Thermal alley is quieter than life support and ruder about numbers. Okonkwo meets you there without moving her bruise much.

“Radiators,” she says, tapping two pale panels on a diagram. “In space, heat does not convect away. There is no air hug. We shine the extra energy out as infrared. If you close the radiators ‘for the storm,’ the particles do not care, and the computers cook. The storm is protons and magnetic weather. It is not a campfire you block with a lid.”

The radiator doors show STOWED. Someone’s automatic safe-mode thought stowed was safer. Safer for micrometeoroids, maybe. Not for boxes that have been awake and thinking.

A caution: CMD BAY TEMP HIGH.

Okonkwo’s eyebrow is a whole lecture. “Open them. Or invent a reason involving ‘weather’ and watch KILO get a fever.”