Our guide led us through alleys, corridors, stairs. Most of them going down, most of them dark and dirty with sludge, rust, the occasional pile of polymer or metal garbage. Not much organics, so the smell was of lubricant and rust rather than rot. Yet another difference between a station and a planet.

  I was getting mighty tired of it. And of the woman's silence. My heart kept hammering from the fight. I wanted to punch something. Instead, I rushed forward, drawing even with the woman.

  "Wait up," I said, grabbing her poncho. It billowed out, a dark, grey cloud, before stopping her. "Who are you?"

  "Riina," she said, as if that explained everything. She pronounced the name with three-note falling tone.

  "Where are we going?" I said.

  "To Maiko." She turned away, tugging her poncho free with a soft motion. It left a cloud of dust behind when I let it fall. Smelled dry, and old. Felt like something dug out of storage. Why? Something wasn't right here. I was starting to hate the way things weren't what they seemed on Rimont.

  Like Riina. Her curt, soft words hinted at her being mindless, or subservient and deliberately obfuscating, but it didn't ring true. Her answers had the surety of someone used to command, as if her words were so obvious that a five-year-old would know, and she was humoring me by answering.

  It reminded me of my teachers at the Academy, the better ones who made you grow not because you had to, but because you wanted to please them. The phrase "born leader" wormed itself into my mind. If a leader would run around wearing a too-large, dusty poncho as a uniform. But true leaders didn't rely on uniforms.

  I glanced at Hao, to see if she was as suspicious as me, but she was following Riina. Born leader indeed.

  Riina stopped by an internal airlock, a pair of grey, cross-hatched metal doors with a zig-zag seal in the middle, and pulled an auto-hacking kit from her pocket. The kit was a small, fat, metal rectangle, magnetic on one side as it slapped against the metal and stuck to the airlock controls, the readout blinking purple and pink before settling on a dim white. The doors whooshed open.

  There was no airlock, only a set of stairs going down into empty sky. Except that we were on a station, not a planet. The sky was our floor, the ceiling of the level below us. Riina motioned for us to walk, the wind rushing down the doors and flaring her poncho. Pressure difference between floor and ceiling, or a broken regulator. What a crudmucking place. Hao entered quickly, stepping down though the meter-thick floor, but I hesitated.

  The stairs went round and round, stretching down around a central pole, a thin hand-rail and the grates on the metal steps the only thing separating climbers from a drop of a hundred meters or more. Fat access girders led away beneath the ceiling. They looked sturdy, but we wouldn't be walking on those. Crudmunching heights.

  Riina gave me a poke with a bony finger.

  "Walk," she said.

  I tried to stare her down, but her expression remained calm, as if humoring an obstinate child. Then she nodded gently toward the stairs, a thin, somewhat encouraging smile on her lips, and hopped a few steps down. Go ahead, boy, it's safe.

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  I ground my teeth. Shamed by a grandmother. Pride and fear fought a battle in my mind, pride narrowly winning out.

  The airlock closed behind us, the wind dying away. Not wind but pressure differentials. I tried not to think about that, or the long, long fall over the side of the stairs.

  The stairs vibrated with our steps. I forced myself to release the rail so I could slide my hand forward. My feet stumbled downward, my legs vibrating almost as badly as the stairs, hot, wet air covering us with a thin, greasy film. Somewhere nearby, there was a venting recycling vat.

  Covered in airborne vat-crud. Just what I'd always dreamed of.

  The climb went on forever, an orange searchlight passing over the stair every so often. Too far away to illuminate anything, but bright enough to blind me. I conjured a thread of force, and it came slowly, cold, drawn from the void. Conjuring it took me three breaths, an eternity long enough to make me clench my jaws in frustration. Crudmunching stairs, crudmunching Riina. Crudmunching Hao who bounded down the stairs without even holding on to the rail.

  Void them all. I forced another step, and another. Looked over the side at the tiny structures far below and gripped the guardrail until my fingers grew white. Void the entire station. Crudmunging idiots to build floors a hundred meters tall.

  Slowly, the ground came closer.

  Finally, the stairs ended at the top of a metal pylon, part of a dismantled building surrounded by heaps of metal, slag, filings. Empty barrels lay in piles, some leaking black fluid that stank like used welding flux.

  At least it was ground, of a sort. I didn't want to think that just below the surface was another sheer drop. Crudmunching stations. Hao had been right. We shouldn't have come here.

  Riina danced up the final steps toward me, the stairs not even trembling beneath her stained, brown shoes.

  "Hurry," she said. "Everyone can see you." She swept out with her arm, and I realized how well the dark poncho camouflaged her against the stairs and the refuse beneath.

  These people were used to hiding. My tan leather jacket, so fitting in the upper levels, stuck out like a moon against the night sky. I hurried down the last steps to the steel floor.

  The largest pile of metal junk had an entrance, a tall slit beneath a bent space-ship deck plate, its rough, black, anti-slip surface partially worn away. Hao had to bend double to get inside, Riina and I merely lowered our heads. Lucky that I don't have any problems with enclosed spaces.

  We followed a twisting passage, sometimes wide, often narrow, always low. Hao cursed behind us, occasionally forced to crawl on all fours. Served her right for skipping on the stairs.

  The passage bent slowly to the left, curving in on itself. Lots of air-flow through it, none of it stale. Only the usual acidic stench of molten metal, slag, and recycling vats. Wonderful place to raise a family.

  I didn't know how prophetic that statement was.

  We slipped past a protruding carbonite bar, the edge toward the passage honed to razor sharpness, and entered a home.

  It was a bowl-shaped cavern, set above the rough, steel floor. Centimeter-thick steel slabs partitioned it into open-topped dwellings. Everything was moist, and rusty, but the dwellings were painted in muted blues, browns, or greens. Fresh colors in a dreary place. People trying to make things better.

  They didn't seemed to have succeeded. Several hundred people milled about, most of them with the kind of bent backs and worried looks that gave the impression that they'd been beaten and lost for too long. Their mismatched clothes accentuated the mood of defeat. Only the children were running around, playing a complicated game of tag that involved several chasers, two balls, and lots of giggling. Kids will adapt to anything.

  "Where are we?" I asked Riina.

  Behind me, Hao exited the passage and stretched with a groan, then cursed as her head scraped against a sharp piece of copper wiring.

  "Downbelow-town," Riina said, holding out a pale purple kerchief to Hao. Hao touched her head, then accepted the kerchief, wiping away a thin trail of blood. "We will go see Maiko now," Riina continued, as if wiping away blood was the most common thing in the world. With a swoosh of her poncho, she turned and led us into the warren of dwellings and humanity.