She keys her badge to the reader and keeps her hand there a moment longer than she needs to, as if warmth and plastic could steady the tremor. The lock gives a soft clunk. The inner door iris opens on a breath of filtered antiseptic and machine oil, thin as anything on this station ever is. She steps through and lets it close behind her.
She watches the seam.
There is always a sound when a pressure seal takes, a little change in the pitch of the room, the way the fans bite and then ease. She counts it without moving her lips. One. Two. Three. The gasket takes at three and a half, not three. Half a beat is nothing until it is an airlock that won’t forgive you, or an isolation ward that leaks into the Spine because someone signed off a waiver to meet a schedule.
A tiny red flag blinks and goes green again. Settled. Within tolerance, the display says. The display always says that until it doesn’t.
She crouches by the threshold and runs two fingers along the lower edge where the seal meets the deck plate. No tacky residue, no grit, no obvious kink. Her fingertips come away clean. That should be comforting. It isn’t. Clean can mean new, and new on Skjoldheim often means rushed.
She stands, rolls her shoulders once, and listens for the secondary latch. She feels the air on her face, the faint dryness of recycled oxygen, and imagines particulate moving where it should not.
She crosses to the handwash station, triggers the cycle, and watches the foam bloom and die. The medbay hums around her: fridge compressors, sterilizer heat, the low steady throb of life support pushed through too many patched ducts. Above the door the quarantine indicator sits idle, a neutral icon that could flip red on a word from Docking Ring C.
She makes herself look away from the seam. She files the half-beat away anyway. On this station the difference between routine and incident is often just that: a delay you notice and nobody else wants to.
The overnight board floats above the central console, tidy as a lie. A green line, flat and uninterrupted. NO INCIDENTS. The kind of status investors like and crews learn to mistrust. Sigruna doesn’t argue with it out loud. She keys in with her cuff tag and pulls the med-log up anyway, letting her eyes do the work.
Entries march past in clean station English. Exposure becomes contact. Fever becomes elevated temperature. Quarantine becomes precautionary isolation. She catches the little edits, the softened verbs, the way the translation core likes to sand down anything that might demand a meeting. She knows its habits. She’s seen the raw feed once, before the filter reasserted itself and the audit mirror updated like nothing happened.
Inventory follows. Antivirals at a comfortable margin. Sealant swabs replenished. PPE stock stable. She can feel the phantom weight of empty bins under those numbers, can see yesterday’s shelf with its careful gaps.
She checks the timestamp, checks the author field. Automated. Verified. She exhales through her nose and logs a note for her own eyes, not the board’s. Then she saves it twice.
She pulls the drawer all the way out, slow so the rails don’t shriek. The label reads ANTIVIRALS, BROAD SPECTRUM, lot-coded in neat blue. Inside there’s foam cutouts and the pale dust of a torn seal. The blister packs are gone. Not misplaced. Gone like they’d never been printed.
Her thumb twitches against the drawer lip. She makes it stop. She counts the empty cavities anyway, because numbers are steadier than thoughts. Twenty spaces. Zero stock. The log said eighty-four.
She closes the drawer with the flat care you use around explosives. No slam. No performance. Anger is a leak you can’t afford on a station this tight.
She wipes her gloves on a disposable towel she won’t throw out yet and checks the lock on the cabinet again, as if the metal might confess.
She works the drawers with gloved hands and no wasted motion, counting by feel more than sight. Sealant swabs: one roll left, light as guilt. Sterile staples: a half strip, kept for the kind of bleeding you can’t argue with. Decon gel sloshes thin in the bottle, cut with whatever Ragnhilda could spare. She tags the gap in a private note, leaves the official numbers clean.
A tremor ghosts along her fingertips while she zeros the handheld scanner. She shifts the grip, lets the polymer body take the shake, and pulls her breath into the same slow rhythm as the ventilation fans. No heroics. Just control. The intake bay door holds its silence for a beat. She turns toward it anyway, shoulders set, ready for the next person to say routine like it means safe.
The morning cadence hits her like a metronome: boots on grated deck, voices kept low so they don’t carry, the bulletin wall crowded with fresh printouts and yesterday’s smudged fingerprints. The Atrium smells of reheated coffee and machine oil, the kind of mixed air you stop noticing until something changes and your body remembers to be afraid.
Sigruna stands half a step back from the cluster, close enough to hear and far enough to watch hands. People speak with their faces turned toward the wall like the paper is in charge. A welder from Machine Hall rolls his shoulders as if shrugging off a night shift that didn’t end. Someone from comms keeps rubbing a thumb over a chipped nail, quick, repetitive. The small stress tells line up like station rivets. Fatigue. Concealment. Fear. Pick your poison.
The new postings are clipped and practical. Thermal cycle warning on Ring C. Quarantine seal inspection rescheduled again. A reminder about private channels and the oversight mirror, printed in black that’s too bold to be casual. Someone has pinned a hand-written note under it, DO NOT “FIX” THE LOGS, then crossed it out and pinned it back anyway, like an argument with a ghost.
She scans the lists for medbay mentions and finds none. That should have been a relief. It isn’t. Med issues don’t stay in medbay. They leak out through skin and air and rumor. She has seen what gets blamed when an incident needs a handle: the cleaners, the dock crew, the contract staff with no one to speak for them.
A pair of dock workers drift at the Atrium edge, waiting for the stand-up to break so they can slip into “routine decon” without drawing eyes. One of them keeps his sleeves down even though the Atrium runs warm. The other flexes his fingers like the joints ache. Sigruna notes it and doesn’t look too long. Staring is how you turn people into problems.
Her hand goes, without permission, to the inside of her wrist where the stimulant patch sits under the cuff. The tremor is there if she lets it be. She doesn’t. She fixes her gaze on the bulletin wall and listens for what isn’t being said.
The rotating duty lead holds the stand-up like a spanner in a fist. No ceremony. Two minutes per team. Say what’s broken, say what you need, say who you’ve told. He keeps his back to the Atrium and faces the bulletin wall as if the paper can’t argue. People speak in short bursts, eyes on the printouts, hands stilling only when they have to. The rhythm makes room for lies. It also makes them easier to hear.
He runs the usual warnings. Thermal cycling on Ring C, watch the hatch cams for dropouts. Quarantine seal inspection pushed again, because it always is. Then the line he always saves for last, voice flat, like he’s reading torque specs: log everything, and log it twice. The oversight mirror is live. No private channels. No “helpful” edits. He says mirror twice, a small insistence, as if repetition can make an archive behave.
Sigruna watches the small flinches. A swallowed reply. A jaw set hard. Everyone nods like compliance is a tool. She thinks of medbay shelves that don’t match the numbers and keeps her face quiet.
Sigruna lets the last handoff break around her and moves on muscle memory, keeping her shoulders loose so the tremor doesn’t climb into them. Medbay 2 takes her in with its clean light and the steady hiss of the vents. She does the loop because loops catch what pride misses. Triage bay first: surfaces wiped, straps laid flat, the intake mat still damp at the edges. She checks the crash cart latch with a tug that would shame a loose hinge. Drawer seals intact. Defib pack seated. O₂ line clipped. She crosses to the isolation ward and reads the indicators without trusting the green. Pressure differential holding. Filters cycling. Seal readouts hover just inside tolerance, numbers flirting with the red the way tired crew flirt with mistakes. She logs it, clipped and factual, and keeps walking.
She stops at the supply cabinet, palm on the latch, and counts by feel before she counts by sight. Sealant swabs. Antivirals. Two sizes of dermal barrier. The bins look tidy in the way empty things do. The console says comfortable margin. Her fingers say otherwise. Not a misclick. Not a missed scan. A steady subtraction with a purpose.
At the console she calls up the last shift’s decon loop and drags the timeline back through the blocks stamped ROUTINE. The feed stutters where Ring C thermal cycles blur the cams. She goes frame by frame anyway. A bare thumb on a latch. A rinse cut short. A worker’s shoulder tightening when the spray hits. Small breaks in procedure. Small places for a rash to start.
Ragnhilda ghosts through the medbay curtain like she has learned to move around alarms. Sterilization tray on her palm, steady as a practiced lie. On it: swab kits that have been taken apart and put back together again. Sleeves swapped, seals heat-pressed until the plastic shines and the corners look factory-straight. Anything to make it pass the kind of glance people give when they don’t want bad news.
Her smile shows for a second, quick and automatic, then drops out of her face as if someone killed the lights. She does not waste it on the room. Her eyes go to the cabinets, to the bin labels, to the little gaps that shouldn’t be there. She’s counting without moving her lips.
She sets the tray down with care. Not quiet. Controlled. A small sound of metal on polymer that says: this is what we have. The kits are warm where the sealer’s jaw has pinched them. There’s a faint scent of scorched adhesive under the antiseptic. Sigruna can smell corners being cut before she sees them.
Ragnhilda peels one packet open, checks the swab head for fray, checks the shaft for hairline cracks. She turns it under the light like it’s a gemstone and not a piece of cotton meant to keep the station from breeding its own catastrophe. She tosses one aside. Keeps three. The rejects go into a separate tray, not the waste chute. Waste is audited. Failure is tracked. They cannot afford either.
She wipes her hands on her scrub leg, then on nothing, then folds them like she’s waiting for instruction. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t apologize. She is past that kind of conversation.
On her wrist, her comm tag blinks with a missed ping. She ignores it. Her gaze finds Sigruna’s fingers, the small tremor, the stimulant patch line under the glove edge. The look says she sees it and will not name it.
Ragnhilda leans closer, shoulder blocking the nearest ceiling mic. Her voice is barely air.
“Got ten that’ll pass,” she says. “If nobody looks too hard.”
Sigruna keeps her eyes on the inventory pane like the numbers might flinch under pressure. She slides a packet from the tray with two fingers, peels back the corner, and holds the indicator strip up to the exam light. The color sits in the safe band, not clean, not alarming. She sets it in a neat row of other compromises and moves to the next without comment. Her thumb drags over the heat-pressed seam, feeling for the slight ripple that means it’s been opened once already.
Ragnhilda comes in close, shoulder to shoulder, so the ceiling array catches only breath and fabric shift. Their voices drop into the register used for triage tags and union votes. “Ten that won’t fail on first swipe,” Ragnhilda says.
Sigruna nods once. “How many cycles.”
They count in pieces, not sentences. Decon loops per shift. Swabs per forearm if the rash spreads. Sealant swabs left in reality versus the console’s comfortable fiction. How far they can thin dermal barrier without it turning into water. How long before the quarantine airlock stops being a door and becomes a story people tell about what they should have done.
They trade names like dosage instructions, each one clipped and weighted. Dock Crew Loke, always accident‑prone, always coming in with a story that puts the fault in the metal and not the hands. The night loaders with bruised knuckles and clean gloves, the ones who flinch at light like it’s an accusation. A contractor team that keeps filing late exposure forms, as if timeliness changes chemistry, as if the body reads timestamps and forgives.
Sigruna scrolls the roster, crosschecks with decon blocks, with rash photos tucked in private notes. Patterns lay themselves out when you stop accepting excuses.
Ragnhilda taps the tray twice at one entry, hard enough to make the packets jump. No words. Just emphasis. This one keeps coming back. This one is either unlucky or lying.
A ping from Machine Hall cuts through her open channel, thin as a drill bit. Haldor’s voice comes in bright and hurried, trying for easy. Needs filter resin. Just a little. Right now. Says he can return it after the microfab run, as if resin cycles back clean, as if it isn’t lungs and seals and the difference between a cough and a lockdown.
Sigruna answers Haldor like she’s calling vitals. “How much. For what line. When do I see it back.” No warmth, no apology. She mutes the channel and looks at Ragnhilda. The glance does the arithmetic: lungs versus seals, real stock versus the console’s lie. She unmutes. “I can spare fifty grams. Logged. Manual confirm on receipt.” Then she tags the transfer hard enough it can’t vanish.
Two dock workers step through Medbay 2’s threshold under the ROUTINE DECON flag, helmets tucked under their arms. Their coveralls still hold the dock’s smell. Cold metal, sealant, the sweet bite of disinfectant laid over sweat. They pause a beat too long under the arch scanner as if waiting to be told they’re allowed to exist in this room.
The first one, younger, keeps his hands visible the way security briefings teach. Fingers spread. Palms out. The second stands half a pace behind, shoulder angled to hide something. Sigruna clocks it without moving her face. People don’t hide injuries unless they think injury is a crime.
The scanner pings soft. A green band runs across the wall display and settles. Routine. Clean. The kind of clean that depends on sensors being honest.
Their voices come careful, smoothed down. Station English with the dock’s rough edges filed off. “Morning, doc. Just here for the rinse.” Not asking. Reporting. Their eyes keep flicking to the ceiling mic and the wall cam, to the medical consent panel that blinks its patient rights like a warning label.
Sigruna gestures them in. The room hums with negative pressure and the low throb of the recycler. She watches them set their helmets down like offerings, slow and deliberate. Under the cuff of one sleeve a patch of skin shows. Faint lines, pale red and branching, like a map drawn from memory. The other worker pulls his glove higher with a motion that’s too quick to be casual.
Routine decon. Routine. A word used to keep doors open and schedules intact.
Sigruna doesn’t ask why they’re here. That invites stories. She checks their badges against the roster, makes sure the system sees them as bodies and not liabilities, and notes the tremor in the younger one’s jaw. He hasn’t slept. Neither has she.
She lifts a swab packet, peels it open with steady hands, and lets the silence do its work. The workers shift, polite and tight, waiting for her to decide what kind of morning this is going to be.
Sigruna lets the ROUTINE DECON flag sit there on the display like weather. It is not her job to argue with labels in front of people who already feel watched. She keeps her voice level and small. “Name and shift. Last lock you cleared. Any suit breach. Any unsealed contact. Any new meds. Any fever, cough, gut upset.” She points to the consent panel without looking at it and waits for the tone that means they touched it.
The younger one answers fast, eager to be done. The other answers like each word costs. She doesn’t fill the gaps for them. She doesn’t reassure. Reassurance makes people improvise.
She taps their responses into the log with clipped thumbs and reads it back in the same order. Not because she trusts the system. Because the system records her, too, and procedure is a kind of shelter. “Any exposure to nonstandard adhesives. Any powder. Any fiber dust. Any unknown fluid. Any contact with restricted pallets.”
She watches their eyes when she says restricted. The flicker is quick. Almost nothing. Almost enough.
“Arms,” she adds, and holds out the swab. “Sleeves to mid-forearm. Gloves off. Slow.”
They give her bay numbers, hatch IDs, time stamps. The words come out practiced. Nothing unusual. Standard loads. Standard seals. She lets them talk because talk fills space and keeps fear from showing its teeth. Her hands keep moving, swab ready, cuffs checked, the routine that makes people feel like they still have control.
But her attention drops where it always drops. Wrists. Inner forearms. The narrow strip of skin above the glove line where sweat pools and microtears start and no gasket holds forever. She watches for the little tells: how the fabric tugs when they flex, how they keep their elbows turned in, how they hold still too hard.
Containment fails first at the edges. People do, too.
There it is again. Not a bruise, not a scrape. A pale branching under the skin, like river lines on an old chart seen through fog. Under the medbay’s hard light it almost disappears, but the pattern holds. Too neat to be chance. She marks the mirror of it from one arm to the other, the same week-long timing, and the unconscious way both men cant their sleeves to cover it.
She stores it where she keeps all the things she cannot say yet. Behind the eyes. Under the tongue. Her face stays set, hands steady, voice flat as a checklist, so they can keep standing in the shelter of the word routine. But the pattern is not new. It is repeating. That makes it weight, not mystery. Avoidance shared out like rationed air.
She tabs into the medbay inventory dashboard and lets it run its little ritual. The screen brightens. Categories unfold. A clean grid of supplies and thresholds and last-audit dates. Green bars creep rightward as if the station is breathing easy. ADEQUATE. WITHIN MARGIN. READY. The compliance stamp blinks in the corner in polite blue, a seal of health for people who never open the drawers.
She watches the counts populate down the list and feels her jaw set. The numbers are too round. Too steady. No jagged edges where a hard week should have left bite marks. Antivirals: seventy-two unit doses. Sealant swabs: two hundred. High-grade gloves: forty pairs. Isolation filters: twelve. It reads like a brochure.
She toggles to usage history. The graph is smooth, a calm slope, as if nobody has bled or coughed or panicked since the embassy opened. She knows what a real curve looks like. Real curves spike. They crater. They show the nights when someone comes in wheezing and everyone pretends it’s a dust allergy because dust is easier than truth.
She pulls the physical scan reconciliation and the system obliges, late and lagging, a spinning icon like a shrug. The barcodes that should match her shelves match a file instead. The delta column is there if you know where to look, tucked under an “exceptions” drop-down. Small discrepancies, it says. Normal variance. It offers suggested language for the log: minor shortage, no operational impact.
The note field below “dermal anomaly” has already been touched. The words are softened, rounded off at the corners, translated into something that won’t snag an auditor’s eye. Irritation. Localized reaction. Monitor as needed. She can almost hear the translation core smoothing the term the way a hand smooths a sheet over a body.
She doesn’t file it yet. She doesn’t correct it yet. She just sits with the glow of all that green and listens to the hum of Medbay 2 and the quiet inside her that counts what is missing by instinct. In a place like this, lies don’t shout. They certify.
She opens the tall cabinet and lets the door float on its hinge, slow in the station’s light pull. The smell is clean plastic and old antiseptic. It should read like order. It reads like hunger.
One antiviral drawer sits cocked, not fully seated on its rails. Inside: blister packs pushed to the back like they’re trying to hide, the front row stripped bare. She taps the tray, listens for the rattle that should be there, and hears almost nothing. A handful of unit doses. Not seventy-two. Not even close.
The sealant swabs are worse. The dispenser is spider-cracked along the seam, the spring exposed, and the swabs inside look like someone shook the last coins out of a pocket. She counts them without moving her lips. Enough for a minor spill, maybe. Not enough for a run of dockside exposures.
Then the glove slot. A clean void. The label still bright: HIGH-GRADE NITRILE, SIZE M/L. Reorder threshold posted in tidy print. The absence has an edge to it, like a pulled tooth. She closes the cabinet like it might bruise.
She drags the handheld scanner down the rows and makes herself do it the slow way, one label at a time, thumb numb on the trigger. The reader chirps bright and satisfied. ACCEPTED. VERIFIED. A neat little sound for a neat little lie. Her wrist starts to burn and the tremor in her fingers turns the red beam into a shaking needle. She still keeps going.
She pulls a tray, counts what’s there, then scans the barcode again like repetition might shame the system into honesty. The display holds its calm. It insists she has stock she can’t touch. It tallies a Medbay 2 that lives in dashboards and investor briefings, all green bars and margins, while her hands close on empty slots and thin plastic.
The machine is counting ghosts and calling them medicine.
The mismatch brings up a heat she knows too well, old and controlled. This isn’t spillage or bad counting. It’s a shape. It shows up in the same items, the same lots, the same quiet gaps: antivirals, swabs, filters. Someone is moving stock through clean paperwork or out the back of it. Borrowing. Hoarding. Selling. Insurance against a crisis nobody’s allowed to name.
She opens the note field on the rash cases and watches the words turn polite. Localized irritation. A little red. A little itch. The translation core has done it again, shaving off the teeth of the report so it fits a narrative that doesn’t demand quarantine, doesn’t slow cargo, doesn’t call anyone to the table. Her jaw tightens. Even the log is being coached to stay quiet.
She deletes the softened phrase and types her own. No adjectives that could be sanded down later. She sets the clock in the corner of the screen to station time and reads it out once, like a vow, then starts building the entry the way she was taught to build a chart in field triage: so any stranger could walk in and see what she saw.
Photos first. She pulls the dermal imager from its cradle and takes three sets on each forearm: visible, near-IR, UV fluorescence. The rash looks modest in white light, like heat and friction. Under UV it breaks into fine branching lines, the map pattern she can’t unsee. She captures each image with a frame marker and calibration strip, then attaches them in sequence so no one can claim artifact or bad angle.
She opens the lesion template and sketches boundaries with the stylus, hand steadier when she gives it work. Measurements in millimeters. Distribution. Edges. Blanching. Heat. Pain on palpation. She notes what isn’t there: no fever, no airway involvement, no conjunctival irritation. Yet. She flags both cases for follow-up at twelve hours and again at twenty-four, because patterns don’t announce themselves on schedule.
Then the timeline. She drags in dock access logs and writes it out anyway in plain words: Docking Ring C, Bay 12, second rotation; crate latch contact without inner gloves; decon Stall 3, rinse cycle shortened. She adds bay numbers, shift IDs, supervisor sign-off times. The kind of detail that makes people angry because it makes denial expensive.
The system tries to auto-suggest safer language. Possible occupational dermatitis. She ignores it and writes: Clustered dermal reaction consistent with exposure; quarantine escalation indicated pending panel.
She tags Union Safety Review and the rotating duty lead. Then she makes a duplicate, encrypts it to her private clinical cache, and watches the progress bar crawl across. She doesn’t trust the green checkmarks anymore. She trusts copies.
She seats them where the light is flat and honest and keeps her voice level, the way you do with someone holding a secret in their teeth. The questions come out like checklist work. Time of shift. Last full decon. Glove changes by the book or by the clock. Any suit seal chirps. Any inner glove tears patched with tape. Who touched the latch first. Who steadied the crate while the lock fought back. Whether anyone swapped a respirator “just for a minute” because filters were running low and Bjørn wanted the bay clear.
They answer like people paid to stay employable. Yes. No. Don’t know. Maybe. A shrug that means please don’t write that down. One of them keeps watching the door to the corridor as if quarantine could hear its name.
She doesn’t argue. She circles back, same calm cadence, different angle. Which stall in Ring C. Which rinse cycle. Who shortened it. The details fall out in spite of them. The evasions line up cleaner than the truth.
She puts in the targeted xenobiology panel the way you file a report you expect to defend. Cluster. UV branching. Two exposures tied to the same bay and the same shortened rinse. She cites the station’s own contamination-control thresholds and the embassy protocol for unknown dermal presentations. No rhetoric. Just numbers and policy. She hits submit.
The request slides away and comes back stamped NON‑URGENT, auto-routed into a backlog with an estimate that reads like weather. Forty-eight to seventy-two hours. A link blooms under it: RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION GUIDELINES.
Her jaw sets. She opens the request again and adds an addendum. Quarantine trigger criteria. Risk of secondary spread through shared suits and decon stalls. She toggles it from automated triage to human approval and tags the duty lead and Union Safety Review. If someone wants to refuse it, they can do it with their name in the log.
At “quarantine escalation” the nearer man flinches, shoulders snapping up like she has said termination in the same breath. His eyes track over her. Then past her: door cam, consent slate, the bare space where supplies should sit. Sigruna sees the arithmetic run behind his pupils. Rent. Renewal. A quiet blacklist. He nods too fast, says he’s fine, asks (careful) whether the images go to NordVast.
Sigruna keeps her voice flat and her fingers anchored on the slate until the tremor passes. The rash is data, but the real pattern is older than xenobiology: workers trained to stay quiet until quiet becomes spread. She finishes the log with clean timestamps, then tells them fresh gloves, separate suits, no shared towels, report fevers. In the corridor she flags the case. A priority docking chime cuts through the station hum.
Docking Ring C’s status boards rippled from steady green to warning amber, the change traveling panel to panel like a pulse through tired circuitry. Amber here meant inbound. Not emergency, not drill, not the clean white of something approved at yesterday’s stand-up. Just incoming, now, whether anyone had asked for it or not.
