Eventually, the maintenance tunnel leads to a larger room--a ventilation hub and electrical access area. Sera was bringing up the rear, but once there, she closes her eyes, communes with the room full of machines around her, and says, "OK, it's this way."
She then leads the group through a labyrinth of tunnels, some wide, others narrow, and still others requiring they crawl again. Finally, they emerge in a small disused space, filled with the hum of machines, as well as the occasional thud and whoosh of space craft coming and going somewhere nearby. Sera turns to the others and says, "We are close to the generators for the station. From here, I can override the escape pod controls and launch them remotely, then, after a while, we can head through that access panel to the hangar and steal a ship. Hopefully. Just give me a moment..." She points to a seemingly blank wall when she mentions an access panel, and then she places both hands on a large bundle of wires and closes her eyes.
In her mind, Sera feels the form and purpose of this power grid. She extends her mind out along it, dancing across the vestiges of intention. There was the intention of the designer, making blueprints and holo models. Then there was the purpose and goals of the laborers, the men and women who worked to build the station. And finally there is the uses and intentions of the station residents today, accessing and manipulating power and systems for their own ends. Sera senses all of this, laid out in a grid, and she follows the threads until her mind arrives at the escape pods themselves, currently drawing small amounts of power to maintain their own internal systems and power backups. This is further than she has ever extended herself into a system like this, but she pushes on, leaving her feeling as though she is being stretched very thin over a great distance, but she perseveres. She presses her mind across the power coupling into the escape pods, identifies the navigation system and launch mechanisms, and powers them up. She enters a variety of coordinates for the navigation, mostly on different parts of the nearby planet, but a few at a local moon, and one straight out into deep space. Finally, she activates the internal sensors, hacking them to read as if there are one or two living beings within each one. Then, finally, she triggers their launches, almost simultaneously, as if their occupants had coordinated their launch to increase their odds of escape.
Finally, she draws her mind back toward herself, reeling it in like a fishing line, until se finally finds herself in her body once more. Her eyes open, her hand release, her knees buckle, and she passes out.
