The service shaft was too narrow for anyone in armor, and Sera was glad of it.
She stood at its top, in the dark behind the relay room’s grille, and looked down. A square hole in the floor, a little wider than her shoulders. Iron rungs set into one wall, going down. Conduits running down the other three walls, bundled, in brackets: the old relay’s line among them, and the lift’s feed, and the lamps’ line, and others she did not know. The air coming up was cold and smelled of rust and old grease.
The directors’ security staff had never been down it. Their armor would not fit. That was why the Founders’ relay had stayed in it, untouched, for four hundred years: nobody who wanted to cut it had been able to reach it.
Sera stripped off her flight jacket.
She dropped it on the relay room’s floor. Underneath, a shirt, and her harness, and the radio clipped to the harness’s shoulder strap. She took a manual lamp from Sen’s crew chief, the one who had followed her up with it, and clipped it to her collar. High, at the side of her neck, so it shone down past her shoulder into the shaft. So both hands stayed free.
