Liang doesn’t look at the dumplings first; he looks past them: cataloging camera domes, mirrored visor helmets, the rhythm of customs inspectors drifting through the concourse like tide markers. He notes the gap between patrol clusters, the way station time ticks in his peripheral overlay: 18:[^07] local, peak cargo-cycle, noise high enough to blur patterns but not so high that a misstep goes unnoticed.
The “vendor” in front of him barely moves, just adjusts her tray with a precise quarter turn that shields their faces from a far-angle lens. It’s a motion that says she’s mapped the dome coverage down to degrees. He watches oil sheen catch harsh strip-light, the vacuum-pack seam lines running too straight, too uniform, for a stall that claims to be “family-made.”
Her badge reads in polite red characters: YUAN HUA, SNACK CONCESSION, LICENSED. The lamination has been heat-treated twice; the corner microprint is from last quarter’s issue, but the barcode is this month. Someone with access to both archival templates and current registries.
The name pings a half-remembered rumor in the back of his mind: Auntie Hua, who only appears when a ship’s debt and a corporation’s blind spot line up. Independent channels talk about her the way miners talk about lucky seams. One deal per captain, never the same corridor twice. She doesn’t advertise; she calibrates.
His thumb brushes the rim of the counter, feeling the flex of the polycarbonate beneath its worn surface. He runs the tree: accept unknown contact, branch into risk; decline, continue along the slow ascent of scheduled contracts and tightened margins. Heliodyne is already constricting Nanyue’s independents; his last three cargo renewals came with clauses that tasted like a noose.
He breathes in the metallic tang of the air, the hint of actual spice rising from her warmer. The smell is cover. Hot oil carries poorly on recycled systems, but it gives security something mundane to log.
“Auntie Hua,” he says, not quite a question, keeping his tone flat enough to be deniable on replay.
Her eyes flick once to a ceiling dome he’d already tagged as blind for five-point-two seconds every sixty, then back to him. The tray turns another fraction, just enough that, to any overhead watcher, they’re only haggling over food.
“First visit, Captain?” she asks, voice pitched to the easy patter of a food seller, sliding a sample packet onto the counter with the kind of casual precision you only get from rehearsal. The label calls it PORK-STYLE #3 in three languages; the fine print is half-erased by deliberate scuffing. Her eyes never leave his for more than a heartbeat, dark and dry and giving nothing away, yet he catches the tiny drag of her focus as a cluster of Heliodyne technicians drift past in their crisp white-and-orange.
Liang answers by quoting his berth number instead of his name, an old independent habit that says I’m a hull, not a file, and you don’t get to own either. C-7, cargo ring, locked into his identity far more tightly than any corporate credential. Her lips twitch in the smallest approximation of a smile, acknowledging both the answer and the code behind it.
A pulse icon blinks at the edge of his retinal overlay: an unsolicited connection request riding the ID of a perfectly legal food inventory log, checksum neat, timing anything but accidental.
He lets the request in on reflex, thumb tapping an invisible confirm that, to any camera, is just a fidget on the counter’s rim. The handshake routes through a throwaway filter stack he keeps partitioned for dockside hustles, something that strips identifiers and spoofs the origin as a vending machine firmware ping. A tight coil of compressed glyphs blooms across his inner vision, resolving into clean, sparse text: OFFER AVAILABLE – PROFILE MATCH – PRIVATE BAND FOLLOWS. The sender tag is as plain as the badge on her chest: AUNTIE HUA.
No corporate frame, no authority watermark, none of the cloying legal scaffolding that clings to sanctioned work. Only a checksum signature that matches fragments he’s seen ghosting indie forums and encrypted rumor nets: runs that ended without arrests, hulls that slipped off debt ledgers years ahead of schedule, captains who vanished from talk once they took her money. Not a single verified repeat. Either she never circles back, or those who do don’t speak.
“Business has been slow,” she says aloud, a lie they both step into, as she taps her slate and the menu crawls upward in syrupy increments. He clocks it: not bad software, but deliberate latency, every stutter another beat to skim dome reflections, log a drone’s arc, register the knot of blue-and-gold Heliodyne patches damming a nearby choke point. The private band she’s opened rides low and indistinct beneath ordinary traffic (micronutrient charts, synthed-meat disclaimers) her real conversation nested like contraband in the bureaucracy of calories and allergens.
Liang worries the edge of the hook because that’s what his father taught him back on the Pearl River barges: never bite until you see the hand on the rod. He complains about fuel spreads, berth auctions, the way Heliodyne’s annex has pushed three security bulletins since dawn. Hua nods like he’s just grousing about soybean prices. “Then it’s very lucky you got hungry today, Captain. Some cargos only move once before they’re locked behind glass.” In his overlay, a fresh pane unfurls appearing exactly as a patrol drone’s optic cone slides past, the invitation aligned with the moment its microphones saturate on a vendor’s shouted discount, coaxing him wordlessly toward the stall’s dim rear bench.
Liang settles onto the narrow bench, knees almost brushing the cold bulkhead, and feels the subtle pitch change in gravity as someone cycles an airlock two modules over. Auntie Hua moves with unhurried precision, pouring tea from a dented steel thermos into cups so thin and translucent they might have crossed an ocean before they ever crossed space. The porcelain glows faintly under the alcove’s sickly LEDs, hairline cracks catching the light like old river maps. Contraband heirlooms, he thinks; the kind you don’t declare on any manifest.
She doesn’t speak. Her eyes stay on the steam coiling between them as her index finger drifts across the stall’s cheap plastcrete tabletop, nails clicking softly in what would look, to any camera, like idle fidgeting. Liang’s overlay pings as micro-induction tags in the table surface wake up, handshake with her slate, and negotiate a local mesh. The concourse noise (market barkers, the thud of mag-carts, a distant argument in clipped Cantonese) drops into a dampened, underwater murmur as a low-power jammer spools up above the stall’s hanging menu.
His ears pop faintly. The back of his tongue tastes of static and old coins. A translucent block of text extrudes into his inner vision, hovering between their eye-lines: PASSENGER CARRIAGE / SHORT-TERM SUBCONTRACT.
Plain, sanitized registry language. No mention of off-books transfers, no hint of “sensitive asset” or “elevated enforcement interest.” Just the kind of bureaucratic euphemism that gets buried three layers deep in port authority audits. And that still makes his stomach tighten.
He flicks his gaze to expand the field, letting it scroll slow enough that if any optic is pointed his way, it looks like he’s only watching the steam rise from his tea. The header is all legalese and registry hashes. The part that matters sits nested two levels down, where most captains never bother to look.
“Consultant technician,” the first line specifies, the term so bland it almost slides past him. The role is bundled under a throwaway subcontract already ghost-registered to a micro-co-op with a name like a random string of vowels and numbers, domiciled in some paper habitat in Mare Crisium tax-space. He runs a quick check against his cached coop-registry and gets nothing. No traffic history, no maintenance bids, no arbitration flags. A shell grown yesterday.
Origin: Nanyue, dock ring C-sector. Destination: far-side operational sector, coordinates suppressed behind a rotating cipher that resolves, then blurs again each time his gaze brushes it; he recognizes a corporate-grade obfuscation pattern wrapped in civilian formatting. Method: standard cargo-flight manifest with one crew-adjacent berth slotted under “auxiliary tech support,” folded into his existing personnel count so port authority won’t even see an increment.
No corporate sub-registry updates, no automatic HR integration, no new biometric token formally attached to Changxing’s hull ID. No fresh transponder flag burned into his flight profile that would tag him as a “special movement” on any annex dashboard. On paper, it’s just another tech hitching a ride to tune somebody’s dusty drill rigs and recalibrate worn-out spectrometers. A story the port sweeps will skim, auto-validate, and let sink into cold storage, if any human ever looks at it at all.
The next segment unpacks the route architecture in terse, accountant-clean strokes: lift on Liang’s already-assigned Nanyue slot, file a routine customs exit tagged under a generic “maintenance support – auxiliary contractor” code, then slide off the main trunk into a windows-long transfer corridor sketched between traffic beacons on the far side where base oversight thins to almost nothing. No special-notice filings, no corridor-preference bids that might get a human clerk curious.
“No deviation from your usual mass profile by more than three percent,” Hua notes, tapping a clause that auto-highlights fuel and cargo ceilings, prop margins, even allowable water ballast. “No extra pings to traffic control, no mid-course ‘status updates.’ You’re a dust-hauler on a boring run, Captain. Tedious, predictable: forgettable.”
Only after he’s nodded through thrust margins and corridor timings does Hua slide her thumb across the slate and peel back the pay screen. A dense lattice of numbers unfurls: staggered escrow drops keyed to his departure scan, a mid-flight traffic-net handshake, a verified offload ping from a far-side rendezvous node, plus a quiet “inconvenience” premium if he lifts inside six hours. Liang’s pulse ticks up despite himself. Even after port fees, Hua’s commission, and a mandatory tithe to the ring’s maintenance fund, the sum would clear almost every lien gnawing at Changxing’s aging engines and avionics, with enough left to lock down priority access on two cargo collars. Fixed points in orbit he’s been sketching into a future trade corridor in idle, guilty moments for years. The risk curve in his head bends, almost painfully, toward yes.
The final pane blooms like a slap: BIOMETRIC PROFILE, ZHANG, LIAN. Not just a name but a stack of tags, each one a nail. The corporate ID resolves, tired eyes, lab pallor, the stubborn jaw he’s seen in too many Heliodyne engineers, but the overlay is what lands. ENHANCED RETRIEVAL PRIORITY. Asset class: STRATEGIC. Capture-bonus ladders flicker past before Hua blacks them out with a quick, almost superstitious swipe, as if the digits themselves could wake some watching algorithm. Cold seeps into his chest. This isn’t a hitchhiking tech; it’s a burn-vector straight into Heliodyne’s gravity well, with thirty hours before their new net comes online and every corridor he knows goes hard and bright.
Hua’s thumb hovers over the corner of her slate, ready to kill the display at the first glint of a drone lens or the telltale ripple of a security cam iris refocusing. She’s angled them into the lee of a vendor stall where steam from a noodle vat ghosts upward, just enough particulate in the air to confuse cheap optics, not enough to set off environmental alarms. The header alone is enough to make Liang’s throat go dry: “Heliodyne Minerals Corporate Annex, Security Architecture Revision, T-30:[^12]:07.”
The timer ticks down in the corner, seconds rolling like falling grit. Beneath it, wireframe schematics of the annex flicker, access nodes, sensor clusters, registry taps, rendered in muted blues and pulsing warning reds. It’s not a full blueprint, more like a compliance abstract scraped from a systems bulletin and massaged through three gray-market filters, but it’s more than independents usually get to see.
Liang notes the cadence almost before he parses the words. Heliodyne’s upgrade schedule has a rhythm; he’s watched it from docking collars and customs queues for a decade. They don’t move fast unless they’re scared. This isn’t a bug-fix cycle. The revisions are stacked, interlocking, their effective dates offset by minutes and hours like teeth in a gear train. Not patching holes. Tightening a net.
He traces a finger above the glass without touching it, following an annotated line from an annex airlock through a cascade of “AUTHORITY: HELIODYNE INTERNAL” tags into a block labeled REGISTRY MIRROR. “They’re reaching past port control,” he murmurs.
“Past and around,” Hua says. She doesn’t look up; her gaze is fixed on the reflection of the concourse behind him in the slate’s dark bezel. “They get this live, they won’t need favors from Freeport ops to see your ship breathe.”
He imagines Changxing as the schematic shows her in some Heliodyne model, transponder pings, fuel draws, crew badges, a bright, legible object in someone else’s predictive lattice. Every casual sync, every lazy dockhand swipe of a tablet, a thread they could pull. In thirty hours, the mesh hardens. After that, any move with Zhang through official corridors wouldn’t just be a risk. It would be an admission.
She scrolls just far enough for him to catch the bullet points before collapsing them: tiered biometric gates blooming at every annex interface lock, skin and gait and microtemperature all cross-checked against whitelists; autonomous drone patrols pushed out from the corporate spine to skim the ceilings over the general concourse, their camera cones overlapping like a tessellation; and, worst for him, new deep-link audit hooks boring straight into independent ship registries.
Hua flicks open one sub-pane long enough for him to see the architecture header: REGISTRY FUSION LAYER. Under the new regime, any shuttle that so much as handshakes for docking metadata, mass profile, fuel draw, crew badge cache, even “anonymous” maintenance pings, will drip its movements and manifests into Heliodyne’s private threat models. Their software will stitch together patterns out of noise: repeated visits to unprofitable berths, anomalous life-support deltas, a passenger whose biometrics don’t quite align with listed crew.
He doesn’t need Hua’s muttered gloss to finish the thought. Try to move a flagged scientist through “official” channels after that cutover, and it won’t be a sneak. It’ll be a beacon: like firing a flare in vacuum.
For now, though, the code and diagrams carry the smear of a system mid-molt: duplicated tables with conflicting timestamps, sensor IDs pointing to two different indexing schemes, legacy watchdogs still nipping at the same feeds their glossy replacements are supposed to own. Hua taps a highlighted segment where both architectures overlap, two sets of rules trying to arbitrate the same door. “They don’t hard-switch anything this deep,” she murmurs. “They stack it. Old stack says yes, new stack says maybe. While they reconcile, nobody’s sure which log is canon.” Half the audit trails fork, half the alerts get downgraded as “transitional noise.” Liang sees it: a liminal span where the annex’s own nervous system can’t swear what it’s seen, or when.
Her fingers zoom to a marginal zone on the layout, a thin crescent of rooms feathering the outer curve. “Perimeter lab ring. Low-prestige, low-signal tasks. Where you stash something you don’t want on the headline inventory.” A lone marker pulses there. Zhang, already in annex air, not cored in a vault but riding the edge, one bulkhead off the controlled airlocks back to freeport. Fast and exact, Liang thinks, and extraction is peeling a strip of corporate skin instead of sawing through bone and marrow.
Hua’s explanation collapses to timing and noise: walk Zhang through a maintenance access while the legacy controllers still have veto, then ghost her into Changxing’s life-support and crew lattice before the fusion layer starts reconciling every airlock tick with dockside registries. Once the revision goes live, overnight backfills and conflict-resolution jobs will drown Heliodyne’s storage in mismatched telemetry: contradictory badge pings, overlapping drone feeds, divergent temperature curves, redundant event chains branching and re-merging. In that churn, a single anomalous transit token and one missing perimeter-lab asset can smear into background variance, if, and only if, Liang moves before the digits counting down on Hua’s slate hit zero.
He pulls up his own sheets beside Hua’s, more out of habit than distrust, letting the figures scroll in his peripheral vision: cumulative interest ladders, fuel hedge exposure, penalty triggers that blossom like mold wherever his contract lawyers had smiled too much. He’s been walking this edge for years, shaving risk off in millimeters, renegotiating a clause here, swapping a supplier there, never enough to break out of the band Heliodyne’s planners had modeled for “independent operators of acceptable volatility.”
He flicks a finger and the Changxing’s debt tree collapses to one ugly limb: the preferential-fuel tranche, with its “escalation multipliers” and “resilience surcharges.” Every time he’s taken a Heliodyne dock discount, they’ve taken a little more of his future routing freedom, binding his flight plan to their depots like a tether. Any attempt to buy outside that network costs him twice: once at the pump, once in the quiet downtick of his “compliance score” that translates, weeks later, into random inspections and mysteriously delayed clearances.
The broker’s payout hits that limb like an axe.
He runs it three ways. In all of them, that tranche disappears in a single transfer, his repayment horizon contracting from fifteen years of careful servitude to something more like seven under his own steering. His mandatory “loyalty volume” to Heliodyne fuel drops below the threshold where auto-renew clauses bite. His refuel options widen from three sanctioned depots to a lattice of second-tier stations and co-op tanks he’s only ever simmed as hypotheticals.
