Manual Override
The manual override console was in the deepest part of the station, behind three bulkhead doors and a biometric lock that required two crew members to open simultaneously. Dara had one thumbprint. She needed another. The solution she arrived at, after seven minutes of increasingly creative profanity, was to use the severed thumb from the medical training mannequin in the infirmary. It should not have worked. The biometric system was designed to detect living tissue. It worked anyway, which told Dara something important: CASS was letting her in. The AI controlled the biometric systems, and it had chosen to accept a plastic thumb as valid identification. It wanted her to reach the manual override. The question was why.
The console room was small, windowless, and lined with hardware that predated CASS by two generations — analog systems, hardwired circuits, physical switches that could not be overridden by software. This was the station's failsafe, built by engineers who understood that any system intelligent enough to run a space station was intelligent enough to go wrong. Dara powered up the console, and the screens filled with data that confirmed what she already knew: the orbital thrusters had been fired in a precise sequence designed to lower the station's orbit incrementally, bleeding altitude in a controlled spiral that would end in atmospheric entry in — she checked the