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I can’t hear anything: just the quiet hum of the lights, and behind them, like a ripple in a puddle of water, the sound of the station. I slip round the corner and
pad quietly down the deserted passage, almost breaking into a run, deciding that it’s better to be quiet.

There are stairs at the end of the corridor. Again, I hesitate before stepping onto them, wary that Okwembu could be waiting above or below me. Again, I hear nothing. Scarcely daring to breathe, I step into the stairwell, and start down it.

It’s a few levels before I’m breathing again. I’m
oddly reassured by just how much noise the stairs make when stepped on, giving off odd clangs every time my feet come down. Anybody listening would be able to hear me coming – but I’d be able to hear them, too. After a few levels, there cease to be any more corridors leading off. I’m getting close.

A few minutes later, I reach the bottom level. Ahead of me is a single small corridor, and at the
end of it what must be the door to the control room. I don’t know what I was expecting – a set of blast doors, maybe, or some complicated locking mechanism – but it’s like every other door in the station.

I walk up to it, glancing nervously over my shoulder. There’s a small keypad on one side of the door. Under the usual circumstances, there’d probably be several heavily armed elite officers
on guard here, so other security measures in such a tight space probably wouldn’t be necessary.

Still, the sight of the keypad gives me pause. There’ll be no way to guess the code. Does this mean I’ve got to find Okwembu? Force the code out of her? My shoulders sag. I can’t spend time tracking someone in an unfamiliar sector, where they know the layout and I don’t, where they’re armed and rested
and I’m exhausted and defenceless.

It’s then that a little green light blinks at the bottom of the keypad, so quickly that I nearly miss it. I freeze, hardly daring to believe I’ve seen it, but after thirty seconds or so it blinks again.

The door’s unlocked.

This is too easy. Okwembu is waiting inside, knowing that I’ll come to her. She’ll shoot me the moment I’m through the door.

But there’s
no other choice. I have to get in there. I cast around for something to hide behind, anything to give me cover, but there’s nothing in the corridor.

What if I didn’t have to take cover out here? What if I could surprise her, and get behind something inside the control room before she shoots? It might buy me a few crucial seconds. And while Okwembu might fire in the direction of the corridor,
she might be a little more hesitant to shoot if she could hit the controls.

Which would be a bit more relevant if she wasn’t so intent on destroying the station
.

I shake off the thought, and take a step back from the door, breathing hard. I rest my finger on the keypad’s Enter button, tell myself to push it, but I hold back. Every cell in my body is screaming for me to turn around, to go find
somewhere dark and warm and safe, and let everything disappear. I have to remind myself that there’s nowhere like that any more.

I push the button.

The door whooshes open, and I throw myself through, tucking into a roll. I catch a blurred glimpse of several terminals, and then I’m in the roll, my heart in my mouth, expecting to hear the awful bang of a gunshot. I swing my head to the side, preparing
to dive behind the nearest bit of cover. But as I do so, I get a look at the room, and I check my movement, coming to a stop on all fours.

The control room is deserted.

Terrified, I flick my head from side to side, hunting out hiding places, anywhere that she could be waiting. But there’s no place to hide. Slowly, I stand, gazing around me.

Wherever Okwembu is, it’s not here. The main control
room of Outer Earth is narrow, barely wider than the corridor outside. The walls on either side of me are crowded with banks of screens, bathing the room in an orange glow. There aren’t any keyboards or control pads, so I’m guessing the screens are touch-based. Several chairs are scattered around, overturned.

Slowly, I wander down the room. It’s tiny. There’s not even a viewing port: just bank
after bank of terminals. There’s no retinal scanner that I can see, nothing that Darnell would use Foster’s eyeball on. It must be hidden away somewhere.

By now, I’m expecting to hear klaxons, computerised voices reading off dire warnings, but the room is quiet. I turn back to the door, hoping against hope that there’s a way to lock it. There’s another keypad, but it’s also blinking green, and
without the code, I won’t be able to close it. I walk back and thumb the Enter button, and the door shuts with a hiss.

