The bent boom still pressed on the capsule's crushed valve cage. Mara took its weight with the crawler while Nessa worked the local service drive. The capsule shifted on its clamps; Hester stopped them long enough to check the seal, then let them lift clear. Mara caught the crosspiece in the crawler's saddle and parked the boom against the station-side stop. It blocked their planned approach to the rail, but Hester could work beneath it now.
The damaged valve block came into view.
The regulator housing lay folded into the yellow cage. Hester's isolation valves were intact behind it; the rest had become a knot of steel with no room for a tool.
Hester inspected it on the close camera. "No."
Nobody had asked a question.
"You could take the—" Nessa began.
"No."
"I'm talking about the upstream—"
"I know where upstream is. The tool access is crushed. The replacement path would have to cross my pressure boundary with hardware we do not have. No."
Nessa's face flushed. "I wasn't going to tell you to open a hole."
"Then let me finish my inspection."
Hester finished the inspection and tagged the main bank isolated. Mara moved the camera to the station's remote-release box.
The external remote control had been torn open. A linkage remained, bent beneath the cover. Its surviving electrical path ended in crushed contacts. Mara could see why the station-side support would not release from the main console now. Nessa followed the cable with the camera, found a split sheath and closed her eyes.
"The local hydraulic controls still work," Mara said.
"I know."
"That's a way to finish."
"I know what I broke."
Nessa opened her eyes and reached for the local drawing.
At the dock Hester had laid out the portable breathing reserves. The small walking bottles stood in padded clips. Mara's larger reserve remained full, untouched because they had used the capsule feed until the collision and then the fixed shelter bank. Her short working bottle was partly spent from the pod and passage work. Hester's own carry reserve and Imani's were serviceable. None could restore the capsule's primary system; together they could feed its independent emergency manifold for a limited ascent with proper cabin circulation and carbon-dioxide scrubbing.
"I can get three up," Hester said. "On the inventory as it stands. We leave the work feeds connected until we close the hatch. We don't use these for walking around."
Mara looked at the bottles. "And after the local correction?"
"You come back. We connect. We go."
"If I need one at the bearing."
Hester's eyes lifted. "That's why you have the short one. It's still got a short job in it. Don't turn this into an argument about which of us deserves to breathe."
Mara had not meant to. She nodded and put the short bottle back in its clip.
Imani brought the fixed-bank reading. She had stopped apologizing for it. On a sheet beside the shelter she had drawn three columns and entered the time on each feed. The remaining bank would cover the work as planned, with margin for ordinary delays. Its limit would become the station's limit if they stayed too long. Mara sent the number to Sal with the damaged-system images.
His reply came after a brief delay. He had been at the cable drum.
"I need an honest departure state," he said.
Hester took the microphone. "Independent emergency ascent works. Cabin pressure, seal and scrubber intact. Main breathing delivery isolated and unrepairable down here. Portable supply supports return if managed as departure air. The external boom's clear. I've got work on the release linkage before I call departure ready."
"How long?"
"An hour if the fasteners behave. More if people interrupt me."
"I'll stop doing that. Mara?"
She reported the gray station remote, viable local controls and refuge requirement. Sal did not ask whose fault it was. He had the answer already and she was grateful not to hear it spoken over the work.
"Package is ready," he said. "The new descent can't solve your immediate breathing margin. Ninety minutes from a ready launch, and I won't put it into a lane with your loaded tram. Finish the move. Give me the stable dock. We support it."
"Understood."
"And Venn. You come back on Lin's capsule. That's the manifest I have."
"That's the plan."
He accepted the exact words, or chose not to challenge them in front of the others.
Mara went back to Nessa. The woman stood at the Bore Room console, holding the local bearing drawing as if she had worn a hole through it with her eyes.
"We need the route recalculated," Mara said. "Boom parked there means the cradle has to enter from the far side."
"It'll put the guide bundle across the bent support."
"We lift it over."
"Not with that boom."
"With the crawler. Then the boom takes load after the turn."
Nessa stared at the model. For a while Mara could see only resistance in her face. Then her fingers moved. She put a marker on the far support, another on the rail beyond it. She did the clearance sum mentally and checked it on the screen.
"If the tram leaves first, the bundle reaches that guide before the cradle does. We need the source moving with it."
"Agreed."
"Not after it. With it."
"Show me where you want the timings."
They worked shoulder to shoulder. The changed route was more complicated but cleaner in one respect: it put the moving source closer to the destination gradient for the last part of the crossing. Nessa found a place to rest the guide bundle so its weight would not pull at the patient manifold. Mara changed the cradle pickup to keep the foot that had hooked on the bore clear of everything.
Nessa made a mistake in the support angle, saw it before Mara spoke and corrected it violently enough to draw a line across the whole screen.
"Stop hitting it," Mara said.
"It's my tablet."
"It's also our only current load model."
Nessa put it down. Her hands were shaking. She folded them under her arms.
"I was going to test it," she said.
Mara waited.
"I wasn't going to put it on me until it had output. I know what happened in the capsule. I didn't forget."
"I know."
"It was gold. You saw it."
"I saw it."
"For a little while."
On the screen behind Nessa, the isolated cell's output trace lay flat. Mara left it there.
"I thought if I waited," Nessa said, "you'd get used to the refuge. Then that would be the answer because you'd already built it."
Mara leaned against the console. Her head hurt again.
"I was building it because you need somewhere alive to stand while we don't have an answer."
Nessa's eyes filled, and she turned away so sharply the carrier loop struck the table.
"I don't want somewhere to stand."
Mara began to answer. Nessa pushed the tablet at her, hard enough that Mara had to catch it.
"Put me on the trim. I can do the trim."
Mara set the tablet on the console. They stood side by side without looking at each other. From the dock came Hester's voice, counting a test sequence with Imani. In the Living Drum Kit asked Benji for water, without anger. A little ordinary favor, the sort of thing the room could still give him.
Nessa wiped her face with the back of her wrist. She looked at the repaired skin there, at the line crossing beneath it, and lowered her hand.
"Kit won't look at me," she said.
Mara glanced toward the passage. Nessa followed her gaze, her wet wrist held away from her shirt.
After a while Nessa picked up the tablet again. "The final support release. If the foundation keeps moving, it'll take both the rail and the old station load. The local hydraulics can unload the bearing, but not from this console."
"I saw the pod."
"It'll be close work."
"That's what I do."
Nessa looked at her forehead dressing. "You bleed too."
"I noticed."
A small, ugly laugh escaped Nessa. She pressed her lips together to stop it and failed. Mara laughed once with her, no relief in it, just two exhausted bodies recognizing something they could not improve.
Then Nessa turned the model around.
"Here's the route I can hold," she said.
Mara studied it. Not the one she had wanted, not the one they had drawn before the first loaded movement. A route made out of what remained.
"We use it," she said.