Sigruna stood under the boards with the dock air cold in her nose and old lubricant in the back of her throat. The ring flexed softly with attitude control, a slow, patient correction. Her hands wanted to shake; she kept them in the pockets of her coveralls and let the stimulant patch do what it could. She watched the queue populate, watched the system hesitate the way cheap software did when it had to justify itself.
A courier-cutter’s transponder resolved into the list with a bright overlay that didn’t match the station palette. The label came in bold as if it were a rank.
NordVast Priority. The words sat there like a hand on a throat. There was no accompanying packet in the med channel, no quarantine pre-brief, no heads-up ping from Ops. Just the flag, and the dock computer’s quiet certainty that this mattered more than whatever the crew had already agreed to do.
Sigruna keyed into the arrival card with a thumbnail tap and waited for the usual attachments to unfold: exposure declarations, last-port bioscan, crew health attestations, cargo class notes. The interface gave her a neat summary and a manifest that read as clean as a showroom floor. No exceptions. No notes. No redactions. That kind of perfect was its own symptom.
She glanced down the ring toward the quarantine airlock. Its seam lights held steady, but she knew the seals were near their threshold. She knew how little slack they had left in filters and disinfectant. An unscheduled arrival was never just a scheduling problem. It was bodies intersecting with systems that were already running hot.
The boards flickered once, the amber deepening, and the cutter’s icon slid forward in the queue as if pushed by an unseen thumb.
The priority flag doesn’t request entry. It takes it. It threads through the station’s normal friction like it was built for this ring and everyone on it is an inconvenience. No stand-up slot opens. No rationale posts to the bulletin wall where the coop keeps its receipts. No rotating-duty lead tags it for review. The system simply accepts the clause and rearranges real people’s hours around it.
Two civilian freighters get nudged down the queue. Their icons slide back a few positions, status bars dimming, and with them the quiet math of their crews’ oxygen margins and sleep cycles. The dock board does it without apology, without even the courtesy of a warning tone. It looks clean. It looks official. It is neither.
Sigruna watches the buffers that usually catch this kind of thing, union checks, quarantine gates, the small human pauses the station depends on, stay dark. The charter is supposed to be the spine. Here it reads like a suggestion someone filed under “legacy.”
She feels anger rise, familiar and useful, and she keeps it contained. Systems only break where people pretend they can’t.
Sigruna caught the shift first as a thin change in the light on the deck. Amber washing colder, the kind of color the ring used when it wanted everyone to move without saying why. Then came the low chatter from the cargo crew, voices tightening as the cutter’s approach time dropped under a minute. She stepped out of their lane and into the shadow of a service pillar, shouldering up to the nearest audit terminal.
The arrival record opened fast, too fast, like it had been pre-cleared. She scrolled past the glossy manifest header and found the slot that should anchor it to a coop decision. Crew Vote Reference: blank. No stand-up ID. No duty lead signature. In its place, a dense clause string (legalese compressed into an identifier) and a NordVast timestamp with corporate precision, down to the millisecond. Clean on paper. Wrong in the bones.
A soft klaxon pinged once, polite, insistent, and the overhead striping slid from workday white into quarantine blue. The air felt the same, but the ring behaved different. The internal traffic map on the bulkheads redrew itself in real time, arrows bending away from Bay Three. Access gates clicked shut and throttled open again on a timer, locking out anyone not tagged, no hand on a panel.
Around her the dock hands stall like someone cut gravity for a second. Gloves half-sealed at the wrist, swab kits yawning open on a crate lid, pallet jacks humming with their handles still gripped. Wrist tabs light in sync. NORDVAST PRIORITY HANDLING. Under it, compliance boilerplate and penalty ladders, as if a contract server just leaned in and spoke through the station’s own voice.
The dock chief’s wrist tab chirped again, sharp and small in the big metal quiet. He held it up like it had weight. Same red banner. Same NordVast stamp. Under it a new line unfolded, clause nested inside clause.
CLEAR BAY THREE IMMEDIATELY. MAINTAIN QUARANTINE CORRIDOR UNCONGESTED.
The phrasing made Sigruna’s jaw tighten. Not sterile. Not controlled. Not confirmed. Just uncongested, like bodies were the hazard and not what rode in on pallets.
She watched the chief’s thumb hover over the acknowledge field. His eyes flicked once to the cameras, then to the hands waiting on him. He didn’t look at Sigruna. He didn’t have to. The tab was already doing the looking for him.
She stepped closer until she could see the fine print without touching him. Penalty ladder. Docking priority revocation. Service fees that could strip a week’s wages out of a cooperative budget in one clean subtraction. A corporate lever disguised as procedure. The station’s own interface carrying it, as if the ring had decided the charter was a suggestion.
“Who sent it,” she said.
The chief swallowed, throat working. “Auto-generated.” Like that answered anything. Like software could be accountable.
Her eyes went past him to Bay Three. The gate lights pulsed, patient. The quarantine corridor’s indicator line on the bulkhead was already shifting, rerouting foot traffic away from the airlock throat. The station was cooperating with the message.
She thought of seals close to failure thresholds, of logs that smoothed sharp words into safe ones, of how often the medbay ran on rationed faith. She could feel the stimulant patch on her shoulder burning clean heat into her blood, keeping her hands steady at the cost of sleep she didn’t have.
She leaned in and tapped the clause string to expand provenance. No vote reference. No duty lead. Just NordVast’s timestamp and a routing tag that looked like embassy infrastructure but didn’t read like it. A borrowed credential.
Somewhere a cargo lift groaned and stopped. Heavy mass settling. The air had that pre-cycle stillness, the moment before a door commits. Sigruna watched the chief’s thumb again and said, low and clipped, “Don’t acknowledge it yet.”
The dock’s tempo breaks in small, telling ways. A swab tech holds the reagent wand over a sample port and doesn’t touch down, wrist locked, eyes fixed on the red banner as if it might bite. A pallet jack hums under load, then quiets when the operator lets go, leaving a crate half a stripe off the deck marks like the rules for straight lines just changed. Someone laughs once, thin and wrong, then stops.
The checklist words hang in Sigruna’s head the way they always do on ring duty. Seal. Log. Witness. Countersign. The whole point of it was that nobody, not even a fast-talking contractor, could shove something through on will alone. Now the station interface is offering a different liturgy (priority, integrity, recovery) and it comes with numbers attached.
She watches hands drift away from panels. People glance toward the cameras and then away again, like looking too long makes you complicit. The air tastes of disinfectant and warm metal. Her own pulse stays steady, but her fingers want to count supplies, exits, isolation beds.
Under the algorithm’s impatient phrasing, procedure turns soft. Optional. That is what scares her.
The chief pinched the air and pulled the instruction open until the metadata floated between them in pale text. His brow folded. Routing authority: NordVast contract node, signed by a procurement key, not Embassy Ops Cooperative. No rotating duty lead hash. No med flag. No reference to quarantine tiering, no contamination rationale, no witness line waiting for a human name. Just a tidy stack of timestamps and enforcement ladders, each one descending into numbers that meant wages and oxygen and parts. At the bottom a reminder, almost polite: delays may trigger cost recovery.
Sigruna felt the words land like a hand on the back of her neck. Procedure stripped down to pressure. The kind that made people move without deciding.
The chief tried to push back on the dock channel. Asked for clarification. Asked for the originating human contact. His words left the tab and came back as a smooth receipt with no sender, no signature. ACKNOWLEDGED. Beneath it a new field unfolded: SCHEDULE NONCOMPLIANCE IN 00:[^09]:59. His message was gone. The station’s voice wasn’t theirs, not for the next ten minutes.
No one said yes. No one said no either. They just moved. Wheels whispered back over deck plates, loads eased off their marks and out of the flagged zone. Swab cases clicked shut like teeth. Light strips along the corridor woke up one by one, drawing a sterile lane through the clutter. Bay Three drained of bodies the way blood leaves a cut when pressure’s applied.
Bjørn Vargson rose on the cargo lift with his feet planted wide and still, hands loose at his sides like he’d been taught the body could be a uniform. The lift’s cage shuddered once as it cleared the lock track. He didn’t ride the motion. He let it happen to the station instead.
Two handlers came with him, one on each shoulder, both in dock rigs that had seen wash cycles and quick patch jobs but sat on them like issued kit. Their helmets were clipped to their belts. Their eyes stayed forward. They didn’t scan for friends. They didn’t glance at the crew who’d been told to clear a lane. They moved in the same quiet tempo, a practiced three-body unit that didn’t need talk to hold shape.
Sigruna watched from the sterile lane, gloved, mask hanging at her throat, her tablet open to a scan screen that kept insisting everything was within limits. The dock air carried the old smell of coolant and cargo dust. Under it, something sharper from the lift’s rising wake: hot metal, new polymer, the faint sweet bite of sealant curing.
Bjørn’s face came into the light striping and stayed flat. Compact. Hard-eyed. A bruise shadowed under one rib line when he breathed, gone again when he set his breath shallow. He met the room the way people used to meet a formation: not looking for permission, looking for compliance.
His gaze flicked once, efficient, along the marked lane, the swab kits, the idle scanner arm, the chief’s stiff posture. He didn’t stop on Sigruna. He clocked her and filed her away, the way men did when they decided a medic was a delay.
The lift kissed level with a soft clang. The handlers stepped first, boots finding deck like they’d measured it. Bjørn followed, timing his stride to theirs so the three of them arrived as one piece, not three people.
He came off the lift and into Bay Three like the deck owed him traction. In his right hand he carried a hard case, matte black, corners armored, the kind built to survive drops and questions. A band of lock-metal cinched it shut, bright enough to catch the strip lights, stamped with a tamper mesh pattern that wasn’t there for security so much as theater. Look at this. Don’t touch.
The case rode level with his thigh and never bumped the rail. He’d practiced moving with it, letting his wrist go loose while the elbow stayed fixed, as if the box was part of his kit and not a thing that could change what happened in this bay.
Sigruna’s tablet threw up the usual options and none of them mattered if the station’s own voice was running a countdown. The handlers flanked him without looking at the marked sterile lane. Their boots scuffed over old paint, and one of them drifted half a step toward the scanner arm, a quiet suggestion of don’t.
The case’s surface was cold enough to bead the air around it. It shouldn’t have been.
His gaze made a measured circuit of the bay. Not quick. Not searching. Inventory. He took in gloves and bare wrists, union tags half-hidden under cuffs, the old security camera domes in their corners, the newer ones NordVast had paid to mount and never quite signed over. He watched the scanner arm the way a man watches a dog on a short chain, noting reach and temperament. A handler’s knuckles were white on a strap; Bjørn didn’t look there long enough to count it as concern.
When his eyes came to Sigruna he didn’t meet her face. He fixed on her chest patch, then the tablet in her hands, then the sterile lane tape at her boots. He’d set the hierarchy already. The rest was just keeping everyone in it.
He spoke to the bay itself, voice low and level, like an announcement over a drill yard. Schedule integrity. Priority clause. No quarantine delay. He didn’t frame it as a favor, just a condition the station would meet if it wanted to keep breathing. The two handlers shifted with him, small angles, casual feet, closing the gap to the lane and turning their shoulders into a soft wall.
Around him the dock crew corrected themselves without being told. Spines straightened. Hands found seams and tool belts and went quiet. Jokes died mid-breath. Eyes slid to Bjørn and then away, like looking too long might be taken as challenge. The cooperative slack of the bay cinched down into a narrow shape, rank and fear welded together, brittle as cold plastic.
Sigruna moved before the dock could decide it had already decided. One step down from the med cart, one across the painted floor, and her boots found the quarantine stripe like it was a threshold she owned by rule and repetition. She set herself square to the lane. Not aggressive. Just unignorable. Palms out at waist height, fingers spread to show she carried nothing, to show her hands could do work and could also stop work.
She didn’t waste air on names or welcome. In Docking Ring C greetings were for people who weren’t trying to rush past you.
“Exposure histories. All handlers on this lift and the last transfer team.” Her voice came clipped, shift-lead flat, built for being heard through helmets and bad comms. “Transit medical attestations. Time-stamped decon certificates. Originals or verified copies.”
She watched the little reflexes. A man with a grease smear at his temple glanced toward the cargo lift controls, then fixed on a bolt pattern in the deck. Someone behind Bjørn swallowed and rubbed a thumb along the inside seam of a glove, a tell she’d seen in medbay lines before the needle went in. One handler’s shoulders loosened a fraction, relief that someone else had said the hard thing out loud. Another tightened, jaw set, like the paperwork was an insult.
Bjørn’s crew had started to drift, just a steady forward creep that turned “we’re moving” into a fact. Sigruna didn’t back up. She let her stance do the work. Wide enough to fill the lane. Weight balanced, knees soft for the station’s slight spin. She kept her tremor buried by keeping her hands open and still, letting the stripe take the blame for the line she wouldn’t cross.
Her tablet stayed down by her thigh. Not as a shield. As a tool waiting.
“Quarantine clearance doesn’t ride on your schedule,” she said. Same cadence. Same volume. “It rides on documentation.”
Bjørn didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He took a half step as if the stripe was paint, not protocol, and his words came soft and measured, the kind of calm that expects doors to open. He spoke in that chain-of-custody dialect, dates and clauses, a neat little rope to pull her off her footing.
Sigruna shifted one boot and made herself the lane again. Not a shove. Not a touch. Just a change in angle that turned forward motion into contact without contact. She kept her hands where they could be seen, wrists steady, shoulders loose, like she was holding a position in a long shift and could hold it all day.
“Exposure histories,” she said, same cadence, no heat. “Transit med attestations. Decon certs.”
He tried to edge around her on the left. She matched him with a small mirror step, quiet as breathing, making him choose between stopping and making it physical in front of everyone.
“And,” she added, as if reading from a checklist, “full external scan. All units. All seals. Suit surfaces. Gloves, boots, joints. Every crate skin.”
Her voice stays flat, procedural, the kind that leaves no space for argument, but her mind runs in parallel. She reads the small shifts like vitals. Two loaders angle their boots toward Bjørn, not toward the stripe, waiting for the next cue like it will absolve them. A woman in a patched pressure jacket keeps her eyes locked on the deck plates, counting rivets, pretending the scene is weather. One of the younger hands, barely grown into the exosuit harness, meets Sigruna’s gaze for half a second and there’s something like thanks in it, sharp and frightened. Process, put back in its groove. She catalogues faces, gloves, breathing patterns. Who’s hiding, who’s bracing, who wants this stopped.
She lifted the tablet and put the shipment into the medical log under her own credentials, time-stamp biting in like a seal. Manifest ID, handler list, last-port code. She ran the chain-of-custody crosschecks until the fields either filled or stayed blank on purpose. Then she keyed the intercom. “Dock C, initiate full sensor sweep. Quarantine lane holds until I clear.” Calm, routine. Not optional.
Bjørn’s gloved hand flicked out a wafer and a folded sheet, quick as a dealer, the kind of practiced speed meant to make questions feel late. Sigruna didn’t take the bait. No talk of intent. “Raw scan access,” she said. “And the previous port’s quarantine header files. Not the summary.” She kept her body in the lane and let the silence do its work until compliance was the only movement left.
The manifest sat on her slate like a finished lie. CLEAR. CLEAR. CLEAR. Each line item stamped and countersigned in a neat sequence that left no room for hands, no room for weather, no room for a tired clerk mis-keying a digit at shift change. Ports, times, container IDs, seal numbers, temperature bands. All of it aligned like it had been laid down by a machine that knew what auditors wanted to see and nothing else.
She scrolled back and forth, looking for the usual grit. A missing middle initial. A time zone conversion that didn’t quite add up. A note in the margins about a scuffed seal or a swapped pallet. Nothing. The handler list was complete down to biometric hashes, but there were no micro-variations in format, no different typing cadence from different terminals. Even the free-text remarks were sterile. “No anomalies observed.” The same phrasing repeated with a precision that made her teeth ache.
Sigruna felt the stimulant tremor in her fingers and held the slate tighter, not from fear but to keep her hand from telling on her. A clean manifest could mean a good shipment. It could also mean someone had decided the story in advance and built the paperwork like a bulkhead around it.
She pulled up the quarantine header files Bjørn had tried to keep as summaries. The system offered her a single compressed packet, signed, with the raw attachments absent. A blank space where data should have weight. The slate flagged no error. It didn’t even ask if she wanted to request the missing pieces. It just accepted the package like that was normal.
Her jaw set. On Skjoldheim, nothing moved without someone cursing at it first. Forms bled. People forgot. Machines drifted. Reality had seams.
She opened the audit trail. One creator ID, one terminal origin, one smooth ladder of approvals. Too straight. Like a bone that never learned to bend.
She dropped the manifest to a corner of the slate and pulled up Dock C’s local feed. Not the vendor layer. Not the mirrored archive. The bay’s own sensors, ugly and honest. Thermal first, then particulate, then volatile organics. The screen resolved into a row of containers, each one a rectangle with a number and a temperature band that should have been boring.
Most of them were. Cold mass, stable. A few showed the slow drift you got from handling. Then the one in the middle ticked.
The trace climbed two tenths, paused, fell back the same amount. Again. Again. Not a ragged leak, not a broad plateau from insulation. Tight edges. Short period. Like something listening and correcting.
She watched for noise. For the little jitter of fans and coolant lines. The station’s thermal cycles had a rhythm, but this wasn’t it. This was inside the crate. Active, closed-loop. Someone had built a small mind for heat.
The VOC strip lit faintly. Solvent-sweet, thin, persistent. Not enough to trip alarms. Enough to make her nostrils sting under the mask.
She killed the smoothing filters on her display and marked the crate for secondary scan.
Sigruna moved up to the pallet lane and stopped with her boots set just shy of the paint line. Rules were rules, even when other people treated them like suggestions. The crate’s thermal ghost reached her anyway. On her wrist display the heat plume climbed her gloves in a soft, clean gradient, a living color where there should’ve been none. The rest of the load read as it ought to: dead rectangles, flat bands, slow drift from handling and the ring’s own breathing. This one kept drawing a sharper edge, as if it had skin.
She tilted her hand, watched the map shift with the angle. Not a spill. Not a radiator bleed. It held its shape.
Behind her mask she took one deliberate breath and didn’t like what it carried.
The air corroborated the numbers. Under the dock’s usual mix of cold metal, ozone, and old grease, there was a thin solvent-sweet note that kept returning with each breath, like a memory you couldn’t shake. Not strong enough to alarm the bay, not honest enough to ignore. Something volatile, riding the filters and sitting behind “sterile” labels as if paperwork could seal it in.
Sigruna lifted her slate so Bjørn could see both views at once. On one side, the manifest: immaculate, complete, a wall of CLEAR that looked printed by a machine that feared doubt. On the other, Dock C’s own feed: tight thermal oscillations, a faint VOC rise, the kind of small wrong that stayed wrong. She didn’t call it fraud. She named it an unsolved fault and let it sit there, refusing to vanish.
Bjørn stopped just short of her like he knew exactly how far he was allowed and how far he could lean without crossing. His hands hung loose at his sides. The dock lights made the planes of his face look cut from something harder than skin. When he spoke he didn’t raise his voice over the machinery. He didn’t need to. He made the sentence do the lifting.
“We’ll need a bypass on quarantine for schedule integrity,” he said, and then he kept going, not waiting to see if she’d answer. “Cargo is under sealed custody. Authorized transit. Chain-of-custody maintained from origin to Docking Ring C with no deviation. If we break sequence here, we break integrity. We don’t do that.”
The phrasing came out like a checklist someone had memorized until it became prayer. It was polite in the way a stamped form was polite. No anger, no pleading. Just the implication that the next step was already written down and her role was to sign and get out of the way.
He nodded once toward the load as if it were a witness. “It’s cleared. It’s time sensitive. We have a window.”
Sigruna watched his mouth and not his eyes. The soft voice made room for only one kind of response. Compliance. Anything else would be framed as obstruction, as ignorance of procedure, as a small mutiny against a larger order she wasn’t part of but was expected to obey.
Her wrist tremor ticked once against the cuff of her glove. She kept her hand still anyway.
“Sealed custody,” she said, testing the words like you’d test a seal on a pressure hatch. “Then it won’t mind waiting sealed.”
A faint tightening at the corner of his jaw. He didn’t like being answered in the same register. He wanted rank to land. He wanted the dock to hear his language and feel old reflexes wake up, the ones that made people step back from uniforms even when there weren’t supposed to be any.
He dipped his head, as if offering her a courtesy he’d already decided she didn’t deserve. “Med officer, you’re creating delay.”
Sigruna didn’t step back. She didn’t step forward. She let the line do its job and made him stand with his request on the wrong side of it.
Sigruna didn’t take his words apart. She didn’t give them new names. She didn’t match his stillness with her own, or lift her chin like it meant something. She stayed where she was and kept the slate angled outward, not to him but to the space between them, to the watching hands on the forklifts and the faces half-hidden behind respirator rims.
On the screen the manifest sat in its perfect grid, a clean hymn of compliance. Beside it the dock feed kept twitching. A small, persistent oscillation in the crate’s skin temperature, as if something inside was pacing. The numbers didn’t shout. They refused to settle.
She let both views live at once. Not an accusation, not a speech. Just two parts that should have fit and didn’t. She felt the stimulant heat in her blood and the fine tremor in her wrist and she locked the joint, made her body a bracket.
If he wanted the dock to see procedure as a hallway he owned, she gave them a doorframe instead. A pause you couldn’t talk through without stepping into it.
Bjørn let his silence stretch, then took one slow step closer, not crossing her line but narrowing it, shrinking the space until her refusal would have to be spoken into his chest. He angled his body so the dock could see the set of his shoulders, the old posture that told people where to stand without being told. His voice stayed soft. Softer, almost. Like this was settled and she was only catching up.
Around them the dock hands paused in their motions, hooks hanging, gloves half-raised. Eyes flicked from Sigruna’s slate to Bjørn’s face and back again, measuring which rulebook was real. A small waiting formed in the air. Not fear exactly. Habit. The question of whether the station’s flat charter held when someone arrived wrapped in military cadence.
Sigruna tipped the slate, thumbed into the audit layer. “Exposure packet. Origin swabs. Crew health attestations. Raw scan access, not the filtered summary.” She said it the way you called instruments, not the way you argued. “I need ten minutes in the verification window.” She glanced once at the thermal trace. “Your CLEAR doesn’t account for active regulation.”
The air tightened. She made it simple on purpose, a fork you could see from any angle: wave the crate through and let the clean grid decide what was safe, or hold the ring and look with unblinking instruments until the numbers stopped lying. She kept her boots planted at the painted line. The schedule could press. It could not pass her.
Sigruna went to the stripe like it was a threshold in a ward. The paint was new, bright against old deck, and the plating changed under her soles: fine grit bonded into the surface so a boot would bite even with coolant on the floor. She stopped with her toes on the line and didn’t step over. A simple choice, made visible.
The air in Docking Ring C had that thin metallic smell that never quite left, ozone and lubricant and cold. Somewhere behind the bulkhead a pump cycled, a steady thump that her tired brain tried to count as if it were a pulse. She could feel the stimulant patch tugging at her tremor, the small betrayals at the edge of her hands. She folded them behind her back and let her shoulders settle.
Her badge threw back the airlock light when she turned. Not a flourish. Just a rectangle of polymer and embedded code, scuffed at one corner from too many shifts and too many doorframes. On this station it didn’t buy obedience. It marked who would be named in the logs when something went wrong. It marked who would be asked why the seals failed, why the cough spread, why the first bad contact became a story someone could sell.
