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.

Margaret investigates the door to the maintenance tunnel, at the end of which is the workroom where Amy is stuck. A panel on the conduit running along the tunnel wall just before the door has indeed been pried open, and there's what look like a couple loose wires cut out pulled loose. It looks like they'd patch into the multimeter leads built into the Omnitool (which, as a tool issued to field technicians, conveniently has a multimeter built in). Checking the door into the tunnel forward shows the same panel and behind it is a roughly similar layout of wires.

Margaret hooks up the leads. Fortunately the conventions of which wire is which don't seem to have changed much in the last century.

Once the right wires are clipped, stripped, and hooked up, there's a barely audible "clack" deep in the door.

Draaaaaag the door open?

The door sticks, but once Margaret gets a prybar on it, it starts sliding slowly open. Beyond is a dark tunnel, which winds slightly as it vanishes into the distance beyond Margaret's light.

Once more unto the breach, then.

It's pitch dark down here, not ordinary darkness but the cave-darkness that no eye or camera can adjust to. After the second time she trips on something she turns on her flashlight despite having no idea how much battery it has.

The tunnel leads on into the dark for minutes, the light from her flashlight really only picking out a tiny cone of light inside the darkness. She's not sure how far she's gone so far, only that it's quiet and dark, her steps and a distant dripping the only sounds. After a while, what could be ten or fifteen minutes, the walls change as the tunnels seem to be sloping down. Now, there's occasional spots of what look like corrosion or maybe mold on parts of the walls, the rails, and even the power conduits. After a while further, it starts looking like there could even be cracks in the case of the tunnel walls. Finally, she comes to another one of the doors, sealed across the tunnel.

She's on the other side of the door this time, so it's less clear which panel is hiding the wires she needs to get at. Fortunately, there's nothing stopping her from prying off panels until she finds the one she wants.

It takes a little more checking--it turns out this time, the same sensor overrides are hiding in the other wall rail, but finally the door *clicks* and can be persuaded to open.

Great. She leaves the ripped-off panels on the floor and heads into presumably-Lambda.

Beyond the door is...more tunnel. It's different than the one behind her, though whether for better or worse is hard to say. There's a few flickering emergency lights in this section, which is a supplement to Margaret's light, but the walls seem to be in noticeably worse shape. As the tunnel slopes down and to the right, there's a puddle ahead that quickly grows to fill the full width of the tunnel, even if it looks to be only about ten inches deep. Someplace ahead, around the curve of the tunnel, there's an echoing electronic ringing noise.

Down here a puddle could go from ten inches deep to who knows how many meters in a moment. She shuffles forward into it, not putting her weight on a foot until she knows there's solid floor underneath.

It looks like there is indeed solid floor, especially sticking to the edges. She splashes across the several meters of water. The emergency lighting ripples over the surface of the disturbed water, and in the distance the electronic beeping ring continues.

She tries to follow the beeping to its source, inasmuch as that's possible in the echoing space.

Fortunately, there's also a light once she rounds a slight corner--there's a comm panel on the wall, ringing away in the dark. Apparently the emergency power in this section extends to the intercomm--maybe this half of the tunnel is powered from Lambda for emergency power?

Maybe it's Catherine! Margaret runs to the comm panel and looks for the button to pick up.

There's a marked button for "TALK". When pressed, there's a crackle as the call connects. "Mar...Margaret, are you there?"

"Yes! Catherine, is that you? I'm in the shuttle tunnel!"

"Are you all right? The system says the power's in emergency backup, and warning about potential hull breaches and flooding in that section."