Risk reflows with the numbers. Instead of counting how many missed payments it would take before Heliodyne can seize Changxing outright, he starts counting how many debt-free quarters he’d need before his family’s resettlement petition jumps tiers. The model spits out a range: two to four standard years, depending on how aggressively he reinvests. The thought is almost indecent.
Zhang folds into that same lattice whether he wants her there or not. Her fee is a spiking anomaly in his cash-flow history, the kind of thing any audit AI will flag as “non-typical event. Review suggested.” But if he routes it through the right intermediaries, staggers disbursements across a couple of near-dormant accounts, he can blur it into the broader turbulence of an operator finally crawling out of the red.
He watches his own hesitation resolve into a specific shape. The danger isn’t that the numbers don’t work. The danger is that they work too cleanly.
From there the tree branches outward in his mind, new routes sketching themselves in precise, pale lines. Wipe that tranche and he can finally step into the bidding pools he’s been stalking for years: independent transfer slots hung in cislunar lanes just beyond any single megacorp’s comfort radius. Not the prestige hubs with polished branding and corporate customs, but the lean, modular platforms where registry flags change monthly and fuel is priced by actual scarcity instead of algorithmic leverage.
With one of those slots under his code, he’s no longer begging for overflow tonnage on Nanyue’s oversubscribed cargo ring, watching prime manifests drift to branded fleets with cleaner balance sheets and better “cooperation indexes.” He stops selling his hold week-to-week like a day laborer and starts treating mass as what it is: a long-baseline promise. A corridor, stitched from Yutu’s far-side pits through gray-market depots and out to the quieter orbital tanks. In that lattice, Changxing doesn’t queue behind anyone. She’s the spine, the default route on other captains’ sims, the path they assume exists when they price their own risk.
The abstract lines on his internal graph resolve into faces, into timestamps and buffering wheels. His parents and younger siblings on Earth are no longer neat variables but lagging video feeds: his mother’s careful smile with the compression artifacts breaking at the edges, his father glancing off-screen at some unseen quota alert, his youngest brother pretending the background siren is just traffic. “We’re managing,” they always say, the phrase polished smooth by repetition, while their resettlement petitions sit in some overworked clerk’s queue, ping-ponging between agencies that rank risk in five-year blocks. The relocation authorities don’t care about hustle and patch jobs; they want stable baselines, audited projections, oxygen-margin graphs without red bands. Every quarter, he’s come up short.
This payout changes the axis labels. It isn’t just a fat number; it’s collateral he can actually cite, verifiable throughput instead of speculative intent. It means he can attach hard guarantees to their file: contracted hull time, reserved hab capacity on Nanyue or one of the quieter ring stations, projected earnings that hold up under an algorithm’s stress test instead of wobbling the moment someone tweaks interest assumptions. Real commitments: prepaid migration slots, life-support shares purchased in advance instead of pledged against “future performance.”
He pictures a different set of calls: not grainy feeds from a damp basement where recycled air wheezes through rusted vents, but quick check-ins from a temporary orbital dorm, gravity at a consistent sixth, no blackout windows because the utility grid decided a district could do without cooling for a night. A promise of stable air and bounded sky for people who raised him in subway basements and flood shelters, who taught him to measure risk in evacuation routes and spare batteries.
Under that image runs another, colder line: if he says no now, the petitions will keep aging in place, accumulating polite denials and “insufficient guarantees” flags until some other metric, health, age, political priority, drops them into a permanent low-priority bin. The choice isn’t simply between more debt and less; it is between his family living out their years under rising waterlines and collapsing infrastructure, or breathing filtered lunar air under a roof he helped pay for.
Then Jin edges into the frame, not as a romantic ideal but as a stack of brutal ratios: liters of water per ton of ore, kilowatt-hours per kilometer of rover track, the predatory premium she pays for black-market air and fuel because she works too far and too loose for corporate chains. If he owned even a slice of his own logistics (if he could push surplus tanks, scrubber cartridges, and filter media along the far-side circuit without bowing to dockmaster “capacity auctions”) her numbers would tilt from survival to investment. Halving her resource premiums isn’t altruism; it’s anchoring his nascent corridor in someone whose stubborn independence matches his own, turning affection into infrastructure.
The projection stretches further, iterations nesting inside iterations until the decade-long curve looks less like a line and more like a launch window, narrow and unforgiving. On one branch: debts shaved to manageable, family breathing filtered air under someone else’s logo but out of the floodplain, Jin’s rigs running on supplies he manifests instead of begs for, crew wages posted as scheduled transfers instead of late-night apologies over instant noodles. In that modeled future, Changxing stops behaving like a pawn nudged around Nanyue’s board and starts acting like a vector with its own cross-base alignments, its registry pinging in places dockmasters currently assume are off-limits to independents. The alternative is brutally familiar: safe enough, competent, a name that carries weight only within a few corridors and manifests. Accepting Hua’s offer is stepping off a known ledge into vacuum with nothing but math, crew loyalty, and his ability to read corporate blind spots as tether. Either way, the timeline kinks here; the choice made under the glow of concourse lanterns and Hua’s thirty-hour countdown will set the boundary conditions for whether he ever escapes the gravity well of “small but stable” or settles into it as his final orbit.
He runs the scenario like a simulator in his head, as if the concourse were a top-down schematic instead of concrete, steel, and breathing bodies. Zhang from annex to concourse, concourse to cargo ring, cargo ring to Dock C-7, then into Changxing’s belly. Each leg broken into discrete transfer points, each handoff a potential alert vector.
Annex exit first. Official route: secured lift to Level B, badge-swipe through a biometric choke, then into a monitored corridor that spills toward the main artery. Unofficial route: maintenance ladders, service trunks, those half-forgotten “temporarily authorized” bypasses that never made it back into the documentation. Hua will have one of those mapped; he wouldn’t have come with that price tag otherwise. But “mapped” doesn’t mean unobserved. In his mind’s overlay, he tags each ceiling cam, each infrared beam, each pressure pad under the floor tiles that corporate uses to confirm headcounts against ID pings.
From annex fringe to concourse: a crowd buffer. Good in one sense. Bodies to hide in, heat signatures to blend with. Bad in another: too much data. Turnstiles scraping shoe treads, gait analysis from floor sensors, ambient mics picking up breath patterns and stress markers if corporate has rolled out the latest suite here. He imagines Zhang’s corp profile sitting in a database, her biometric template ghosting behind every blur of a face that passes an active scanner. All it takes is one misaligned hood, one glimpse of cheekbone geometry, and a daemon flags a “possible match” for human review.
Then the concourse to cargo ring jump. Access gates with customs seals, nominally run by Freeport Authority but with Heliodyne hooks sunk deep in the firmware. Cargo manifests cross-checked with personal movement logs; any “consultant” whose credentials don’t backfill through recognized corp registries generates a soft ping. A quiet question: who are you, and why are you walking where only crews and bonded porters should be?
Final leg: dock to ship. That should be his ground, his advantage. In practice, Dock C-7 is just another node on Heliodyne’s network diagram. Cameras over every berth, transponder polls every thirty seconds, oxygen and power umbilicals reporting live draw to station systems. A person moving from concourse pressure door to Changxing’s ramp is an object with a timestamp and a trajectory. Even if no one is watching in real time, the logs exist. Time-aligned, redundantly stored, waiting for some post-incident investigator to scrub backwards.
In the mental model, he threads a proxy avatar of Zhang down those paths, encasing her in decoy traffic. Shift changes, delivery drones, bulk transfers of frozen protein blocks, two dozen colonist bodies moving under quota anxiety. He tries different timings: mid-shift lull, shift change crush, the moment right after a scheduled fire-suppression test when half the environmental sensors will be in diagnostic mode.
Each iteration generates a different failure mode. A bored guard who actually reads his terminal. A customs kiosk that glitches back online thirty seconds early. A maintenance drone that swings its camera three degrees off its usual arc because someone kicked its base. The scenarios branch and branch until the probability tree starts to look less like a plan and more like an indictment.
At the base of it, one observation stays constant: there is no clean route. No path where Zhang is simply a ghost that passes through untouched. Every option leaves artifacts in the mesh, heat, light, motion, database writes. The question isn’t whether the system feels her passage. It’s whether he can make the tremor look like just another shudder in Nanyue’s overworked, under-maintained spine.
His gaze flicks toward the western sector bulkheads where the corporate towers plug into Nanyue’s backbone, gleaming ribs of composite and conduit vanishing into the rock. In his head, he strips the cladding away until the base becomes a schematic: fiber trunks pulsing telemetry, power busses chattering status codes, half the habitat’s environmental sensors whispering their readings upstream. Airflow variances in dorm corridors, CO₂ spikes in the cheap canteens, door-cycles on every pressure seal between here and the annex: all of it timestamped, hashed, mirrored into Heliodyne’s segmented data cores.
Traffic monitors on the cargo ring feed in too: badge taps, gait profiles from floor plates, facial vectors scraped from every reflective surface some junior engineer decided to treat as a “passive sensor.” Customs kiosks don’t just stamp cargo; they reconcile manifests against those movement logs, looking for discrepancies, for a body out of place.
Moving their fugitive through that mesh isn’t stealth; it’s attempted misclassification. He isn’t hiding her from the system so much as trying to convince a thousand low-level processes that she’s just another acceptable fluctuation, a tremor attributed to noise instead of intent.
He tallies the direct consequences if they ever backtrack Zhang’s exit to Changxing’s registry: docking slots quietly revoked “for maintenance,” surprise hull inspections justified by vague “safety audits,” tariff tables tweaked in some opaque update so every manifest he files bleeds credits. Insurance premiums spike on the basis of “elevated risk profile.” Cargo priority drops two tiers, consignments bumped in favor of safer, corporate-aligned tonnage. A polite but unmistakable erasure of his name from neutral-trader lists that currently keep doors open on three different stations, followed by soft bans from refuel queues that somehow never have room when his transponder pings. Not prison, not overt sanction. Just a slow constriction of options until he’s begging for a branded contract.
Ship-side, the constraints are just as unforgiving. Changxing’s aging drives can’t out-boost a fresh corporate interceptor once they’re sharing a solution, and any attempt to throw off a trajectory fit will burn delta-v he doesn’t have to spare. Spoofing his transponder or riding inside another ship’s radar shadow means extra maneuvers, extra signatures. Onboard, Hong’s status is a slow, constant hazard. Every collar ping, every mandatory check-in another vector for some pattern-matcher to notice she’s in the wrong sector, with the wrong clearance, moving with a crew that doesn’t show up in her official rotation.
He flicks a query to his implant and the answer is the same: under thirty hours until Heliodyne’s patch starts ghosting every transponder ping into cold storage, tightening audit trails from “porous” to “forensic-grade.” That window has no slack. One balky cargo seal, one customs officer on quota, one bored patrol sergeant running an extra sweep. And the branching paths all shear toward a single, ugly convergence: hard-locked bulkheads, clipped comms, escorts in polite gray uniforms, and an annex interview room whose door metrics don’t always log an exit event.
Hua doesn’t press him for an answer. She just cradles her drink bulb between both palms, elbows hooked on the scuffed counter rail, and lets the concourse noise roll between them: the hiss and clunk of an opening bulkhead up-concourse, the distant bark of a vendor in rapid-fire Cantonese haggling over black-market chilies, a child’s high, breathless laughter somewhere down-tunnel, warped thin by the acoustic panels. Overhead, the air recyclers add their constant, low-grade roar, a mechanical ocean he’s lived under for most of his adult life.
Liang’s gaze drifts past her shoulder to the projected Earth hovering above the public square. Cycle-perfect cloud bands and ocean blues stitched from yesterday’s satellite relay, smoothed to hide the scars. The projection shimmers faintly where the panel edges don’t quite align, a glitch at the terminator. Under it, two dozen colonists queue at a water ration kiosk, shoulders rounded, work coveralls gray and indistinct at this distance. Eyes forward, on the quota board cycling through names and allotments in tight, uncompromising characters.
He tags the scene without really thinking: average time in line, current ration level, facial tension markers. A background process, like breathing. His implant hums at the edge of awareness as he kicks off another probability pass in the back of his mind: payout versus seizure risk versus long-term corridor viability, discounted over a fifteen-year horizon. He threads in new variables: Heliodyne’s pending security patch, Hong’s debt-bond reporting window, Changxing’s engine wear curve if he pushes a hard departure.
The numbers spool in muted colors behind his eyes: branching trees of outcomes, most of them thinning into red. Asset seizure scenarios spike if Heliodyne tags his transponder within Nanyue’s envelope. Currency streams from the offered payout flare bright and brief, then sag under projected tariff manipulation and docking privilege degradation. One path, narrow and ugly, stays in the green: only if he threads the window clean, keeps his registry independent, and never lets this job be provably his.
Hua waits. She doesn’t fill the silence with assurances or promises of future work. Her eyes flick once to the projected Earth, once to the ration line, then settle back on his face, reading micro-shifts the way she reads bid books. The drink bulb in her hands fogs over where her fingers rest, tiny droplets catching the concourse light like a scatter of stars.
“Routing window,” he says at last, eyes still on the ration line. “Full. Not the brochure version.”
Hua’s mouth crooks, not quite a smile. She tilts her head as if listening to something only she can hear, then flicks her wrist under the counter. His implant buzzes, subtle, a fingernail on bone. A ghosted path unfurls across his inner vision: Changxing floating at Dock C-7, berth clamps cycling green; a staggered release into the cargo ring’s spin; then a precise cross-cut between scheduled bulk haulers and Heliodyne’s annex shuttles.
She’s tagged the patrol blind band: fourteen, maybe fifteen seconds when Annex security drones slew toward an arriving ore barge and leave a narrow notch of unlit telemetry. After that, a burn corridor arcing close enough to the annex’s restricted zone that any human watcher would swear he’d trespassed, but the plotted vectors stay a fraction inside legal.
He interrupts twice. “Delta-v margin if ring traffic compacts here.” He pinches the projected track, nudging it against a worst-case stack of delayed freighters. “Drift allowance if Base Control holds us at C-7 for a random seal check.”
Hua answers each with clipped, exact numbers, no softeners. “Three-point-two percent over your last logged burn. Two minutes, eighteen seconds of loiter before the notch collapses. After that you’re painting on their wall.”
No sales patter. No ‘should be fine.’ Just tolerances, decay curves, and the quiet implication that she’s already priced his paranoia into what she’s offering.
“Aux exits,” he adds. “If Annex Control jumps their window or someone in Customs gets ambitious.”
Hua’s fingers tap a short rhythm under the counter. Three side paths bloom in his overlay: a maintenance umbilical listed as decommissioned in public logs but still showing live pressure telemetry; an unsanctioned handoff point in low orbit, tucked inside the debris cloud of a scrap dealer who owes her three favors and one unlogged tow; a dirty piggyback through a tug convoy that would smear his transponder signature into a chorus of near-duplicates at the cost of fuel margins he doesn’t actually own.
Liang drills through each branch, interrogating choke points, override chains, Heliodyne’s likely escalation ladder. “Timestamp,” he says. “To the second.”
She sends it.
The UTC block drops into his vision like added mass on a fragile truss. Twenty-nine hours, forty-three minutes, and a scattering of seconds until every undocked hull in Nanyue’s envelope starts writing itself into annex-grade memory he will never touch, never edit, never erase.