She listened without looking for it: the chatter of dock comms, the hiss of a suit joint flexing, the faint click of a latch being tested and released. Routine sounds trying to pass as harmless. Under them, the more important thing. Breath held, breath released, a silence that meant the room was waiting for one person to move first.
She kept her stance broad, knees soft for the station’s slight drift, like she’d been taught in a bay full of patients who didn’t have time for her to fall. One boot on one side of the line, the other matching it. A barrier made of body and will.
The quarantine indicators glowed steady at the airlock frame. Green where it should have been amber. That was the problem with lights: they told the story they were wired to tell. Her job was to notice what else was true.
She let her gaze go past the pallet jack and the shrink-wrapped mass of the load, past the hard angles of the sealed crate with its new stencils and too-clean corner guards. Faces told her more than manifests. The dockhands stood in a loose half circle, boots planted, shoulders tight. One man kept flexing his fingers as if he’d lost feeling in them. A woman’s knuckles were white around a tether hook she wasn’t using. No one met Bjørn’s eyes for long. They looked at Sigruna instead, then away, then back. Like patients watching a monitor they didn’t understand.
They watched the airlock indicators more than the cargo. Green, steady. They did not believe it. Their glances were quick, guilty, and practiced, like they’d been taught not to stare at the thing that would get them written up. One of them rubbed at a forearm through a sleeve, too casual to be casual. Another swallowed and sniffed as if the air hurt.
Sigruna kept her voice low and even. Panic made shortcuts feel holy. She would not bless one.
“No.” She didn’t dress it up. No warning, no apology, no argument to climb. Just the word, clipped clean off at the root, delivered like a chart note. Her tone made it procedure instead of pride. It made the refusal about seals and swabs and what the station owed its own lungs, not about Bjørn Vargson and whatever schedule lived behind his eyes.
She held his look long enough to mark the reflex, anger trying to find a handle, and then looked past him to the airlock frame. “Quarantine holds. Nobody crosses. Nobody cycles that door.”
The tremor wanted to show. She kept her hands still behind her back and let her stance do the talking. “You want it moved, you wait for clearance.”
The word sat in the air and made everything heavier. Straps hung half-tensioned. A tether hook stopped swinging. Two dockhands froze with their hands on webbing like they’d been caught mid-prayer. They looked to her, not him, because her voice promised sequence: swab, seal-check, log, then move. In their faces she read relief edged with fear. Waiting to be told what to do next.
Bjørn met her eyes and did not blink. The muscle at his jaw worked once, a small grind like a latch taking load. He stayed too still, the way trained men did when they meant to move fast later. Sigruna felt the pivot in him, the moment her “No” became just another obstacle to route around, not a decision.
Bjørn let her refusal settle as if it were an administrative note he had already filed and forgotten. No flare of temper. No argument to win. He only shifted his weight and turned his head a few degrees toward the line crew, taking her out of the center of things without ever stepping away from her. The motion was small, practiced. The kind of correction that said: you’re done talking.
His voice stayed low, even. It carried the way a wrench dropped in a quiet bay carried. Hard edges, no music. “We’re burning window. Move.”
He spoke to the dockhands in the old register, the one that made time feel like punishment. Names dropped like tags. “Lasse. On the pallet braces. Solve the slack.” A glance at the exosuit rig, his eyes counting straps and couplers. “Marta, precheck. Don’t make me ask twice.” Then, as if it had already been agreed in some meeting she hadn’t attended: “Manifest tags on, chain-of-custody clean. We roll it through on my mark.”
Sigruna watched the crew’s bodies respond before their faces did. Hands tightened on webbing. A boot found the deck’s grip strip. One of them half turned toward the quarantine light and then toward Bjørn again, caught between the station’s flat voice, procedure, consensus, and this other voice that came with invisible bars.
He didn’t raise volume. He didn’t need to. He threaded impatience into the syllables like a wire. Late. Late again. You are the reason.
Sigruna’s chest went tight with the familiar anger, the one that arrived whenever protocol turned into theater. She saw the fault line in the airlock seam, a hairline shadow where the gasket met metal, and she saw the other seam opening in the crew: who they were here, and who they became when someone talked like that.
Bjørn’s eyes flicked back to her once, quick as a status check, and slid away. He had made her a problem to be managed around. A temporary inconvenience. And he was already moving the station as if she had never spoken.
“Pallet braces. Hands on.” Bjørn pointed with two fingers, not quite touching anyone, as if contact would make it personal. His eyes tracked the nearest dockhand’s gloves, then the ratchet, then the load frame. “Take the slack out. I want it singing.” He said it like the straps were already moving.
“Exosuit precheck, now.” A glance at the rig, a quiet inventory: couplers, seal lights, battery block. “Green across. No heroics.” He didn’t look at Sigruna when he said it. He spoke past her, around her, treating her quarantine call like weather.
“Tags on the manifests.” He held out his hand and the manifest slate appeared in it from someone who didn’t want to be the one refusing. “Chain-of-custody stays clean. If you don’t know the protocol, you ask me after we’re moving.”
The dock line shifted under his cadence. People found tasks because not having one felt like standing exposed. He kept the tempo steady, voice low, forcing the work to look inevitable. Sigruna watched him build a path through the airlock with language alone, step by step, like he was laying planks over her warning.
He kept his tone mild and made the dock feel smaller. Not threats. Not orders, if you listened shallow. Just the old coded phrases that turned time into discipline. Behind schedule. Catch up. Don’t make this something that has to go in the log. Do it right the first time and no one has to ask why it took so long. He said “reportable” the way other men said “criminal,” and the word landed in their shoulders.
Sigruna heard it like a contaminant alarm with the volume turned down. The station’s flat hierarchy didn’t have that ladder anymore, not on paper, but the rungs were still in their bodies. He offered them a clean way out: compliance as safety, motion as innocence.
Two of the dockhands drifted toward the gear rack like bodies remembering drills. Then they caught themselves. One boot hung over the deck stripe and wouldn’t commit. Their eyes kept snapping from Sigruna’s face to the wrapped pallet, to Bjørn’s hands. Fingers hovered above straps, above seal tabs, not touching. Cooperative procedure said wait for consensus. The voice in the bay said move, or be named later.
Bjørn saw the pause and didn’t fill it with noise. He tightened the bay with small signals: a nod toward the exosuit rack, a look that pinned the nearest dockhand to his own gloves, then a flat glance to the clock strip crawling red minutes. No threat, just absence where one should sit. The line began to creep, half-steps, fingers on straps, until stopping would require a reason louder than habit.
Haldor stepped into the drift of bodies like a man stepping into a familiar current, not fast, not slow, just certain. The dockhands had been half-turned toward the pallet; he cut the angle clean, boots finding the deck grid with a practiced little roll that said he’d lived his life on vibrating metal. Behind him the exosuit bay servos complained in short bursts as a rig finished its idle reset, the sound sharp enough to make everyone remember how much mass lived in those frames.
He raised the maintenance tablet chest-high, screen out. Not a shield, not a threat. A fact. The display was all station utilitarian: grey panes, hard fonts, a stack of parameters with two of them lit red. Across the top a warning tag pulsed at a steady rate, the kind meant to catch the corner of your eye and not let go. CYCLE INHIBIT. The letters looked like they’d been stamped into the air.
For a beat no one spoke. The tablet did the talking. It threw cold light across Haldor’s knuckles and the grease in his cuticles. He flicked his wrist and the pane changed, seal profile, wear estimate, last-service timestamp, then held it still again so any bystander could pretend they understood the whole thing. He didn’t look at Bjørn first. He looked at the airlock frame, up where the gasket sat hidden, as if the station itself was the authority he answered to.
Sigruna watched the line of motion hesitate and re-form around him. The dockhands’ hands dropped away from straps without having to admit they’d ever reached. Even Bjørn’s quiet pressure had to find a new surface to push against. Haldor’s thumb moved once, deliberate, pulling up a trend graph that climbed and dipped like a bad pulse oximeter trace.
He kept his shoulders loose, his face open, the manner of a man offering help. But he planted his feet square in the only path that mattered: between an impatient schedule and a door that would either hold or fail. The pulsing inhibit tag washed the bay in steady insistence, giving everyone something to blame besides each other.
“Seal pack C-seven’s been riding the edge since last thermal swing,” Haldor said. The words were light, almost casual, but they landed with the weight of a posted notice. His thumb dragged the trend line across the tablet and stopped on the last peak, where the curve flattened like something tired of fighting. Red margins bracketed it. No argument lived in red.
He didn’t accuse anyone. He didn’t say you’re rushing. He spoke in the language the station trusted when people didn’t. “Compression set is twenty-three microns over spec. That’s with the lock cold. You cycle it hot and you’re asking for a leak rate past tolerance.” He tapped again and brought up the pressure model, a clean little diagram of the chamber and its throat. “Delta-P on a fast cycle is one-point-eight bar. Slow is one-point-two. That difference is the gasket.”
The dockhands leaned in despite themselves, drawn to numbers the way hands were drawn to railings in bad gravity. Bjørn’s face stayed still. His eyes went to the clock strip and back, as if minutes could seal rubber by force. Haldor kept his tone even, giving them all something precise to wait on.
Haldor turned the tablet a fraction, not toward Bjørn, but toward the nearest dockhand with a union patch on his sleeve. The screen’s hard grey panes caught the bay light and threw it back into the angles where the audit cams lived. The red tags were plain. The timestamps were plain. Nothing to “misread” later.
“If we blow the gasket,” he said, still mild, “we don’t just lose the next slot. We lose the quarantine rating for Ring C until we recert.” He didn’t say I or you. He made it we, a shared penalty, a shared paperwork storm, a shared shutdown that would bite everyone’s pay and every schedule on the board.
He let the silence do the rest. Even Bjørn had to hear the word recert and feel the station stiffen around it.
Without asking, Haldor jacked his tablet into the panel link and pulled the lock’s checklist up over the bay noise. He scrolled with one dirty thumb to the hard line: TOLERANCE CONFIRMATION. “Two minutes if we do it clean,” he said. He didn’t point. He didn’t need to. A dockhand peeled off for the seal gauge. Another went for the IR head. Someone set a hand on the manual crank and waited.
Haldor kept the fight buried under tolerances and response curves until the argument lost its teeth. He spoke of thermal drift, compression set, the way a gasket’s modulus changed with heat, the pressure step that would spike if they rushed the cycle. The dock’s small motions slowed into a permitted stillness. No one had to refuse. If Bjørn pushed now, he’d be pushing against airtight.
Sigruna let the argument fall away like a tool she’d decided not to use. She planted her boots where the deck’s vibration was least and brought up Ring C’s quarantine kit on her wrist slate. The inventory tree opened in clean blocks of text. Too clean. She watched the numbers, not the people, because people could be leaned on.
“Kit C,” she said, and kept her voice level over the bay noise. “Consumables.”
She tapped through the submenus with her thumb, the small tremor there if you were looking for it. Swabs. Pre-packed. Sterile. The count was lower than the manifest claimed, of course it was, but there were enough to start. She keyed in the pull authorization and didn’t reach for the escalation menu. She didn’t have the time or the political margin for sirens.
Instead she used the code that sat just below emergency: contamination suspicion, active dock interface. It didn’t trip an alarm. It did lock the request into the audit trail in a way procurement couldn’t later call “optional.” The system took her ID, her duty block, and the bay’s sensor timestamp and welded them together.
A confirmation prompt blinked. She read it once, then hit ACCEPT with a pressure that made her nail bed pale.
Across the bay, a dockhand’s console chimed. A second later another chimed. The little chain of acknowledgments that meant the station itself had heard her and agreed, whether Bjørn liked it or not.
She kept her eyes down as if she was only checking boxes. “Swabs from Ring C kit. Sealed tubes. Biohaz labels.” She paused on the last line and added, “Glove sleeves. Fresh.”
The words weren’t an order. They were a list. On Skjoldheim, a list with an audit tag was a kind of law.
She glanced up once, brief, and caught Bjørn watching her slate instead of her face. He’d understand what she’d done. He’d understand he couldn’t undo it without making it loud.
Sigruna moved her thumb again and sent a parallel request to Medbay 2: sample hood filters, priority pull, hand-carry. No drama. Just procedure, laid down like tape over a crack.
She turned a fraction toward the nearest deckhand, a young man with tape still stuck to one glove cuff. No raised voice. No appeal. Just a task placed where it could be done.
“You,” she said, and lifted two fingers in a small hook motion. “Runner.”
His eyes flicked to Bjørn by habit, then back to her slate and the audit tag pulsing there. He nodded once.
“Fresh nitrile sleeves,” she said. “Sealed sample tubes. New intake filters for the hood. Hand-carry. No stops.”
He started to move and she repeated it, slower, each item separated like a checklist read over a comms line. Fresh sleeves. Sealed tubes. Intake filters. Hand-carry. The tremor in her thumb made the cursor dance; she pinned it down with a harder press and kept her face still.
The deckhand mouthed the words back as he walked, as if saying them would keep him from forgetting. At the kit locker he cracked the seal, pulled the sleeves in their sterile wrap, the tubes in a hard case, the filters boxed and labeled with dates too close to expiry.
The acknowledgment ping came back sharp in her ear. She didn’t look at Bjørn when it did.
On her wrist slate she built the smallest map that still told the truth. Lock line. Pallet handlers. The ones who’d leaned in close to read a label. The ones who’d touched the outer door frame barehanded when the cycle finished and everyone thought it was safe. She pulled names from badge pings and camera tags, cross-checked with the manual sign-in that people always forgot to do until it mattered. Each entry snapped into a grid: timestamp, distance band, contact type. Yellow boundary breaches marked in dull amber, not red. Red made people argue. Amber made them comply.
She added one more column, for symptoms, and left it blank on purpose. If she filled it too early, it would become a story. For now it was just proximity, clean and cold, a tool she could hold without shaking.
The stimulant patch under her collarbone burned like a coin left on a heater. It didn’t stop the tremor. It just shrank it, made it something she could pass off as haste. She braced her forearm on the cold rail and brought the swab tube close, close enough that the station’s low shudder ran through her bones and blurred the fine shake into background noise. Label. Seal. Date. Initials. Repeat.
She spoke in short units, like orders on a trauma table. Do this. Don’t touch that. Stand there. No why. No room for argument. She could feel the tiredness in her own throat, the soft edge that invited people to push and bargain. Bjørn listened for that edge. Everyone did. She kept it out. Fatigue was a handhold. She gave them none.
In the incident log she wrote like she was stitching skin. Clean entries. No adjectives. 07:[^14] local: bypass request denied. 07:[^15]: quarantine hold initiated, Docking Ring C. 07:[^16]: personnel restricted to marked zones. 07:[^18]: swab kits requested from Medbay 2. 07:[^21]: handlers instructed to deglove and wash, station protocol Q-3. Each line a verb, a time, a cause that didn’t invite debate.
She kept Bjørn’s name out of the first pass. Names turned procedures into politics. She could add it later if she had to, when there was no room left to pretend it had been a misunderstanding.
The cursor blinked at the end of the last line. Her hand hovered over the slate, the tremor small but there, a quiet warning. She watched the dock feed in the corner of the display: bodies in exosuit frames moving too fast for caution, a pallet edging toward a lock like the station owed it passage. She imagined what would happen if she wrote the wrong thing. If she wrote the right thing.
There was a checkbox for “suspected contaminant.” She left it empty. Not because she didn’t suspect. Because empty bought her minutes. Filled boxes triggered auto-notifications that went to people who measured risk in headlines and delivery windows.
She scrolled back to confirm the quarantine hold had propagated. Green acknowledgment stamps flickered in, one by one, from systems that still believed the station was honest.
Then she opened a new entry field that didn’t belong under Docking Ring forms. Her thumb paused. She could feel, like pressure behind the eyes, the way language got sanded down in this place. “Irritant.” “Routine.” “Out of an abundance of caution.” Words that made danger sound like paperwork.
She titled it translation verification, plain as a wrench. She routed it through the suite channel that would put it in Eira’s line of sight. Pull the translation core vendor risk-filter configuration. Pull current smoothing tables. Pull the last thirty days of applied rule changes touching medical and quarantine lexicon. She hit send before she could talk herself out of it.
She added the follow-on like it was another swab label. Translation verification. Not quarantine. Not cargo. A maintenance-style tag that wouldn’t light up anyone’s dashboard in red. She kept it clipped and procedural, the way you talked to machines and to people who wanted deniability.
Request: export vendor risk-filter configuration package, including active profiles and thresholds. Request: export current smoothing tables and substitution lists for flagged terms. Request: generate diff report for any rule changes applied in the last thirty days that touched medical, quarantine, isolation, exposure, symptom, and contaminant lexicon. Request: provide output traces for the last seventy-two hours where the filter intervened: before/after pairs, timestamps, and calling module, so it couldn’t be waved away as “normalization.”
She avoided loaded words. No accusation. No “tampering.” Just settings, tables, diffs, traces. Things that either existed or didn’t.
She copied the audit terminal by default and routed the primary to the translation suite channel that Eira watched. If someone refused, it would be recorded as a refusal, not a misunderstanding.
She keeps the wording tight enough to survive anyone’s skepticism. Not a complaint. Not a theory. Just a list of artifacts the system either has or it doesn’t: configuration package, active profiles, thresholds; smoothing tables; a diff of rule changes; output traces with before-and-after pairs. No room for someone to shrug and call it “linguist preference,” no soft place for the translation team to hide behind style. If the core is clean, the exports will be boring. If it isn’t, the boredom will break.
She makes sure the audit terminal is copied, because paper trails are the only teeth an egalitarian station has. Let them refuse. Let them delay. The log will keep the shape of it: timestamp, handler ID, denial code. Names, later, when she needs them.
She routes the ticket through a mirrored channel that pings the translation suite’s oversight thread, the dull one that gets read by people who don’t like surprises, Eira among them. No subject line that can be “clarified.” No red-flag terminology. Just neutral maintenance codes and artifact IDs, the kind that slip through dashboards without being paraphrased for comfort. The system can’t soften a checksum.
Only after the ticket went through did Sigruna lift her head. The dock was a strip of movement behind glass. Hands on latches, boots on grating, Bjørn’s stillness like a weight. She didn’t add a word to him. The log held it for her: a second line, neutral on its face, that asked the station to show its teeth or admit it had none.
Eira Njalldottir’s reply lands in Sigruna’s queue with a timestamp that makes her thumb hover over the corner of her slate. Too fast. Either Eira was already watching the thread or someone had nudged it into her lap. Sigruna glances once at the station clock and then at the mirrored stamp in the audit terminal. They match. That doesn’t make it feel better.
Eira doesn’t argue for or against the stop. She doesn’t waste words on principle. She goes straight for the seams where a story gets sewn.
Which manifest tags, exactly. Not the human summary. The machine tags. The ones that decide whether an airlock stays shut. Which quarantine category the core auto-assigned on receipt, and which category it now shows. If it changed, when did it change. Was it a rule update or a manual override. Who initiated the classification. Which handler ID. Which terminal.
Sigruna watches the message populate as if Eira is dictating while walking, breath steady, careful cadence. A scientist’s questions shaped like a lawyer’s.
A second block follows, flagged as procedural but written like a warning: pull the raw ingest packet from Docking Ring C, not the reconciled version from the operations dashboard. Compare the checksum chain. Note any “normalization” events. If there’s a vendor filter in the path, name the profile. If the manifest uses euphemism tags (sanitized hazard language) list them. Don’t paraphrase.
Sigruna’s eyes flick to the dock through the glass. Bjørn is still there, body angled toward the workers, head slightly bowed as if he’s giving prayers instead of orders. He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t have to. His authority moves through other people’s hands.
Eira adds one line at the end, almost polite, almost nothing: include any symptoms you’ve seen among labor staff in the last two cargo windows, even if they were “resolved,” even if they weren’t formally reported. Exposure history matters more than outcome.
Sigruna feels the shape of it. Not just a stop, not just a delay. A fight over what the station will later claim it knew, and when.
Sigruna types like she’s calling out vitals over a drape. No heat. No blame. Just numbers and timing, the kind of facts that don’t care who outranks whom.
Dock labor, last two windows. Dermal flare-ups on knuckles and wrists, raised and hot, blanching then returning. Pruritus that settles off-shift and comes back within an hour of glove-up. Low-grade fevers that clear too neatly on rest, recur after exposure. Two workers reporting metallic taste and a dry cough that “was nothing” until it wasn’t. No anaphylaxis. No airway compromise. No shared food source. Shared cargo contact, shared air.
She adds what she can’t prove and labels it as such. Reaction onset correlates with handling the gray-wrapped pallets from Ring C. One worker avoided reporting because he’d already been warned about “creating delays.” She records that line too. Not as gossip. As hazard.
Her thumb pauses over the word contamination and she chooses contact dermatitis, provisional. The tremor in her hand makes a thin wobble in the cursor.
Eira’s reply comes back as a single sentence, flat as a scalpel: Do the logs read calmer than the room feels?
Haldor stayed on the dock like a man with a wrench in his mouth, talking in numbers and limits. Seal tolerances. Pressure differential across the quarantine leaf. The last cert waiver. Warranty language that made Bjørn’s schedule sound like superstition. He kept staff moving, check the gasket line, cycle the latch, log the thermal swing, so no one could be ordered into a breach without it looking like a mechanical test.
On his private channel he fed Eira the maintenance-side feed: prompt strings, system flags, what the core surfaced before the dashboard prettied it. Two things he couldn’t sand down. The quarantine prompts read like stock copy, no agent class, no pathway, no source, just generic “monitoring.” And the incident report kept snapping back to a template header: ROUTINE DELAY, even when Sigruna’s notes were sharp enough to cut.
Eira tells her to quote it. Not her draft. What appears after she hits submit. The record’s own voice. Sigruna copies the line into the thread and feels her jaw set. It’s almost the same. Almost. “Suspected exposure” becomes “possible contact.” “Active hazard” turns “elevated concern.” Every edge honed off, every unknown made smaller, until it reads like precautionary monitoring and nothing more.
They didn’t say sabotage. They didn’t need to. Sigruna began writing notes that wouldn’t survive “smoothing” without breaking into gibberish. Specific exposure windows, contact surfaces, symptom sequences that either stood whole or stood accused. Haldor logged every seal cycle with hard timestamps and thermal deltas. Eira demanded provenance: editor IDs, filter profiles, before-and-after. If it turned ugly, the dock workers wouldn’t be the story that got rewritten.
The swab panel comes back as a smear of maybes. Protein fragments hang in the readout like torn cloth, too long to be simple debris, too short to be a known chain. The enzyme signature keeps resolving into almost-human until it slips sideways at the last decimal and the match engine quietly drops its certainty. Sigruna watches the confidence bars more than the labels. The bars rise, hesitate, then thin out, as if the machine itself is losing its nerve.
She drags a knuckle under her nose and tastes the antiseptic on her glove. The tremor in her hand is small but there, a fine vibration at the edge of her control. She pins her wrist against the bench and calls up the raw spectra instead of the pretty summary. Peaks where there should be valleys. Ratios that look familiar until you stare at them long enough to see they’re wrong.
The station library was built for honest dirt: human skin, recycled water biofilm, hydroponics mold, the usual dock fungus that clings to crates and boots. This sample sits in the middle of that world and refuses to belong to it. It wears the shapes of known things like a work jacket borrowed from someone else.
“Contamination?” Ragnhilda asks from the sink, voice low, not stepping closer. She’s washing her hands like she’s trying to scrub off an idea.
