The next day, Ali immediately began putting her plan into action.
This time, she was not on the abandoned, rotting deck level FC-N-01. Instead, she slipped back to the FC-N-03 deck two levels above through a secret fissure passage known only to her organization. She quickly blended into the crowd and began walking briskly in a certain direction.
The reason she could mingle with the crowd so freely was, of course, that this was the deck area aboard the flagship Vengeful Spirit where the lowest-level laborers, shipwrights, and some slaves lived. Inspections and patrols were extremely lax, and the noblemen from the upper levels rarely came to places like this.
This was also the residential deck where Ali's former home had been. She knew it extremely well and could walk through it with her eyes closed. Even without a legal identity, she knew how to avoid the eyes and questioning of certain patrol soldiers and lower-level administrators.
However...
Although it was called a residential deck, everyone knew that deep within this relatively unimportant section of the Vengeful Spirit, the so-called living quarters where the lowest-level crewmen and slaves huddled were hardly any better than the "Desperate Abyss." It was no exaggeration to describe them as a corner abandoned by the universe and the Imperium of Man.
As Ali hurried forward, all she could see was a layer of deck where dim fluorescent tubes barely outlined the narrow steel passageways called "streets," along with the densely packed living cubicles crammed along both sides of those steel "streets."
This place seemed even more crowded than the decayed and abandoned FC-N-01 deck. Perhaps because the air filtration systems were underpowered, the air seemed perpetually filled with a pungent mixture of dampness, mold, body odor, saliva, feces, and unknown chemical fumes.
Along with the