We gathered at a small platform, a steel mesh scaffolding holding us above the churning surface of the recycling vat. My nose was tingling and running, but had fortunately stopped working. Only the slimy, greasy, somehow sandy feeling in my throat reminded me of the stench that surrounded us.

  Kylians walked past us in ordered lines. More than should have been possible, given there was only two thousand in Downbelow-town. Maybe Maiko had managed to get others out through his escape hatches.

  It wouldn't last long. This was the darkness before the plasma barrage. Soon, Rimont station security, or the secs, would show up, and the Kylians were exposed, unarmed, and bunched up.

  They had amazing self-control. If I'd been one of them, I'd have run around in circles, shouting. Probably fallen into the sludge vats, too.

  "Captain?" Hao said, walking up as if she hadn't just dropped a hundred meters on a thin string of braided polyfibers.

  "You still got the map?" I growled by way of greeting. Some people look much too cheerful after falling.

  "Here," Hao said, unrolling Montar's map. It was a wonderful map, very detailed and completely indecipherable. Why anyone thought to put a map on anything but a com was beyond me. "But I can't find our position." Another point in favor of maps on coms.

  "Void," I said. "That's the back door to Montar's marvelous ship."

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  "That's the third section cross-flow," Riina said, looking under Hao's outstretched arm. "Three kilometers away, or so."

  Which might as well have been three lightyears. The Kylians kept on dropping from the ceiling. They were already clumps drifting down into the street beyond the vats, and their voices were like a wave on a sea, soft and loud at the same time. And then there was the gale blowing down through the hole in the ceiling.

  Any security warden with two brain cells to hook together and electrocute would be sending reinforcements. Or sending the secs. The streets were about to be clogged with armed men.

  "We won't make it," I said. "A marine assault division might go three kilometers on station against opposition, but it would be a bitter slog. Likely, they'd use their cruisers to burn out any opposition instead. Walking to Montar's ship is out of the question. I'm amazed we haven't been attacked yet."

  "Vats are Trimen Corporation," Riina said beside me. "Smelters are Milamber Corp, docks in this sector are Huragian. Grand Marshal's a Huragian. If they can hurt the Trimen, or accuse them of negligence by withholding troops, it's worth us stomping around in the vats."

  Which was news to me.

  "So we can walk away?" I said.

  "No," Riina growled. "Vats are low-impact areas. They're big cauldrons, really. Lots of steel, not much worth stealing. If we try to walk away, the Trimen will call in their own security, or the secs, maybe wrestling them from the Huragians. As long as we stay put, they might use our presence to their advantage. We dropped in from an Allain controlled part of third level."

  Politics. It's the details you don't know that kill you.

  "Still can't walk away," I said. "We need other ideas."

  Riina gave me a thoughtful look.

  "Well," she said, pointing to the map. "That is a cross-flow. And we're standing on a flow terminus. All we need is to follow the flow upstream."

  Hooray for another dive in the sludge.