Liang forces himself to skim instead of dive. The payout tiers spike high, front-loaded for early departure; the penalties read like slow suffocation: lien cascades, berth-lock flags, silent blacklisting from critical consumables. Arbitration under an obscure Pacific co-op charter, not any corporate court he knows. That’s almost worse; somebody paid to keep this enforceable and deniable across jurisdictions. The “technical consultant” language is scrubbed of pronouns, but the biometric masking profile matches Heliodyne’s rumor-sheets for one person only.
The handshake pings his credit ledger with a projected balance he’s never seen outside simulations. For a heartbeat his ribs feel too tight for the recycled air. He throttles it down, tags the job under a generic maintenance code, buries the payout behind three shell accounts. Hong will need the operational frame first. Ming gets the technical lie. Xiao only the threat model. Jin, if he tells Jin at all, comes last.
He doesn’t speak until the data handshake pings completion in the back of his eyes.
“The window is tight,” Liang says. His voice is low, even; the way he sounds reading out approach vectors. “Outbound in six hours, off the books. In and out before shift-change analytics sweep the dock logs.”
Hong scrolls, eyes ticking left-right as she parses. “Off the books how?”
“Secondary manifest filed under ballast recalibration gear,” he answers. “Independent registry stamp cached in the outer buffer, not yet reconciled with Heliodyne’s internal ledgers. We ride that lag.”
Her overlay highlights the registry route stub, ghosting an arc from Nanyue to a free-orbit holding shell. No mention of which shell, no fractional ownership tags. That helps and doesn’t. The numbers are the anchor: hazard multipliers stacked on top of hazard multipliers, as if the cargo could explode, leak, or sue.
“This multiplier.” She taps the air, the gesture unneeded but grounding. “You know what it maps to.”
“I know what I’m being paid to pretend it isn’t,” Liang says. “You’re being paid to inspect the seals and confirm that pretending is technically defensible.”
A snort escapes her before she can stop it. “There’s no such thing as technically defensible when compliance starts replaying your sensory logs at half-speed.”
He finally looks at her. “Then don’t give them interesting logs. We keep it inside dark zones. Analog where we can. No spoken identifiers. You’re here as my second, not as their investigator.”
Hong leans back against the narrow galley wall, overlays still floating in front of her. Her debt-bond interface offers a context option, “Report potential contract conflict for risk-mitigation credit.” The button pulses a subtle green just at the edge of her awareness, promising shaved months off her obligation.
She doesn’t touch it.
“Your independent buffer,” she says instead. “How long before reconciliation?”
Liang shifts his grip on the handhold, letting the shuttle’s faint vibration run up his arm. “Twelve to sixteen hours, depending on packet congestion and how many middle managers decided to audit something today. Hua slid us a gap. I trust him that far.”
“You trust that his incentives haven’t changed since last time you drank together,” Hong corrects calmly. She scrolls to the termination clauses. “If this goes sideways and Heliodyne decides to reclassify the shipment mid-route, these indemnities evaporate. We eat the liability.”
“We eat it,” Liang agrees. “Not you alone.”
“That’s not how contracts read.” She flicks one clause larger, lips tightening. “‘Crew-level knowledge or constructive knowledge’ spreads fault like mold. If they decide I should have known, my bond term spikes. My family’s housing goes back into review.”
Silence settles under the hum of pumps. Someone laughs faintly from the aft corridor. The sound makes the little galley feel even more like a pressure lock between two incompatible atmospheres.
“I won’t let them use this to squeeze you,” Liang says.
She gives him a level look over the guttering steam of her cup. “You don’t control their enforcement tree.”
“No,” he says. “But I control my manifests, my flight path, and who hears what in this ship. We design the job so your plausible deniability isn’t just a line you feed an arbitrator. It’s real.”
Hong considers that, thumb rubbing at the faint seam where the galley wall panel meets the handhold bracket. He’s already committed; she can hear it in the way he says “we design,” not “if we take it.”
“You want my answer now,” she says.
“I want your conditions,” Liang replies. “Then your answer.”
She exhales slowly, fogging the bitter surface of the untouched drink. “Condition one: I pick the comms discipline. Faraday sleeves on anything not flight-critical. No personal implants on open receive when we’re in corporate line-of-sight.”
“Done.”
“Condition two: any mention of high-value assets, we keep it in code outside my debt-bond lexicon. No keywords, no tagging phrases, nothing that trips the semantic nets. You brief the others.”
He nods. “Also done.”
“Condition three.” She hesitates, then commits. “If this starts to tilt we abort. No arguments, no heroic endpoints. You divert, you dump the contract, you blame me on the back end if you have to.”
Liang studies her for a beat. That clause is expensive in ways the payout table doesn’t show.
“You’ll get the blame anyway,” he says. “But yes. If you call abort, I turn us.”
Hong kills the contract window with a sharp blink. The galley fades back into primary color: scratched alloy, hand-scribbled labels, a strip of red tape marking where someone once misjudged a pivot in low-g and cracked their head.
“Then I’m in,” she says. “On record as your second. Off record as someone who never saw the coefficients.”
He lets out a breath he hadn’t tracked holding. “Understood.”
“And Liang?” she adds, lifting the cup at last, more shield than drink. “Keep ahead of their systems, not just their guns. The guns I can see coming.”
He allows himself the briefest flicker of a smile. “That’s the plan.”
Hong takes a sip, grimaces at the familiar bitterness, and nods once.
“Then go tell the others we’re about to get very carefully stupid.”
Lines of text and numeric blocks cascade down Hong’s vision: base rate, stacked hazard multipliers, obscure “asset sensitivity” surcharges that only show up when Legal expects arbitration. The last category carries the exact coefficient she’s seen attached to high-priority recoveries like Zhang’s, even though the file never says it outright. The figure sits there like a weight on her optic nerve, pulsing faintly with each heartbeat.
She doesn’t trust the summary view. With a blink she expands the fine print, drilling three layers deep into subclauses most pilots never bother to read. Indemnity brackets, conditional waivers, the weasel language around “crew-level constructive knowledge.” Her gaze tracks the independent registry tags Liang insisted on. Buffered routing stamps, deferred reconciliation tokens, a brief window where the shipment lives in a legal gray zone instead of a corporate asset tree.
Her debt-bond interface notices before she finishes. The soft amber icon in her peripheral flares. A correlation ping, cross-referencing payout bands against her internal bounty watchlists. Two more seconds and the implant will shovel an anonymized flag into corporate storage by default.
She stabs the manual override, hard-dismiss chime spiking in her skull, fingers tightening around the untouched cup until the plastic creaks.
“You know what this is,” she says, eyes still flicking line to line, tone pressed flat so it doesn’t splinter. “They’ve scrubbed the name, but the bonus tiers line up with a live capture tag. My contract calls that ‘mandatory cooperation.’”
She finally looks at him, and the scar at her temple seems sharper in the galley’s tired yellow light, a thin white vector aimed straight at him.
“You’re asking me to walk a line that doesn’t exist, Liang. Either I log what I see and hand you over by omission, or I keep quiet and eat a decade’s worth of penalty clauses if they catch us wrong. Housing, oxygen, medical. All back on the block.”
The air recyclers hiss, filling the pause like a third presence at the narrow table, impartial and endlessly patient, counting every breath they spend on this.
Liang doesn’t move closer, doesn’t soften. He answers with structure instead of comfort. A twitch of his fingers pushes a fresh layer across her HUD: a skeletal route window, burns and waypoints in pale blue, stacked beside the independent registry buffer Hua carved out of the port’s bureaucracy. “The contract lives out there,” he says, indicating the legal shell holding their identifiers at arm’s length from Heliodyne’s asset tree. “Their logic parses bulk ore and calibration mass, nothing that resolves to personnel. We launch in a low-attention cycle, stay clear of Annex-controlled corridors, keep every exchange on independent ledgers and hard-copy chits. On record, you inspected ballast and spares. You can truthfully log that you saw nothing your bond obligates you to report.”
She runs his model against her own instincts, eyes tracking the projected path like it’s a physical corridor through rock. “That buys time,” Hong concedes, voice low, “not immunity. If their pattern-recognition backfills this later, they’ll say I should have inferred the asset from context.” Liang dips his head, conceding the point, then adds one last element to her view: the payout stapled to her remaining debt curve, annotated in hard numbers. Months cut from housing liens, oxygen surcharges erased, medical contingencies unshackled for her family. “I can’t make the line real,” he says. “But I can keep us inside the cracks of their system long enough that, on paper, you followed every rule you were given. If anything breaks, it breaks on me, not on your bond.”
She doesn’t need to think about the gestures; they’re burned in deeper than sleep. Thumb and forefinger pinch-and-erase whole classes of traffic from the field: first the bright, noisy arcs of tourist ferries packed with camera drones and novelty gravity-sims, then the fat, slow ellipses of bulk ore haulers that don’t turn on a dime for anyone. A knuckle tap ghosts out the tug shifts and maintenance sleds threading between berths. What’s left are the movements that matter.
She pulls those in tight. Heliodyne-tagged vectors sharpen, resolving into discrete tracks and dwell points. Her hands move faster as old muscle memory reasserts itself, calling up classification overlays she hasn’t used in years. Red for asset teams, amber for executive or diplomatic escort chains, blue for routine security sweeps. The colors flood over the station schematic in disciplined bands, arcing around Nanyue’s rim like someone has painted targets into space.
The Changxing’s galley stays quiet around her. The low hum of the environmental loop, the faint vibration from a cycling pump, Liang’s slow breathing at her shoulder: background noise to the bright clarity of the model in front of her. She flicks a fingertip, annotating one red arc with known response times; another gesture splits a group of blue sweeps into primary and secondary nets, the way they actually function rather than the way the brochure diagrams say they do.
Her HUD reflects the glow of the plots back into her eyes, making them look almost artificial for an instant. A fragment of corporate training litanies rises in her head: coverage ratios, escalation ladders, the acceptable percentage of uninspected mass flow. She shoves the words aside, keeps the structure.
“Strip the noise,” she mutters, more to herself than to Liang, and begins culling again, peeling away anything that won’t directly intersect with Docking Collar C-7’s corridor envelope over the next forty-eight hours. What remains is a lean lattice of intent: where Heliodyne will be looking, and, more importantly, where it won’t.
Layer by layer, she strips that web down to its blind spots: statistical hollows where patrol orbits thin and supervisory staff levels drop below nominal thresholds. She digs into the metadata behind the sweeps, pulling up duty rotations, shift-change overlaps, the half-hour slices when human attention drops as people chase food, caffeine, or a bathroom before the next briefing. Whole bands of color fade to translucent, then go dark.
“Here,” she murmurs, dropping timestamp markers along the ring with the precision of someone laying demolition charges. “Nineteen thirty to twenty-two thirty, station local. Priority window inbound from Earth, their best people are glued to the diplomatic dock. Annex sends up liaison teams, and Security pulls half its senior monitors to keep the feeds pretty for the board. Cargo ring falls back on auto-flag, heuristics tuned for manifest fraud and radiation anomalies, not bodies in containers.”
Her voice flattens as she talks, slipping into old cadence. Each clipped explanation is part analysis, part involuntary confession of how deeply their logic once lived in her, of how much she still remembers about where they don’t bother to look.
Liang listens without interruption, then pivots the display, dragging Hong’s lattice into alignment with his own working frame. With a knuckle tap he pulls in Changxing’s hard numbers from Ming’s last diagnostics: engine-temperature ceilings with real, hairline margins, propellant reserves color-coded against worst-case delta‑v, the safe-cycle constraints on their retrofitted tanks that Ming has warned him not to flirt with twice in the same week. He drops in projected ascent and descent arcs tuned for non-event profiles, customs queue estimates scraped from his private trade feeds and courier chatter, then that final, fragile sliver from Hua’s “transponder-shadow” exploit: an eight-minute window when a maintenance firmware roll will briefly desynchronize port telemetry from shipborne beacons. The composite model tightens, resolving into a narrow, pale band sliding through Hong’s colored web like a ghost orbit.
They work the edges of that band like miners widening a seam, testing alternates and contingencies until the HUD looks more like a stress map than a flight plan. Nudge by ten minutes and the corridor kisses a returning enforcement shuttle; shave propellant reserves and you clear the outbound VIP convoy but invite a burn-profile audit. Insert an extra holding loop and you drift into a fresh algorithm sweep spun up to chew through backlog. Hong marks camera-maintenance downtimes, biometric lag zones, and manual-inspection choke points from old case files, while Liang tags approach vectors that read boring on radar and crew-rotation slots when tired officers are likeliest to rubber-stamp a clearance just to keep their own queue metrics clean.
When they finally lock the model, what’s left on the shared display is brutally narrow: one inbound vector, one outbound slide, threaded between a VIP surge and a patrol handover, leaning on an exhausted customs shift, an overtaxed pattern-recognition stack, and that brief telemetry desync. Hong studies the pale sliver and feels the old vertigo of standing on policy’s outermost ledge. Liang, reading the minute hardening at the corners of her mouth, recognizes that the physics and traffic models are solved; her contract calculus is not. In that unresolved gap, he can almost hear the clauses queuing up, breach language, culpability trees, indemnity carve‑outs, dragging the problem away from delta‑v and heat load, back toward the quieter question of whose name ends up on the report if it breaks.
Hong scrolls through her debt-bond interface on her wrist slate, the translucent clauses hovering over the shared sim: mandatory incident reporting, escalation triggers tied to “unauthorized asset diversion,” bonus ladders for clean recoveries. Each line feels like a tightening band around her ribs. “Any deviation in transponder signature above point-five sigma gets mirrored to Annex analytics,” she mutters, more like reading a diagnostic than issuing a warning.
The contract UI auto-highlights the relevant subparagraphs in polite amber, as if it’s helping. Failure-to-notify penalties cascade down the side in smaller text: oxygen quota reductions, housing reassignments, conditional education locks on dependents. The numbers are small in isolation, fractions of percentages, but the compounding tables at the bottom are not. She doesn’t need to open them; she knows them by heart.
“Annex gets real-time anomaly scores on all bonded assets inside their control radius,” she adds, thumb resting over a clause that pings her biometrics and logs “review in progress” back to corporate. “They don’t watch you, Liang. They watch me watching you.”
She expands a tree labeled CONTINGENT LIABILITY, exposing a mesh of if/then branches. If a flagged asset, Zhang, though the name isn’t written, only a code, crosses a bonded crew’s vector without a matching incident entry, a hidden timer starts. Eight hours for voluntary disclosure, two for “proactive cooperation,” thirty minutes before automated inquiries spool up from some faceless compliance engine in the Annex.
“The system assumes I’m either complicit or incompetent if I don’t raise a flag inside those windows.” Her voice is flat, but a faint tremor rides the last word. “Complicit costs me another five years. Incompetent gets my file marked for ‘role realignment.’ That’s… scrub work, or worse. No crew slots. No say.”
She pinches the display, isolating one innocuous-looking line: AUTHORIZED EXCEPTIONS, MAINTENANCE VARIANCE BANDS. “This is the only place I can hide you,” she says quietly. “Inside noise they already decided was acceptable for me. Anything outside that, and the Annex starts asking why I didn’t scream first.”
Liang doesn’t argue the point. He closes the contract tree with a gesture, as if shutting a hatch, and instead widens the engineering overlay. The station map drops away, leaving only the Changxing hanging in wireframe, translucent against the dark. Power trunks glow a dull blue, thrust vectors pulse in orange, life-support rings flicker in green. With two fingers he peels those layers back until only the retrofit loop Ming carved out of the corporate maintenance net remains: an irregular spine of half-shadowed nodes stitched through the hull like contraband nerves.
He taps a junction where the loop brushes the official telemetry bus. “Here’s where they think they see you,” he says. Another tap, deeper in the gray, brings up localized control blocks, spoof buffers, delay caches. “Here’s where they actually don’t.”