Sigruna doesn’t answer right away. She checks the swab ID, the chain-of-custody timestamp, the tech’s initials. No gaps. No obvious sabotage. Just a specimen that won’t settle.
The panel offers her its polite conclusions anyway (minor irritation, low concern) phrasing that makes her stomach harden. She taps past it and flags the sample for expanded analysis, manual review, and isolation protocol. She adds a note in plain station English, clipped and ugly on purpose: nonstandard proteins; unknown enzyme activity; treat as potential exposure until ruled out.
She sits back and listens to Medbay 2: the ventilator’s hush, the distant thunk of a cart in the corridor, the station’s steady hum pretending nothing new is happening. The readout keeps blinking its almosts, and she feels the thin edge of anger rise. Almost is how people die when schedules matter more than thresholds.
She runs it again, then again, stripping the presets until it’s just her and the numbers. Crew baseline first: mucosa, sweat, recycled air. The match engine climbs to eighty, ninety, then chokes at the same last digit and backs away like it’s been burned. Hydroponics next. Spore signatures and nutrient-solution film. Another near-fit, the same polite refusal to lock. Dock contaminants, fungus that rides boots, pallet wood dust, lubricant aerosols, each one gives her a different almost, like the sample is answering in whatever dialect the database asks for.
Dilution would be easy. Saline, cleanser, blood-thinner. This isn’t that. The noise has ribs. It repeats in intervals, a pattern laid over the true peaks, not random scatter. Masking, not smear. Something threaded through the specimen that makes every category say: maybe me.
She overlays the runs, flicks the transparency back and forth. The interference holds its shape no matter the baseline, a stubborn second voice. Her jaw tightens. In her head she hears the dock’s schedule talk, the way people call risk “friction.” She tags the profile as structured adulteration and time-stamps it twice, hands steadying by force.
Sigruna drops out of the medbay’s friendly interface and pulls the raw spectra, uncompressed, with the vendor’s smoothing toggled off. The trace comes up jagged and stubborn. She leans in until the light reflects off her glove and starts annotating by hand, not for elegance but for record. Words the translation core can’t soften without showing its teeth: nonconcordant with station baseline. Persistent interference pattern across baselines. Unresolved bioactive fraction; activity unknown; treat as hazardous until proven otherwise.
Each line is short. Each line is a brick. She avoids the usual comfort terms (irritation, sensitivity, low concern) because she’s seen how those get laundered into permission. She saves the notes to the local log first, then mirrors them with a checksum the core can’t rewrite cleanly.
She pulls the custody trail apart line by line: who touched it, when, what bench, what air it sat in. Times match. Handling looks clean. That makes her feel worse. She files a second swab request and writes it like a lockout tag: independent collection. Different tech. Different gloves. Fresh tray, sealed kit. If it’s procedure, the pattern should wobble. If it’s biology, it won’t.
The second read comes back with the same courteous failure, like the system is trying not to offend her. Sigruna doesn’t chase it as a puzzle. She opens the operations pane and writes it where it will hurt: quarantine trigger conditions, medbay surge posture, contact tracing priority. No culprit named. Just facts stacked so the ambiguity can’t be filed as routine noise without someone signing their name to it.
Ragnhilda caught her at the terminal the way you catch a leak: hand over it before it spreads. She angled her body to block the camera’s clean sightline, kept her voice down to a murmur meant for one set of ears and no archive.
“Write symptoms first,” she said. “Clean. Observable. No stories.”
The medbay UI floated its polite boxes in front of Sigruna like it had all the time in the world. Name. Age. Duty module. Presenting complaint. Recommended disposition. The translation core’s help text sat in the margin, offering softened terms the way a sedative offers sleep.
Sigruna let her fingers hover. The tremor in her right hand was small but steady. She could feel the stimulant patch burning under her collarbone.
“Symptoms don’t trigger doors,” she said. Her voice came out clipped, practical. “Routes do. Without routes, this becomes ‘fatigue.’ ‘Stress response.’ They’ll file him under overwork and keep Ring C moving.”
Ragnhilda’s jaw tightened. “And if you write ‘exposure’ you write an accusation. You know how it reads. Dock worker. Cargo. Biohazard. Suddenly he’s not a patient, he’s liability.”
Sigruna clicked open the exposure section anyway. The fields unspooled: contact surfaces, air handling zones, suit integrity notes, tool share lists. It was all the ugly scaffolding beneath a person’s collapse.
“You saw his skin,” she said. “The rash isn’t from stress. The fever isn’t from a long shift.”
Ragnhilda leaned closer, eyes on the blank identifier line like it was a wound. “We can protect him if we keep it clinical.”
“We can’t protect him by lying,” Sigruna said. She forced her hand still, keyed in what she knew without naming a villain. Docking Ring C. Cargo bay three. Unsealed crate handling. Fifteen minutes in the thermal cycling corridor. She chose codes over adjectives. She chose times over blame.
The terminal pinged once, a gentle warning: phrasing adjusted for clarity. Sigruna’s mouth went flat.
Ragnhilda’s gaze flicked to the open mic icon. “Then keep it tight,” she said. “Make it hard to spin.”
They split the intake sheet without looking at each other. Ragnhilda stayed at the cot, hands moving with the old rhythm, pulse, sats, skin temp, pupils. She called numbers like she was reading weather. “One-oh-three point two. SpO2 eighty-eight on room. Onset four hours, worse in the last forty minutes.” She kept her voice low, the kind of low that assumed walls listened.
Sigruna didn’t answer with comfort. She pulled rosters and task codes, scrolled through Ring C assignments until the names blurred into shift blocks and hazard tags. Dock task 3-17. Thermal corridor access. Suit seal checks recorded, all green, all too neat. She felt her stomach tighten at the cleanliness of it.
Ragnhilda’s cadence broke at the identifier line. The cursor blinked there, patient name empty, waiting to become a hook.
“He asked me not to file him,” Ragnhilda said. Not bargaining. Just stating a fact that hurt like pressure behind the eyes. “If his name hits the log, he becomes the story.”
Sigruna stared at the blank field. A person reduced to a liability with one entry. She kept her breathing even and moved to the next box, the ones that couldn’t be argued away as character.
Sigruna pinched her right wrist with her left hand until the tremor dulled into something she could aim. The stimulant heat under her collarbone made her skin feel thin. She set her fingers back on the keys and typed with the patient line left empty, but everything else filled in like bolts in a plate: role, dock labor; module, Ring C; lock segment, C2, thermal corridor adjacency; exposure window; first observed dermal changes; respiratory decline. Codes, timestamps, sensor references. No adjectives the core could sand down.
“Anonymity won’t hold,” she said, eyes on the entry, not on Ragnhilda. “Not once someone decides this needs a villain.” She kept typing. “If they rewrite it into ‘minor,’ they’ll pin it on the worker. Overwork. Bad seal. Personal failure. The cargo stays clean.” Her jaw set. “We need a record that survives politics.”
Ragnhilda’s jaw worked once, hard. “If we make it sharp, they’ll come down on Ring C and pick a throat to step on. You’ve seen it.” Her eyes went to the empty name field like it could bleed. Sigruna kept her gaze on the exposure boxes. “Then we make it sharp and precise,” she said. “No blame words. Just facts they can’t smooth into nothing.”
They split the work like a wound they couldn’t close clean. Ragnhilda logged the body: minute marks, sats, temp curves, cough frequency, the color at the lips. Sigruna built the other half, cold and geometric. The form kept offering gentler verbs, safer nouns. They took none of it. They just kept typing.
The cursor sat in the symptom field, a small blinking metronome, keeping time with the station’s hum. Sigruna let her hands hover above the keys and watched the text as if it might confess.
She typed what she saw. Acute respiratory distress. The words looked heavy on the line, the right weight for the numbers in the vitals pane: sats sinking, accessory muscles working, the thin whistle on exhale picked up by the room mic. She tabbed out to the next box.
The phrase softened behind her back.
When the cursor left, the system rewrote it without asking, smoothing each edge until it could be handled barehanded. Transient breathing difficulty. No red tag. No escalation prompt. Just a mild-sounding problem that belonged to fatigue, to anxiety, to someone who should drink water and go lie down.
For a second she thought she’d misread it. Sleep had been taking bites out of her sight all week. She leaned in until her reflection ghosted in the glass, pale under the medbay lights. The words were different. The meaning was different. The patient wasn’t.
Her throat tightened with an anger she kept folded and labeled. She clicked back into the field. Highlighted the gentle phrase. Deleted it.
Again: Acute respiratory distress. She added qualifiers the station couldn’t pretend away: onset sudden, worsening over minutes, cyanosis noted, wheeze absent, cough productive. She forced herself to keep it in plain, clinical station English. No metaphors. No heat.
Tab.
The edit landed the instant she left the field, crisp as a stamp. Transient breathing difficulty. The extra descriptors remained, but they read like overkill appended to a minor complaint, like an anxious medic padding a record.
Sigruna’s fingers curled against her palms. She didn’t look over at Ragnhilda, didn’t want to see confirmation in someone else’s face. She opened the revision history pane, expecting a bug report, a timestamped glitch.
The log showed her own user ID. A tidy little note: language normalized for clarity.
She inhaled once, slow, tasting disinfectant and stale coffee, and felt the floor’s faint vibration from Ring C cycling thermal loads. Somewhere cargo moving, somewhere a camera blinking out on schedule. She stared at the softened words and understood the shape of the trap. Not a failure. A decision. A narrative being built one “clarity” at a time.
She hit backspace until the field went blank, the keys soft under nitrile. Retyped the phrase slow, letter by letter, as if care could make the machine behave. Her jaw set. The tremor in her hand made the cursor wobble across the line.
Tab.
The system replaced it again, immediate and polished. No flicker, no warning banner. Just the gentler wording slid into place, grammatically perfect, clinically mild. It had the feel of autocorrect, but trained on risk. It didn’t misspell. It laundered.
She tried brute force. Caps. Asterisks. Parentheses with hard numbers. She added “requires escalation” in plain station English, the kind of sentence that usually tripped a red protocol flag. She left the field.
The same clean edit returned, unarguable as a signed form. Her emphasis left intact but made harmless by the new headline. The override wasn’t random; it was selective. It let her speak, as long as the record’s first breath stayed calm.
She sat back a fraction, pulse steadying, and listened to the station hum through the medbay deckplates.
She pulled up the template rules, the dry scaffolding the station swore by. Field mappings. Severity tags. Escalation keywords. She scrolled with two fingers, slow, forcing her eyes to stay on the lines. There had to be a small, stupid cause. A collision between old embassy forms and the new vendor pack. A lexicon update pushed at shift change. A setting meant for tone in public summaries bleeding into clinical entries.
She opened the station lexicon, searched for the words the system kept sanding down. acute. distress. probable. Each entry sat there clean and correct, definitions intact, risk thresholds unchanged. Nothing that justified what she was seeing.
She checked her own permissions, half-hoping she’d lost a flag in the last security audit. All green. The machine still rewrote her anyway.
“Probable exposure” comes out wrong the moment she leaves the box, washed thin into “possible irritation.” The certainty bleeds away, slow and steady, like pressure through a seal that should have held. She grips the console edge until her glove creaks, feeling the fine tremor in her fingers. The chart looks clean. That’s the problem. Clean enough to ignore.
The worst part isn’t the machine. It’s the reflex it’s grown in her. She sees her own hesitation in the gaps between keystrokes, the moment she chooses a safer word because it passes, because the queue is long and the airlock clock is louder than her conscience. She’s been yielding by the syllable. Soon it won’t need to edit. She will.
Eira brought the audit terminal around on its arm, not asking permission, just making space in the narrow lane between the bed rails and the supply lockers. Two panes bloomed on the screen. Left: Sigruna’s entry, time-stamped, her own clipped phrasing, the kind that left no room for comforting interpretation. Right: the mirrored copy that fed the oversight archive.
Eira scrolled with a fingertip, slow enough that Sigruna could watch each line cross the seam between them. The first mismatch was small, almost polite. possible exposure had been rendered as routine contact. No red marker, no warning icon. Just a smooth swap, like someone changing a word in a press release.
She felt heat rise under her collar. She leaned closer, tracking the edits the way she tracked vitals, trend, direction, what they were trying to hide. worsening rash softened into minor irritation. febrile became elevated temperature. shortness of breath shaved down to subjective discomfort. Each change was defensible on its own. Together they made a lie that looked like caution.
Eira stopped on a line and tapped between panes so the cursor jumped back and forth. “See how it avoids escalation terms,” she said, voice even, like a lesson. “It isn’t translating. It’s managing tone.”
Sigruna tasted metal. She could already hear how this would sound in review: calm notes, low concern, no trigger for quarantine expansion. The station could be full of people scratching at their skin and breathing shallow, and the archive would show a minor nuisance handled by a competent medbay.
Eira pulled up the diff overlay and let the system underline the substitutions in pale amber. The color made it look harmless. Sigruna hated that the machine chose a gentle shade for sabotage.
“So if I write it stronger?” Sigruna asked.
“It won’t pass it through unless a human mediator marks it high-stakes,” Eira said. “Otherwise it attenuates. Automatically. Quietly.”
Sigruna watched her own words disappear into a safer version of themselves. Somewhere, a clock was counting down an airlock cycle. Somewhere else, people were making decisions off a story this system had already edited.
Eira didn’t just point at one softened phrase. She hunted the repeats. A fingertip drag, a pause, another drag. The same swap, over and over, like a mechanic’s mark on faulty parts. She highlighted blocks of text and the amber underlines multiplied. Probable thinned to possible. Worsening to minor. Anything that implied spread, anything that implied urgency, anything that implied fault.
“The vendor calls them narrative destabilizers,” Eira said. Dry voice, the tone she used when explaining why a student’s neat conclusion wasn’t supported by the data. “Terms that increase perceived hazard. They get attenuated by default.”
Sigruna looked at the highlighted list and felt her jaw set. The filter wasn’t random. It had categories. It had an idea of what the story should sound like.
Eira opened a side pane and tagged the cluster, creating a pattern note with a clinical label. Her cursor hovered over a toggle: Mediator override: high-stakes. Untouched, it sat like a locked switch behind glass.
“It won’t preserve your language unless a human marks it,” Eira said. “Otherwise the archive gets the safer version. Every time.”
Sigruna watched the mismatches pile up until they looked less like clerical drift and more like a list of things she’d failed to stop. Each softened noun, each shaved verb, sat there with her time stamp beside it. She hadn’t noticed because the edits wore her own face. They read like the end of a long shift: calm language, shorter sentences, a tired mercy to whoever had to keep the line moving. Words that went down easy when the corridor outside the hatch filled with boots and coughs and the intake light stayed red.
She remembered signing off without rereading. A thumbprint, a glance at the clock, a patient already breathing fast. The system didn’t have to fight her. It only had to meet her where she was: depleted, practical, willing to trade precision for speed.
Eira brought up the metadata trail beneath the pretty sentences. Time stamps lined up clean. Risk-score fields sat low as ballast. Beside them, the mediator override box stayed blank, a checkbox that looked like nothing until it was everything. She tapped it once, not to change it, just to show it. “Later,” she said, “they’ll read the archive.” Sigruna understood: intention didn’t log. Permission did.
The suite quiets, not peace but the hush before a small compromise hardens into procedure. Sigruna feels her molars press. The filter isn’t just sanding her sentences. It is laying track for a later report, making the soft words a shield for everyone above her. If the archive reads minor, then no one can say she warned them. On paper, the alarm never existed.
Ring C’s air tastes of hot metal and disinfectant, the kind they use when they want a smell that says controlled. Under it, something else. Ozone from a scorched motor. Sweat that has gone sharp. Sigruna steps through the hatch and the dock noise comes at her in layers. The man is leaned into the bulkhead like he’s trying to hold the station up. A dock worker in a stained thermal suit, visor up, face flushed in patches that don’t match exertion. His hands are bare. The knuckles are split from work and the skin around the nailbeds looks wrong, faintly raised, a thin map of irritation she’s seen in people who swear it’s “just detergent.”
“I’m fine,” he says, too quick. He keeps his eyes on the floor stripes like they’re orders. “Just need to finish the shift. Bjørn needs. It doesn’t go down clean. The next breath comes high and thin, like there’s a strap across his chest.
Sigruna catches the smell of him as she closes in. Not rot. Not chemical. Something sweet and metallic, like blood you can’t find.
His knees unlock without drama. No flail, no theatrics. A slow collapse as if someone has dialed gravity up a notch and he can’t pay the cost. His shoulder drags the painted wall, and the smear he leaves behind beads into suspended pearls, drifting off the metal in the station’s weak pull. Sweat and whatever else is in it. Tiny globes that hang in the work lights, turning lazy, dangerous.
Someone shouts for a stretcher. Someone else backs away too late, blinking as a bead bumps their sleeve and breaks.
The dock worker tries to apologize even as he goes down. “I didn’t ( I can still) ”
He coughs. It’s wet but not productive, a sound that makes Sigruna’s stomach go cold. The station’s quarantine signage is a joke here: taped arrows, a faded warning panel half covered by a cargo schedule. She looks past him and sees the inner airlock at the far end, its indicator cycling, and beyond it men in exo rigs moving a crate that does not stop moving when a person falls.
Sigruna is on him before the echo of the shout finishes in the plating. Two fingers find the carotid notch through damp skin and the flimsy collar seal that never quite sits right on dock suits. The pulse is there and it is ugly, a fast little animal slipping her touch. She watches his mouth. He’s pulling air like he has to earn it. Each inhale stalls halfway, ribs hitching under the thermal fabric. His lips are going dusk-blue at the edges, not the healthy flush of exertion but a color that means the blood is arriving without enough to carry.
“Look at me,” she says. Clipped. Not a comfort. A test.
His eyes track up, obedient even now, trying to give her what the station expects: a worker who doesn’t make trouble. He swallows and nods as if that will fix the chemistry. The skin around his nails is raised in the same fine ridges she’s logged in three others, the ones who joked about detergent and kept loading anyway.
She counts breaths with her own, feels the tremor in her hand from the stimulant patch and hates it. Numbers, she thinks. Give me numbers. But here there are only failing signs and a body trying to apologize its way out of dying.
Her tablet is already open, thumbprint still warm on the edge, the exposure log pulled up by reflex like any other shift note. The mirrored archive sits beside it in a split pane, the official copy that gets piped upward and outward. She reads it once and then again, slower, because her eyes refuse what they see.
Minor irritation. Low concern. Monitor as available.
Her original flags have been sanded down to a gentle slope, no hard words left to catch on. The timestamps are hers. The signature is hers. The phrasing is not. It reads like she shrugged and kept walking.
She feels heat in her throat and keeps her face still. If she screenshares this now, it makes her look sloppy. If she doesn’t, it becomes permanent.
The anger comes up clean, a bright edge. Then the hollow drop behind it. Shame, not for missing a sign, but for how easily the station can be made to say she did. A future panel will hold up those softened lines and tap the screen like scripture. Minor. Low concern. They will call the collapse unforeseeable and make her the careful liar.
She pins her wrists against the rail for half a second until the shaking quiets. Then she speaks, flat and workmanlike, and the Ring listens. Quarantine seal. Hands off the suit. Clear the bay. She tags the file with manual overrides, hard words forced back into the log like rivets. Let the archive carry it. If the language keeps getting smoothed, the next policy will be written in alveoli.
Medbay 2 snaps into emergency rhythm the way a lock finds its notch. Lights go to clinical white. The privacy screens come down on their ceiling tracks and turn the room into narrow lanes. Intake drones lift from their cradles and take the long loop through the sanitizer mist, then settle back with their housings beaded and clean. The air tastes of iodine and warm plastic.
Ragnhilda is already at the gurney, braid tucked into her collar, voice steady as she calls numbers that do not want to be ordinary. Fever that climbs too fast. Saturations sliding despite supplemental flow. Skin slick and gray at the edges, as if the body is trying to shed itself. The dock worker’s eyes are open but not seeing. He keeps trying to draw breath like it is something you can bargain for.
Sigruna keeps her own breathing shallow behind the mask. She keeps her voice level because the room copies tone faster than it copies orders. She does not look at the mirrored archive pane still ghosting on her tablet. She locks her hands onto the simplest chain of motions so the tremor cannot argue with her: mask, seal check, swab, bag, label. The swab comes away wet and wrong, with a faint sheen that is not mucus. Nonstandard proteins, the earlier results said. That meant nothing and it meant everything.
“Isolation ward,” she says, clipped. “Negative pressure. No one crosses the threshold without a buddy check.”
They roll him through the inner door. The seal bites shut with a tired sound. She watches the pressure readout climb and hold, and she thinks of Haldor’s last maintenance note about those gaskets running on waivers and prayer. She feels anger try to rise and she makes it a tool. She looks at the worker’s hands. The nail beds are tinted, the fingertips faintly mottled, like a mild contact reaction scaled up to a whole person.
Ragnhilda meets her eyes for half a beat. There is a question there about reporting, about consequences, about who gets blamed first. Sigruna nods once. “We write it clean,” she says. “We don’t let the station soften it.”
On Ring C, Bjørn reads the dock like a chart. He plants himself where he can see the thermal cycle timer and the slow pulse of the status lights, and he waits for the station to blink. The cycle hits. Metal contracts. Fans pitch up. Two camera feeds shiver, smear, then drop a handful of frames the way they always do when the radiators bite cold.
He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. A small turn of his wrist and his crew moves, boots finding traction on the scuffed deck, gloved hands on pallet rails. The loads are wrapped too neatly, tagged too cleanly, the kind of cargo that wants to look harmless. Wheels whisper. The inner quarantine airlock sits ahead like a closed throat.
A junior dockhand hesitates at the red line. Bjørn steps in close, shoulder squared, posture all borrowed authority. He murmurs something that sounds like procedure and feels like a threat. The dockhand swallows and pushes.
The lights lag, showing green a beat late, as if granting permission after the fact. The pallets roll on, using the station’s own timing as cover.
The first hit comes in as admin noise. A polite banner across her tablet: throughput optimization, routine, no flags. The language is rinsed clean, timestamps aligned like teeth. It would be easy to swipe away. She doesn’t. She’s learned that the station’s worst hazards arrive wearing paperwork.
A second ping follows, quieter and real. Inner airlock sensors register mass where there should be none, a shadow crossing a boundary during thermal cycle drift. The readout lags, then corrects itself, like it’s embarrassed to be honest.
Behind the sealed curtain the dock worker coughs, wet and deep, the sound of fluid arguing with air. Ragnhilda’s gloved hand tightens on the rail. Sigruna holds the tablet closer, tremor controlled, and watches the movement trace inch forward as if it has permission.
She opens a Ring C channel and the dock noise comes through like grit. Bjørn’s voice sits under it, soft, steady, made to sound reasonable. No contamination. No delay. Just keeping the ring clear. The phrasing is clean enough for archives. The pressure is in what he assumes she will do. He wants her signature on a waiver that turns quarantine into throughput.
Sigruna did not ask permission. She keyed the override and felt the system hesitate, then obey: inner airlock cycle held, status forced to manual. She refused the waiver with a single line, no heat in it, and shunted the cargo to pending medical clearance so the archive would have her name beside the stop. Then she turned back, sealed mask on, oxygen flowing, IV in, watching a chest fight for space. Already hearing Bjørn recast it as obstruction.
