What wasn’t standard was the oxygen reclaimator humming in the corner by the entrance to the toilets and showers, or the tiny fans hastily clipped here and there to shove the air around.
The double-width doors leading further into the level were standard, but the wheeled rack of hard-worn extra-reinforced pressure suits and tool kits next to it didn’t belong here. The construction crew normally came down, passed through the decontamination airlock beyond those doors, and went out to forcibly gouge more work space from the island’s basalt.
The aliens’ arrival had scrambled Tritium’s entire schedule and shut down construction. The maze of tunnels and caverns down here was already legendary. Montague didn’t need to rush to expand it.
I had no idea why the stack of two dozen or so lightweig