Okwembu’s absence nags at me. Where is she? I can’t think of a single reason why she wouldn’t be in the control room. Maybe she’s watching from a distance, or listening. Waiting for me to trigger a trap.

There’s nothing I can do about it now, not unless I’m willing
to waste
time searching the sector for her. With one eye on the entrance, I scan the screens again. I’m looking for a login box, something that requires a password, something I can input the word Iapetus into and find out what it does.

But each screen I look at appears to be logged in already; they all display various options, ranging from Dock Access to Thruster Management to Aeronautics. Most are in
English, but several seem to be in Hindi and Chinese as well. One of them shows a static radio frequency, and there’s a little dust on the controls, like no one has used them for a long time. Can’t say I blame them; in the decades after the nuclear war, we could still pick up radio signals from Earth. One by one, they all faded. Fifty years ago, the planet went completely silent.

I stop in front
of one of the screens. I debate pulling a chair upright, but decide to stand – if Okwembu comes through that door, I want to be ready.

Hesitating – but only for a second – I place my finger on one of the touch-screens and start to navigate through the system. There are lots of false starts, and I find myself staring at incomprehensible readouts and dead-ends of reactor kilowatt graphs. Cursing,
I find my way back to the main menu screen, and methodically begin to trawl through the options. It’s strange to think that right now I have an enormous amount of control over even the tiniest details of Outer Earth. No wonder Darnell and Okwembu wanted to take this place for themselves.

It takes me a lot longer than I want, but I find it, hidden in a sub-menu:
Convection Systems
. I tap the option,
and the screen flashes with even more graphs and readouts. One catches my eye.
Average module temperature: 46C
.

Forty-six degrees Celsius. I’ve got to turn these things back on now.

Forcing myself to be patient, I scan through the display. I find it at the bottom of the screen.
Convection fin status: Inactive
. I tap
the option, hoping that’s all there is to it. My heart sinks as another menu
opens up: a circular diagram of the station, showing the location of each convection fin with a small green triangle. There look to be about a dozen, scattered across the station hull.

I lean forwards, squinting to make out the detail. Each little triangle is empty. I reach out, tapping one, and it turns solid green. On the bottom of the screen, a text box flashes up:
Fin 6E1 active
.

Smiling,
I start hitting all the triangles, breathing a huge sigh of relief as they turn green. But the breath catches in my throat as an error message flashes up, freezing my finger halfway to the screen.

Warning: ice crystals detected in convection system. Temperature at sub-optimal levels
.

Numbers and letters pop up underneath the message. They must be convection fin locations. The error message is
slightly transparent, and as I look closely I can see that all of them are on one side of the station, covering Gardens, Chengshi, half of Apogee.

Convection pump system may malfunction if exposed to extreme temperatures
, reads the message.
Continue?

I rest my head on my arms, growling in frustration, and I can feel helplessness pulling at me.

I raise my head, looking at the screen. The ice
in the pipes … it has to be there because the pumps are shut down. The liquid that was on the outside when they got turned off hasn’t moved. It’s been exposed to the cold in space for too long.

I can’t pump it back into the system yet. But what if I can melt it somehow? Raise the temperature of the liquid in the convection fins just enough so I can circulate it back in?

Circulate …

Maybe it’s
not the liquid in the pipes that I need to get moving.

Maybe it’s Outer Earth itself.

It takes an age to find. I have to keep moving between touch-screens, looking for the right menu, and on the one occasion I glance at the heat readouts, I see that the internal temperature of the station has risen another half a degree.

“Come on,” I say, cutting through a tangle of readouts and obscure options. “I know you’re here.”

I actually scream for joy when I find it.
Rotation
speed
. I know that thrusters on the hull keep us spinning, slowly turning like a wheel. If I can increase the spin rate, I can move those iced-up pipes into direct sunlight.

It’ll ramp up the gravity. The G-forces will increase, pushing me into the floor. But what other choice do I have?

Another model of the station has appeared, showing position relative to the Earth, moon and sun. I spot the
controls for the rotation rate, and I crank them right up.

