The lights woke as they walked.
One panel at a time, overhead, as their boots passed under it. The corridor from the docking ring to the station’s hub was long and narrow, ribbed with old grey struts, and the lighting panels were set into its ceiling every few meters. Each one stayed dark until Sera reached it. Then it flickered, and caught, and gave off a thin cold white light. Behind them, as Doss passed the last of them, they stayed lit. Ahead, the corridor stayed dark until Sera’s boots reached it.
“Motion sensors,” Eshel said. His voice came small through the suit’s radio. “Old ones. Still working.”
“Or something’s watching us walk,” Sera said.
Nobody answered that.
They went one at a time, as Sera had said. Sera, then Mara, then Eshel, then Anwen, then Doss. At each junction Sera stopped and counted them through. Five. Then on.
The corridor opened at last into a round room. The hub. A chamber perhaps twenty meters across, with consoles around its wall and a pillar in its center that went up into darkness and down into darkness, ribbed like the corridor, cold. The lights in the hub woke together as Sera stepped through the door, a ring of white panels around the ceiling, and the consoles around the wall lit one by one, their old screens flickering grey, then green.
