintly damp, like the track through the slightly-propped door back to the maintenance workshop and power controls where Amy is attached to...whatever the gel it is that's keeping her alive. That has been keeping her alive for...possibly a year if Margaret's doing the math right. It looks like there's some kind of main rail along the base, with guides along the walls containing power and data. It looks like the motor for the door out of the station pulls it sideways into the left side of the tunnel once it's triggered, but the one blocking the path to Lambda is a big chunk of metal for the moment. There's some kind of door at the Lambda end of the platform, too, next to where the power switch would be active, if not for Amy's life support drawing straight from the source back in the maintenance tunnels beyond the half-open other track door.

Margaret looks at the door. It looks heavy, but not so heavy that she couldn't drag it out of the way if it was unlatched. Unfortunately all the components involved in latching it are hidden by the fact that it's shut.

On the other hand, the door to the workshop Amy's in is open, and it looks a lot like this one. In fact, Amy would have had to hack it if the power was in its current state when she came in there. If she goes and checks out that door she might be able to repeat the process on this door, and then presumably again at the far end of the tunnel.