Deck One - Main Hall.

“Do you have somewhere safe to go?” the other Sam asked.

I shook my head. “I woke up not that long ago in an auto-doc room. I don’t know what's happening.”

She pulled me to my feet and led me into a maintenance hatch hidden behind the slick plating on the walls. “That makes two of us.” She paused and looked me up and down. “Literally. Are we related? Clones? Do you know?”

It didn’t seem possible but there were all kinds of research projects on this station that didn’t seem possible. “Maybe. I don’t really know. I’d guess twins but I don’t remember having any siblings.”

“Me either,” she said, slipping into the dark confines of the maintenance shaft. “There’s at least one more of us out there too. And he’s a real asshole. He looks exactly like you, actually. I thought you were him at first.”

I followed her into the dark, sealing the hatch behind me. The maintenance duct felt safe. It was quiet here. Warm. Close. Nothing could get in here without us knowing. “What changed your mind?”

“You fell when that void closed around you. He wouldn’t have done that. He would have tried to kill it.”

“Kill it? How in the hell could you kill something like that? It’s a black cloud that speaks.”

She shuddered. “He would have found a way.”

“I hope I never meet him, then.”

She palmed open another hatch and slipped into a small tools room. Chambers like these were carved out at intervals along the maintenance tunnels. The spreadsheet licking idiots who built the stations thought that actually seeing a maintenance person would upset the walking money bags here on Deck One, so they made sure the technicians had a place away from their betters to take breaks or store equipment between jobs.

“I don’t know if we can avoid him,” she said. “He was pretty fucking intent on gutting me on Deck Three. I’ve been sleeping with one eye open ever since.”

“He was going to kill you? Why?”

She shrugged. “He never gave a reason, just busted into my room with one of the fire axes and started swinging.”

The tool room was scattered with empty water bottles and crumpled protein bar wrappers.

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

She rummaged through the discarded wrappers and came up with two unopened bars. “Well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Any data slate I’ve found says I’ve been awake and aware for about four hours, but I’ve slept too many times for that. By my best guess I've been here at least two weeks.”

“So,” I said. “Between four hours and two weeks. That’s a good, reasonable window. Do you have memories from before the station? Because I have nothing.”

She shook her head. “Me either. The first thing I remember is waking up to the gravity failing either four hours or two weeks ago. Nothing before that. I know my name is Sam and I’m part of the science team on Deck One. Clearly I’m cross trained for engineering or maintenance work, but that’s about it.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said. “So, we all look the same, different genders aside, we seem to have the same kind of memories. You asked if we were clones. Do you really think that's possible? And are you my clone? Or am I yours?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “There might be some records or something in the main security office at the Deck One Core, but I wouldn’t try to break in there if I were you.”

“No? Why not?”

She stood, opened an access hatch in the ceiling and pulled down a thin ladder. “Here, I’ll show you. I feel like you wouldn’t believe me otherwise.”

We climbed through the arteries of the station, worming our way deeper through the mess of cables and plumbing. The maintenance tunnels were an entirely different world than the station beyond them. Plain. Complex but uncomplicated all at once. I might not know what every wire did but I appreciated that they were there on display. The maintenance ways didn’t hide anything from you. There were no secrets here, just honest machinery staring you in the face. It was a hell of a lot better than the thin, useless veneer of civility on Deck One. Space was dark, dirty and dangerous, and it should look like it. There was no sense hiding what it really was behind white plasteel and polished chrome. That was just adding extra bullshit to cut through when things went wrong. And something always went wrong. Especially out here.

Clone Sam stopped and levered open the grille of an air vent. “Here, take a look.”

I slithered up next to her and peered through the grate. The maintenance way ran along the ceiling and it was a ten meter drop to the floor. It was an incredible amount of wasted space. Below us, there were dozens of riot troops in polished armour standing behind a series of hastily erected barricades. The fortifications rose in wide steps up to a sealed door. Each soldier carried a less than lethal pulse rifle and a more than lethal plasma pistol. The pulse rifle fired a small bolt of energy that would leave you twitching and gasping on the floor. The plasma pistol fired a bolt that  would leave you wondering ‘gee, did I always have a fist sized hole in my lung?’

“Who are they?” I asked. “I don't remember there being this much security.”

“To be fair,” said Lady Sam. “Neither of us can remember much of anything. But I haven't been able to figure out who they are or what they're guarding. I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to run that line and get shot to pieces.”

I leaned around her and squinted down the maintenance shaft. It ran straight for a while before diving down deeper through the core. I checked the map on my wrist. “If this shaft runs through the core, what are the odds it dips past the hangar?”

Sam shrugged. “It definitely goes past the hangar, but it's not like that does us any good. We'd be dropping straight past the security core, and I'm not going any closer to those riot troopers. Besides, even if we did get to the hangar, who's going to fly us out of here? You?”

“Yes.” I pushed past her and crawled closer to the core. The tunnels here were narrow. Too tight for us to fit side by side and so short we had to crawl on our hands and knees.

“You know how to fly?” She followed at a distance, moving hesitantly and keeping an eye on the security forces through the grate.

“I think so,” I said. “It doesn't seem that hard to figure out.”

She scoffed. “Not that hard? It’s literally rocket science.”

“And rocket science isn’t that hard. It’s not xeno-biology or pan dimensional physics.”

“And you know what those are?” she asked.

I paused and an ice cold wave of painful memory washed over me, driving an icy spike of thought through my head. “I … I do. I did my masters in pan-dimensional physics after my second tour with the galactic marines was over. I went back for a doctorate. Wrote my thesis on the creation of stable wormholes for faster than light travel.”

She froze. “We should turn around now. We can’t go closer to the core.”

I shook my head. I was going on whether she wanted me to or not. “If this is the clearest route to the hangar then that’s where I’m going. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

“Just promise you’ll be careful.”

“Sure.” I pushed forward, wiggling through a rat’s nest of loose cabling and squeezing through a tight cluster of pipes and O2 lines.

We must have been close to the core now. The equipment here was caked with dust and I stifled a sneeze.

“Shit,” said Sam. “Run. Run now.”

I couldn’t run even if I wanted to. I was packed into this damned tunnel like a canned ham.

A muffled voice echoed through the walls. “Who’s there?” It was my voice. Another Sam.

A molten fist of plasma hammered through the wall and sent a spray of stinging, red hot sparks into my face. There was hardly enough room to get onto my hands and knees but I ran anyway, scrambling towards the drop to the hangar. A face peered into the hole. My face. The ranks of security troopers outside were guarding … me. Or maybe they were keeping him prisoner.

I didn’t have much time to think about it. The ground disappeared from beneath my hand and I tumbled head first down the shaft to the hangar.