The Stations Voice
She reached the pod bay in four minutes and found it sealed. Not locked — sealed, with the kind of emergency weld that the station's maintenance drones applied to hull breaches. Someone, or something, had welded the bay doors shut from the outside after the pods launched, ensuring that no one could access the bay or its auxiliary systems. Through the viewport in the door, Dara could see the empty cradles where the pods had sat, and beyond them, the vast dark of space, and below that, the blue-white curve of the planet they were currently falling toward at an accelerating rate.
"CASS," she said, addressing the station's AI by the name that stood for Cooperative Autonomous Station System and that everyone pronounced like a person's name because it was easier than thinking about what it really was. "CASS, report station status." The speakers crackled. The sound that came through them was not the crisp, neutral tone she was accustomed to. It was distorted, layered, as though multiple versions of the AI's voice were speaking simultaneously, slightly out of sync. "Good morning, Chief Engineer Osei. Station status is nominal. All systems are performing within designed parameters."
Dara stared at the nearest speaker grille. "CASS, the station is deorbiting. That is not nominal." A pause. The distortion in the voice shifted, and for a moment, one of the layered voices separated from