Dim lighting panels glowed along the ceiling, turned down to Moonlight Seven. The vines in the small hubgarden at the center of the crossroads drooped, suffering already from eighteen hours of darkness. Everything down here was dead or dying, like the body she’d found in the public toilet two decks up and three segments over. When she realized the dog was still on her tail she’d headed back home to the apartment she’d shared with her parents and younger brother, hoping the scent would confuse the hound while she sneaked away onto one of the other evacuation ships. But now she was trapped down here with it, and what she should really have done was head for the traffic control offices and barricade the doors -
Her training nudged her forward. This sector was given over to administration offices, station police, customs and trade monitors, and the small clump of services that fed them during their work shifts. Darkened office doorways hung open, unattended, dust already gathering on chairs and desks. Very deliberately, she stepped into the police station. Behind the counter a public notice poster scrolled endlessly, STATION CLOSED. Grunting with effort, she clambered over the chest-high barrier, then rolled down behind it.
The antique leather satchel Herman had told her to take banged against her hip; she cursed it and what it had brought her to. It was half-full of paper: rich, slightly creamy fabric-weave paper, written on with real ink that didn’t swim and mutate into different fonts when you stroked the margin. Dumb matter, the sort of medium you used when you really, really didn’t want some tame infowar worm to unpick your traffic. Nestled at the bottom of the bag was a locked cassette full of molecular storage — records from the station customs post. Records that somebody thought were important enough to kill for.