Lights We Cannot Explain
Mihkel had the bypass ready when she found him. It was a dull grey cylinder of machined aluminium about the size of her forearm, with a bundled loom of ribbon cable coming out of one end and a physical key of the old kind, a cut steel tab, clipped into a recess on the other. He had laid it on the bench in the fabrication shop the way a man laid out a tool he did not especially want to use. He looked up when she came in and he saw her face and he stopped what he was doing.
"What," he said.
"Raimo wrote me a message. Fourteen years ago. He said don't trust the wake tone."
Mihkel put down the torque driver. He did this slowly, in the way he did things when he wanted his hands to be empty before his next sentence.
"Raimo."
"My predecessor."
"I know who Raimo was. I am asking if you are sure it was him."
"I checked the metadata."
"Then I believe you."
He looked down at the cylinder on the bench. He touched the edge of it with one finger.
"Anneli," he said. "This changes what we are doing."
"It changes some of what we are doing. It does not change that we are going into deck eleven."
"No. It doesn't."
"But we are not going in through the main hatch."
He looked at her.
"Maintenance corridor," she said. "From the outside. Along the hull. Up through the inspection lock into the deep hold from below."
"That is three hours in suits."
"Yes."
"Through a vacuum section that