Screams pierced the darkness that had suddenly enveloped the repair bay. Roger grunted and rubbed his forehead, wondering if the darkness was caused by a power outage or the impact of his head against his workbench a few seconds ago.

Lights flared up a few yards away and he squinted. Okay, power outage, then. Those look like Lopez’s headlights.

The four beams drifted around as the car-sized, vaguely spider-shaped robot tumbled slowly in the air, giving Roger fleeting glimpses of the rest of the maintenance crew floating around him.

"Is everybody okay?" the robot said as the startled screams faded into a confused background mumble.

A few affirmative replies came out of the darkness.

"I dunno," Kamala muttered from somewhere behind Roger. "I can’t see shit."

"I can." Lopez held up one of his pincers, giving his version of a thumbs-up. "I’ve got my cameras on light-amp mode. I don’t see any open wounds."

"Same here." Asuka’s voice, off to the left. "Plenty of bruises, I bet. Maybe some broken bones. That was a hell of an impact."

Lopez’s headlights flitted over Kamala’s twenty-foot-long, snake-like body. Roger flailed, trying to grasp something to turn himself toward her.

"Kamala, you okay?"

"I think so. What the hell was that? Did something hit the station? Or..." Her yellow eyes widened. "Could it have been a bomb?"

"The way things have been going lately, it wouldn’t surprise me. The centrifuges have obviously stopped, so..."

"I’ve just tried to contact someone on my internal comlink," Asuka said. "There’s nothing--can’t even establish a connection."

The muttering in the background grew more panicked.

"I can’t get anyone, either," Lopez said.

Lights appeared around Roger, popping up at random, as the roughly two dozen people in the bay dug flashlights or lamps attached to headbands out of their toolboxes. Kamala appeared briefly in several of the beams, glancing around, brushing back the long, thick tentacles that she had instead of hair. She found whatever she was looking for, flicked her tail to spin herself in the right direction, and coiled the tip around the leg of her workbench. She pulled herself over to it, grabbed her toolbox, held it in two of her hands and opened it with the other two.

The lights moved off her and she faded into the blackness for a moment. A new light appeared on her forehead. She found Roger and extended herself toward him while keeping her tail wrapped around the workbench leg. She grasped his ankle and tugged him gently toward the floor, and he grabbed the edge of his bench.

"Hey," Lopez said, "can you get me to the floor?"

"Sure, just a sec." Kamala held onto Roger’s shoulders, let go of her bench and curled her tail around his bench leg. She floated out toward Lopez, clamped all four hands onto one of his legs, pulled on him and twisted her body, trying to fling him at the floor. He drifted toward it, activated his magnetic footpads when he was close enough and secured himself.

"Thanks, Kamala."

"You're welcome." She pulled herself back to Roger's workbench, reached over and patted Lopez's nearest leg.

Roger looked around the room again and frowned. Red light appeared to be coming through the viewports set into the floor at the edge of the bay. He braced his feet against his workbench, aimed himself at one of the ports, and pushed off. When he reached the port, he clamped his hands onto the edge and peered through it, unsure what to expect.

"What the hell?" Depending on the station’s rotation, he should have found himself staring at either empty space or Io, with Jupiter in the distance yet dominating the sky.

The vista before him was not even close. The sky was red and appeared to be made of gas and dust. A nebula, maybe.

Kamala floated over to him, put one of her left hands on the edge of the viewport and slipped both right arms around his waist and shoulders. He moved aside to let her take a look through it.

She gasped.

"Where the hell are we?" he mumbled. "Where’s Jupiter and Io?"

"Never mind that." Her voice was barely above a whisper as she turned her head, looking out at various angles. "Where’s the rest of the station?"

"What?" He pushed in for another look. Oh, hell. The repair bay appeared to be tumbling through space on its own. After watching the sky do two full orbits without spotting the rest of the cylindrical, O’Neill-class station or the nearby jumpgate construction site, a cold surge rushed up from Roger’s guts.

What he could see, however, was a lot of debris--and bodies floating in the void.

"It’s gone." Kamala shook her head slowly. "The station’s gone." She turned to face him and put her other arms around him. "Oh, shit."