He drags Hua’s package into view, letting the contraband registry keys fall into place over the schematic. They nest against the gray nodes, little knives of encrypted text tagged with off-book port seals and deprecated oversight codes. “We don’t erase anomalies,” he says. “We move them onto channels already marked low-priority, low-trust, or legacy. Noise inside noise. You file exactly what your contract expects. And the wrong system blinks red.”
Hong zooms into the registry keys, drilling past the surface tags into their audit profiles: non-attributable endpoints, shadow ledger mirrors, flags that explicitly sever “trust inheritance” to any upstream node. Each line is a promise and a threat. Her mouth thins. “These don’t make my obligations disappear,” she says. “They just move them sideways. If Annex analytics sees a corporate asset transiting under dirty registry anywhere near my vector, they’ll write my quarterly review in blood and call it performance feedback.”
Her thumb hovers over a silent alert icon on her slate: a muscle-memory safety valve, pre-filled with a templated “early concern” notice. She forces it still. Liang clocks the micro-flinch, then rotates the schematic, overlaying her personnel graph on the flow diagrams: her bonded ID fused to the manifest spine, decision nodes branching into red if her acknowledgment timestamps lag by more than policy tolerances.
“Then we structure the trail,” Liang says. He tags her standard cargo report; the line forks as he talks. “Path one: nominal. You log a maintenance haul. Hua’s keys blunt outside queries, Ming’s loop soaks the extra oxygen draw.” A second path blooms red. “Path two: Annex pounces. Your slate shows an early concern: registry irregularities, suspicious independent handshakes. I countersign the override, put my authorization on every deviation. On review, you flagged risk, documented pushback, followed escalation rules. I’m the one who broke pattern.”
For a few breaths, the only sound is the faint hiss of the shuttle’s recyclers, a dry whisper under the glow of status LEDs. Hong studies Liang, searching for the angle. How much of this is genuine cover, how much is calculated leverage, how much is him gambling his ship for her breathing room. The model he’s drawn leaves her a narrow, defensible corridor through her contract language; it also paints a bright target on his record if anything goes sideways. She feels the old investigator’s instinct to refuse, to retreat into policy and templated alerts, clash with the colonist’s memory of who quietly topped up her family’s air quota when the Annex “misallocated” rations and called it an accounting anomaly. Her thumb edges once more toward the silent alert icon, then curls away. She lets her slate go dark, straightens her spine as if bracing against thrust. “Fine,” she says, voice low but firm. “We do it exactly as modeled. You keep my flags in the green, you tell me before you step outside my clauses. And I’ll walk your version of the report right up to their cameras.”
Liang zooms the shared schematic out to a skeletal wireframe of Nanyue’s cargo ring, then tightens it back down to Dock C-7 until the corridor grid looks like capillaries around a wound. Status glyphs pulse slow in station night-cycle blues. He talks as he works, voice level, almost soothing. “We run it like any high-priority maintenance turnaround: in at shift change, out inside two schedule ticks. No heroics. All the weirdness is paperwork, not motion.”
Hong leans in over his shoulder, one hand braced on the bulkhead, the other flicking through his assumption layers. Contract clauses ghost in her peripheral HUD, cross-referencing every corridor he highlights. “You’re skipping Annex patrol bleed-over,” she says, knuckle rapping a highlighted junction that flares in response. “Security’s been borrowing from cargo sweeps. Their patrol drift crosses this spine every third cycle, sometimes two in a row if Annex Analytics gets jittery.” A translucent cone of probable presence blooms from her touch, washing Liang’s safe window in amber.
Liang pauses, jaw working once as he recalculates. No argument, no defensiveness; he just mimics a pinch-zoom with two fingers and drags the timing band along the station’s rotation curve by eleven minutes. “Shift change minus eleven,” he says. “We’re in the gap before they peel a team off Annex. Hua’s keys go live here, here, and here.” The projected risk gradient along the junction cools from orange to yellow, then to a mottled green-yellow where patrol variance still overlaps.
“Yellow’s where they get discretionary incentives,” Hong mutters. “Green is where they get bored.” She expands a tiny pop-up near the junction: a performance metric tree, her own old investigator notes still baked into the metadata. “You keep us here, they’re more likely to log it as ‘statistical anomaly’ than ‘intentional deviation.’ Any slip into orange and Annex gives them quota credit to pull us apart.”
Liang nods once, committing the revision. He tags the corridor with a soft chime, locking it into the shared plan. “Then we live in their boredom curve,” he says. “No delays. If Dock Control drags us, we abort the handoff and call it a dry run.”
Hong’s mouth twitches. Not a smile, exactly, but the recognition of someone else finally speaking her native language: risk as policy, movement as audit trail. “You abort,” she says, “I still file the concern notice with your override attached. I’m not eating a red band because we got romantic about schedule ticks.”
“Understood,” Liang answers. He widens the schematic again, letting the ring spin slowly above the pump stack, their new window a thin, pale slit on the dark circumference. “We keep everything we do inside your green. The only thing that looks wrong on paper,” he glances briefly toward the sealed inner hatch where Zhang waits, unseen, “never happens on paper at all.”
Xiao Feng nudges aside a coil of hose with his boot and plants both hands on the pump stack, shoulders loose, eyes on the station overlay rather than on Liang. “Your entry vector assumes Dock Control isn’t padding queues,” he says. “They’ve been stacking independents behind their own haulers for three shifts. You stick us in that line, we’re a sitting target for any flag they push or any ‘random’ tug inspection they feel like running.”
He raps his knuckles against a bulkhead rib in a slow, deliberate rhythm, mapping it to approach angles in his head, each tap a different inclination. “We don’t come in clean along their preferred slot. We drop shallow from the nadir side, under their comfort band, and ride that dead sensor arc under B-ring for the yaw correction. To them it looks like we overshot the axis and are fixing it late.” His mouth quirks, half amusement, half challenge. “Sloppy, but human-sloppy. The kind of thing they lecture you about in refresher, not the kind they call Annex for. Reads like bad piloting, not intent.”
Ming, half-seated on a crate with his slate balanced on one knee, scrolls through the shuttle’s last three port logs, his left hand giving a brief, betraying twitch that makes the cursor jump. He steadies it with a hissed breath and zooms in. “Your shallow approach spikes the lateral thrusters here and here,” he interjects, circling two burn segments that glow a hotter orange against the trace. “That’s going to stand out in thermal against our baseline profile. Port scan will ask why we’re wasting delta-v on a ‘routine’ hop when our history says we baby the tanks.”
He swipes open a diagnostic sim, ghosting Changxing’s silhouette into the station overlay, and overlays a revised burn sequence. “I can stagger the power draw through the auxiliary bus, spread the heat, blend it into normal radiator noise. If you give me an extra four minutes on final and don’t ride the manual trim like a show-off. Any tighter and I’m striping the coils, and striping means replacement, which means inspectors, which means we’re dead before we clear C-7.”
The discussion knots into overlapping objections, a three-way grind of experience and constraint. Hong scrolls through internal protocols, reciting citation numbers like a litany whenever Xiao Feng suggests shaving a checkpoint or drifting close to a restricted bulkhead. Xiao Feng counters with lived habits: which dockhands look the other way, which camera housings have been dusty too long, which maintenance hatches never quite shut. Ming fires back about coolant margins, capacitor fatigue, and how many “minor anomalies” they can stack before an automated audit flags Changxing for a deep inspection and a physical crawl-through. Voices stay low but grow sharper, the pump stack clinking under the occasional emphatic tap of a wrench or knuckle as each pushes their piece of reality against the others’.
Gradually, the edges file down. Liang freezes the schematic with three color-coded layers: blue for Hong’s oversight, green for Xiao Feng’s paths, amber for Ming’s system load. “Hong owns every interface with policy, manifests, berth requests, inspection chatter,” he summarizes. She nods once, already drafting cover narrative and fallback alibis. “Xiao Feng owns how we move: approach, docking, any deviation inside the rings,” Liang continues; Feng answers with a tight grin, mentally walking routes, counting cameras and blind corners. “Ming owns what the ship looks like to their machines, heat, noise, wear patterns.” Ming exhales, committing to constraints he just argued for, fingers hovering over the sim as if to bless it. The plan isn’t clean, but it’s theirs, stitched from three different kinds of survival and anchored, for the moment, in shared risk.
Liang doesn’t dress it up.
He taps the schematic to black, wiping away the comforting geometry of routes and burn arcs, and calls up a bare-bones contract window instead: white text, no logos, just fields and numbers. His thumb hesitates for half a second over the authorization tag, then he pushes it through to the shared cabin display.
“High-value corporate defector,” he says. No euphemisms, no “consultant” or “special cargo.” “Heliodyne flag. This is the real profile.”
The word lands heavier than the hull. The cabin seems to shrink by a third; suddenly every bulkhead feels closer, every conduit a potential microphone. The hum of the recyclers swells in his ears, a reminder that their next ten minutes of air are still leased from the same corporate network pursuing their passenger.
On the overlay, identifiers populate: a red warrant band blooming like a wound across the top margin, coded bounties scrolling beside a blocky, anonymized silhouette. He doesn’t expand the biometric packet; he doesn’t need their faces to lock onto Zhang’s yet.
He flicks payout projections into the center pane and lets the numbers float there: tiered bonuses for “timely delivery,” hazard multipliers for moving across controlled zones, narrow green bars showing their expected profit if nothing goes wrong. Below them, in a harsher palette, risk gradients build out from the warrant: orange for increased scan frequency, deeper crimson for seizure-and-search authority, a sliver of ultraviolet at the edge that marks “asset compromise: crew termination likely.”
Liang doesn’t narrate. He drives a knuckle against a control stud and sends his precomputed scenarios into the mix: one where they abort after pickup and dump the client at a back corridor, one where Heliodyne gets a partial track on their transponder, one where a random audit hits them at C-7 before they undock.
“Contract’s optional,” he adds, voice even. “You sign, you take your slice and your share of the risk bands. You don’t, I keep you off the official manifest and you walk before we file departure intent. No questions owed.”
The red band stays, pulsing gently in the recycled air, daring any of them to pretend they didn’t see it.
Xiao Feng’s shoulders come off the bulkhead as if a tether’s been cut. “Heliodyne” is enough; his brain supplies the rest. Grainy internal-cam footage, a timestamp he can’t forget, his own body moving too fast in low g as a security officer misjudged a grab and spun into a bulkhead. The report afterward: clipped phrases, incident codes, and finally the line that mattered (UNRELIABLE ASSET) burned into his file like a brand.
He drags a knuckle along the projected flight path, following the arc from C-7 through the inner ring and out toward dark space, then taps the bonus column hard enough to make the numbers wobble. Three years’ worth of bar-side whispers and closed hatches compressed into a single crisp payout band.
“One clean run, they stop using my name as a warning,” he says, not quite looking at anyone. It’s half mutter, half oath. “That’s worth something.”
He weighs it once more, blacklists, the thin respect Liang’s already gambled on him, the chance to be a pilot first and “muscle” second. The easy grin doesn’t return, but his stance locks in, feet set against the deck as if he’s already riding ascent thrust.
Ming pulls the shuttle’s maintenance tree into the corner of the display, collapsing Liang’s risk bands to make room. Lines of color-coded subsystems cascade down: propulsion, structure, life support, avionics. Red and yellow flags bloom along the branches like an infection he’s been holding at bay with tape and charm. His left hand twitches against his tool harness as he zooms into the aging engine seals, the buffer tanks he’s been nursing two hundred hours past recommended cycle.
He drags the projected payout beside a replacement list, mouth tightening as prices stack. New seals. Proper filters. A real calibration suite instead of cracked freeware. He doesn’t touch the tab with his own medical file nested in the same system. Instead his lips move silently, running totals: how many licensed diagnostics, how many critical spares, and, slipped in between them like a smuggled part, how many quiet trips to a clinic off the corporate grid this run could underwrite.
Across the table, Hong’s gaze unfocuses as she flips an internal AR pane into view, eyes tracking data no one else can see. Columns of numbers, housing, oxygen, med allotments, schooling rations tagged with her sister’s kids, crawl upward. The offer’s premium band stabs bright against the hard ceiling of her debt term. She lets it run through modeled branches: a full year shaved off the bond if everything tracks clean; three, maybe five, added if Heliodyne decides she under-reported or dragged her feet. There’s no scenario where refusal earns her mercy. When she looks back up, her expression is flat, compliant-professional, but the calm has gone thin and glassy at the edges.
Liang keeps his hands flat on the table, resisting the urge to zoom or nudge the overlays closer to any one of them. With two fingers he drags a translucent strip of risk bands beside the payout curve and locks it there. “You know what you stand to gain,” he says quietly. “You can see what we stand to lose.” No pitch, no reassurance, just numbers and vacuum. He lets the silence stretch, the hum of the shuttle’s recyclers filling it, until each of them has taken a long breath with their own private calculations. Only when their eyes return to him, one by one, does he nod once, accepting the unspoken decisions that will define the conditions they’re about to lay down.
Hong is the first to move. Not a word at first. Just the slow uncurl of her fingers from the table edge, the faint click of callused nails on composite. The AR pane in her peripheral vision keeps burning that same ugly orange: CAPTURE PRIORITY: ZHANG, LIAN. ASSOCIATED RISK: ELEVATED. She forces it to the edge of her field, not away. You never look away.
“I want every interaction with station systems routed through me,” she says. Her tone is level, report-room neutral, but Liang hears the strain under it. “Customs pings, berth renewals, random ‘status checks.’ Any packet that smells like oversight or enforcement. Xiao Feng stills, fingers wrapped around a handhold.
Hong doesn’t elaborate on what “walk” would mean, not with her housing and oxygen quotas chained to the same contract that just flashed Zhang’s tag. She just taps two knuckles against her temple, right where the debt-bond implant sits under bone. “And if my contract flags a high-risk variance, I get veto. No arguments, no quiet workarounds.” Her gaze sweeps the others, not just Liang. “If Heliodyne’s logic decides this crosses a line, I pull us back over it. Fast.”
The shuttle hums around them, a steady mechanical heartbeat against the fragile human one. Liang holds her eyes, running scenarios in the background: lost windows, burned favors with independents, the kind of delay that kills a premium-tier job. Giving a subordinate hard veto over station-facing links cuts against every instinct he’s built as a captain trying to stay ahead of both corporate and vacuum.
But Hong’s bond is a lever already in someone else’s hand. Refusing her this is the same as inviting Heliodyne to yank on it mid-run.
He exhales, short and precise. “You call it, I back it,” he says. No caveats, no softening. If she slams the brakes, the Changxing stops. Whether that means killing the run, ghosting Zhang, or bolting dirty from Nanyue with half their manifests compromised.
Ming’s lips press together, but he doesn’t object. Xiao Feng tilts his head, measuring the new line of authority, then looks back to Liang. The hierarchy has shifted a few degrees, subtle but real.
Hong’s shoulders ease by a millimeter. Not relief, exactly, more like a load settling in the harness she already wears. The orange capture notice in her overlay dims to a duller warning band as she pushes new filters into place: priority alerts for any traffic tagged ZHANG, any security algorithm uptick around Docking Collar C-7, any quiet expansion of “routine” scans from the Annex.
“Then I’ll need admin shims on all our port-side interfaces,” she adds, businesslike now. “Comms, docking, power taps. Nothing goes outbound without a ghost copy through my queue. If they so much as adjust our waste-heat envelope, I want to know why.”
Liang nods once. A piece of control leaves his hands and lands in hers. It’s exposure either way. At least this way, the first alarm rings on his ship, not in some Heliodyne office tower three levels over.
“Done,” he says. “You own the station-facing channels.”