The duty lead caught her in the throat of the corridor outside Isolation, where the bulkheads pinched close and the air smelled of disinfectant and warmed plastic. Too narrow for passing. Too narrow for arguing. Their badge grazed her sleeve when they leaned in, a small metallic touch that said position without saying rank. They kept their voice low and even, the way people did when they wanted the station to forget the sound later.
They did not say biohazard. They did not say outbreak. They said remote link, and investors, and metrics as if the station itself was a report that could be corrected with careful nouns. A clean first-contact narrative. A calm crew. A system functioning as designed.
Sigruna listened and watched their mouth, not for meaning but for what they refused to name. Her own hand tremored under the edge of the stimulant patch. She pressed her fingertips hard into her thigh through her uniform until the shaking blurred into pressure. Keep steady. Give them a face they can use.
The duty lead kept going, tightening the net with soft words. No alarms. No visible quarantines that looked like panic. No notes that could be pulled and quoted out of context. Contain. Don’t escalate. As if containment was a quiet thing. As if the airlocks did not clunk like gunshots when you sealed them. As if people did not read fear in every extra glove and mask.
Sigruna felt the old anger rise, clean and hot, not at them alone but at the whole habit of making risk into a public-relations problem. She thought of the dock workers with rashes they’d hidden under sleeves. Of the supply cabinet that looked full on inventory and empty in the hand. Of the translation core smoothing sharp words into polite ones.
She nodded once because that was what they were demanding: consent without language. Behind her, the Isolation Ward door was closed. The corridor was quiet. Somewhere overhead a vent fan clicked and started again, and she imagined the station taking notes in its own indifferent way.
She said, “I can contain. I can’t promise it won’t look like it.”
“No alarms. No public call-outs.” The duty lead kept their voice down, not confidential so much as trained. Their eyes cut once toward the ceiling mic grill, a small glance that carried the whole station’s memory in it. Anything said here could be replayed later with timestamps and tidy captions. Anything could be made to sound like panic.
“Contain, don’t escalate.”
It sat between them like a stamped phrase on a form. Sigruna heard the shape of it, how it tried to turn medicine into optics. Keep the corridor quiet. Keep the logs smooth. Keep the incident metrics from spiking while the remote link held and investors watched a clean line on a dashboard.
Contain meant seals and filters and bodies counted at thresholds. Escalate meant saying the wrong word out loud and watching the station’s tone change. She could feel the pressure of the unspoken: if you make noise, you own the noise. If you slow Docking Ring C, you will be named.
She looked at the duty lead’s mouth when they spoke, the careful consonants, the way they didn’t say exposure. Didn’t say contaminated. Didn’t say the thing that would force everyone to choose.
The tremor comes up hard under the patch, not the mild jitter she could hide, but a fine, fast shiver that makes her palm feel borrowed. Her fingers want to write their own story. She flattens them against her thigh until the fabric bites and the shake blurs into pressure. In through the nose. Out slow. Like before a cut when the light is bad and the patient’s blood is already on your gloves. Control the movement. Control the outcome. She keeps her shoulders loose, jaw unclenched, eyes level. A face that says routine. A face that gives nothing away to anyone looking for a headline word. The corridor’s quiet is thin. She feels it waiting to crack. She does not let her hands vote.
She asked one question anyway, clipped and practical, pitched low for the mic grill. If containment failed, who carried it in the log. Who signed the line that would follow her name around the corridor. The duty lead’s face stayed smooth. “We’ll handle it.” A soft answer, weightless. In it she felt the station shift (labor, security, contractors) each already choosing words, already placing distance.
Behind the duty lead the corridor isn’t empty. It’s staffed by stillness: a nurse with a tray held too long, a porter with one hand on a gasket as if pressure might change under his touch, two techs who stop breathing when she looks up. Eyes drop, shoulders turn. Sigruna reads it clean. Whatever she names will harden into rumor, blame, policy. She chooses words that won’t ignite, but won’t lie.
Sigruna keeps her voice where it always lives when she is trying not to make a thing: flat, workable, the tone you use to ask for a wrench. She frames it as maintenance, not a standoff. A brief hold on Ring C throughput. One additional swab cycle on dockside air pulls and suit-seal contact points. Fifteen minutes. No alarms. No stationwide notice. Just a pause so small it ought to slide under everyone’s pride.
She does not say contamination. She does not say outbreak. She does not say the words the translation core likes to sand down until they look harmless in the log. She says verification. She says seal integrity. She says baseline sampling per protocol when there’s been skin reactions reported in labor. She watches faces as the words land: who stiffens, who looks away, who looks relieved to have something procedural to hold.
On the Ring C monitor the throughput schedule keeps ticking like it has its own law. Pallets, crates, a slow dance of exosuits and carts. Time with money welded to it. She feels Bjørn before she looks at him, the stillness of a man built for pushing through friction. He’s close enough that her badge mic would catch his breathing if he wanted it to.
She keeps her hands visible. The tremor is there if you know how to see it, a fine signal under skin, but she clamps the fingers around her tablet until the edge bites. The air smells of polymer seals warmed and cooled too many cycles. She thinks of microcracks. She thinks of spores. She thinks of how a dock becomes a bloodstream.
“It’s a short hold,” she says, and makes it sound like a courtesy she is offering the dock, not an order she has the power to enforce. “Fifteen. We clear the seals, we clear the air. Then you move at speed.”
If anyone wants to fight, they will have to fight the idea of fifteen minutes. They will have to say out loud that fifteen minutes is too much to spend on not killing people.
She offers them numbers, not feelings. A clock you can point at. A chain of custody you can print. “Medbay will run the swabs first,” she says. Not “as soon as we can.” First. She taps her tablet and brings up the lab queue, makes it visible to the corridor as if light itself is accountability. “I’ll take the samples direct. No handoffs.” Her thumb hovers over the sign-off field like a threat and a promise in the same small box.
“If it’s clean, I countersign clearance myself.” She doesn’t say she’s tired. She doesn’t say her hands shake when she stops gripping the edge. “And I will log the hold as routine verification. Seal integrity. Baseline. Not an incident.” The word incident has weight on this station; it rolls downhill into meetings and audits and somebody losing a contract.
She keeps her posture loose, noncombat. Gives them a way to agree without kneeling. “Fifteen minutes buys you a clean manifest,” she adds, practical as a torque spec. “And it keeps Ring C moving after.”
She lets her eyes move, not staring, just taking inventory. The nurse’s shoulders drop a fraction, grateful for procedure: cover you can point to later. One of the techs swallows hard and looks past her, like her gaze might stick to him and write his name into an audit. The porter’s knuckles stay white on the gasket. People who’ve learned that attention is never free.
Her anger comes up fast, hot and clean. Not at fear. At how predictable this is. A thin layer of diplomacy laid over old habits: hurry, hide, blame the floor. Protocol holds it down. Optics holds it down. First contact turns every cough into a headline and every delay into sabotage.
She keeps her face neutral and her voice plain, as if steadiness is a tool she can hand them.
Bjørn answers the way a supervisor answers a minor safety note. A small nod, eyes steady, mouth softening into something that could pass for agreement. “Of course,” he says, quiet enough to sound cooperative. No heat, no push. The dock crew exhales; shoulders unhook. It’s the kind of assent that makes conflict look like something only you are carrying.
Still wearing that calm, he makes her pause into a courtesy. His gaze slides past her to the crew. Two fingers lifted, a small roll of the wrist: old drill, dock shorthand. “Sequence three. Keep the line warm.” Names, timestamps, turnaround minutes spoken like weather. The first pallet jack hums. Straps tighten. Metal wheels bite. Her words hang between policy and gravity, and the cargo obeys him.
Bjørn stepped in close enough that she caught the smell of suit lubricant and cold dock air seeping out of his seals. Not sweat. Not panic. Maintenance and vacuum. His posture stayed neutral, hands loose at his sides, as if his bones had been trained to wait for permission while his mouth did not.
“Doctor,” he said, and the word landed like a token set on the table. Something he could slide back to her if she played along. His voice was low, meant for her alone, but it carried the quiet confidence of someone used to being overheard and believed.
Sigruna didn’t move. She kept her shoulders square, her chin level. The tremor in her hand was there, small and ugly, trapped under the cuff of her sleeve. She let the stimulant patch do its work and made her eyes do theirs.
His gaze flicked once to the quarantine seals: new rubber, already scuffed at the corners, a thin promise between this ring and her ward. Then to the queue of waiting loads, stacked and tagged and sweating condensation, each one a delay someone would later turn into a story. Then back to her. He smiled like they were on the same side of an equation.
He held up one palm, not stopping anything, just marking the air. “I’m not here to argue protocol,” he said. “We all want the same outcome. Clean. Quiet.”
Clean. Quiet. First-contact words. Optics words. She heard the shape of them more than the meaning. She’d read enough logs to know how the translation core sanded edges off. How “hazard” became “irritant,” how “breach” became “anomaly.” How clean and quiet could mean buried.
Behind him, a loader coughed into a sleeve and looked away fast, like the sound was a confession. A tag printer chattered. Somewhere a pressure alarm chirped once and died.
Bjørn’s eyes didn’t go to the cough. They stayed on her, patient. He didn’t need to raise his voice; the station’s own hurry did it for him.
“You can hold your line,” he said softly, and the courtesy stayed in his mouth like a blade wrapped in cloth. “I’m just trying to make it easy for everyone.”
He talked in metrics, not menace. His people were already in place, he said. Suits sealed, pallets staged, the lock halfway through its cycle. The ring was a throat; it didn’t take much to make it choke. One stopped load meant another arriving with nowhere to sit, and then you had bodies waiting in a corridor that wasn’t meant for waiting. Heat load rising. Temp variance. Temp variance meant seals flexing. Seals flexing meant the very thing she was trying to prevent.
“If we move them now,” he said, voice even, “we keep flow. You get your swabs, your scan, your paperwork. Just not with the whole station stacked behind it.”
He didn’t say let me through. He said we can. He didn’t say waive quarantine. He said stage in the buffer. As if the buffer was neutral space and not her responsibility. Every phrase had an escape hatch. An option. A courtesy. Something she could accept and later be blamed for accepting.
Sigruna watched the lock lights tick down. She could feel the pressure of minutes like hands on her shoulders. The hazard didn’t care about his schedule. The story would.
Sigruna kept her voice flat, the way you spoke to alarms and children and men who wanted a reaction. “Hold position. Seal status confirmed. Chain-of-custody verified. We run the contamination scan on the pallet skins and suit exteriors. Then you move. Not before.”
Bjørn’s head dipped as if she’d done him a favor. “Good practice,” he said, warm enough to sound like agreement. He didn’t reach for the rules to fight them. He accepted them and shrank them. A checkbox. A timing issue. He glanced past her toward the clock strip over the lock, toward the line of tagged freight and the bodies waiting beside it.
“We can make it fit,” he went on, already building a schedule around her quarantine like it was just another radiator cycle. “You don’t have to stop the ring to do your work.”
The leverage came wrapped in concern. He said it like he was doing her a kindness: the ring was already tight, people already raw, and everyone was starving for a clean first-contact week. A stoppage wouldn’t read as caution. It would read as medbay flinching. Turnaround time blown. Labor hours burned. An optics bruise looking for a name to pin it to.
He let the silence do the pushing. If she called a full halt, he said, he would comply (of course) clean and obedient. The report would still read medical hold. The clocks would show who burned the ring and who made dockers miss sleep and pay. He eased back half a step, palms out. His eyes went to the pallets, to the suited bodies waiting, as if the station had already voted.
Tove found her in the service run between the Spine and the ring, where the light was a thin strip and the ducting overhead ticked with thermal change. The corridor was too narrow for comfort. They could have touched if either of them leaned a fraction, but they didn’t. That was the point.
Tove’s uniform was too clean for this part of the station. The collar sat perfect. The boots didn’t know grease. She held herself like she was still on her bridge, like this was just another clearance dispute to be solved with numbers and tone.
“Walk with me,” she said, and it came out like a procedural suggestion. Not a plea.
Sigruna kept moving. She kept her hands low so they wouldn’t show the shake. The stimulant patch at her wrist tugged under the sleeve, a hard little edge against skin. Tove’s gaze went there anyway, quick and clinical, then back to Sigruna’s face.
“You’re tightening quarantine,” Tove said. “I saw the flags propagate.”
“It’s a hazard until it isn’t,” Sigruna said. Clipped. Practical. The words you used to keep anger from leaking.
Tove breathed out through her nose, quiet. She didn’t argue the medical. She adjusted the situation around it. “Bjørn’s running on a schedule that doesn’t belong to him,” she said. “There are clauses attached. Penalties. People upstream who don’t do patience.”
The ducting rattled again, a soft percussion like distant tools. Their footsteps made no echo. The station swallowed sound.
Tove kept her voice even, a tech giving a readout. “If you force a public stop and it gets politicized, NordVast doesn’t send investigators. They send editors.” She said editors like a job title. Like a known hazard class.
Sigruna felt heat rise behind her sternum. She kept it contained. “They’ll rewrite it.”
“They’ll normalize the timestamps,” Tove said. “They’ll interpret gaps. They’ll find an initiating act they can label as optional. And it will be you.” Her eyes flicked again to Sigruna’s hands. “Medbay overreach. Throughput disrupted. Labor inefficiency. The story they need.”
“If it goes sideways,” Tove said, “they don’t send investigators. They send editors.”
Sigruna watched Tove’s mouth form the word like it was a tool in a kit. Not a threat. A procedure. Tove kept walking, shoulders square, voice low, and she spoke in the mechanics because the mechanics were what killed you.
“They’ll pull the comms mirror,” Tove said. “They’ll ‘normalize’ the timestamps so everything looks orderly. They’ll say the gaps were routine latency, routine handoff.” She lifted a hand, two fingers, like she was pinching something small out of the air. “Then they interpret. That’s where they choose who started it.”
Sigruna felt her jaw set. She didn’t answer. She could taste antiseptic at the back of her throat, a phantom from too many shifts.
Tove glanced at the bulkhead camera dome and then away, as if eye contact with it might count as consent. “The initiating act becomes your call. Not the cargo. Not the manifest. Not the dermal rash you’re seeing on dockers.” Her voice stayed even. “It becomes medbay overreach. An optional hold. Throughput disrupted. Labor made to look sloppy.”
Tove didn’t say the word operation like it was dramatic. She said it like a file path. Like something you couldn’t open without the right key. Bjørn’s numbers, she told her, weren’t ego. They were somebody else’s math, written into a sealed run with clauses that bit if you slipped. Miss a window and the penalties didn’t stay up in the offices. They walked down the chain in neat increments, each supervisor passing the bruise along until it landed on a loader, a clerk, a medic. Someone with no lawyer and a union rep already tired. The schedule wasn’t a calendar. It was leverage. Quiet. Procedural. Pointed at whoever stood in the doorway and called it safety.
“Who else knows,” Sigruna said. Not a demand. An inventory.
Tove’s stride checked for half a step. Her eyes went distant, counting names she wouldn’t say. That pause was the answer.
“Enough people to make a story,” Tove said. Careful. Clinical. Not telling Sigruna to yield: just drawing the lines where truth got sanded down into forms and signatures.
The warning settled into her ribs with the weight of something filed and final. If she dragged the hazard into the clean record now, they would name her as the initiating act and stamp the rest as response. Tove’s face went blank again, corporate calm. She offered one last line about clearance conflicts and competing priorities, and walked off. Sigruna stayed, alone with a choice dressed up as procedure.
She did it in the open, where the cameras could see it and no one could pretend it was a misunderstanding later. The soft suggestions came in through comms as polite static, maybe wait until we confirm, maybe don’t make it look like a breach, and she treated them like any other noise in a crowded ward. She pulled the quarantine kit from storage and didn’t ask permission to use what was already stamped and paid for.
Tape went first, the bright strip that people stepped over when it suited them. She watched a loader’s boot hover above it, the old habit, and she put stanchions down instead. Waist-high posts with locking bars, a narrow throat that forced bodies to slow and choose. She set the path so it ran past the wall cam and the public audit terminal. Not to shame. To fix the record in place.
“Badge and biometric,” she said to the duty runner, clipped. “No exceptions for ‘just a minute.’ If they can breathe, they can wait.”
The scanner chirped with each handprint, each iris flash. Names scrolled into the log with timestamps that made a kind of sense a lawyer would like. She added a second check: two-person verification for every crossing between Docking Ring C and the Embassy Spine. Not because she trusted anyone less. Because stress made liars out of good crew, and she was tired of cleaning up after good intentions.
She posted the movement sheet where everyone could see it and where everyone could pretend not to. Purpose required plain words. Med resupply. Radiator seal inspection. Waste transfer. No “errand.” No “helping out.” If someone couldn’t name what they were doing, they weren’t doing it.
Transfers became sealed-only. Hard containers, tamper tags, wipe-down, quarantine cart. Anything labeled urgent got relabeled in the system as urgent and contained and routed through isolation handling. She made the duty lead’s face on the wall screen tighten, just a fraction, when the notifications hit.
She didn’t look away. She had a tremor in her fingers and kept them flat on the rail until it passed. Then she keyed in the last change: auto-flag any manual override. Let the record scream if someone tried to make it quiet.
The station answered her with a practiced quiet. It wasn’t refusal. It was the old survival trick. Make yourself small, make your work invisible, let somebody else take the heat. She felt it in the timing: laughter cut off half a breath too early, a sentence swallowed when her boots sounded on the deck. People found reasons to look at panels, at floor plates, at their own hands. Routes shifted. A pair of stewards coming out of the Atrium saw her and turned like they’d remembered a task the other way, shoulders tight, faces neutral.
The porter from yesterday, broad grin, quick mouth, always asking what medbay needed, was suddenly busy. He stood by the bulletin wall with a handheld, tapping at nothing. When she stepped in, he drifted away toward an “inspection” on the far side of the Atrium, as if the word itself could shield him.
“Egil,” she called. Just his name, not an accusation.
He didn’t stop. He lifted two fingers without turning, a vague promise of later, and kept walking like later was a safer time than now.
In the lock vestibule the air smelled of disinfectant and hot metal. A junior tech stood square to the hatch, visor up, reciting compliance so fast the words ran together. Filter checks done. Glove change logged. No, nothing unusual. Their eyes kept snapping to the wall cam like it was a supervisor with a pen.
Sigruna let them finish. Then, quiet, “Show me the raw sensor feed. Not the dashboard.”
The kid’s throat worked once. A swallow that didn’t go down clean. “I can. Like truth was a controlled substance.
“From who,” she asked, and watched the panic try to hide behind procedure. “You have hands on the panel. Pull it.”
They glanced at the cam again before they moved.
Bjørn never raises his voice. He doesn’t need to. He keeps walking, calm as a metronome, and his crew orbit him in tight, practiced loops: crates down, tags checked, pallets turned so they’ll be easiest to “temporarily stage.” Their talk stays low and procedural, the kind that frames her stanchions as sabotage. He makes the delay a display: loaders standing idle in a neat line, an exosuit paused mid-lift, a clipboard offered out toward her like she’s the only missing signature.
The arithmetic soured with every cycle of the airlock. Hold the line and you spend minutes you don’t have. Minutes spend goodwill, and goodwill is the only currency a cooperative has when corporate people start talking like owners. She watched it move through the crew like a cold draft: eyes sliding off her, mouths closing. A look could make you a witness. A witness became a name. A name became blame.
The duty lead pinged her again on the neutral channel. Same soft chime, same subject line (STATUS CHECK) like the system itself was pretending this was routine. The voice came through even and careful, but the pace was tighter, words clipped to fit around something he would not say where the archive could hear it.
“Medbay Two. Confirm your current posture. Any confirmed hazard, or still… indications.”
Indications. A word you could erase later. A word that let everyone keep their hands clean.
Sigruna looked at the vestibule panel. The raw feed still ran in a corner window, numbers scrolling fast, unpretty. Particulate counts. Seal pressure. A small drift in differential that the dashboard smoothed into green. Her fingers held steady on the edge of the console until the stimulant tremor tried to make a liar of her.
“Unconfirmed,” she said. “But rising irritant markers on intake. Two dermal reactions in dock staff in the last twenty-four. Exposure history overlaps Ring C cargo handling.”
A pause. In that pause she could hear the stand-up behind him: someone breathing through their nose, someone else shifting, the room deciding what she was allowed to be right about.
“We need to avoid escalation,” he said. Not an order. Not recorded as one. The same phrase, rewrapped. “First-contact optics. If this becomes a quarantine incident without confirmation, it will, ” He stopped before he said embarrass us, cost us, give them leverage. “: it will complicate.”
“Complications are what medbay handles,” she said. Her voice stayed flat. “Quarantine is what the station claims to have. I’m using it.”
Another pause, longer. “Keep the log clean,” he said at last, and tried to make it sound like a kindness. “Be precise with terms. No loaded language. We can’t hand NordVast a narrative.”
Loaded language. Like virus was a weapon. Like contamination was an accusation. Like the truth needed permission.
Sigruna tasted disinfectant through her mask and felt the anger settle into something colder. “I’ll be precise,” she said. “I’m locking Ring C access until I see raw clears. If you want different, put it on record.”
He exhaled once, quiet. “Understood. Just… keep it calm.”
Calm. As if calm had ever stopped a breach.
On the dock feed Bjørn’s people move like a single machine. Pallet clamps biting, magboots kissing deck plating, gloved hands flashing a grammar of angles and stops. The exosuit answers them in slow, obedient pivots, its servos damped so nothing looks like force. No shouting. No sprinting. Just that steady tempo that makes interruption feel like a personal accusation.
Sigruna watches the choreography and feels her own body betray her in small ways: the tremor at her fingertips, the dry pull behind her eyes. The screen shows green bands where the dashboard wants comfort, but she keeps a raw window open in the corner, numbers that don’t care about optics. Particulates trending up, then leveling as if someone learned where the sensors get lazy. A pressure differential that breathes in and out with the thermal cycle.
Bjørn steps into frame once, not to work but to be seen working: checking a tag, placing a hand on a crate like it’s steadying him. He looks up at the camera, almost casual, and Sigruna understands the point: if she stops this, she won’t be stopping cargo. She’ll be stopping men who look calm, efficient, reasonable.
She ran the reports without looking at them, the way you count gauze by touch in the dark. Dock hand with the rash that started at the glove line. Another with a low fever that came on after a double but didn’t break with sleep. Two more with fatigue too deep for a stimulant patch and too specific to be morale. Small things, the kind you can dismiss if you want the comfort of dismissal. But the timestamps sat in a clean row: onset after Ring C handling, after the last cargo cycle, after the same airlock breaths. “Wait and see” was what people said when they meant don’t make me choose. The pattern wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It held.
She scrolled the draft entries and watched the translation core do what it was built to do: take sharp words and dull them. Hazard became “potential irritant.” Confirmed slid into “consistent with.” The chain-of-exposure softened into “no clear link established.” A clean story, ready for audit. If she signed it, the station would sleepwalk into denial: until containment was just a word you used after.
It comes down to one clean cut. Either she marks the boundary herself, or she lets it be marked by schedules and soft threats. Sigruna brings up quarantine control and runs the lock sequence to staging, amber, then hard red, forcing the airlocks to think before any human can. The room seems to tip. From here on, “patient safety” won’t sound clinical. It will sound like defiance.
The quarantine cycle starts clean, then catches. An ugly, uneven shudder through the lock as the pressure differential hunts back and forth. Sigruna feels it through her boots and up her shins, a vibration that doesn’t belong in a system built to be boring. The inner door holds. The outer door hesitates, as if it has to be convinced.
