We are in the walls, and we are not in the walls. Second squad skitters through the pipes; they've always been the faster of us. "Two, bearing north-by-northwest," they echo through the connection. Their shadows blaze like inkblots through the haze. We affirm, gritting in the heating ducts, that this is true: north-by-northwest, thirty-to-thirty-five beings, locked into sleep pods for the long haul. Intoned through the station's very bones, so our bodies can hear: "Listen up, we're locking on, imaging's on the move… "

We hold a prayer between our sympathic circuits. //Our ears are your ears, our eyes are your eyes also. We are also your fingers and gestures…// More symbolic than anything, seeing as we've got the senses, but not the parts -- but the master connection chirps in response anyway. Were we any closer to home, we might read the warp of our bodies' lips, sense their held breath melt into motion: feel that heat of the isolation chamber resolve into a thousand blazing mantras and error-correction subroutines. As it is now, there is only the affirmation. Like the far-off plucking of a string.

We are the imaging horde: the archetypal flies on the wall. (No, not even that: flies have the luxury of being. Twelve months in the black chambers will do that to anyone.) Physically, we are pure sense, we are nothing but sense, we are sense dulled down to nothing less than a gaping hole at the heart of being: which is to say, we trespass all, and sense all. Around us, the station sleeps, unaware. Second squad punches through a loose panel and descends into the hibernation room, chittering:

"It's empty."

That can't be right. The room flickers with darkened light.

"We're very positive."

We are now in the room. Thirty-two sleep pods lay arrayed like a mandala. Their lids open, damningly, jaws without teeth. In the middle, a gleaming pattern etched into the metal. Flashes of white, fragments of skull. A mass of rubber wires.

"Decoy."

The explosion tears through the hull, venting its contents into space. Non-fatal, but some of us are hurled out with it. (Cheap, to vent the material we're attached to.) The station rocks with the impact, airlocks sealing shut. First squad's weakened, but more or less functional. I reach out to second squad and find silence, cosmic dust, void.

"Fuck."