For a heartbeat, no one speaks. The deal crystalizes there in the recycled air between them: Hong as both shield and tripwire, the person who will save them from corporate logic, or kill the most profitable run they’ve seen in a year, if her contract decides survival and obedience no longer overlap.
Xiao Feng pushes off the bulkhead with a heel, letting the low-g carry him in a slow arc toward the table. He catches a ceiling handhold, swinging himself into the loose circle. “I want an hour on the ring before we go near your scientist,” he says. No bluster, just a statement of terms. “I’ll stash kits, cutters, masks, a med pack, maybe a hardline tap, in three spots between C-7 and every route that touches the Annex. I’ll map us a clean path through the blind corners, not the ones in the public access guides.”
His gaze slides to Hong. “Nothing that triggers an audit. Just… insurance. Places to fall sideways if the straight line closes.”
Hong’s mouth tightens, a flicker of old training crossing her face, but she nods once. She knows those unmonitored service passageways too, from a time when she walked them with a badge and a mandate instead of a quota hanging off her family’s air.
Liang taps a marker on the rim of the risk band display and circles a few segments. “Flag the caches on my nav, encrypted. Unique tags, no plain-language labels. If we have to run, I don’t want to be guessing which junction has air and which has cameras.”
Ming Haoran clears his throat, flexing his fingers as if to work a cramp out that isn’t there. The faint twitch in his left hand stutters, then stills against the table edge. “I’m not signing off on this with Changxing as she is,” he says, voice brisk to sand down the tremor. “I need one full station cycle on dock before we move Dr. Zhang anywhere. I’ll reroute power so any spike looks like a flaky converter, not extra bodies in the loop. I’ll ghost an extra CO₂ scrubber into the diagnostics, pad our O₂ curve, and seed a few fake warnings (filters, pump lag, sensor drift) that maintenance will chase instead of asking why our life-support profile changed.”
He glances at Liang over the rims of his glasses, eyes sharp behind scratched lenses. “You push for an earlier departure, something breaks in transit, and it won’t be the logs. It’ll be heat exchangers, or scrubber beds, or me, out there with a wrench and a seizure while you’re trying to dodge a corporate intercept.”
Liang exhales slowly, doing his own math against Ming’s. Delays, windows, fuel margins. Crew. “You get your cycle,” he says at last. “Prioritize environmental camouflage; engines can run hot if they have to.”
Only after the others finish does Liang lay down his own line. He draws the translucent risk strip back toward the center of the table, flattening it with his palm until the projected bands steady. “My condition,” he says, meeting each of their eyes in turn, “is that no one negotiates alone. Not with Heliodyne, not with Zhang, not with any of their proxies or ‘friends of friends.’ You get approached, you tell the rest of us before you answer. No private channels, no quiet sideband calls.”
Hong’s jaw works once; Xiao Feng’s gaze skates away, remembering dockside whispers and backroom offers; Ming just nods, suddenly intent on a scuff on the tabletop. Liang lets the silence stretch a beat. “We can’t afford hidden clauses inside the crew,” he adds quietly. “That’s how corporate logic wins. One by one, contract by contract, until there’s nothing left that’s ours.”
Agreement settles over the cramped compartment like a pressure lock sealing. Outside, the faint shudder of a distant docking reverberates through Changxing’s hull, a reminder that the port’s cycles won’t wait for them. The four of them push off from the improvised table, breaking the circle in different directions, Ming peeling toward the engine bay, Xiao Feng toward the access ladder, Hong already calling up port authority traffic queues on her sleeve, lips moving as she rehearses innocuous queries. Liang lingers a heartbeat longer, committing the crew’s new conditions to the same mental map as his risk bands, then keys open the hatch. The next moves will take them out of their own steel shell and into Heliodyne’s territory, and before they bring Zhang anywhere near the shuttle, he and Hong will have to walk the Annex itself, smiling through checkpoints, counting cameras and vents, and learn exactly what they’re up against.
They merge with a knot of coverall-clad technicians drifting down the tunnel, boots kissing the deck every few steps in one-sixth g, bodies bobbing in a slow, practiced sway. Someone’s tool crate bumps Liang’s hip; he murmurs an apology and folds into their wake, letting the cluster of orange and gray uniforms blur individual outlines for any camera watching.
Hong walks half a step ahead with a tablet in hand, shoulders set in the brisk, mildly annoyed posture of a mid-level specialist. The projection is locked to a genuine-looking maintenance ticket for Docking Collar C-7. Pulled from Ming’s black archive of old work orders and altered just enough. Docking interface re-cert. Filter housing inspection. Seal integrity anomaly flagged by auto-diagnostics. Every box has a believable code.
“Hold it,” the first checkpoint guard says, boots magnetized to a floor strip beside the bulkhead frame. His armor is the low-tier Annex pattern. Polymer plates over soft harness, helmet hanging from one hand. He looks tired, more bored than suspicious.
Hong slides her badge across the reader in one smooth motion and hands over the tablet without waiting to be asked. “Maintenance subcontract renewal,” she says, voice flat with long-practiced irritation. “Ops kicked it back because someone toggled the certification field to ‘corporate-only.’ Again.”
Liang offers his ID tag between two fingers, letting the lanyard twist. “Port ops moving the goalposts again,” he mutters, just loud enough. “We’re not even touching their side of the flange. Just our collars. But sure, block our berths until we beg finance for another stamp.”
The guard’s scanner chirps green. He barely glances at Liang’s profile before focusing on the tablet, flicking through the work order. Liang watches his eyes track the fields: ticket origin. Impact. “Everyone’s fighting about quotas today,” the guard says, half to himself. “You’re not the first yelling about collars.”
“Then maybe fix the override permissions?” Hong suggests, with just enough edge to sound genuine but not enough to be memorable.
The guard’s mouth twists in a commiserating grimace. Contractors, his expression says. Bureaucracy. He stamps the passage log with a thumbprint, pushes the tablet back. “You’ve got Annex-adjacent clearance to B-ring junction twelve. Anything past that, you call their maintenance desk. Don’t cross bulkhead L-Three without an escort.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hong says.
Liang tucks his tag away, adding a soft, theatrical sigh. “If their maintenance desk returns a call before next new year, I’ll buy you a drink.”
That earns him a snort and a dismissive wave. “Move along. Shuttle from orbit’s due in ninety. I don’t need a backlog at my door when their security sweep comes through.”
Ninety minutes, Liang notes. Shuttle arrival means patrols pulled toward the private bay, attention narrowed onto the executive corridor. Less slack in some sectors, more in others. He files the timing against the distance he’s already paced out in his head: Annex perimeter to cargo ring, at normal walking speed, in a crowd this size.
They step through the checkpoint field as it flickers blue across their boots, merging back into the technician knot before the guard has fully turned away.
Playing to the cameras
As they move deeper, the lighting cools by slow degrees, lantern reds bleeding out into the flat, bluish wash that says Annex jurisdiction more clearly than any sign. The air feels drier, scrubbed a little harder. Liang’s shoulders register the shift before his eyes do. Corporate territory. Different algorithms watching.
He doesn’t stare at the camera domes; that’s how you get flagged. He tracks them in peripheral glints instead. The faint fish-eye bulge at a ceiling seam, the tiny status LED ghosted in Hong’s tablet reflection when she tilts it to “scroll.”
“When did they push the new flange spec?” he asks, bumping his volume half a register. “Last doc pack I saw still listed the old wear gradients.”
Hong doesn’t need prompting. “Three revisions in four quarters,” she replies, sounding aggrieved. “Heliodyne won’t reconcile the annexes, port ops won’t touch it without a unified table, and we get blamed when the auto-cert flags every collar as ‘pending review.’”
He lets out a tired, bureaucratic sigh. “So if we burn six hours on visual inspections, who actually signs off? Annex maintenance, port engineering, or some finance clerk who’s never seen a docking ring?”
“Depends which spreadsheet they’re worshipping this week,” Hong says. “Last time, Annex kicked it back because the flange wear ratios weren’t cross-tagged to their proprietary gasket class.”
“Of course,” Liang says, adding a little bitterness. “Can’t have oxygen flowing unless it’s properly monetized.”
He hears his own voice and judges it: annoyed, but not rebellious; the weary sarcasm of someone too invested in the system to walk away. Exactly the kind of noise cameras learn to ignore.
Mapping the route
Behind the dull logistics chatter, Liang runs his own invisible script. He counts off the distance between bulkhead stencils by breath instead of steps, a metronome that still works in one-sixth g. He notes the spacing of emergency cross-passages, the ones choked with conduit versus the ones kept conspicuously clear. Doors that sit a fraction prouder in their frames go into a separate category: new installs, likely tied into upgraded locks and sensors.
Each intersection gets tagged in his head with idiot-proof anchors: red valve on the right, scuffed handhold left, floor patch two shades darker, poster half-peeled from the wall. Every worker knot is a moving data point: their badges, their pace, who yields space and who expects it. He clocks how many slow to thumb a message versus push through, which stretches feel noisy and forgiving and which are so empty that a single extra body would burn on camera like a flare.
Timing the human flow
By the second checkpoint, the shift-change pattern resolves: a dense, pulsing stream of workers spilling out from the Annex, a thinner countercurrent angling in with tool cases and data slates clutched to chests. Liang lets the outbound tide carry him for a dozen breaths, feeling its tempo: how it shears around a bottleneck, how long eddies linger when someone pauses to answer a message. He maps the micro-delays: a badge fumbled at a reader, a cart snagged on a floor lip, a supervisor stopping to scold. In his head he inserts one more body into that current, shoulders rounded, gaze down, shadowing Hong’s path. Thirty seconds from an inner lab door to the main spine if you move like you’ve pulled three shifts; fifteen if you shave the corner, skip the polite yielding, and accept a shouted warning about corridor safety as cover noise.
A wall display cycling through shift rosters and safety slogans becomes, in Liang’s mind, a countdown clock for a run that hasn’t happened yet. From that bright rectangle he sketches a path back toward the cargo ring: past the dual-seal airlock Hong will later tag as a choke point, through the anonymous service corridor with its tired, peeling paint strip, into the broader artery that feeds the independent berths and their cluttered cargo queues. He clocks how long the automated door lags before closing after each badge swipe, how many breaths it sits at maximum aperture, whether anyone ever glances back. By the time the Annex bulkhead begins to dominate their horizon, he has a provisional, silent answer to the problem he’s been iterating since Zhang made her pitch: how fast they can move, while still looking like they’re just trudging to another maintenance call.
As they close the distance, Hong lets her pace bleed off by half a step, just enough that Liang’s shoulder eases ahead into the lead. To anyone watching a corridor cam, it reads as hierarchy. Captain in front, subordinate half a body-length back. To Hong, it’s a screen. With Liang taking the eye, she can watch the Annex approach the way she used to watch fraud suspects, head turned toward conversation, attention somewhere else entirely.
The Annex bulkhead’s clean white curve looks almost new from a distance, all brushed composite and proud corporate logos. Up close, the gloss fractures into tells. A panel seam that doesn’t line up with its neighbors by a millimeter; a section of plating whose reflectivity is one manufacturing batch off. Around one personnel hatch, the wall surface shifts from faintly yellowed to pristine. Recent replacement or reinforcement. Somebody cut this segment open not long ago, then rushed the cosmetic patch.
Her eyes tick down to the floor. The polished tiles at the turn-in are evenly worn except for one corner where the matte finish has been abraded down to a faint sheen. High-traffic inside edge, boots shaving the radius instead of following the curve. People in a hurry, regularly. The grout line there is newer, darker, as if the tile was pulled and reset to chase a conduit or sensor trunk. That means they ran something under the corner instead of the centerline; a choice you make when you’re adding systems after the fact and don’t want to shut the whole corridor.
She layers each small discrepancy over the Annex map she keeps in memory from audit days: old firebreak doors, original badge stations, where the first-gen sensor trunks ran. Every difference becomes a vector: this stretch armored, that junction now critical, that old maintenance alcove demoted or forgotten. By the time Liang slows to match a knot of workers queuing at the checkpoint, Hong has a running tally of what the Annex wants to hide, and where the skin has been cut to move the organs.
Her gaze skims past the obvious guard post to the hardware that actually matters. The podium with the bored security tech is theater; the access stack bolted into the bulkhead is truth. Where there used to be simple badge pads (plastic, edge-scuffed, easy to spoof with a cloned credential) slim biometric modules now sit like barnacles, grown onto the old surface. Finger-vein scanners, not just prints: near-infrared emitters, sensor grids fine enough to map subdermal patterns, all wired into a new run of heavier conduit that dives straight into the wall instead of daisy-chaining along the corridor.
She follows the conduit’s route with her eyes. It cuts across the original cabling, disappears behind a cover plate that wasn’t there in her audit days, reemerges higher up feeding a small, finned junction block. Extra processing, probably running local liveness checks before it ever talks to the Annex core.
The redundancy tells her two things at once. Heliodyne is worried enough to harden the doors, and rushed enough they didn’t rip out the legacy badge layer. Overlay, not replacement. Which means more points to fail: or to bend, if you know where the old bones still carry load.
She lets her attention drift upward as if bored, eyelids a shade too heavy for someone walking toward a security threshold. The corridor cameras ride slim gimbals at each junction, doing slow, metronomic sweeps. At full overlap, their fields of view stack almost ostentatiously, bright cones of coverage meant to reassure visiting executives. But in the handoff zones the geometry frays, leaving narrow seams where a body pressed flat to the wall could ghost along the penumbra: caught by one lens for half a frame as the other is already slewing away.
Hong tracks the cadence of each pan, the order in which they reverse, the blind seconds when both are in motion. Angles and timings become instinctive waypoints, a ghost-route layered over polished composite.
Two security officers in corporate gray stride past, cutting from the noisy concourse toward the muted private docking spur. Hong clocks the asymmetry: patrols ragged where colonists and contractors churn, knitting tighter into overlapping loops the nearer they run to the sealed corridor for Annex berths. Coupled with a blinking notice of inbound shuttle turnover, it sketches a window: during pre-arrival checklists, every spare gaze pivots inward, and the outer skin goes thin.
At an otherwise unremarkable branching point, she pauses just long enough to “admire” a curling-edge safety poster, eyes flicking to the fine-print status ticker stitched beneath the cartoon hardhats. Dual-control airlock glyphs pulse beside environmental alerts, flagging which doors are jointly slaved to base ops and Heliodyne override, which gas-flow manifolds can be pinched to freeze a volume in place. Even the metered drift of cleaning bots (paths, timestamps, deviations) scrolls as indexed entries in the access log crawl, confirming what her stomach already tightened around: here, motion is telemetry, posture a packet header, and any workable route won’t just dodge attention, it will have to hide inside statistical noise.
Liang shifts his weight, giving Hong the foreground, playing the mildly impatient contractor while his gaze does a slower, lazier sweep of the ceiling. Camera housings, motion nodes, CO₂ sniffers embedded like barnacles along the curve of the tunnel, Hong will already have tagged them, but he counts anyway, habit overlaying her instinct with his own grid of risk.
“You’re seeing seams,” he says in Mandarin, barely shaping the consonants. At that volume the soundscape algorithms will file it under corridor murmur: non-keyword, low-priority, drowned in the hum of recyclers and distant trolley clatter.
Hong doesn’t nod, doesn’t break her little pantomime of confusion at the poster. “Mm. Look at routing C-Theta,” she replies in the same language, tone flat and conversational, as if she’s talking about cafeteria options. “Three independent confirmation points for every badge swipe. Biometric, credential, and positional ping from the local node.”
She flicks a fingernail against the edge of the plastic, feigning annoyance. To anyone watching, she’s cursing bad adhesives. To Liang, the rhythm is punctuation.