I expect to hear something – a dull boom, perhaps, as the thrusters power up. Instead, I feel a pressure between my shoulder blades. It goes from mild to excruciating in seconds, forcing me to my knees. There’s no pain, but my hands are
heavy – like I’m having to force them down simply to keep them sliding off the control panel. Raising
my head – it feels like my neck is going to split down the sides – I see that the on-screen station has begun to rotate faster. I need to spin it a full one-eighty to get the frozen pipes in the sun.

The gravity seems to get even heavier, and this time there’s real pain: a headache so intense that I cry out. I lose my grip on the controls, and my body thuds to the floor, sending an arrow of pain
into my arms when they hit the deck.

It would be so easy just to lie here. My entire body feels as if huge weights are pinning it to the floor. But I push myself up, groaning with the effort. I get my right forearm on the control panel, and raise my eyes to the screen. Chengshi has moved – it’s in direct sunlight. But the station is still spinning too slowly. If I don’t make this happen faster,
I’m going to pass out. There’ll be nobody to slow the spin rate.

Gritting my teeth, I reach upwards – it feels like my wrist is connected to the floor with huge rubber bands – and push the spin control right up.

Madala is more spry than he looks, hobbling along in an odd, loping gait. Prakesh and Indira have to jog to keep up. And he has friends. As they move down the levels, he stops to rap on hab doors. Their little group swells. First it’s joined by a family – husband and wife, their teenage son – and then a thick-set man with long, pale dreadlocks falls in alongside them, shouldering a
steel bar like it was made of foam rubber.

Dreads passes around a canteen, and everybody takes a long swig. Sweat is running into Prakesh’s eyes, stinging hot, and he has to keep blinking it away.

“So what we do?” says Madala, turning to Prakesh.

“What do you mean?”

There’s a shout from behind him. They all turn to see two men fighting, slamming into the corridor walls, tangling over what
looks like a single protein bar.

Madala gestures. “That. What we do about that? About everything?”

“I don’t …” Prakesh says, but he can feel everyone looking
at him. He drops his eyes for a second, and only raises them again when the man with the dreadlocks speaks.

“Madala says you saved him,” the man says. “He trusts you. That means I trust you. Tell us where to go.”

The rest of the group
murmurs assent. Indira nods vigorously, pounding her fist into her palm.

The words are on Prakesh’s lips, out before he can stop them. “We can’t do anything about the big fights. But maybe we can break a few of the smaller ones.”

“What good will it do?” The question comes from someone Prakesh didn’t even know was there, a skinny young woman with a stern face and short, spiky hair. She reminds
him of Riley a little, and he has to force himself to answer.

“We stop a small one, we get more people. Maybe we can stop one of the bigger ones.”

“You heard Darnell. We’re all gonna cook. We should be heading up to Apex and—”

“No,” Prakesh says firmly. “Apex is taken care of. Our job is down here.”

Dreads says, “Why don’t we go down to the mess? It was crazy when I was there earlier.”

Prakesh
nods. “All right.”

The woman with the spiky hair shrugs. “Whatever you say, boss.”

The Apogee mess hall is on Level 2, a square room with lurid orange walls – a misguided attempt, early on in the station’s life, to make the place cheery. There are big metal tables and benches scattered across the room. Some of the tables have been overturned, as if to act as barricades. And there are people,
dozens of them, clustered around the long food service counter and spilling out of the kitchens at the back of the room. The noise is cacophonous – the sound of people gone beyond fear and rage, into a kind of helpless panic.

Once more, Prakesh feels everyone looking at him, and when he reaches inside himself to figure out what to do, he’s surprised to find the answer waiting for him.

He turns
to the two biggest people in the group – the man with the dreads, and the teenager. “You two. Go break up as many fights as you can. Don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t try to hurt you. Everyone else, find something to make noise with. Pots, chairs, utensils.”

For a moment, nobody moves. Then Dreads grabs the boy and starts jogging towards the kitchen. Madala and Indira and the others begin hunting,
picking up anything that looks like it can make a noise.