He didn't know exactly what waited at the end of that shaft.
He suspected, given the way every ship he'd ever read about in old Earth stories worked, that it would be something important.
Important enough that they won't want it damaged. Important enough to be leverage.
It was, he would later reflect, either the smartest decision he made that entire night, or the single most reckless — and for a long stretch of the fight that followed, there wasn't a meaningful difference between the two.
The service shaft dropped him into a maintenance crawlway two decks lower, tight enough that he had to move at a crouch, the walls thrumming with a deep mechanical pulse that grew stronger the further he crawled.