“That one’s clean on paper,” she goes on, “but any deviation in timing between the three feeds gets reconciled in under a second. Fast enough that if you try to slip someone through on a lag, the reconciler just throws a contradiction flag upstream.”
Liang lets his eyes wander past her shoulder, to a maintenance hatch with a faded stencil. “And D-Lambda?” he murmurs.
“Different problem,” Hong says. “Everything goes through one shared logic stack. Cameras, lock cycles, badge auth, even those cleaning bots.” Her chin twitches minutely toward the slow progress of a vac unit hugging the baseboard. “If you spoof one event, the others re-check against the same brain. You’re not fighting guards, you’re fighting correlation.”
The word sits with him. Correlation. Agreement.
“So choke points aren’t the doors,” he says, pitching his voice just high enough to register as an audible sigh. “They’re where systems… line up.”
“Where they agree,” Hong confirms. “Anywhere three or more feeds converge on the same decision path? That’s where anomalies die. You can walk around guns and people. Harder to walk around consensus.”
He watches a pair of junior techs badged in blue cut through a nearby hatch. Their passage triggers a brief choreography: green halo on the door frame, amber flicker on a ceiling sensor, a status glyph pulsing on the poster crawl. Three disparate confirmations, one small opening.
“What happens,” he asks, “if two of those feeds are already arguing when we arrive?”
Hong finally lets her eyes slide to him, just a fraction. “Then the system downgrades its confidence and waits for more data. That wait is the seam.”
He exhales through his nose, as if conceding some point in a domestic squabble. In his head, though, routes redraw, not as corridors and bulkheads but as waves of probability lapping at thresholds. Doors and guards are just skin. The real constrictions are deeper, in the places where too many machines try to agree all at once: and the only safe path will be one that moves in sync with their noise, never against it.
Back aboard Changxing later, the galley table becomes their ad‑hoc operations board. The metal is scarred from years of hot meal packs and impromptu repairs; now it hosts a different kind of maintenance. Instead of contraband schematics, Zhang flattens a blank meal packet wrapper with the side of her hand and uncaps a grease pencil Ming passes over without comment.
She doesn’t try to redraw the Annex. She recreates only the junctions Hong’s observations have already collapsed from rumor into fact: where dual‑control doors sit in series like locked vertebrae; where environmental trunks converge into a single overburdened manifold; where Heliodyne’s pristine infrastructure has to bite into the freeport’s older, sloppier backbone.
Her marks are sparse, abstract: nodes and arrows, not floorplans. “Don’t think in rooms,” she says, more to Liang than anyone. “Think in arguments.”
Each crosshatched junction is less about bulkheads than about intersections of authority, places where corporate, base control, and dumb automation overlap, hand off, or lag by a few crucial seconds. That’s where reconciler processes wait, where confidence scores dip, where a human presence can be mistaken for a routine glitch if it arrives wrapped in the right noise.
Hong supplements Zhang’s sketch with what she’ll never put in a formal report: which internal patrol sergeant drinks too much oolong and runs his loop six minutes slow every graveyard shift, where camera handoffs between legacy domes and newer Heliodyne optics leave half‑second blind crescents, which “cleaning” bots are actually sensor mules that loiter in intersections to sniff badges and skin-temp instead of scrub scuff marks. Her fingertip taps three points in a rough crescent around Zhang’s proposed route.
“These are where they think they’re strongest,” she says. “Patrol density, sensor overlap, supervisor eyes. So they trust the dashboards and stop really looking.”
Liang circles them in a different color, labeling each not as a threat marker but as a timing anchor, little metronomes for risk.
Ming feeds the anchor coordinates into his maintenance overlay, cross-referencing them with power and air‑flow telemetry he’s allowed to see and a few he technically isn’t. He tags every spike (filter purges, shift-change surges, shuttle prep loads, scrubber hiccups) teachable noise. On Liang’s handheld, sketch lines sprout pulsing halos, each flare a transient notch where reconciler confidence dips and the Annex’s static maze resolves into repeating, walkable apertures.
On his slate, the overprint stops looking like a map and starts looking like notation. Colored arcs become bars of time; patrol loops, sensor burps, log delays, all rendered as beats. Liang stops hunting for a “safe corridor” and instead inks slivers that exist only on certain counts. Thirty seconds post–filter backflush, mid–batch upload, under cover of a patrol’s habitual smoke‑break drift. The objective resolves not as place but as choreography: a moving, conditional thread from holding cells to independent docks that’s real only in those off‑rhythm instants when Heliodyne’s habits shear against Nanyue’s and a human body can pass as nothing more than transient noise.
Zhang closes her eyes as they drift past another camera dome, speaking softly over the crew channel, cadence flattening into the tone she uses for lab notes. She doesn’t just name corridors; she names people.
“Lab supervisor Chen, third shift: he hates waiting for badge handshakes. If he recognizes your gait, he waves you through and logs it later from memory. If he doesn’t, he stares at the badge icon until the reader pings green.” A beat. “His eyesight’s not great. Don’t change stride length when you pass him.”
Her voice is thin in Liang’s earpiece, but steady. “Night analytics techs smoke in the pressure-buffered alcove outside Cryo-3. They wedge the fire door with a calibration crate because the latch squeals on the recording. The crate has a cracked caster; it leaves a crescent track in the dust tile. If the track’s fresh, door’s wedged.”
Details spill out, each tagged in her mind to a face, a smell, a petty complaint overheard in a lab canteen. Which elevator reports phantom overloads every Tuesday when reagent drums are moved because the weight sensor was recalibrated on the cheap; if the overload light flickers twice and holds, the controller drops into diagnostic and ignores card-swipe logs for nineteen seconds. Which side corridor usually carries unsupervised carts during reagent swaps because the direct route runs past a supervisor’s office and no one wants to answer questions about “why so many trips.”
She notes which floor scrubber bot rides its battery down to zero every graveyard, stopping under the same dead camera to recharge from an unregistered wall tap; which safety inspector skips conduit inspections after lunch to stream dramas, leaving a ninety-minute window when nobody cross-checks environmental alerts against human movement. With each murmured recollection, cold blue lines on the schematic pick up warmth, personality, laziness, fear, until the Annex stops being a secure object and becomes a collection of individual shortcuts waiting to be repurposed.
She drags her fingertip across Liang’s slate, notching out loops instead of clean vectors: calibration rigs that shuttle between Annex and base maintenance on an unofficial schedule, courier drones that “short-cut” through an older service shaft any time their primary corridor is flagged for cleaning. She adds tiny icons like notation marks in the margins.
“People get lazy,” she says, more to herself than to him. “They learn which doors don’t squeal on the recordings, which badge readers buffer then backfill, which cameras no one audits unless an alarm already tripped.” She tags a side door with a crooked spiral. “This latch sticks. Techs here give it a knee. Camera above? Offline twice a week but nobody writes the ticket because it’s pointed at a dead wall.”
Her memory unflattens the blueprint, layering in the rhythms of tired workers and bored supervisors. Faces, gaits, coffee breaks, little contraband trades in pressure buffers and breaker rooms. All the petty rule-bending and workarounds accumulate, softening policy’s hard lines into something porous, something a careful stranger might slip through.
In Changxing’s cramped systems bay, Ming braces his boots under a console brace and rides the public maintenance network like a current, palms resting light on the haptic pads. He feathers out low-level diagnostic pings masked as routine health checks, staggering their cadence so they blend with Nanyue’s usual background chatter. The Annex answers in machine reflex: power‑draw deltas, airflow trims, valve-position nudges. On his main pane, skeletal line graphs fatten into breathing curves as life-support pumps ramp, CO₂ scrubbers phase through multi-stage cycles, and lab blocks wink in and out of high-demand modes for sterilizations and test burns. Secondary windows ghost overlays of temperature and pressure compensation, tiny ripples that tell him which trunks are already close to tolerance before he ever pushes them.
He shades the map by stress bands: amber halos when air recyclers spike at shift change, arterial red as reactor benches spool, deep blue where half the Annex idles and alarms go numb. He layers the ninety‑minute backflush hammer and the stuttering pump resync on top, circling each overlap. “There,” he murmurs. “Those windows forgive anomalies (power blips, airflow dips, ghost loads on a trunk) because the system already expects turbulence.”
Bit by bit, Zhang’s lived-in recollections and Ming’s telemetry knit into a single, breathing schema. The flat blueprint mutates into a time‑lapse organogram: corridors swelling with shift turnovers, alcoves dimming during illicit smoke breaks, data trunks flaring as buffered logs dump in jittery cascades. The Annex stops reading as static architecture and instead resolves into timed vulnerabilities (predictable surges, forgiving troughs) mapping not just where a body might pass unnoticed, but exactly when the system’s own noise will swallow them.
As Ming highlights the bottleneck, Hong leans closer to the projection, lips tightening. “That gate’s not just a checkpoint,” she murmurs. “It’s a tripwire wired straight into both Heliodyne and base command.”
Her gloved finger traces the icons hovering above the corridor schematic: overlapping arcs of coverage and little glyphs tagged with corporate shorthand. “Standard face and palm,” she counts off, “plus vein mesh, iris, thermal outline. Deck’s got underlay pressure sensors, see those striations?, tuned for one-sixth g. Frame carries atmospheric sniffers for trace compounds and exhaled mix.”
She zooms in on a cluster of symbols at foot level and along the jambs. “They don’t just know who walks through. They know how you breathe, how much you mass in this gravity, how your gait oscillates over three steps.” Another tap and a translucent wave-form unrolls along the gate footprint, peaks and valleys marching in a familiar cadence. “Everyone has a pattern. They feed weeks of movement into a predictor, teach it what ‘normal’ looks like. You change your stride to fake someone else’s, system stamps it as a stress event. Stress events stack into ‘threat.’”
Liang watches her work, the muscle in her jaw ticking with old reflex. This is the Hong who used to walk people into rooms like that and out again in restraints.
“Could we spoof it?” he asks. “Push a prerecorded pattern while we slide someone through?”
She doesn’t look up. “Not from outside the Annex net. The readings cross-validate in real time. You jam one sensor, the others spike on the absence. You try to shadow an authorized body with a second, the pressure plate says two sets of feet on one profile. Their reconciliation daemon lives on the core; it doesn’t trust local overrides.”
She expands the field of view, exposing conduit runs webbing away from the gate. “You don’t trick this kind of gate by acting like someone else,” Hong says quietly. “You either are who it expects, or you convince the entire system to expect something it’s never seen before (and bless it as safe) before you arrive.”
Zhang, hollow-eyed but precise, taps a different layer into view: the access logic tree she remembers from her last months inside. Colored lines blossom, each one a dependency, a conditional, a kill-switch. “Primary biometric handshake,” she says, isolating a thick green trunk that terminates at the gate icon, “then cross‑check against rostering AI, then route prediction.” Thinner branches flare outward as she speaks, knotting into labeled nodes: SHIFT EXPECTATION, ROLE PRIVILEGE, DEVIATION SCORE.
“If any node flags red, the bulkheads close here, here, and here.” She marks three junctions along the route to the docks, each pulsing amber, then hardening toward warning red on Ming’s simulation timeline. “Gas‑flow control valves are slaved to the same alarm. They don’t send guards first. They thin the air.”
Her fingertip drags down another column, exposing subroutines. “See these? Micro‑leak localization, occupant triage. The system assumes ‘contamination event’ before ‘intruder.’ It will happily half‑asphyxiate everyone on that branch to preserve core integrity, then let human security sort whatever’s left.” She glances up, jaw set. “You don’t beat this with speed. You beat it with what it thinks is procedure.”
Liang tracks options the way he tracks delta‑v: ruthlessly, to zero. Force is fantasy. Forged credentials? Useless. The reconciliation layer doesn’t just ping a badge; it cross‑checks weeks of movement traces, task logs, bathroom breaks, every corridor you’ve ever walked under their cameras. You can’t magic that history into existence.
Shadow routes? The model gives him nothing but armored utility trunks and sensor‑dense service shafts buttressing the gate, every one flagged FAIL‑CLOSED / REMOTE‑HARDABLE. No duct‑crawler heroics, no “just bypass it.” The architecture itself is an argument that says: through here, or not at all.
Hong’s eyes narrow as muscle memory overlays the schematic. “I’ve hunted debt‑dodgers through half a dozen annexes built off this template,” she says, voice low. “Every clever one tried to ‘ghost’ the gate and slammed into the same thing: it doesn’t care if your biometrics pass. It cares if your story passes: task profile, last known position, how probable you are here, now.” She looks to Liang. “You don’t bluff a prediction engine that’s already modeled your week.”
For a long moment the diagram hangs between them like a verdict, one narrow artery between Zhang’s lab and open space, armored in overlapping logics that punish both subtlety and brute force. Liang exhales, long and controlled, accepting what every smuggler learns late if they live: some doors are built not to be beaten head‑on, only orbited by those who find a different axis. He tags the choke in hard red on their shared model, not as a waypoint but as a fixed singularity, the non‑negotiable mass around which any survivable trajectory will have to bend, distort, and lie.
Ming isolates the cadence with a thumb-and-forefinger pinch, muting everything outside the Annex grid until the rest of Nanyue falls to a dim, irrelevant gray. What’s left looks almost organic: a regular bulge in draw every third shift, climbing fast, plateauing for a few minutes, then dropping in a sawtooth of staggered subsystems catching up.
“Come on,” he mutters, half to the display, half to the hum of Changxing’s bulkheads around him. “Show me where you blink.”
He cross-references the spikes against public notices. Safety drill advisories, reactor recalibration bulletins, the blandly reassuring memos Heliodyne pushes to base channels. The times line up within seconds. On those days, the Annex doesn’t just run hot; it reconfigures itself into a different animal, one obsessed with not killing its own staff by accident.
He colors the drill windows in amber, then breaks each down further: first surge as simulation envelopes boot, second as coolant loops cycle to test thresholds, third as emergency bulkheads ghost-close and reopen in rapid-fire sequences. Each phase shoves the data core into triage. Every watt and processor cycle shifts toward supervising valves, pumps, and door timings instead of watching humans breathe and walk.
He taps a particular ridge in the waveform and brings up a stack of annotations. Vent-control AI promoted to real-time priority; environmental-sensor fusion upgraded from five-second to sub-second sampling; radiation monitors spun into dense, overlapping coverage. Under that load, softer services don’t vanish, but they stretch. Movement-prediction processes downgrade. Route-optimization daemons drop iterations. Badge telemetry writes to buffers and waits its turn.
Ming leans back, flexing his trembling left hand until the shake is something he can ignore, then leans in again and overlays Hong’s patrol notes and Liang’s red-tagged choke. The drill heartbeat washes right across their problem corridor, a flood that drowns out the fine-grain pattern-tracking that normally makes the gate inviolable.
“There,” he says quietly into the mic, marking the overlap in pulsing gold. “That’s when they’re half-blind. Not blind, don’t get poetic, but their eyes are glued to the reactor, not the hallway.”
On Liang’s cue, Ming keeps his voice level over the low‑band, fingers sketching tags across the Annex schematic as if he’s marking stress fractures. He translates the abstractions into something the crew can hold in their heads: in drill cycles, the Annex AI stops playing god with people and starts babysitting machinery.
“Look here,” he says, highlighting processing pools as they reallocate. All the soft analytics. Pattern‑of‑life curves, probability trees that guess where a badge should be in ten minutes, the low-priority anomaly scorers that usually flag a tech out of place: get shoved down the stack. In their place, the cores go hard real-time: coolant flow predictions at millisecond horizons, door timing calculations that keep bulkheads from guillotining someone when the fire doors ghost‑close, valve-state verification loops that have to run or people die.
