The manual release wheel sits beyond the safety rail, close enough to the plasma column for heat to come through your gloves. Its spokes are made for a powered tool. The tool cradle is empty, and the station has no working machine left to send in its place.

You set your boots against the rail and take hold of the wheel. Across the reactor display, the falling orbit advances another mark. The core is still coupled to the relay; the release has not moved.

You hit the coolant gallery's door alarm and run before the first drone clears the corner. The warning tone sends both machines after you. Their search beams slide over pipework slick with condensation.

At the next junction you pull the beacon from your courier kit and send it skidding beneath a pump housing. Its signal keeps moving on the drones' displays as you slip behind a row of tanks. Metal claws strike the housing; the machines have taken the bait.

The gallery bends back toward the signal chamber. The alarm is muffled by two pressure doors, and the service entrance is unguarded. The station still knows your identity. You can reach the chamber if you turn back now.

"I'm aboard," you say. For a moment the only answer is a burst of air over the channel. The survivor asks which dock you used, then stops herself before giving her name. Somewhere behind her, machinery beats against a loose panel.

A softer click joins the transmission. The emergency channel has routed your voice through station security, which is testing it against a watchlist. The survivor hears it too. She asks you to stay on the line while she finds a private circuit.

The exterior lock seals behind you. Beyond the gantry rail, the moon fills the dark with cities too small to pick out from here. Your tether pulls taut as Station Zero rolls beneath you.

The gantry shudders. A maintenance drone swings its camera toward the movement, and another support tears loose ahead. The next handhold is still in reach, but the metal between you and it has begun to bow.

The console recognizes your courier license and begins to release the archive. Halfway through, the route table goes blank. A second process has been laid over it, hiding the paths through the station behind a security trace.

The trace wakes when you touch the next command. It starts checking your identity against the station's watchlist while the route table loads one line at a time. You hold the connection open and look for a way through the false data.

The private circuit opens with a burst of static. "Saye," the survivor says. "Reactor engineer." Now that security is off the line, she can tell you what she saw: a shutdown order went out before any fault appeared in the relay. She tried to cancel it. Someone used her terminal access to lock her out.

You ask where the order came from. Saye has only the transmission header. The full record is still in the signal chamber, if its decoder has power. A heavy door closes somewhere on her end of the call, and she lowers her voice before giving you the route.

The directions take you through a service passage toward the security gate. Saye stays on the private circuit long enough to confirm the passage is open, then the station's failing power breaks the connection.

You put your weight on the next rail just as the damaged span folds behind you. The tether jerks at your waist. By the time the loose section spins away, your glove is on the upper lock's manual lever.

Inside, pressure returns with a hard pop in your ears. The lock overlooks the signal chamber; red route lights pulse along the floor toward the reactor. A status display beside the door is caught on a command sent just before the relay began to fail. It ordered a shutdown the station never requested.

The display gives you a time and a terminal number, enough to know the failure was set in motion deliberately. You leave the record lit and take the upper passage. No alarm follows you in.

The support under you tears free. You drop through a layer of insulation and strike a service ladder hard enough to drive the air from your chest. It holds. The broken opening above is already out of reach.

When you can breathe again, you see why the ladder was hidden. The shaft has no route number, and its access plate has been painted over. A maintenance arrow points down toward a manual reactor cutoff. Another rung leads upward to the relay controls.

You came in by the wrong route and found a piece of the station that its public maps leave out. The cutoff could stop the descent without depending on the damaged relay. To reach it, you will have to follow the narrow lower shaft; the climb above offers the controlled options you came for.

The route toward the signal chamber narrows at the security checkpoint. A red light finds you before you reach it. Your courier license appears on a wall display, followed by the words ACTIVE TARGET. Whatever opened a path through the station also gave its surveillance system a way to identify you.

Two drones detach from charging ports above the corridor. They hold position for a second, checking the doors on either side, then begin to follow your movement. Beyond them is the chamber where you can reach the reactor systems. The checkpoint shutters are already lowering.

A coolant gallery branches off behind you. Its pumps are loud enough to hide footsteps, and its doors can be tripped from the far side. You can draw the drones in there and circle back to the chamber's service entrance.

The signal chamber has emergency power and very little of it. A fault light travels down the supply board each time Station Zero fires a course correction. At the center console, three systems are still available: a decoder holding the false shutdown signal, a channel marked ENGINEER SAYE, and the controls for the armored passage to the reactor.

The decoder could turn a fragment of the transmission into a usable command. Saye's channel is open, though she is too far away to reach the reactor on her own. The passage controls feed an emergency ram strong enough to force the sealed door. Each system draws from the same failing reserve.

A relay clicks behind the wall, and one row of lights goes dark. The board shows enough power for one of the three systems. The other two will shut down when you commit.

The watchlist trace breaks away from the route table. You cut the console's return channel before it can send your license number anywhere, and a maintenance map appears beneath the false data. It shows a path from the docking ring to the central signal chamber.

One entry in the archive holds your attention: the time of the reactor's first failure. It precedes the damage alarms by eleven minutes. The entry beside it is a shutdown command, issued from a station terminal while the relay was still healthy. Someone started the failure and let the alarms blame it on the machinery.

You copy the record to your courier drive. Ahead, the map marks a security gate and a service corridor that reaches it from the side. The corridor lights are still green.

The emergency ram drives into the armored passage seal. The first blow dents it; the second shears a line of bolts from the frame. Heat pushes through the gap, carrying the smell of scorched insulation.

You brace the ram for one more stroke. The door opens far enough to pass, then the mechanism locks in place with a sound like metal breaking underwater. The power board behind you goes dark. There will be no second attempt at the chamber's other systems.

On the far side, a stair drops toward the reactor relay. You leave the ruined ram holding the passage open and descend into the heat.

The decoder strips the noise from the shutdown signal. Under it sits an instruction to hold the reactor relay in its failing state even after the station requests a correction. Its signature belongs to a terminal on Station Zero, and the timestamp is earlier than the first damage alarm.

You save the command and its header to your courier drive. The same data includes a maintenance path behind the armored passage, left accessible for technicians after a door failure. Its lock accepts the decoded signal as an override.

The maintenance door opens without a warning tone. Beyond it, a narrow stair descends beside the armored wall. You take the evidence and the route down to the reactor level while the chamber's last lights fail behind you.

The relay has one intact instruction channel. You clear its queue and bring up the last orbit command the station sent before the sabotage took hold. Half the sequence is missing; the false shutdown keeps writing over the rest.

You rebuild the command from the surviving lines while the station falls. Each time the damaged relay shakes, your cursor jumps across the display. The next correction window is opening, and the instruction channel is still yours.

The moon's defense network answers with a targeting tone. Its operators have watched Station Zero leave its assigned orbit and are seconds from firing to break it apart. You can hear other voices on their channel, each asking for a different course.

You open the evidence channel and send the reactor's sabotage record. The operators need to know why the station is falling before they will work with you. The targeting tone continues under your first words.

Saye answers on the third call. She has made it to a lift, but its door keeps reopening as the station rolls. Over the channel you hear her strike the manual switch twice before it catches. You talk her through the timing of the next jolt and hear the lift begin to move.

"I can reach the evacuation controls from here," she says. She knows the craft still docked along the station's rim. You stay on the line until the lift reaches her level; then she asks you to get to the relay. Neither job can wait for the other.

The channel drops as power leaves the signal chamber. You have helped Saye reach the controls, and the stair toward the relay is still open to you. A warning lamp over the stair flashes with each lost meter of altitude.