"Kenta, you know those accidents on the far side were far more than what they showed in the official reports. I kept in contact with Jim, from the recent Hab 5-"

"I know what you're going to say," Kenta interrupted, "and I've heard the rumors myself. Nobody wants to think about it, but so what if it's true? What can we do about it? We still have another 150 cycles on our contract before the taxi gets here to take us back to Pleiades Station."

"There's the medical evac shuttle on the geosync platform," Lee stated.

"And it will only move if the pencil pushers send the signal."

"That's my area of expertise. I recorded the signal last time it was used, then used a rainbow table to decrypt it, shift the phase-cipher blocks, and re-encrypt the next code in the rolling sequence. Problem is, I'm going to have to be very close to the shuttle for this hand transmitter to even seem like it is coming from one of the deep space relays."

"So how are you going to get up there?"

"The old hauler is still 10 klicks to the east, I'm sure we could convince it to rise from the dead," Lee said, referencing the original payload shuttle that had dropped supplies well before the human staff had even landed.

"And by we, I assume you mean me..."

"Yeah, you are about the only one on this rock that could ever get it going again."

"There's only one problem with that," Kenta said, a quiver entering her voice.