The plan required him to go outside. He stood in the airlock, a small, sterile white room, and watched the inner door slide shut. The sound was a soft, final sigh of compressed air. It sealed him off from the rest of the Penrose Oratory, from the faint, steady drone of the Equilibrium Hum that had been the soundtrack to his life for weeks. Lena Petrova’s voice, tinny and distant, crackled in his helmet comms.
— Pressure is dropping. Five seconds to vacuum. Remember to breathe normally. Your suit will handle the rest.
He nodded, a useless gesture no one could see. The air thinned, the pressure in his ears changing. A single red light on the panel beside the outer door turned green. Silence. A complete and total absence of sound that was more profound than the quiet he had heard in the Choir. This was not a manufactured peace. It was the truth of the void. The outer door slid open, revealing a perfect, star-dusted blackness. He took a step, his magnetic boots clamping onto the hull of the station with a dull thud he felt in the soles of his feet.
Lena emerged from the airlock behind him, a second white figure against the impossible dark. A tether snaked between them, a thin, silver-white line connecting his life to hers. She clipped her own boots to the hull and gave the tether a sharp tug, a question asked and answered without a word. Their survival was now a physical fact, a shared risk measured in the length of a single cord. He felt the price of this action in the cold knot in his stomach; one mistake, one slip, and they would both become silent, drifting anomalies.
— Okay, — Lena’s voice was all business, cutting through the immense silence. — Follow me. Stay on the designated path. The hull isn’t a sidewalk.
She moved with a practiced, deliberate grace, her boots releasing and clamping in a slow, steady rhythm. He followed, his own movements clumsy and uncertain. The station was a vast, curving desert of white composite panels, stretching out into the darkness. Below them, the black hole Terminus was not a hole at all. It was a presence. A perfect circle of nothing, rimmed by the thin, impossibly bright ring of its accretion disk. The light from dying stars cast their two small shadows onto the hull, long and distorted.
— We’re heading for the main data conduit, — Lena said, her voice a calm island in the sea of nothing. — It’s about fifty meters along this truss. Just keep your eyes on my back.
They moved across the silent, curving world. Elias focused on the rhythmic clamp and release of his boots, the feel of the station’s structure vibrating faintly through them. He thought of the Cracked Slate of Korbin, the broken screen a map of a fractured truth. This felt different. He wasn’t just finding a broken piece of the story. He was drilling a new hole in the wall to let the light in.
— We’re here, — Lena’s voice broke his concentration. She had stopped beside a thick, armored channel running flush with the hull. — This is it. The river of lies.
— And truth, — Elias said, his own voice sounding strange and muffled in his helmet.
— Same thing, usually. Just depends on who’s telling it. — She paused, her voice becoming all business. — Okay. The bypass tap is in your right-side pouch. It’s magnetically keyed. You just have to place it over the access port. I’ll guide you.
Elias fumbled with the pouch, his thick gloves making the simple task difficult. He pulled out the bypass tap. It was a small, dense block of black alloy, cool to the touch even through his suit. It looked like a featureless brick, but he knew it was the key to everything. He held it over the designated port on the main data conduit.
— Easy, — Lena coached. — A little to the left. The magnetic field will grab it when you’re in position. Don’t force it.
He adjusted his position, his movements slow and exaggerated. He could feel the faint pull of the magnets. He let go. The tap snapped into place with a solid thunk that he felt more than heard. A small green indicator light on the side of the tap began to pulse, a tiny heartbeat in the void.
— We have a connection, — Lena said, and for the first time, he heard a note of something other than professional calm in her voice. It was relief. Maybe even triumph. — The hardware is in place. It’s sealed.
He looked at her, a white figure against the stars. Her face was hidden behind the gold-tinted visor of her helmet, but he could see his own distorted reflection in it. A small, lonely man floating in the dark. He had made his choice, and this was the consequence. He was outside, literally and figuratively. He had stepped off the path. This was the beginning of his own self-authored meaning, and it was happening in a place with no air, no sound, and no life.
— Now the data line, — he said, his voice steadier now.
— Pouch on your left hip, — she instructed. — Connect it to the port on the tap, then run it along the seam to the relay box ten meters back.
He worked, his hands more confident now. He secured the thin, shielded cable, a new vein of pure, unedited truth running along the station’s skin. They had done it. They had their own private, permanent window into the Sum. An undetectable raw feed, a river of history that bypassed the Scriptorium and the Hermeneutic Engine and the Abbot’s red pen. They had their weapon.
— It’s done, — he said, clipping the final connection into place.
— Good, — Lena said. — Let’s go home.
The journey back to the airlock was faster, their movements more certain. The shared danger had forged a new kind of trust between them, a bond built on competence and a mutual rejection of a comfortable lie. As the outer airlock door slid shut, sealing them off from the void and the silent, watching eye of Terminus, Elias felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him. The intense focus, the constant, low-level fear, it had drained him completely.
The hiss of returning air was the loudest sound in the universe. Dust motes danced in the single beam of the ready-light.
Then the Orison Call chimed through their helmet comms with a summons for the entire station.