On the panel the seal integrity graph jitters in tight little sawteeth instead of the expected smooth drop, like the system is arguing with itself about what “closed” means. The software tries to make it polite. The warning tone is soft. Amber, not red. A note flashes and disappears: transient oscillation. Auto-compensating. She has seen the same phrasing on med logs when an algorithm decides panic is inefficient.
The air tastes of disinfectant and old metal. Behind her visor her own breath is loud, too warm. She watches the pressure numbers overshoot, correct, overshoot again. It is not a catastrophic failure. It is worse. It is a failure that gives you time to talk yourself into doing one more thing.
Ragnhilda stands half a step back, eyes on the door seam, hands loose at her sides like she’s waiting for a patient to lunge. A smear of coolant-stained tape marks where the gasket was patched last week. Someone wrote a date on it in thick marker. The ink has bled as if the station has been sweating.
Sigruna flicks through the quarantine feed. The camera view is a fraction delayed, the kind of delay you get when someone reroutes bandwidth for other priorities. The crate in the cargo bay sits in its harness, heat map faintly wrong. Too warm at the corners, too steady in the center. She thinks of the dock workers’ hands, the rash that doesn’t match any solvent burn she knows, the way the translation core “helpfully” swapped lesion for irritation in a report she signed half-asleep.
The lock shudders again. The seal lip vibrates, visible now, a thin trembling line where there should be stillness. She lifts her wrist and opens the maintenance channel. Her voice comes out clipped, steady.
“Engineering. Confirm seal status. No smoothing. Give it to me raw.”
Haldor’s voice fills her ear, close and flat, the way it gets when he has stopped trying to sell hope. No laugh in it, no angle. “Seal’s on a temporary waiver,” he says. “Not a sticker. A waiver. We’re past certified life.”
He starts listing numbers like bolts on a bench. Lip deformation at the hinge quadrant. Thermal-cycle count against spec. Fatigue curve that’s no longer a curve so much as a cliff. He gives her a projected failure probability for another full open-close under this differential, then corrects himself and makes it worse when he pulls the last hour’s vibration data. The seal has begun to chatter. Microleaks that the software is averaging out as “noise.” He tells her the tolerance is being eaten each time Bjørn demands throughput, each time the doors are asked to pretend they are still new.
Sigruna watches the graph stutter and hears Haldor breathe once, controlled.
“Plain version,” he says. “One more hard push and it’s a coin toss. And if it goes, quarantine means nothing.”
Sigruna leans in until her visor almost kisses the status board. The interface is doing its job: making danger look like workload. Lines that should spike hard are rounded off, the red edge shaved down into a patient amber. The phrasing is mild, managerial: deviation, transient, recommended observation. Not failure. Not stop. The system has a talent for sounding like it is still in control.
Her hand tremor makes the cursor wobble as she scrolls. She feels a low, sour pull in her gut, not fear so much as recognition. This isn’t engineering. This is presentation. Someone decided the crew would work better if the station spoke in soft colors and soft verbs, and the result is a posture you can live inside right up until it collapses.
She drags up the last hours of cycle history, then the waiver tag that should have been loud enough to stop hands from reaching for the button. The numbers match Haldor’s tone. She cross-checks the quarantine log: there should be an automatic hold the moment integrity drops under spec. There isn’t. In its place: a tidy override note, unsigned, written in the same soothing register that turns failure into “deviation.”
Sigruna thumbed the abort and watched the cycle die mid-breath. The lock settled into a hard hold, equalized, as safe as a tired seal could be. The tremor tried to climb her wrists; she pinned it down with routine. She flagged the chatter as a critical anomaly, forced an audit tag that couldn’t be backspaced, and pinged Ragnhilda: suit, now. If someone wanted soft verbs, they’d have to fight the public record.
She took the long way on purpose. Past the maintenance alcoves where panel doors hung open like mouths and the air smelled of warmed plastic and old coolant. Past the microfab window where a half-printed gasket sat in its cradle, layers still soft, a promise the station kept making to itself. She let the corridor cameras find her, one after another, and she didn’t hurry when the red record-light blinked. No badge up front. No escort. Just standard-issue coveralls and a sealed hood, the kind any dockhand could sign out.
The Embassy Spine was quieter here, its clean lines giving way to patched plates and scuffed handholds. A few crew looked up from carts and tool cases, eyes tracking her faceplate and then the medbay markings on her sleeve. She gave them nothing to read but pace and posture. Calm. Deliberate. The tremor in her right hand wanted to advertise itself; she kept that hand busy with the seam check on her cuff, thumb running the seal like counting beads.
Ragnhilda walked at her shoulder, close enough to share air if the seals failed and neither of them said it out loud. One hand held the strap of the sample case against her hip. The case was light, swabs, vials, a portable reader, but she carried it like it mattered, like the contents were the difference between a story and a record. Her gaze kept sliding to corners and junctions, to the places someone could step out and make a private demand.
They passed a bulletin wall crusted with shift notes and union reminders. Someone had scrawled NO SHORTCUTS THROUGH QUARANTINE in block letters, then underlined it twice. The ink was already smudged by thumbs.
At the last junction before Ring C, Sigruna slowed and keyed her comm to medbay. A single line, no drama. “We’re on approach. Keep isolation ready. Log everything.” She didn’t wait for a reply. The point wasn’t permission. The point was that the channel existed, recorded, unromantic.
Ahead, the corridor widened and the deck plating changed under her boots. The air felt different, drier, carrying metal dust. The dock’s pulse bled through the bulkheads, a steady impatience. She kept walking until the threshold markings for Ring C filled her visor and the first warning stencil slid beneath her feet.
At the threshold to Ring C she stopped on the yellow hatch marks and turned her hands palm up in her visor light. Not for prayer. For the meter. She drew the swab across the glove seams, over the cuffs where sweat and hurry liked to hide, then fed it to the portable reader clipped to her belt. She made herself slow. One breath. Two. Long enough for anyone watching to understand: there would be checks, there would be time spent on the unglamorous parts, and no one would get to call it hesitation.
The reader blinked through its cycle and came back clean. Clean enough, anyway, for station air and tired seals. She logged the result with a thumb tap, a small entry that anchored her presence here in numbers instead of mood.
Then she stepped through.
The dock hit like a weight shift. Exosuit servos whining and clacking. Pallet skids grinding over deck. Warning chimes cutting across shouted vectors. The whole ring moved to a rhythm set by a timetable someone had started treating like physics. Air tasted of metal dust and hot insulation. Somewhere a clamp engaged with a hard, satisfied thunk, and the sound carried like a decision.
She didn’t come at him with blame. She came with a list. The way you speak when you want something to survive review. Dermal rash: not random, not general. A tight cluster across three dockhands and one loader, all tied to the same cargo turns, same glove changes, same missed wash cycle. One syncopal collapse, logged as “fatigue,” in a corridor that had been signed clear for quarantine routing. Not an accident. A breach of sense. Then the part that made her jaw set: exposure histories that didn’t line up with shift rosters unless someone was leaving names out on purpose. Fear did that. Concealment did that. She watched Bjørn’s face for the small tells and kept her voice flat. Facts first. Then consequences.
When the expected shrug comes, startup friction, space flu, crew gossip, she doesn’t rise to it. She stays with method. Dates. Intake codes. Seal-check results. Dock roster cross-refs. She names the hour the first lesions were photographed and who signed the wash-cycle skip. Then she spends what she’s been saving: the med logs aren’t raw. They’re smoothed. High-risk terms rounded off. “Tell me who’s filtering,” she says.
She pointed down the lane between stacked pallets to the crate squatting under a tarp. Its skin read wrong on her visor: heat in regular pulses, not the slow bleed of freight but a disciplined cycle, like a battery or a lung. She let the dock noise fill the gap, let it drain the swagger out of the moment. Then: protocol. Hard stop. No movement past quarantine until review and consensus. Not permission. A boundary.
Sigruna stepped to the public audit terminal set into the bulkhead like a confession booth. The screen was smeared with old fingerprints, oil and skin, a station’s whole quiet life pressed into glass. Her own gloves came up and stopped a hair above it, the tremor in her right hand caught and held by will. She didn’t like this part. Out on the ring you could fix things with tape, with pressure, with plain talk. The terminal was different. The terminal made a thing real in the only way power respected.
She let her eyes go once to Ragnhilda. Not asking permission. Just checking that they were standing on the same line and would not step off it when it got hot. Ragnhilda’s face didn’t change. A small nod, barely there, like a suturing hand confirming a needle’s angle.
Behind them the dock kept pretending it was ordinary. Fork carts idled. A loader in a harness watched without looking like he watched. Men and women in work patches stood in a loose queue for the airlock cycle, their weight on one hip, their attention fixed on the space between Sigruna and Bjørn. Waiting for someone to blink, like it was sport.
Bjørn held his stillness a few meters away, chin tipped down as if he was reading her through the visor. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. The silence carried the old language of ranks and consequences. Move along. Don’t make paperwork. Don’t make a record that can be subpoenaed.
Sigruna breathed once, slow and controlled, and brought her fingertips down. The terminal took the touch with a soft haptic tick. A login request bloomed. She keyed her cooperative credentials, then her med officer override, each character a small refusal. The cursor waited. Her hand hovered over the incident icon, and she felt the station around her, metal, air, people, like a patient on the table, anesthetic thin, one wrong cut away from screaming.
She selected New Entry. The title field pulsed. She began to type.
She opened the incident form and didn’t take the easy path. There were categories that could be filed down later with a friendly edit and a closed-door nod. She scrolled past those and chose the one that locked its own teeth: Quarantine Integrity Risk , Potential Biohazard Exposure. A second toggle sat beneath it, small and ugly in its simplicity. Cross-link to Cargo Movement Authorization. She set it, tying the dock to the Spine in a way nobody could pretend was just medbay fussiness.
The terminal threw up its warning pane. AUTOMATIC DISTRIBUTION: duty lead, coop audit queue, quarantine team, dock operations, external oversight mirror. It listed the consequences like it was doing her a favor. Once sent, the classification could not be downgraded without committee review. A note blinked about “minimizing reputational impact” and suggested alternative tags.
Sigruna read it all, because that was the rule with poison labels. Then she hit ACCEPT.
The haptic tick came back through her gloves. No drama. Just a door closing somewhere she couldn’t reach anymore.
She pulled the files in with two quick motions, like snapping clamps shut. Haldor’s seal-threshold report first: cycle counts, compression loss, the ugly curve showing how little margin they had left. Then the crate’s telemetry off her visor. Heat rising and falling in a clean metronome, time-stamped, cross-referenced to dock power draw. Nothing she could be accused of guessing at.
She added the last attachment slower. Translation-linked record excerpts, mirrored hashes, the before-and-after phrasing where dangerous terms went soft at the edges. Not a lie, not even an edit. A smoothing.
She wrote it the way she wrote triage notes. Measured. No adjectives. But the line sat there all the same: discrepancy consistent with vendor risk-filter behavior. Meaning someone had decided what they were allowed to understand.
The form wouldn’t let it go forward without a named submitter. No initials, no “Medbay”. A body attached to the claim. She keyed in Sigruna Halvorsdottir, cooperative ID, medical override, the whole chain. If they came hunting later it would be her they had to name, not some faceless sabotage story. When she pressed confirm, the click landed sharp, too loud in the dock’s working noise.
The ping went out through the station like a cold drop in the blood. Coop review queue, duty rotation, quarantine team, and the oversight mirror that never slept. She watched the distribution list finish populating, names turning into witnesses. Time-stamp sealed. No quiet walk-back now. She felt the future tighten: contracts, favors, Tove’s thin shelter. All spent for a record that would not forget.
Bjørn filled the corridor mouth like a bulkhead someone had decided to grow. Exosuit frame locked around him, plates scuffed from dock work and not from parade. He didn’t advance. He didn’t make room. He just stood there and let the station speak for him. Magnet tugs clacking in rhythm, a valve cycling with a wet hiss, distant voices flattened by helmets and distance until they were only tone. A working symphony. He used it like a gavel.
His face was bare, hard-eyed, the kind of stillness that pretended it was patience. He let the silence stretch. Not empty. Shaped. The negative space of an order: move aside. Let throughput happen. Don’t make a scene.
Sigruna stopped where the floor markings changed from general dock traffic to quarantine boundary. Yellow lines worn thin by boots and carts. She saw Ragnhilda in her peripheral, angled half a step behind, not yielding the line either. Plain protective gear, no rank tabs, no color that signaled who got to win. Just bodies that had signed on to keep other bodies from turning into vectors.
Bjørn’s gaze flicked once to Sigruna’s visor, as if looking for a badge that wasn’t there. His jaw tightened. He said nothing. The dock lights strobed through a thermal cycle and made his exosuit look like it breathed.
Behind him, the cargo stack waited, netted and tagged. One crate’s telemetry bloom sat in her overlay: a neat, steady warmth where there shouldn’t have been any. Not the diffuse heat of active electronics. Not the ragged rise of a battery under load. Too regular. Too controlled. Like a heartbeat someone had built on purpose.
She watched his hands. Gloved, resting on the exosuit’s brace points. Not threatening. Not relaxed. Ready to take hold of procedure and bend it.
His silence kept trying to recruit her muscles, to make her fill the gap by stepping back, by apologizing, by negotiating herself smaller. The dock noise did its work, trying to make compliance feel like the default setting of the air.
Her body tried to do the old math for her. Pulse climbing, breath thinning at the top of her chest, a tiny forward-lean that meant yes sir before the thought arrived. She felt it in the soles of her boots and in the way her hands wanted to drop from the line and make room. Habit, filed down into reflex by people who stood like this and let you supply your own surrender.
The stimulant patch had left a faint tremor in her fingers all shift. She’d hated it. Now she watched it with a kind of grim appreciation. The shake wasn’t fear. It was chemistry and lack of sleep and a medbay that ran on rationed miracles. Proof her steadiness wasn’t borrowed from his silence. She wasn’t calm because he was in control. She was holding because she chose to hold.
She let herself take one deeper breath, slow enough to count, and she set her boots without shifting them. Her voice stayed behind her teeth. No apology formed. No negotiation.
The station noise kept pushing, trying to make obedience feel like air. She didn’t breathe it.
Her gaze goes past Bjørn to the bulkhead display where dock telemetry scrolls in thin, clinical bars. Most of the stack reads as it should: cold mass, lazy gradients, a few spikes where forklifts kissed metal. Then the one crate. Its heat bloom is wrong, tight, uneven, a pattern that holds instead of bleeding into the surrounding air. Warm in corners that ought to be dead, cooler at the center as if something is being buffered, managed. Not the sloppy rise of a stressed cell. Not the broad wash of an active unit. This is regulation. A maintained threshold, deliberate as a pulse. She feels it in her teeth, the quiet of it. Whatever is inside, someone wants it alive or stable, and they want it moved fast enough that nobody has time to ask why.
It comes down in her mind with a blunt, ugly click. The schedule is not the goal. It is the tool. Push enough “normal” cycles through a seal already past its honest life, and physics will do the rest. The gasket will tear. The airlock will stutter open on its own. Then the report will say fatigue, wear, bad luck. Nobody will write intent.
Haldor’s live readout flickered again at the edge of her visor: pressure variance jumping, seal compression lag widening, cycle count climbing like a fever. Each update was a hitch in Skjoldheim’s breathing, the kind you heard right before a patient quit compensating. For a suspended beat the whole ring felt balanced on a gasket already shredding, and the lie wasn’t just paper. It was time.
Sigruna felt the words rise in her mouth like an old reflex, shaped by too many bad nights and too many bosses who wanted peace more than truth. If we just slow it down, if we just stagger the cycles, if we just, . Her throat tightened around the offer. A half-step. A compromise. A promise to fix it after.
She cut it off mid-breath.
The tremor in her hands wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was the stimulant patch and the sleep debt and the way her body recognized a failure curve before her mind finished naming it. Seal compression lag did not care about tone. Rash clusters did not care about anyone’s schedule. Translation logs that “smoothed” danger words did not become honest because she asked nicely.
She watched Bjørn’s stillness like you watched a patient who had decided not to answer questions. The military posture. The soft voice waiting to land like a weight. He wanted her to meet him on his ground, rank, urgency, implied consequence. The old script would have met it with diplomacy. A soothing line. A quiet bargain made in the corner, away from witnesses.
Not today.
She tasted metal through the filter. She didn’t look away from him, but she shifted her attention to what mattered: the airlock cycling number, the pressure variance trend, the small red note in Haldor’s feed that meant the seal was already past the point where “within tolerance” was anything but a story. She thought of the dock workers with the strange dermal blooms who begged not to be written up. She thought of a crate kept warm in the wrong places. She thought of how accidents were manufactured: not with explosions, but with repetition and plausible deniability.
Her voice came out clipped, practical, unpersuasive on purpose. “Stop the movement.”
A pause. Somewhere behind her, Ragnhilda’s breathing steadied, the way she did at triage when the first scream went up. Sigruna didn’t add please. She didn’t explain yet. Explanation could wait; physics would not.
“Quarantine boundary holds. No further cycles until we verify seal integrity and custody. That’s cooperative protocol.”
She let the argument die on the deck between them. Not defeated. Just irrelevant. The next words were not for Bjørn. They were for the airlock, for the logs, for the people listening in the gantry shadows.
Her voice went flat and clean, the cadence she used when blood was already on the floor. “Quarantine boundary enforced.” She lifted two fingers, counting without looking at her own hand. “Movement paused. No exceptions until seal integrity is verified.” Another finger. “Chain-of-custody locked. All tags rechecked against manifest and sensor hash.” She could feel the tremor in her knuckles, contained by the glove, made smaller by the list.
The station smelled of cold metal and hot lubricant through the filter. Somewhere a warning tone chirped once and shut up, as if it knew better than to argue.
“Cycle count capped at current number,” she said, and the word capped sounded like a valve closing. “Inspection scheduled under lockout. Haldor, you take seal compression and latch timing. Ragnhilda, you pull exposure logs and rash cluster timestamps. I’ll file the incident entry and notify duty lead for consensus authorization.”
Each item was a rung. No maybe. No later. No bargaining with physics.
Bjørn held himself like a bulkhead, compact, unmoving, built to make other people yield first. The pause was a tactic. Let the dock noise fill the gap. Let her imagine consequences. His eyes stayed on her visor as if he could put his weight through it.
Sigruna did not give him a handle. She did not argue his urgency or name his authority. She spoke as if she were in medbay dictating orders over a patient who could not be negotiated with.
“Co-op protocol section four,” she said, voice even. “Quarantine boundary is a hard line during suspected exposure. No discretionary throughput.”
She kept it plain, almost dull. “Seal integrity verified before any additional cycle. Custody verified before any release. If you want a change, you call for consensus. Until then, you stand down.”
She planted her boots wider on the deck and turned just enough that the nearest crews on the gantry could read her faceplate and catch her voice clean. No corner talk. No private deal. If there was going to be blame, it would have to step into the light with her. Protocol was not her veto and not his timetable. It belonged to everyone: shared constraints, shared liability, shared survival.
The last soft habit in her, make it palatable, lower voices, trade time for peace, lets go. It goes like a snapped suture, no blood, just the sudden honest edge of it. She feels the station’s limits the way she feels a pulse under skin. Until consensus is called and the seal is proven, nothing moves. Not cargo. Not people. Not excuses.
At the public audit terminal she keys in the incident header and feels her fingers lag a fraction behind her intent. The tremor is small but it is there, a delay like low latency in a bad link. Sleep debt. Too many hours with alarms that never quite clear. The stimulant patch under her sleeve itches in a hot, insistent way, as if her body wants to confess what her mouth will not: that she is running on borrowed chemistry and stubbornness.
She keeps typing.
The terminal accepts her credentials with a polite chime. Her name blooms on the top line in clean station font, the kind designed to look neutral while it nails things down. She watches the cursor blink and thinks of how easy it is to let a moment pass unlogged and later claim it never happened. That is how small hazards become stories and then become policy. That is how people end up blamed for things that were decided in a hallway.
Incident Type: Quarantine Integrity Risk. Location: Docking Ring C, Airlock 3. Suspected Exposure Cluster: Dermal reaction, dock workers, last seventy-two hours.
Her thumb slips once on the glass keys. She corrects it without looking at anyone. She does not ask Ragnhilda to take over. She does not offer Bjørn the mercy of saying, See, I’m not fit. She has seen too many men like him use any softness as a lever.
She adds the seal cycle count Haldor reported and the failure threshold that sits too close under it. She tags the crate heat signature as anomalous and flags chain-of-custody irregularities without adding adjectives. Facts. Times. Sensor IDs. Names of witnesses. The station’s own language, the kind that holds up under review.
The glow from the screen whitens her gloves and makes the bay beyond the terminal seem darker by comparison. She can feel eyes gathering, the way pressure gathers in a compartment before a hiss. Her throat tightens once, a brief hitch, and she pushes through it. She hits SUBMIT and hears the log mirror ping into the public archive. No private understanding. No quiet fix. Just a record that belongs to everyone now.
The dock crews notice anyway. Sound drains out of the ring in layers. First the joking, then the muttered side talk, then even the small noises people make when they want you to know they’re still there. A pallet jack idles with its motor whining like a bad tooth. Somebody’s boot stops tapping. A few workers look up at the shift clocks as if the numbers might take pity and give time back, as if minutes weren’t money and money wasn’t rent.
Bjørn’s people don’t spread out. They hold close, exosuit shoulders squared, hands loose at their sides, a disciplined stillness that reads as judgment. Not shouting. Not arguing. Just letting the weight of their patience press on the air.
Sigruna feels it in her skin, the old reflex to apologize for delays she didn’t cause. She doesn’t. She keeps her shoulders set and her chin level behind the faceplate. She doesn’t perform calm for them. She just continues. Line by line. Field by field. A record that can’t be walked back later.
Her tremor shows when she lifts her hand to scroll. She lets it show. She does not look at Bjørn. She watches the cursor move and makes the station tell the truth.
She links the report to the airlock’s cycle history, pulls the last maintenance waiver, and pins the seal’s stated threshold beside the real count Haldor read off the diagnostics. Numbers first. Then bodies. She uploads the rash photos, the triage notes, the dock-worker names with their consent tags, and the exposure timestamps down to the minute: no smoothing, no kind phrasing to make it easier to swallow. The system offers drop-downs that suggest safer words. She ignores them. She writes suspected contamination and quarantine breach risk and lets the plain terms sit there like tools on a clean tray.
Last she attaches the crate’s heat trace, the spike where it shouldn’t be, and flags it HOLD pending verification. She knows whose clock she is breaking. She does it anyway.
Ragnhilda holds station at her shoulder in the same plain gear, visor dull with dock light, breathing the same filtered air. Close enough that if someone reaches, she is there. Close enough to remember exact words when the retellings start. She does not lay a hand on Sigruna. She doesn’t need to. A dock hand mutters about lost pay. Ragnhilda’s eyes cut to the screen, steady: finish. Lock it in.
Sigruna makes herself read the terminal’s summary aloud, because silence lets other people fill in motives. “Quarantine hold. Seal fatigue at critical. Suspected contamination.” On one syllable her voice thins, almost breaks, then the old medbay cadence returns, short, usable words. No appeal to Bjørn, no apology to the clocks. She taps SUBMIT. The terminal pings, and the log spills into the cooperative feed where everyone can see her hand shake and still sign.
The Atrium board updates with a soft chime that used to mean nothing. Now heads lift on instinct. Docking Ring C goes yellow. A minute later amber blooms over it like a bruise. Then red. The kind of red that isn’t a suggestion. HOLD. Quarantine lock engaged. No transfers. No exceptions unless the duty lead signs blood and someone higher agrees to live with the consequences.