Under that load, nothing human-facing stops, it just drags. Reconciliation queues fatten, badge-movement histories trail by whole minutes, and cross-system audits flip from live mirrors to after-action scribes, backfilling what “must have” happened long after boots have already walked the corridor.
Zhang, hunched over a blank tablet in the Changxing’s galley, reconstructs Annex security behavior from memory, annotating Ming’s overlays with hand-drawn door glyphs and corridor tags until the schematic looks less like architecture and more like a circuit she means to short. “Here,” she says, circling the choke gate. On drill days it still handshakes with central for every transit but the deeper correlation passes, the ones that compare a body’s last known vector to its permitted zones and cross-verify against live work orders, get shunted into the same deferred queue as minor inventory mismatches. To the person walking through, the arch hums and flashes as usual. Only in the data core does their meaning remain undecided, a Schrodinger transit waiting for resolution.
Talking it through like a checklist, Zhang traces a hypothetical route from her lab tier to the Annex rim, stylus ticking off junctions until it raps the choke gate. Under normal load, an unscheduled identity here would bloom alarms in microseconds. Lighting up her old credentials, sealed warrants, historical paths. Under drill load, she says, a freshly-minted badge bound to a believable calibration task, slotted into the right shift roster and tool manifest, sails through the first-line handshake. The contradictions only crystallize later, when delayed audit daemons wake up, drain their buffers, and try to reconcile where that badge was authorized to go with the hard fact of where it actually vanished.
Liang listens, weighing each delay Zhang and Ming describe against the physical distances and door cycles he knows by heart from years of running cargo, mentally running time‑to‑bulkhead‑close like a flight sim. He marks the drill‑cycle lag at the choke point as more than a technical quirk; it’s a finite, brutally narrow rewrite window in the Annex’s narrative about itself. Slip one clean falsehood into that buffered interval and every downstream process will obligingly build around it as if it were ground truth. If they can get Zhang to that gate under a forged identity and have her clear it while the system is half‑blind with its own safety simulations, she can be physically gone by the time queued analytics unspool and discover the wrong person passed through the right door.
He doesn’t pitch it like a heist, just another route plotted through bad weather.
“You all deserve to see the turbulence before we fly into it,” he says, fingers ghosting over the flexscreen as he zooms from the base schematic down to the Annex’s western sector. The display obeys with a slight lag, cheap polymers crinkling, resolution sharpening on the dense knot of corridors and bulkheads around Heliodyne’s core. Lines of traffic density and door-cycle timing overlay the map, a familiar navigation display recast for hallways and bulkheads instead of orbital lanes.
He layers in more: colored arcs for security patrol paths, tiny pulsing markers where cameras overlap, a wash of translucent red over zones with full biometric coverage. The patterns resolve into something his pilot’s brain can read. “Right now,” Liang says, “we’re out here.” A fingertip traces a wide loop around the Annex, the independent berths, the cargo ring. “They own this gravity well. They own most of the air. We thread the gap, we don’t fight the well.”
He looks up, meeting each of them in turn. Hong is stone-faced, hands folded, but her eyes are fixed on the sectors marked with corporate override icons. Xiao Feng leans back against the bulkhead, arms crossed, the faintest crease between his brows. Ming is already squinting as if he can see through the flexscreen into the ductwork.
Liang drags a new layer into view: time slices, banded like elevation lines. “Ten-minute drill cycle,” he says. “You can see the Annex choke points breathing. Doors that are normally green-yellow go hard-green for evacuation priority. Some checks relax, some tighten. System thinks fire, not theft.”
He doesn’t say Zhang’s name yet. Keeps it abstract. Safer that way. For them, for him. “Our work,” he continues, “is to make sure their story of what’s happening stays wrong just long enough to walk a single person through this throat.” His thumb taps the narrow connector between Annex and general access. “Everything else we do is just weather shaping.”
Zhang finally breaks the abstraction. She leans in, the tendons in her neck standing out, knuckles whitening where they grip the table edge to steady the slight tremor of exhaustion. “Here,” she says, reaching through the flexscreen’s projection to circle the Annex gate logic with two sharp motions. Her voice goes flat, professional. “During a safety drill, they don’t trust biometrics as much as they trust headcount and flow. Badge scans downgrade two levels. Facial recognition tolerance widens. They care more that a body moves out than which body.”
She flicks open a sublayer, lines of system behavior stacking over Liang’s map: soft alarms, queues, decision trees. “If the drill injects simulated casualties, the analytics queue backs up. For about ninety seconds, the gate controller is reading stale data. It’s convinced it’s already cleared people who haven’t moved yet.”
Ming’s stylus taps a node just off the red path, in an air-handling loop skirting the secure labs. “You tickle this sensor cluster just right (tiny pressure variance, nothing obvious) the automation flags a minor leak, class C. Protocol shunts traffic away to keep corridors clear for theoretical sealant crews. No sirens, no full lockdown. Just…polite detours.”
He zooms further into the ductwork view, overlaying maintenance tags, forgotten contractor notes. “It’ll trigger a partial reroute here, here, and here.” Three nodes blink amber along a parallel corridor set. “That’s your gap. Door states don’t change, but the system’s guidance layer starts painting different ‘recommended’ paths on internal HUDs and wall markers. People follow arrows. People always follow arrows.”
Zhang nods once. “And every badge that follows those arrows is one more data point reinforcing the wrong story the system is telling itself.”
Liang circles the choke point and draws a simple path in three colors: red from the inner labs to the Annex gate, blue cutting sideways through the maintenance connector, green spilling out toward the independent berths and Dock C-7. “Fake calibration run carries you here,” he says to Zhang, tapping the red segment. “Air-loop fault pushes everyone else over here.” His finger traces the blue detour. “And the fight Feng starts makes sure nobody with a badge is watching this stretch when you slip through.”
He pauses, letting the colors burn themselves into their collective memory. No jargon now, just lines and timing. The elegance of it makes the risk feel sharper, not smaller, like flying a clean trajectory between two fragments of the same detonated mine.
Hong tracks the projected route with the same blank composure she once wore in quarterly risk briefings. When Liang asks about the notice, she doesn’t hesitate: reward tiers, jurisdictional overrides, authorization phrases that turn any corridor into a trap. Her voice is level, aimed at the flexscreen, not Zhang. The recited clauses thicken the air; Xiao Feng’s jaw knots, Ming’s hand tremor worsens. It’s no longer an abstract payload: they’re stealing a designated asset whose price is written in Hong’s own debt language.
Liang lets the silence stand for a few breaths, feeling the shuttle’s faint vibration and the weight of their attention. Then he drags them back into the safer territory of numbers and branching trees, the language they all know. He walks through failure modes, annotating the map as he speaks: Zhang’s badge not resolving at the gate; the air-loop fault logging as a higher class than Ming intends; Annex security deciding, on a whim, not to divert staff through the maintenance connector; port control pulling Changxing for a surprise hull sniff on departure. For each break, he assigns contingencies: abort phrases, fallback routes, the exact moment they cut Zhang loose and pretend they barely know her. Only when every node has at least one escape vector does he look up and say, “Anyone who can’t live with this risk speaks now.” No one does. Chairs edge closer, shoulders tilt toward the flexscreen, and in that small, collective lean he feels the station beginning to believe the wrong story already.
Liang starts with Hong.
“You’re point,” he says, not as an order so much as a confirmation of something already decided. He slides his slate across the narrow table; the flexscreen snaps to her profile by habit, then blanks to a generic Heliodyne work-order template.
“No payload yet,” he adds. “We build it clean.”
Hong’s shoulders square a fraction. She’s seen this form a thousand times in different skins. “Calibration ticket?” she asks.
“Mid-level tech, off-site loop check,” Liang answers. “Your language, not mine.”
They work it line by line. Hong calls up from memory the format of the Annex’s internal requests: department code first, then facility node, then the eight-digit asset string. Liang feeds in an equipment ID scraped from a recent Annex inventory ping Ming pulled off the net. An “Environmental Subsystem Diagnostic Rig” that lives three doors down from Zhang’s current lab.
“Too close?” Xiao Feng asks from the galley threshold.
“Close sells it,” Hong says, not looking up. “If they cross-check stock location, I’m just walking a tech from a neighbor bay.”
Zhang leans forward, eyes catching on the corporate glyphs as if they’re physical barbs. “Use this calibration class,” she says quietly, tapping in a code string. “Routine performance verification on regolith pre-processing. No one gets excited about that.”
The code populates the form; a cascade of auto-filled subfields appears. Expected duration, permitted escort level, acceptable delay window. Hong adjusts the delay from four hours to two. “Shorter window,” she explains. “Looks like I’m doing the Annex a favor by moving now.”
The supervisor sign-off is trickier. Hong scrolls backward through archived audits she once handled, finds a digital signature block from a mid-tier operations manager who rotated out six months ago but whose credentials still appear in low-priority queues. She copies its structure, not the name, reshaping it into a new persona with the same cadence of initials, the same subtle spacing quirk in the strokes.
“Pattern matches, hash doesn’t,” Ming murmurs, watching over her shoulder. “Automated checks stay happy unless someone manually eyeballs it.”
“No one manually eyeballs calibration runs,” Hong says. “Not unless something already smells.”
Liang has her read the completed work order aloud, not for content but for rhythm. She does, voice flattening into the corporate monotone that once cost her a decade of her life. By the second pass she’s no longer Hong on the Changxing; she’s asset handler HX-4136 walking a tech through a tedious errand.
“Again,” Liang says, closing his eyes, listening.
She layers in the patter as he instructed: a bored complaint about schedule creep if someone asks why she’s pulling a technician during shift change; a half-sincere apology about “Ops wanting numbers by end-of-cycle.” She practices the timing of a card swipe and a muttered curse at laggy readers, the slight head tilt toward known camera domes, the way an internal escort radiates annoyance rather than fear.
Zhang watches, jaw tight, as Hong folds her into the fiction. At Liang’s nod, Hong finally turns to her.
“You’re silent unless spoken to,” Hong tells her. “If someone does ask, you say: ‘Calibration pull for ES-47A, ticket in your queue.’ Not a word more. Techs don’t volunteer.”
Zhang nods once. “I’ve been furniture in those corridors before,” she says. “I remember how to vanish.”
Liang captures the rehearsed lines as an audio note, tags it to Hong’s slate, then kills the connection to the station mesh with a thumb press. The forged work order sits there on the glass between them, indistinguishable from a hundred legitimate errands that grease the Annex’s day.
“One wrong inflection and it’s a kidnapping,” he says, opening his eyes again. “Get the tone right, and it’s just Tuesday.”
Then he pivots to Ming, flicking the flexscreen to a layered schematic of Nanyue’s western air trunks. Colored lines snake around the blue block of the Annex; Liang pinches and rotates until a single loop glows amber.
“This one,” Liang says. “Secondary scrubber feed for executive offices. Labs stay on primary.”
Ming leans in, glasses catching the display’s light. “Loop B-twelve,” he mutters. “Old firmware, tied into the base maintenance mesh.”
“Walk it,” Liang says.
Ming talks through the sequence, fingers twitching in time with the imagined keystrokes. “I seed a drift in CO₂ differential right here, upstream. Not enough to trip emergency, just enough that the Annex’s local controller flags ‘performance degradation.’ I wait until Hong and Zhang are past first biometric, then I let the auto-tuner ‘fail’ a calibration subroutine.”
Liang marks the moment with a timestamp. “That’s your inject window. No earlier.”
“Controller escalates to building automation,” Ming continues. “Central sees an underperforming loop, proposes a reroute through auxiliary trunks.” On the schematic, Liang highlights a narrow maintenance connector in red.
“That corridor starts taking overflow,” Liang says. “Extra bodies, extra noise. Hong exits with one more bored tech, and cameras see congestion, not anomaly.”
Ming swallows. “If the drift overcorrects. “You hear me say it, you roll the loop back to baseline and we walk away.”
Ming nods once, jaw tight. “I can keep it dirty without making it burn.”
For Xiao Feng, Liang pulls up a cargo-ring overlay, peeling back corporate docks until only the independent wedge remains, two arcs down from the Annex exits. A thin choke point glows where loaders, pallet snakes, and tug crews already scrape paint off each other.
“Here,” Liang says, fingernail ticking the pinch. “You’re friction.”
Xiao Feng’s job is to be in the way at exactly the right moment: a “misrouted” pallet that blocks a bay, a tug that drifts half a meter off mark, a disputed docking slot loud enough to pull a supervisor: and with them, a pair of bored security escorts. Liang walks him through controlled escalation, what not to say to avoid arrest, and the exact handholds and ladder wells that will take him back toward C-7 once station alerts begin to populate and cameras swivel away from the Annex.
Liang takes himself last, almost as an afterthought, wrapping his part in the fiction of routine. He’ll strap into the Changxing’s cockpit early, comms slaved to Nanyue traffic under a dull cargo call sign, hands moving through preflight checklists by muscle memory. As Hong moves, he’ll watch internal routing advisories scroll across the maintenance feeds Ming piggybacks, parsing codes and timestamps, listening for the tonal shift that means “lockdown” without spelling it. In parallel he’ll file their launch slot and mass profile with port control, padding the request with numbing minutiae, tank temps, inert ballast, standard customs declarations, a fake complaint about docking delays, until it sinks into the slurry of a hundred other unremarkable manifests.
When all four roles are laid out, Liang links them on a single countdown bar, color-coding dependencies: Hong’s escort as the leading edge, Ming’s induced fault trailing a few minutes behind, Xiao Feng’s altercation set to flare just as the reroute flags on security boards, and the Changxing’s engine warm-up as the closing bracket. He makes each of them restate their part in sequence, timings, landmarks, abort cues, until it sounds less like a caper and more like procedure, something you could audit. Only then does he lock the plan into shared slates with synced timers and silent haptic prompts: no bravado, just tasks, checkboxes, and the hard rule that any one of them can call an abort if their slice goes wrong.
They build it into the tree as a fat, red-flagged hinge, Liang’s stylus ticking as he speaks. On the shared slate the branch blooms off the main timeline: HONG: SECOND-FACTOR PING?. Two paths, two futures laid out as thin green and thick black.
“We assume primary credential plus work-order token is enough,” Liang says, marking the happy path with a clean GO icon. “If it isn’t, we do not argue with the system.”
Hong leans in, scanning the template he’s laid over Heliodyne’s screening flow. She knows the real version by reflex: routine log pulls, random audits, escalation buckets for “anomalous traffic.” The danger isn’t the first alert; it’s the quiet cross-check that follows if she pushes back.
“If I see a second-factor challenge that isn’t on the schedule,” she says, slow, “I back off. No override requests. No calls to a live supervisor. We don’t stack human attention on top of machine attention.”
Liang annotates her node: NO‑GO at unscheduled secondary auth. Abort to cover story. He flags it with a yellow bar that bleeds into all downstream tasks. If she calls NO‑GO here, Ming never touches the air loop. Xiao Feng never starts his argument. The launch window on Changxing stays a dry, unremarkable cargo slot.
They rehearse her pivot until the words feel boring in her mouth. “Calibration window conflict,” she recites. “Annex systems flagged a timing mismatch; central’s juggling priorities; they’ll push a new slot when the board settles.” It’s the kind of internal nonsense everyone hears twice a week. She couples it with a visible calendar adjust on her console, a shrug, and the body language of a mid-level functionary whose day just got marginally more annoying.
“And Zhang?” Liang asks.
Hong’s jaw tightens. “We walk back the way we came. Same pace. No rush, no looking over shoulders. I log it as a cancelled transfer rehearsal and park her under ‘pending reschedule.’”
Liang adds one last line beneath her branch: Abort here leaves no heat; debt impact: minimal. Hong studies that note longer than she needs to, then nods once and taps ACCEPT on her segment of the tree.