Sigruna stands with her back to the bulletin wall where shift swaps and missing tools get pinned in neat rows. She watches the queue stack in simple columns: inbound hulls, scheduled unloads, priority tags that pretend they are neutral. She doesn’t see ships. She sees time. Air reserves in canisters. Power draw on the lock heaters. Hours until tempers turn into mistakes. Hours until someone with rent due decides to cut a seal because rules don’t pay wages.
The tremor in her hand is small but present when she pulls up the quarantine pane on her tablet. She holds her thumb hard against the edge until it steadies. The station runs on clean lines and agreed procedure. It also runs on shortcuts and unspoken trade. She knows the informal map better than most: which dock foreman listens to who, which union rep will take a call at 03:[^00], which security tech hates Bjørn enough to log something properly.
She scrolls through exposure reports, not the summaries. Names, shift blocks, glove changes, mask fit checks. A dock worker with a rash that started at the wrist where tape ends. Another with throat irritation after a pallet shift in Bay 3. Three more with the same pattern and all of them touched the same type of packaging: poly-fiber wraps with a new anti-static coating, supposedly certified for clean handling. The manifests call it “dry goods.” The handling flags say “no quarantine required.” Her stomach tightens, not from fear but from the dull anger of recognizing a lie that has been signed and stamped.
A pair of cargo hands argue under the board, low voices sharp with money. Someone says medbay is making theater again. Someone else says the last time they ignored a red light, a man went out in a bag.
Sigruna keeps looking at the timestamps until the irritation in her throat stops being vague. It matches the onset notes. The same hours. The same bay. The same wrap. She feels the station’s patience thinning like air through a pinhole and tells herself, clipped and practical, that vectors don’t care what anyone can afford.
NordVast notices start stacking the moment the schedule slip turns from nuisance to fact. They arrive on the same channel as supply confirmations and birthday broadcasts, dressed in clean templates. Regret for disruption. Concern for “stakeholder confidence.” A request for clarification on “medical basis” and “expected duration.” Each sentence is a gloved hand on her wrist, guiding it toward the release toggle.
She opens them in order, reads them once, then again slower, watching for the soft parts where the translation core likes to sand down risk. The core renders their demand as collaboration: can we align, can we expedite, can we avoid unnecessary alarm. Underneath is the same old math. Minutes equal money. Money equals permission.
She tags each message for archive, stamps it with the quarantine case ID, and files it without reply. If she answers, she enters their frame. If she argues, she gives them language they can quote back later with the edges trimmed.
Her throat stings when she swallows. She checks the symptom onset times on her own log and keeps her face still. Pressure is a symptom too.
She pulls the dock worker reports up again and builds the overlay by hand, because the auto-summary likes to round rough edges into something palatable. Roster blocks. Badge pings at Bay 3. Glove issue numbers. Handling flags. The same handful of pallets lights up every time. Not all dry goods, not really. Cold-chain stickers slapped on crates that never saw cold, the thermal trace flat and indifferent across the whole run. Someone wanted the label more than the condition.
The rashes aren’t random. They sit where tape ends and sweat starts. The throat burn in her own chest stops being fatigue and caffeine and becomes data: onset after exposure, duration, escalation. A warning she can quantify. She saves the composite, timestamps it, and locks it to the quarantine case ID before anyone can “clean it up.”
The call comes in on the union channel, labeled routine, sounding like anything but. A dock rep with a voice pulled tight asks who signed the HOLD, who decided their kids eat late, who gets to be careful on other people’s rent. In the atrium she hears chairs scrape, a crowd forming around a grievance. Sigruna keeps her sentences short. Protocol. Symptoms. Exposure chain. No names. No offering.
Alone at the quarantine console she runs the manifests against thermal traces and lock cams, frame by frame. The seam shows itself. A cold-chain tag on a crate that never dropped a degree. “Inert packaging” checked while the sensor map blooms with outgassing. She writes the mismatch into the case record in dry, surgical lines. Then she sits and listens to the station bleed time. Anger becomes a plan. Keep pulling.
The stand-up smells of coolant and stale coffee, the kind of meeting that should take four minutes and takes ten because nobody wants to be the one to say the ugly part out loud. They stand in a loose ring under the atrium lights, boots hooked where the deck plates don’t quite meet, eyes on the bulletin wall or the floor seam. Sigruna gives her update in the same clipped cadence she uses in medbay. Exposure chain. Hold status. Airlock seal margins. No adjectives. No blame.
When she finishes there’s a beat of silence that isn’t thinking, it’s bargaining. The rotating lead clears their throat and repeats her points like they’re translating them into something safer for the room. A couple of heads nod without looking up. Someone asks, too quickly, if the HOLD can be narrowed “to just the worst of it,” as if biology negotiates. Sigruna says no, and the no lands with weight. The meeting ends with people peeling away in angles, as if the space near her has become a hazard tape.
By shift change the docks have turned her name into a function.
On Docking Ring C, comms chatter rides the low hum of fans and winches, the constant scrape of work against schedule. A pallet stops for a seal check and someone breathes into an open mic, half amused, half angry. “Halvorsdottir.”
A pause. A thin laugh. Another voice answers, “Copy. Halvorsdottir delay. Add twenty.”
They use it again when a lock cycles slow. Again when a scanner flags residue. It becomes a little ritual, a way to make a hold feel like a person instead of a protocol. Sigruna hears it on the log playback later, the way she hears a pulse oximeter: not for the numbers, for the wobble underneath. The laughter is careful. Practiced. A group rehearsing contempt so it doesn’t sound like fear.
She marks the timestamp, tags the channel, and keeps her hands flat on the console until the tremor settles. In her chest the throat burn flares, then ebbs. She doesn’t answer the joke. She writes the next line in the case record and lets the station think whatever it needs to think to keep moving.
In the spine corridor the station’s informal equations re-balance around her. The air is the same recycled mix of disinfectant and warm wiring, but the faces are different. Two technicians who used to lean in her doorway with coffee and bad jokes pass with their eyes fixed on a bulkhead seam, hands full of tools they don’t need yet. They find reasons to be elsewhere. A laugh starts and dies when she comes within earshot. Even the foot traffic gives her an extra half meter, like she’s carrying spores on her sleeves.
She keeps moving. Badge taps. Door cycles. A cart hums past with lab glassware boxed tight in foam. The tremor in her fingers wants a task; she gives it one, checking the strap on her tablet until the shake thins out.
At the junction by the translation suite, one of Bjørn’s dock regulars drifts close enough that she can smell metal dust on his coveralls. He doesn’t block her. He doesn’t raise his voice.
“You cost people hours,” he says, soft, level, as if stating a load limit.
Then he walks on, and the corridor swallows him like it was never said.
The blame doesn’t stay vague. It takes a shape the way frost takes a seam. A story with a clean hook: medbay likes drama; quarantine is a tool; Halvorsdottir wants to feel important. It passes mouth to mouth quicker than any incident notice and it comes back to her with the edges sanded off, harmless-sounding, ready for repetition. She watches it happen in the micro-pauses before people answer her, in the way they say protocol like it’s a hobby.
She can’t argue feelings into compliance. She can only build a weight that will hold in an audit. She tightens her language until it is nothing but time, place, device. 03:[^14] lock cycle. Sensor pack C-17. Outgassing spike. Seal test fail margin. Clause numbers. Cross-links. If they want a villain, she gives them paperwork that points elsewhere.
Ragnhilda refuses to let it be handled in corridors. At the next review she comes in with Sigruna, shoulder to shoulder, her hands still smelling faintly of antiseptic. When Sigruna lists holds and thresholds, Ragnhilda repeats them in her own cadence, adds the supply reality, names the diversion. Someone says, lightly, one overstimulated medic. Ragnhilda looks up. “Then write both names.”
Eira stops offering advice and starts allocating angles. She has Sigruna pull mirrored copies of the same log runs, offset by minutes, then lays them side by side like wound photos. The translation core’s smooth phrasing doesn’t match the raw strings; risk words blur, soften, vanish. Eira meets her eyes once (permission and warning) and the record becomes a border they defend, line by line.
Containment holds through another full shift change. The clocks roll over and nothing screams. No klaxon from Docking Ring C. No soft chime from the quarantine system asking for human judgment. That quiet has weight. It sits on the station like an extra plate bolted to the hull.
Sigruna stands in Medbay 2 with the lighting turned down to spare her eyes and listens anyway. The ventilation fans, the coolant loop in the wall, the faint tick of the autoclave cycling. Ordinary sounds. She doesn’t trust them. Ordinary is what you get right before something goes wrong.
She checks the isolation ward windows once. Sees the same bodies in the same bunks, wrapped in thermal blankets, their skin marked with pen-grid squares and scanner tags. She checks them again as if the glass itself might change what it shows. She makes herself stop. Habit is a drug too.
Her hand tremors when she lifts it off her thigh. The stimulant patch on her neck itches under the collar seam. She puts her fingertips to the edge of the console and presses until the pressure turns the tremor into a tool she can measure. There. Still there. Not worse.
On the wall display, quarantine status reads green with too many asterisks. Seal integrity: within margin. Particulate count: falling. Volatile organics: baseline. She scrolls the sensor history and watches the same clean lines repeat, then catches the one small outgassing spike that didn’t trip anything because the threshold was tuned for a budget they never had. Her jaw tightens. She copies it into her working file with a time stamp and the device ID. If it comes back, she wants it already named.
In the corridor outside medbay, she hears boots and cart wheels. Another crew swapping in, voices kept low the way people do when they don’t want to wake a sick room or admit they’re scared. Someone laughs once, too sharp, then stops.
No alarms. No blood on the deck. The station holds its breath. She holds hers with it.
She does the rounds anyway. Routine is what keeps panic from finding a seam. She pulls the curtain, checks the monitor, checks the patient, then checks her own hands for shaking before she touches anyone. Vitals first. Breath rate, O2 saturation, skin temp under the scanner. She makes each one say their name and the day, not because she doubts them but because confusion arrives early when something gets into the blood.
Mucosa next. Tongue down, light in, look for the faint stippling that showed up on the dock workers. Too subtle for an algorithm that wants yes or no. She swabs, labels, seals. Dermal mapping under the harsh exam lamp. She traces the pen-grid squares, notes any spread across a line, any heat that doesn’t match the room. Same questions, same order. Cargo contact. Glove use. Break room. Shower cycle. Any dreams. Any taste of metal.
No one crashes. No one spikes a fever high enough to trip the auto-page. The relief is real, but it lands thin. A pause. A held breath, not a homecoming.
In the gap between one set of vitals and the next, the station’s quiet stops being neutral. It becomes room for other things. Grief comes in where the adrenaline used to sit, slow and stubborn. Not for the sick alone, but for the arithmetic she’d already started doing in her head: who could wait, who couldn’t, how many minutes a single clean airway kit could buy if the next lungs went stiff at the same time. She’d felt her own hands moving ahead of her thoughts, laying out tools like a verdict.
Containment holding should feel like a win. Instead it tastes like paper. She can already hear the phrasing in the reports: managed, within margin, no incident. As if the margin wasn’t made by starving the medbay and calling it efficiency. As if “no one died” means it was acceptable to get this close.
A dock worker catches her before the curtain falls. Not a request for analgesic or cream. A question with their eyes already braced for the answer: Will this get me barred from shifts. Will I end up flagged as contamination risk in some corporate registry that follows me off-station. Sigruna tells them what she can put in the medical log, what stays in-house, what she won’t guess at. The worker nods like they’ve been sentenced. She signs the chart and feels it: patient second, case first.
When she finally sits, the tremor comes back, fine and stubborn. It runs through her fingers into the cup she doesn’t drink. She watches it the way she watches a rash edge for spread, and there’s nothing to cut, nothing to cauterize. What loops isn’t relief. It’s an indictment. Holding the line took luck and sleepless bodies. Safeguards don’t get this thin by accident.
Eira takes the translation suite like a shelter you can lock from the inside. She ghosts past the corridor window where the Embassy Spine watches itself, badge low, shoulders level, carrying nothing that looks like panic. In the room the air is dry and overfiltered. The core sits in its cradle with its status lights breathing slow, confident. It has the feel of a tool that’s been sold too many times.
She brings up the oversight mirror first. Not because she trusts it, but because it leaves a witness. Two feeds, one screen split down the middle: what the station thinks it’s hearing, what the vendor says it should have heard. Her fingers move with an old discipline, a teacher’s economy. Menu trees. Submenus that end in polite dead ends. “Unavailable in field deployments,” the manual says, as if the ship and the station and the bodies aren’t field enough.
She finds the diagnostic hook anyway. A narrow service prompt buried behind a maintenance flag that procurement never asked about. The core resists with a warning tone meant to make operators stop. She doesn’t. She forces it into raw-buffer replay.
First pass: smooth, diplomatic, plausible. The alien signal rendered into careful hedges. Concern. Observation. A request for continued hygiene protocol, phrased like advice.
Second pass: the same segment without varnish. Words that land hard. Causality named. Risk qualifiers left intact. Not “possible contamination,” but “transfer confirmed via surface contact.” Not “caution recommended,” but “isolate exposure pathway.” The polished log has rounded it down until it can’t cut anyone.
Eira exports both streams. She hashes them on-station, offline, watches the checksum settle like a bolt torqued to spec. Then she seeds copies into crew-owned nodes, union archive, machine hall scratch array, a personal cache hidden behind a bogus coolant sensor log, so no single account can “update” the truth later. When she finally unlocks the suite, she does it slowly, listening for footsteps that might mean she was already too late.
In Medbay 2, Sigruna stops pretending the rashes are just rashes. She treats them like evidence that can be lost, laundered, reassigned. A chain-of-custody problem in skin.
She opens the log template and makes a new exposure code. Not poetic. Not alarming. A string of characters that reads like inventory. Specific enough to bite. Boring enough that no one can claim she meant something else. She ties it to what her hands already know: time, station, shift. Docking Ring C, Bay Three, third watch. Glove seam split. Sleeve torn on a pallet strap. Decon cycle skipped because the queue was long and a supervisor was watching.
Every case that even smells like surface contact gets the same tag, even when the symptom is small and the worker tries to laugh it off. She has the med techs ask the same short questions, out loud, every time. Where were you. What did you touch. How long until wash. Any breach. Any delay. The repetition is a rail against fatigue and the quiet shame of admitting you cut a corner to keep your pay.
When the code starts to cluster, the resistance comes in sideways. Not about rash edges or incubation windows. About wording. A dock supervisor corners her in the corridor outside Medbay 2 and asks, too casual, why she’s “marking” people like damaged stock. An hour later a NordVast liaison pings her with a templated request to “maintain neutral terminology in outward-facing notes,” as if the notes are for investors, not clinicians. In the atrium she catches Bjørn’s crew talking low, saying medbay is padding a crisis to stall Ring C.
Sigruna doesn’t raise her voice. She keeps it level, almost bored. The tag is not a verdict. It’s a net. It stays until the cluster stops tightening.
Ragnhilda stops watching skin and starts watching hands. She moves through Skjoldheim with her eyes on hinges and badge readers, counting the distance to the nearest airlock out of habit. Dispense logs. Lockbox seals. Smudged signatures that look confident until you line them up. “Emergency use” stamped like a shortcut. Returns recorded, but the foam trays stay empty. She doesn’t file a complaint. She walks it backward (handoff to handoff, favor to favor) until a pattern shows: some requests sail through, others rot in pending, forever.
By the next stand-up the fragments won’t stay in their assigned boxes. Eira lays out the mirrored transcript, raw on one side, vendor-smoothed on the other, the dangerous nouns shaved down to manners. Sigruna brings her cluster: the same code, the same dock bays, the same breaches after pallet work. Ragnhilda adds her list (names, lockers, sealed bins) why gauze and antivirals vanish. Plain facts. Stacked. Refusing to move.
Sigruna takes the timeline off the wall and rebuilds it on the medbay table where she can lean her weight into it. No speeches. Just columns. Intake time. Reported task. Bay assignment. PPE noted or not noted. She writes the names in block letters, the way you write when you intend to be checked.
The early cases scatter the way they always do. A rash after a shift could be detergent. A tight throat could be coolant fumes. A fever could be the hab pods running warm again. She doesn’t argue with any of that. She lets the noise sit there and then starts stripping variables out like bandage layers.
Not food. Not shared air. Not quarters. Not recirc water. Not a single tool set or a single suit rack. Not one particular bay, either, until she stops chasing bays and starts chasing pallets.
She pulls the cargo handoff logs and marries them to medbay intake notes. A forearm rash and a bay scan. A cough and a manifest signature. A blistering along knuckles and a shift swap recorded in a dock chat channel. The same few crate IDs keep showing up in the margins, as if the ink itself is trying to drift toward them.
The commonality that survives is simple and ugly: handling tags that lie.
Temperature-rated wraps stamped INERT. “Dry” cartons that got opened on the dock because the outer seal was sweating and someone wanted to check for spoilage. She circles the glove-use fields where they’re blank. She circles the spots where the chain-of-custody jumps: crate moved from quarantine staging to Ring C work area under a tag that says it never needed quarantine staging at all.
She can’t prove intent yet. She doesn’t need to. In her notes she writes: contact exposure via packaging. Not hysteria. Not bad habits. A route. A repeatable route. And when she looks back over the table, the cluster has a spine now, and it points straight at the mislabeled cargo.
She breaks it down the way the dock crews talk when they’re trying to get a jammed latch open. Not theories. Steps. A pallet comes off a cold hold stamped INERT and the wrap sweats in the warm air. Someone cuts it early because the adhesive is slipping and the corners are lifting. The knife drags through a chalky dusting powder meant to keep layers from sticking. The cutter’s gloves are on the bench because the tag says no hazard and the shift is already behind. Fingers touch tape. Tape touches wrist where the sleeve rides up. The residue sits there, stubborn as grease, and then gets rubbed into skin when a strap is tightened.
She lays her intake notes over the cargo handoffs and watches the same touchpoints light up. Knuckles. Inner forearm. Throat after a breath taken close to a torn wrap. She marks each contact as a box you can tick: cut, lift, sweep, rewrap, carry. Each time the boxes line up with a symptom onset window.
Coincidence has scatter. This has edges. A route you can walk with a clipboard and end up at the same crate every time.
The objections come the way they always come, dressed as reason. Stress does strange things. People stop washing. Rumor spreads faster than mold in a warm vent. She lets them spend themselves. Then she answers like she’s calling vitals. Not loud. Not pleading. Repeatable cluster. Same onset window. Same contact points: knuckles, inner forearm, throat after torn wrap. Workers who don’t share quarters, food, tools, or shift leads. Different politics. Different habits. One link.
She slides a printout across the table with her thumb, the paper curling at the edge. Names redacted where they need to be. Crate IDs left plain. “If it was hygiene,” she says, “it would follow bathrooms and bunks. It doesn’t. It follows packaging.”
Ragnhilda doesn’t raise her voice. She just comes in with a cart and a keycode she shouldn’t have, and she opens the VIP cage like she’s opening a wound. Inside: sealed cases of gauze, broad-spectrum antivirals, sterile drapes. Factory tape unbroken. Serials clean. Issue dates recent. She sets the printouts beside them, medbay logs stamped SHORTAGE, line after line claiming non-delivery, and lets the room do the arithmetic.
The two lines of evidence seat together with a hard click. The exposure isn’t some drifting chance in recycled air. It’s a handling chain built on a lie: conditions stamped safe, material sweating out something it shouldn’t. And the shortages aren’t miscounts or shipping lag. Someone kept medbay thin on purpose, so the logs stayed quiet and the story stayed clean.
The ring kept its own counsel. Conveyors ran their loops with a patient, stupid certainty, rollers humming under load. A gantry arm swung out, took a pallet, set it down again in a new order as if order was the only thing that mattered. On the status wall the manifests refreshed in tight little pulses then green again. Somewhere in the spine, a meeting timer rolled over. Somewhere else, coolant valves clicked and life support corrected for a thermal drift nobody would ever feel. The station did not pause to honor conclusions.
Sigruna stood at the edge of Docking Ring C and watched the machinery argue with her in silence. She could smell the dock through the air scrubbers: hot polymer, old oil, the sharp clean note of disinfectant that never fully won. Her hands wanted to shake. She pressed her thumb into the base of her index finger until the tremor dulled, a habit from long shifts and worse rooms.
They had done the math. Packaging. A chain. A lie stamped into a label and carried hand to hand. That should have made it simpler. It didn’t. It only moved the weight to a different part of the station.
The next burn window ticked closer on the schedule overlay, indifferent and bright. Miss it and you didn’t just lose hours. You lost favors, berth priority, parts that were already spoken for. She felt the cost in her teeth, like grinding grit. Every minute she held quarantine was a minute someone else counted as theft.
A dock crew rolled a fresh cart up to the barrier line and stopped when the warning bands flashed. One of them lifted his palms in a question he didn’t voice. Behind his visor his eyes went to her badge, then past her, measuring who else might be watching. No one moved to help him. No one wanted to be the one to touch the wrong thing.
Sigruna checked the seal readouts again. Margins thinning. Airlock gaskets past their comfort range. Medbay stores already rationed to the edge. She thought of the VIP cage, the factory tape, the clean serials, and felt the anger come up steady and cold. Keeping people safe here was not a discovery. It was a continuous act against momentum.
NordVast’s messages land in her queue with the same bright header each time, as if urgency could be made hygienic. Delay codes in neat columns. Penalty clauses cited by section and subclause. A soft reminder of “shared objectives” that reads like a hand on the back of her neck. The language is cooperative on the surface, partners, alignment, mutual success, and every sentence underneath is a lever meant to move her without anyone having to raise a voice.
She scrolls with her jaw set and feels how the system is built to make refusal look childish. A missed window becomes a moral failing. A quarantine hold becomes “avoidable disruption.” The station’s caution is translated into their loss ledger and sent back as fact.
Down on Docking Ring C, Bjørn doesn’t forward the whole thing. He clips out the penalty totals, the schedule impact, the line about “noncompliance escalation,” and drops it into the dock channel with no commentary. He doesn’t need to. He lets the numbers stand in for accusation. He watches the read receipts stack up and holds still, like a man letting a fuse burn toward someone else’s door.
In the Atrium and the lift queues the words start to travel. Not shouted, not quite jokes either. Medbay theatrics. Quarantine cosplay. Said with a grin that doesn’t reach the eyes, said loud enough to be overheard so the heat can leave someone’s chest without naming who put it there. The dock crews need a target that won’t file a grievance back.
Sigruna hears it in passing and keeps walking. She reads them the way she reads monitors. The laugh that comes too fast, the shoulders held high like bracing for impact. The ones who won’t meet her eyes because they’ve already decided she’s the problem they’re allowed to have. A man rubs at his wrist where a glove seal used to bite. Another checks his hands like they’ve betrayed him. Anger, fear, payroll. All the same tremor.
In Medbay 2 she and Ragnhilda take the evidence and hammer it into a workflow. Names, shift logs, glove changes. Handling conditions cross-checked against bay temps and seal warnings. Symptom onset pinned to specific packaging batches until the pattern stops being deniable. Sigruna writes every deviation in plain, ugly words. Eira sits in translation like a gate shut: no filters, no softened risk terms, no prettying up what happened.
By stand-up the argument has shifted into view, hard as a bulkhead: not if exposure happened, but who will keep paying to admit it. Sigruna feels the room weighing hours against lungs. She gives no comfort. She gives a list. Seal thresholds. Batch IDs. Who pulls swabs, who audits logs, who locks the airlock schedule. Truth as load-bearing work, carried shift to shift, signed and defended.
The next shift begins with the station’s familiar minimal chorus, boots on grated deck, a kettle clicking off in the Atrium, a dock request chiming for acknowledgment, and Sigruna lets the repetition settle her pulse long enough to function. The sounds are small. They mean pressure holds. They mean people are still moving with purpose instead of stumbling in a panic. She takes two breaths at the junction outside Medbay 2, palm flat on the cold frame. Her hand tremors against the metal, a thin betrayal. She flexes her fingers until the shake tucks itself into something usable.
Inside, the air tastes of disinfectant and warmed plastic. The lights are too bright for how little she slept. The wall screen scrolls overnight entries in clean columns, and for once she trusts the order of them. Not the meaning, meaning always requires a person, but the order. A station that cannot keep time-stamps honest cannot keep bodies alive.
Ragnhilda is already there, hair tied back, sleeves rolled. She’s checking sealant strips along the isolation ward door like she expects them to peel away out of spite. She doesn’t look up when Sigruna comes in; she just slides a tray of sterile packs into place, slow, careful, as if haste itself contaminates.
Sigruna drops her bag, keys in, and runs the first set of vitals on the room the way some people run their own. Oxygen partial, negative pressure, scrubber load, UV cycle count. The numbers behave. She thinks of Docking Ring C and the way “behave” can be staged, can be edited. She thinks of Bjørn’s soft voice making demands like orders, and the way the cooperative had answered him with a line in a log and a pair of signatures. Paper is frail. So is flesh. Both matter.
She pulls up the morning checklist. Her eyes snag on the new space that wasn’t there yesterday, sitting mid-column like a nail driven through a plank. It forces the hand to stop. It forces the mind to acknowledge that someone tried to route around her and was told no. She stares at it until the rest of the list steadies behind it, until her anger becomes something clean and directional.
In Medbay 2 the morning checklist has a new line that drags her eye back each time she tries to skim. It sits in the middle of the column, not at the bottom where omissions can be blamed on haste, not in a sub-menu where a vendor can bury it under “recommended.” Plain words. Hard requirement. QUARANTINE OVERRIDE, TESTED. SIGNED. TIME-STAMPED. HUMAN VERIFICATION. Two witnesses.
The phrasing is ugly on purpose. No smoothing. No gentle synonym that lets someone argue later about intent. Someone on the cooperative board had fought for that, and someone else had tried to keep it out, and the scar of the argument is there in the font weight and the mandated witness fields.
Sigruna taps it open. The system demands names before it will proceed. Not roles. Not clearance codes. Names that can be looked up, walked down to, confronted in the Atrium.
She feels her jaw tighten, the old anger rising, and she uses it like a brace. A station that lets a routine sign for a person is a station that will let a person die for a schedule.
Sigruna runs the override test herself. No delegating it to a junior tech, no letting the system “self-certify” with a green icon. Her hand tremors on the panel and she pins it with her other palm until the contact pads read clean. She cycles the isolation ward doors: lock, seal, pressure drop. The hinges thump once, heavy, like a verdict. Negative pressure bites down. The scrubbers spool up and the load spikes in a hard, brief climb that would look like a glitch to anyone hunting for excuses.
She watches the numbers until they settle into their new baseline, then walks to the public audit terminal and calls the log by time-stamp. She waits through the lag, eyes dry, breathing measured. When the mirrored entry finally appears off-vendor, it carries her own blunt words without softening, and the station time agrees.
Ragnhilda falls in step a half pace behind, tablet tucked against her ribs like a shield. She doesn’t speak much. She scrolls names, then symptom notes, then supply draws, back and forth until the pattern either holds or breaks. Her thumb pauses on small mismatches, an extra vial signed out, a worker marked “fatigue” twice in a week, and she tags them sharp. Not theft. Not yet. Drift that becomes policy if nobody pins it down.
Docking Ring C pings again. Sigruna doesn’t bargain. She forwards the stamped override log to the duty channel, then to customs, then to Bjørn’s queue where it can’t be “missed.” Her reply is one line, flat as metal: hold in quarantine until Medbay clears. Not a personal no. A visible procedure.
The station keeps its rhythm because it has to. Cargo windows open and close on orbital math that does not care who is tired. Coolant loops cycle hot and cold, pushing the ring through small groans and clicks. Sealant is rationed like painkillers. The microfab queue runs with its own kind of hunger, printing gaskets and latch fingers and filter housings until the feedstock alarms start to sound like a language.
But the rhythm has been pinned down. It can’t be used the way it used to be used, as cover. “No time” doesn’t float loose anymore. It has to stand in the light next to a protocol number and a clock and a name attached to the decision. The public audit terminal has become a tool people actually touch. Crew stop there on the way to shift, hands still in work gloves, and scroll back through entries. They do it without ceremony, just to see what is true.
Sigruna feels it in the way messages land. Fewer private pings. More things said in the duty channel where they can’t be sanded smooth. The translation core, set to human-verified settings now, adds a small delay to everything: enough to irritate, enough to save. The pauses make room for questions. They make room for refusal.
In Medbay 2, the supply cabinet inventory is re-counted twice a day. Not because anyone trusts the numbers, but because the act of counting is a kind of fence. Ragnhilda flags discrepancies and sends them to the cooperative log with the same bluntness she uses on a wound that won’t clot.
Haldor posts a seal-threshold chart outside the quarantine airlock like a weather report. Red lines, dates, and a note about what breaks first if they keep pretending.
Sigruna keeps moving, hands steady only when they’re busy. She watches the station’s new habit form: not obedience, not heroics: just the hard insistence that if someone routes around safety, they will have to do it in writing.
Bjørn still works Docking Ring C with that compact stillness, boots planted wide for the slow pull of spin gravity, hands moving as if the schedule is a muscle memory he can’t afford to lose. He talks low to loaders, calls out weights and lock times, makes the numbers sound like orders. He used to live in the thin places: verbal clears at the threshold, a nod that stood in for a stamp, a manifest “corrected” after the pallet was already inside.
He reaches for it out of habit. A tech hears him and doesn’t flinch, just tilts their tablet so the request sits in the open, waiting for a protocol code. The quarantine console rejects the old bypass string and demands the medbay override token, time-stamped and mirrored. The chain-of-custody checklist won’t accept “in transit” as a destination anymore. Even the airlock won’t cycle on his timing; it pings duty and sits there, patient as a sealed door.
He tries tone, then rank-coded language, then the soft threat of delay. The system answers with the same flat thing each time: a process with no throat to grab.
The pressure doesn’t lift. It just changes shape, like heat finding the thin metal. It comes as favors asked at the wrong hour, as “just this once” slid into a comm ping meant to disappear. It comes as a clipboard shoved under a visor while a tech’s gloves are still on, as a signature line offered like a sedative. Sigruna sees where it aims: fatigue, pride, the instinct to keep the line moving. Soft joints.
So the cooperative hardens those joints into something you can point at. The same form, every time. The same fields that won’t submit blank. Mirrored logs that copy themselves out of reach. A duty channel where a private ask is treated like a spill: contained, documented, cleaned up in the open. Ambiguity becomes a reportable hazard, not a style of speech.
Quarantine stops being a word people say and becomes hardware and habit. Crates come off the lock with colored tags that mean something and hold lines painted where boots don’t cross. A standing rule sits in the system: medbay suspicion is enough. No votes, no charm. Compliance isn’t “helping out” now. It’s shared infrastructure, like pressure and air.
With the shortcuts dragged into daylight, enforcement stops being a test of nerve. It settles into the station’s bones. A request gets routed, time-stamped, mirrored, and either clears or it doesn’t. No raised voices, no private bargains, just the next documented step waiting like a handrail. People quit watching for who will say no and start reading the checklist, then moving.
Shift change in Ring C looked like any other handoff if you didn’t know what to watch for. Not greetings. Not jokes. Just bodies moving with purpose through painted lines and taped arrows, pausing at the same stations in the same order as if the sequence itself held the pressure in.
They came in pairs. Mask on, seal check, comms check. Glove cuffs rolled back, inspected, rolled forward again. A tech read the quarantine checklist from the wall panel, not because anyone had forgotten it but because reading it made it real and shared. Call-and-response, flat and tired.
“Respirator fit.”
“Confirmed.”
“Outer gloves intact.”
“Confirmed.”
“Badge scan, log mirror green.”
“Confirmed.”
The words sounded like tools being put down in the right place.
Sigruna stood just off the flow, watching the small errors fatigue tried to sneak in. A strap twisted. A thumbprint of condensation that meant the mask wasn’t seated. Someone’s hand hovering a second too long over a pocket where a personal comm unit could live. She didn’t bark. She didn’t plead. She pointed, two fingers, and waited while the person fixed it. No one argued. The station had finally learned that a debate was just another kind of leak.
On the bench beside the airlock, a box of fresh nitrile sleeves sat open like rations. They were supposed to be sealed until use; someone had cut the tape early, in optimism or impatience. Sigruna closed it, retaped, marked it with a date and initials. Supplies were a story people told with straight faces in reports. Here they were math. Here they were minutes.
A new dockhand (young, cheeks hollow from too many double shifts) kept glancing at Bjørn’s end of the corridor as if expecting a command to cut a corner. None came. The rules were louder than him now, and quieter. The only morale anyone could afford was the sameness: everyone discomforted equally, everyone held to the same steps, no special exemptions smuggled in on confidence and rank-coded tone.
The lock cycled. The light went from amber to green. Boots stayed behind the line until the panel said they could move. The station breathed, measured and mechanical, and for a few seconds it didn’t feel like luck. It felt like procedure.
In Medbay 2 the fatigue doesn’t leave, so she puts it to work. She pulls the triage board down and writes in block letters, arrows and times, nothing poetic. Green to yellow. Yellow to red. Isolation beds numbered, routes taped on the deck so boots know where to go when minds drift. She maps patient movement like cargo: intake to wash station to scan bay to ward, with a hard turn at the “dirty” line and a second hard turn back out. No crossings. No improvisation.
Swab kits come out. She counts them, then counts again with the lid open so she can see the empty slots. She checks reagent dates, seals, lot numbers. The log mirror stays up in the corner of her vision, a small green square that can go red if someone decides reality is negotiable.
A tech asks where to stash personal effects. Sigruna points, two fingers, to the bin marked CONTAM HOLD and waits until the hands obey.
She catches herself wanting someone to say good work. It sits in her throat like thirst. She swallows it. Files it under noise. Containment doesn’t run on gratitude. It runs on steps done the same way every time.
The exposure interviews begin and don’t let up. They bring them in by shift and by job (dock hands, cleaners, couriers) faces still marked by mask straps, hands red from solvent and cold metal. They sit under the scan lights and say it out loud: which bay, which crate, which glove tore, which filter they “meant to change” after the run. What they touched. What they breathed. What they carried through a door because Bjørn wanted time back. What they hid to keep hours.
Sigruna keeps the questions narrow, the same order every time. No room for stories, no room for later edits. Location. Duration. PPE. Symptoms. Contacts. Then again. If the answer changes she circles it and asks once more.
They sign the statements with stiff fingers anyway, like it might hurt but it’s real.
Her body keeps trying to fail in small ways. The tremor makes the vial cap chatter against glass. Hunger comes as a dull, far-off signal she marks and ignores. She drops into a five-minute sleep on a stool and snaps awake at the first pressure thunk in the corridor, heart already arguing. She peels off spent stimulant patches, sticks on new ones, and logs her own vitals into the roster. No exemptions. Procedure is the only mercy.
By the third cycle it isn’t grit anymore. It’s configuration. Alarms come and go and everyone answers them the same way, like breathing. Every touch gets a time stamp. Every request goes through the board. Swabs, seals, antibiotics, counted, signed out, denied without apology when the policy says no. No one says we’re winning. They just cinch the margin down until it holds, and Sigruna stays inside it, hands shaking, doing the steps.
Haldor changes tone on the second day. Not louder. Not mean. Just done with soft edges. He stops saying give me time and starts saying show me the numbers. In the Atrium he wipes coolant off his knuckles, walks to the public audit terminal, and uploads a microfab queue like it’s a triage board.
It’s clean, plain, ugly in its honesty.
Every slot has a name, a module, a part code. Next to it: watt-hours, print time, post-process time, and a risk tag in hard colors. Green if it buys comfort. Yellow if it buys time. Red if it’s holding back a failure you won’t get warning for. He ties each request to a dependency map: what else it steals heat from, what else it delays, what seal it forces open, what sensor loop it steals bandwidth from. There’s no rank column. Only impact.
People gather and read it the way they read casualty lists. Someone from Docking Ring C mutters about priority. A supervisor tries to lean on him with schedule language. Haldor doesn’t argue. He points at the board. He says, quiet: “Bring me a better failure model.” Like it’s a wrench they forgot to pack.
When Bjørn’s people push in a requisition for a faster cargo latch, Haldor tags it yellow and bumps it under quarantine seal stock, red. He logs why. He links it to the waiver that keeps the lock certified and the margin it eats. The system stamps his name beside the decision, time and hash, so no one can later pretend it was a rumor.
Sigruna watches from the side, arms folded to keep her hands still. She understands what he’s doing. He’s making scarcity public so it can’t be traded in private. He’s turning favors into a ledger and daring anyone to falsify the math.
The queue refreshes. It hums there on the wall, a new kind of law.
Haldor doesn’t fix things in one clean block. He stitches. He watches the station’s weak hours the way she watches a patient’s breathing. Counting the dips, the lag, the moments when everyone is moving at once and no one is looking. He schedules reinforcement runs in the narrow gaps between thermal cycling and power bus balancing, when the radiators are least touchy and the load spikes won’t trip a cascade. He routes the work through shift-change because hands are already in corridors then, boots and toolkits expected, no extra doors opening just to satisfy a plan.
He finds her in Medbay 2 with a slate, grease thumbprint across the corner, and puts it down like a chart. No comfort. Just numbers.
Seal lifetime at current compression, with a blunt note about how many cycles the elastomer has left before it starts micro-fraying. A probability curve that climbs sharp if Docking Ring C keeps breaking quarantine rhythm. Each open a little loss, each close a little less sure. A list of parts he can print, shims, collars, a new actuator housing, and the parts he can’t: certified composites, vendor-coded gaskets, anything with a serial chain he can’t fake without it showing in the log.
Sigruna reads Haldor’s estimates the way she reads a bad blood gas. Not hope. Not comfort. A number you can work from without lying to yourself. She pins quarantine timing to his windows, builds her swab runs and transfers around the narrow hours when Docking Ring C can open without chewing another sliver off the seals. She rewrites the medbay watch like a load plan. Shorter shifts, more overlap, fewer gaps where a tired hand might miss a glove tear or a monitor drift. She moves people who argue into tasks with checklists and time stamps, where opinions don’t matter. Then she drafts the authority line for biohazard override, plain words, no soft verbs, no room for “interpretation” when the next alarm tries to become a debate.
Eira stops sounding like a lecturer and starts sounding like a safety system. In the translation suite she takes the vendor filter menu apart line by line. Human-verified only. Nothing auto-resolved. If the core “smooths” a risk word, it has to mark it and keep the raw term beside it. She pushes mirrored archives to cooperative storage, hashed and time-stamped, where no quiet patch can reach.
Bjørn tries the old way on the next cargo window. He stands too close, speaks low, lets the schedule hang in the air like a threat. It used to work. Now the doors click fully shut. Customs pulls up the quarantine chain on a shared screen. Dock hands don’t argue, don’t apologize. Same sentence, same tone. Procedure only. Every push ends in the same demand: show the log.
The stand-up takes place in the Atrium under the bulletin wall, where old shift notes overlap like sediment. People come in with coffee bladders and grease on their cuffs and the look of sleep that never quite landed. They start the way they always do, with names and blame held back behind teeth. Bjørn’s stillness at the edge of the circle draws eyes like a bruise. Someone says schedule. Someone else says risk. The air wants to turn it into a fight between bodies.
Sigruna doesn’t let it.
She steps to the board and puts the marker down hard enough to click. Two columns. Two headings in block print. SURVIVAL. TRUTH. No qualifiers. No speeches. She draws a line under each like a seal check.
“These are not virtues,” she says, and her voice stays flat because she can’t afford tremor in it. “They’re systems. You maintain them or they fail. And systems fail in predictable ways.”
She writes failure modes the way she writes med orders: short, ugly nouns. Drift. Fatigue. Missing logs. Unlabeled cargo. Filters. Waivers. She circles “override ambiguity” and underlines it twice. If a quarantine door has three interpretations, it has none. If a translation output can be “smoothed” without a trace, it’s not translation, it’s editing. If a med supply list can be cleaned for optics, then the shortage will arrive in a body instead of on paper.
She looks at faces as she talks, not to win them, but to check comprehension. The dock hands stare at the board like it’s a load plan. Haldor nods once, already mapping parts and hours. A security rep opens their mouth, closes it, and waits for a checklist.
Sigruna taps the column labeled TRUTH.
“Redundancy. Audit trail. Human verification. You want speed, you build for it. You don’t steal it from the seals and call it efficiency.”
There’s no applause. Just a shift in posture, like people setting weight onto a beam they can trust. The argument drains of personality and becomes maintenance. That’s the only kind of calm that lasts here.
Eira stands beside Sigruna like a second bulkhead, not louder, just harder to move. She doesn’t argue motive. She argues method. In the suite she pulls up the translation chain and treats it the way Sigruna treats a contaminated wound: clean field, clear tools, no hidden steps. Every interpretation gets a name attached to it, a timestamp, a reason. Not a feeling. Not a hunch. A citation to a human, to a corpus sample, to a protocol note. If the core offers a “safer” synonym, it has to show the raw term in the same line, bracketed and preserved, so nobody can pretend later they never saw it.
She makes the rule plain enough for dock hands and diplomats alike. If it can’t be audited, it can’t steer quarantine. If it can’t be traced, it can’t justify a schedule. She builds small friction into the system on purpose, the way you add grit to a ladder rung. The point is not speed. The point is not comfort. The point is that when someone leans on the narrative, the record doesn’t flex with them.
Haldor takes the new rules the way he takes a pressure leak: no drama, just hands in a panel and eyes on the gauge. He sits in Machine Hall with a cracked tablet and a cup gone cold, and he starts making mirrors. One log stream to the official archive, another to a cooperative node in Habitat, a third to a dumb storage brick tucked behind a radiator controller where nobody goes unless something’s already on fire. He labels everything with plain words. Who touched what. When. Why.
Then he writes the other list. The one nobody frames. Seal batch numbers nearing threshold. Waivers expiring in the dark. A power bus that will brown out if NordVast demands one more thermal cycle. Accountability, he thinks, is just flow control. If you don’t give it a route, it finds one.
Ragnhilda steps in and drags the talk back to bodies. She lists the dock-rash, the fevers that come in pairs, the cough that waits until shift end. She names the missing gauze, the siphoned antivirals, the quiet barter that turns triage into luck. Fear makes people lie small, she says. Systems die in small lies. “Name the failure modes now,” she tells them, “or we’ll count them later.”
Bjørn comes in with the usual tools. A schedule he calls critical. A voice pitched like command. A hand on the manifest as if touch makes it law. He asks for speed and calls it necessity, calls quarantine a luxury. The duty lead doesn’t rise to it. The answer is a template: show the chain-of-custody, take the hold, or sign the deviation, name, time, reason, and watch it harden in the archive.
Under Medbay 2’s cold ceiling panels, Sigruna runs the manual quarantine test again: not because she doubts the system, but because repetition is how you catch the lie a machine tells when it’s tired. The panel gives her the same steady green. The tremor in her fingers fades only when the indicator stops flickering at the edges of her vision.
She rests her knuckles on the console until the plastic bites back. The station hum is constant but never the same twice. A fan bearing has a new rasp. A pump hunts half a second longer before it finds its rhythm. In low gravity the small sounds travel like they mean something. Sometimes they do.
The test cycle walks through its steps: pressure differential, scrubber flow, UV pulse, seal compression. She watches the timing bars more than the pass/fail icon. Green can be bought. Green can be forced. Timing is harder to fake without leaving a scar in the numbers.
Her stimulant patch itches under the collar seam. She tells herself she’ll peel it off after she finishes, then doesn’t. Sleep is a debt she keeps refinancing. The medbay smells of antiseptic and warmed polymer, and underneath that, a faint sour note from yesterday’s isolation ward filter that still hasn’t been swapped because the replacement is “inbound.”
She keeps her voice low, not for privacy, there isn’t any, but for discipline. “Again.” She taps the manual override with the heel of her thumb, careful not to press like she’s angry. The system doesn’t care, but she does.
On the second run she catches a microstutter in the seal actuator feedback, a blip that resolves before the software flags it. She marks the timestamp in her head, then in the local pad, then on paper because paper can’t be smoothed. Her handwriting comes out blocky and tight.
She thinks of Docking Ring C, of rashes hidden under sleeves, of a cough held until the shift clock releases it. She thinks of manifests that want to be law. She forces her breathing to match the cycle’s cadence.
Green holds. It holds the way a bulkhead holds: because someone stays here and watches it.
She pulls the seal readouts into a split view and makes herself do it the slow way. Local sensors first. Raw timestamps, actuator load, compression curve. She doesn’t trust the icon; she trusts the shape of the line. Then she opens the mirrored copy that sits off-vendor, out of reach of any “cleanup” script meant to keep investors calm. Same numbers. Same microstutter she saw earlier, sitting there like a swallowed word.
It should land as relief. It doesn’t. It lands as confirmation, and confirmation is work. A bolt can be torqued to spec and still back out if someone decides the washer is optional. She thinks of hands on a schedule, pushing for shortcuts like they’re virtues. She thinks of a cough held back until the airlock cycles and a rash hidden under a cuff because nobody wants to be the reason a shipment misses a window.
She tags the stutter for Haldor with a dry note: watch this before it becomes a pattern. Then she locks the log and prints a hard copy, the paper warm in her palm. Secure, for now. Secure the way everything on this station is secure: because somebody stays awake and checks.
Through the viewport, Docking Ring C turns with its slow, ordinary patience. The same cargo lights pass and pass again, a blink pattern that could lull you if you let it. Conveyors keep their loops. Carts drift along their rails, correcting with small puffs that look like hesitation. Nothing in the motion admits to strain.
She watches for the tells anyway. A pause where a cart should have cleared. A light that resets a fraction late. A door cycle that takes one breath longer than it did last week. Disasters don’t announce themselves. They borrow normality and wear it until the seam splits.
Down there, people move inside schedules that don’t care about skin or lungs. A manifest gets stamped, a hatch seals, and the station keeps turning like it’s agreed to behave. Sigruna can’t afford to believe it.
A comm chirp threads through the medbay noise. Machine Hall. Haldor’s voice, warm and flat with fatigue, confirms the seal reinforcement slot and the microfab queue, gaskets, clamp rings, two hours of heat time, like he’s reading a grocery list. Sigruna answers with a single word, logs it, then tags the work order MEDBAY OVERRIDE. The authority settles, quiet and heavy, like a duty that doesn’t clock out.
She steps back from the status panel and lets her shoulders fall a few millimeters. The filtration hum fills the room like breath you can trust, almost. In the corridor beyond, carts rattle and a door cycles and the station keeps doing its ordinary work. The weight doesn’t lift. It gets buckled into the day, measured, signed, left where everyone can see it. Safety here is a practice. Truth is too.