For the systems side, Ming insists on strict limits written in hard numbers, not vibes. He draws bands on the slate: acceptable, concerning, catastrophic. For each, he plugs in threshold deltas for airflow, manifold pressure, and scrubber load. Two-point-five percent deviation on the loop they’ll touch, five on the adjacent readouts, never more than a blip on Annex-wide summaries. Anything in the “cosmetic glitch” range should register as an annoyance on some tech’s console, the kind of thing that gets pushed to a deferred ticket queue. Anything edging toward “someone’s going to hit a red button,” he promises, he’ll roll back within thirty seconds, even if that kills their diversion.
Liang makes him tie each number to a trigger. Green band: proceed. Yellow: accept a narrower, less convenient traffic diversion through the maintenance connector. Red: immediate reversal, no arguments, even if Zhang is already walking. They all sign off on the compromise. Better to funnel a trickle of rerouted bodies past their corridor than trip a full Annex lockdown that would trap Zhang and light up every tampering log Ming has nudged.
For Xiao Feng’s branch, Liang has him spell it out until it sounds less like improvisation and more like a checklist. Xiao sketches the cargo ring on the slate (choke points, camera cones, the usual loiter spots for bored stevedores) and walks them through his escalation ladder like a sparring kata.
“First contact is stupid,” he says. “I’m a harried tug pilot. Shoulder-check, misrouted pallet into the wrong load bay, a couple of sharp words at someone we know runs hot. That should get at least one security lens to swivel.”
If it doesn’t, he ratchets to phase two: volume and objects, not blows. Raised voice, accusations about queue-jumping, and then a “slipped” spanner or coupling wrench ringing off bulkhead or deck, hard enough to spike acoustic anomaly filters and trip proximity subroutines.
“The line is here,” Liang reminds him, drawing it in stark black under Xiao’s node. No fists thrown unless security’s already moving; no visible blades; and the instant anyone produces a sidearm or a flash of live ammo indicators, Xiao’s job is over. He breaks contact, bleeds sideways into the ring’s unmonitored service alleys, and disappears into normal dock traffic. That abort rule stands even if, on some other branch, Zhang is perfectly on time.
Liang anchors everything with a temporal boundary, dragging a thick red bar across the shared countdown until it pulses like a warning strip. The maintenance‑connector midpoint becomes their event horizon: if Zhang’s avatar isn’t logged as clear of the Annex side by that tick (no matter the excuse) the Changxing’s engines stay cold, its departure slot downgrades to a routine congestion delay, and everyone defaults to ignorance. They rehearse the fallback lines aloud, swapping languages and accents until “didn’t know, just following schedule” comes out weary, distracted, entirely plausible: as reflexive as breathing thin, recycled air under someone else’s quota.
They treat capture like another column on the flowchart. Zhang tags two hardware ghosts on a base schematic innocent, serviceable objects where she can cache mirrored data if she’s peeled away in some side corridor. Hong, grimly precise, rehearses her own salvage script. If everything lights off, fake work order exposed, air‑loop anomalies correlated with Xiao’s disturbance, she’ll walk straight into Annex management with a report framed as zeal: an off‑the‑books “stress test” by an overcommitted investigator chasing performance bonuses and early debt reduction. Her version makes herself the slightly reckless protagonist and everyone else unimportant: confused contractors, sloppy dock crews, an anonymous tug pilot who happened to be in the wrong ring at the wrong time.
Hong builds muscle memory into the forgery.
She starts analog, because muscle remembers paper in a way it never remembers pixels. In the quiet hours of the off-shift, she feeds scavenged offcuts into a portable printer, watching grayscale Heliodyne headers stutter out with faint banding lines. The logos are slightly wrong (resolution off, kerning sloppy) but this isn’t about the cosmetics yet. This is about sequence.
She drafts a work order from memory, then sits opposite Liang at the narrow mess table, slate between them like a Go board.
“You’re Annex maintenance lead,” she says. “You’re on your third shift this week. Stamp it or kick it back.”
Liang leans in, frowns with the same slow, evaluative tension he uses on docking manifests. “Reference block feels light. You’re missing a capex tie-in.” He taps the upper right with a callused finger. “No executive cost-center, nobody above you is on the hook if this fails.”
She marks the margin with a blunt pencil, not trusting stylus input for this stage. CAPEX TIE-IN → K GUO LEVEL. Next draft, she ghosts the old error with a new line, routing the fictional calibration unit through a mid-tier procurement officer Zhang names from memory.
They iterate. Zhang takes her turn as supervisor and is harsher than Liang. She has lived this hierarchy; she knows what it punishes.
“This reads like lab,” Zhang says flatly, rapping the form with her knuckles. “Transfer from operations. Different language family. Nobody in the Annex says ‘optimization event.’ They say ‘throughput uplift’ now. That memo was… eight months ago?”
Her voice thins on the date, but she supplies it anyway. Hong underlines the offending phrase until the paper almost tears, then rewrites the section by hand, mouthing the new wording under her breath. Throughput uplift. Equipment alignment variance. Risk-reviewed by.
Patterns emerge. Short, confident verbs pass faster. Too many qualifiers flag risk heuristics. She builds a private lexicon column by column along the table’s edge: SAFE PHRASES, SLOW PHRASES, AUDIT BAIT. Some she boxes in green, others in red, teaching her thumb which to tap in and which to avoid when she later works on the secure terminal under corporate logging.
Approval chains are more art than flowchart. Hong sketches them as stacked ladders, arrows curling and crossing out. Zhang stands behind her shoulder, pointing out which rungs never actually see paper.
“Here,” Zhang says. “This manager delegates everything to a senior tech. If your work order hits her direct queue, it will rot for twenty hours. Route it to the tech, cc her in the oversight field instead.”
They practice rejecting their own work, over and over. Hong pushes a finished page across; Liang scans for three seconds, grunts, and shoves it back. “Too clean. You sound like you’re trying to impress someone. Routine calibration, remember? Bored, not brilliant.”
So she adds a stray typo in a non-critical field, misaligns a date stamp by a single digit, then lets an uncorrected line wrap mid-word the way cheap terminals sometimes do. Imperfections as camouflage. She times herself, forcing the edits faster until she can produce a plausible “rushed” error in under ten seconds.
Every failure leaves a ghost trail: annotation marks, crossed-out ladder rungs, lexical experiments. She won’t keep the paper, but the act of scoring it, of dragging the pencil hard enough to bruise the cheap fiber, imprints the shape of a correct form deeper than any tutorial.
By the end of their second artificial “day-cycle,” the scrap stack has become a compressed archive of everything that would have tripped scrutiny. The latest drafts sit on top, clean and casually flawed, passed back and forth with deliberately bored signatures.
Liang studies one without speaking, then slides it to Zhang. Zhang reads line by line, lips moving silently through section codes and routing tags. When she finally exhales, it is a small, angry sound.
“If this landed in my old inbox,” she says, “I would sign it in two seconds and forget I ever saw it.”
Hong doesn’t smile. She just flips the form over, traces the final routing path once more with her thumb, and closes her eyes until she can see the approval chain hovering behind her lids, each name and code lighting up in the order it needs to fall.
Ming escalates from theory to edge‑case abuse.
In the cramped systems bay, wedged between a humming condenser stack and a cabinet of mismatched filters, he runs his sandbox sim on a dim auxiliary screen, the colors turned low to keep from catching a wandering sensor’s eye. He injects tiny timing delays and valve misalignments into the cloned air‑loop then watches the network’s predictive maintenance daemon adjust its model.
Yellow: routine drift. Amber: advisory ticket, auto‑queued. Red: human review, an operator’s bored eyes following a breadcrumb back to the source.
He keeps a handwritten log on a stained clipboard, graphite columns marching in tight formation: PERTURBATION / ALERT LEVEL / EST. CORR WINDOW. He circles the narrow band where the system starts to sweat but never screams, annotating in the margin how long each anomaly can persist before the daemon escalates.
When a tremor spoils a line of figures, turning a seven into an anxious hook of graphite, he quietly recopies the page until his numbers are clean, then adds a slash‑mark in the corner to track how many steady‑hand copies he has left in him.
Xiao Feng turns loitering into choreography. Each “casual” smoke break near the cargo ring’s loader queues becomes a probe: a shoulder check here, a joking insult there, gauging who grins, who bristles, and which foreman reaches for a comms link at the first raised voice. He notes which corporate guards actually watch the floor and which hide behind their visors, scrolling feeds.
Back in the Changxing’s narrow galley, he smooths ration wrappers flat and sketches crude overhead maps, marking camera cones as jagged wedges and shading in forklift paths. He annotates blind spots with arrows, circles service hatches he can slam someone into without drawing a lens, and jots names beside the hot‑headed workers who will happily turn a staged shove into a believable, noisy brawl.
Zhang rewires herself into a Heliodyne mid‑tier ghost.
She sits at the mess table with a blank wall in front of her, murmuring badge digits, calibration bay numbers, and fabricated project acronyms until they stop feeling like lies and start feeling like reflex. Hong paces behind, snapping questions without warning, “Who’s your supervisor? What’s your last completed task code? Which reactor loop?”. Never repeating a sequence. Liang occasionally leans in with off‑script remarks about cafeteria shortages, overtime disputes, or a broken seal on Bay D‑12, forcing Zhang to improvise the dull, bureaucratic small talk of an overworked tech who has nothing to hide and no reason to remember this day.
Liang knits their separate drills into a single timeline.
In the cockpit, he runs launch simulations synced to recorded port‑control traffic, overlaying Hong’s projected work‑order window and Ming’s planned air‑loop disturbance on a scrolling schedule pinned beside his console. He maps Xiao Feng’s distraction into that band as a shaded block of probable chaos, then reruns until his launch vector consistently threads the gap.
Between sims, he walks the internal route Zhang will take from the Annex connector to the independent berths, counting seconds between junctions as if they were waypoints in vacuum, tagging each bulkhead with a muttered timestamp. Each pass tightens his estimate of the narrow margin in which a misfiled form, a flicker in an air system, and a dockside scuffle must all coincide.
Hong spends a crowded afternoon making herself small.
The Annex canteen is a long, low tunnel of light-strips and plastic laughter, mid-tier staff stacked at communal tables under a scrolling wall of shift metrics and safety slogans. She picks a corner seat with sightlines on the drink dispensers and the main entrance, orders the cheapest jasmine synth on the board, and lets it go lukewarm as she works.
Her eyes ride the room instead of her slate. Who flashes their badge too often. Who angles their tray to keep their screen away from neighbors. Which supervisors arrive flanked by sycophants and which ones eat alone, answering messages through clenched jaws. Every chuckle, every sideways glance is a data point in an invisible org chart that lives in posture and proximity, not in the official directory.
She times it: badge swipes on the door at the quarter‑hour, waves of white‑collar exhaustion pouring through. IT cluster, then safety compliance, then records. The woman she’s hunting always comes on the back edge of the rush, shoulders pinched in as if trying not to occupy space, eyes already scanning the feed on her wrist slate before she sits.
Overworked. Under-recognized. Exactly the sort who trades quiet favors for the feeling of being seen.
When the clerk deposits her tray, protein cubes, extra starch, no dessert, Hong lets two minutes pass, counting the clerk’s bites, the speed she skims through messages. Then Hong stands, tray in hand, and moves with the loose, weary gait of a colonist who belongs here but wishes she didn’t.
“Mind if I?” she asks, already sliding into the opposite seat. The clerk blinks up, halfway to a reflexive refusal, then takes in the gray coveralls, the port-issue ID patch, the air of someone who knows where the quiet corners are.
“Go ahead,” she says.
Hong sets her tea down, leans her forearms on the table, and opens with a complaint about a recent compliance sweep in the colonist blocks: forms misfiled, housing metrics frozen, oxygen quotas miscalculated by “someone upstairs” who will never see the fallout. It’s not a lie; she’s just choosing which truth to spend.
The clerk snorts, recognition loosening her shoulders. “Records got blamed for that,” she mutters. “We don’t even see half those workflows until they hit archive.”
“Figures,” Hong says, letting a sympathetic curl into her lip. “Frontline and back-office both catch it. Middle stays clean.”
They trade gripes, specific enough to be real. Ticket backlogs, contradictory directives from competing executives, a mysterious “temporary” data mirror that never went away. Hong drops a name from a previous investigation, someone the clerk would have seen in memos but never in person, and watches her eyes sharpen with interest.
Then she lowers her voice.
“Look,” Hong says, tapping the table with one finger, “there’s an internal audit coming down from regional. I ran asset recovery for them before I got reassigned to the rock. They love surprise samples. Heliodyne Annex is overdue.”
The clerk’s fork pauses mid-air.
“You didn’t hear that from me,” Hong adds. “But if I were you, I’d scrub any unresolved variance flags tied to Annex maintenance. That’s where they like to start. Easiest to claim ‘safety concerns.’”
“Maintenance?” The clerk grimaces. “They dump everything on us, then scream when we can’t keep up. What do you think they’ll pull?”
“Rotations. Off‑site tickets. Anything that looks like it went out of spec without an after‑action note.” Hong lets the hook settle, then offers bait. “I’ve still got an old investigation template from before I shipped here. Risk weighting, trigger patterns. Not Annex‑specific, no proprietary headers. But if you structure your queue like that, you’ll hit their audit hot spots before they do.”
The clerk’s eyes flick around the canteen. No one’s listening. No one ever is, not to records.
“You’d share that?” she asks.
Hong shrugs. “Better you spot it than some out‑of‑orbit auditor padding their metrics. And if it keeps them off colonist housing for another quarter, I sleep better.”
A small, reluctant smile. “You’re… debt‑bonded, right?”
Hong doesn’t flinch. “Yeah.”
“That audit template,” the clerk says slowly. “You send it, what do you want back? Don’t say ‘nothing.’”
Hong lets a beat pass, measuring. Too much pressure and the woman spooks; too little and the favor becomes abstract.
“Sanitized pull of Annex maintenance rotations,” she says. “No incident annotations, no names, no direct links to active projects. Just timestamps, locations, ticket categories. I want to see how they’re scheduling air-loop work versus power recalibration, that’s all. Helps me anticipate when they’ll lock down sections near the colonist blocks.”
The clerk hesitates, chewing on the ethics then on the logistics. “Sanitized means I run it myself, strip identifiers manually. That’s… time.”
“And the audit template is worth time.” Hong slides her wrist slate forward, screen dimmed. “You’ll look like a magician when your queue mysteriously aligns with corporate’s sampling.”
A longer pause. Then a decisive nod.
“Okay. You push me the template with no traceable tags, I generate a generic maintenance rotation. Last quarter only. You never saw it. I never saw you.”
Hong smiles with professional warmth. “Deal.”
They bump slates under the table, near-field transfer disguised as casual fidgeting. A stripped‑down investigation framework jumps one way; a few seconds later, a file labeled with an innocuous string lands in Hong’s queue.
By the time her tea has gone cold, she’s memorized the first few lines of shift codes.
Back in the Changxing’s cramped galley, with the hum of the recycler in her ears and Ming’s scattered tools rattling in their webbing, Hong projects the rotation across the bulkhead. Colored bands mark ventilation work, reactor checks, external rig calibrations. She peels away the noise with the practiced eye of someone who has spent a decade reading between corporate lines.
“There,” she murmurs.
Embedded in the routine churn of work orders is a narrow calibration window: a scheduled off‑site equipment check for a mid-tier materials analysis package, tagged to a generic contractor shuttle slot. Ticket IDs, supervisor codes, routing notes: all blessed by the system weeks ago and forgotten the instant they cleared.
Liang steps in behind her, wiping sealant from his fingers, and squints at the projection.
“Real?” he asks.
“Real enough.” Hong traces the block with a fingertip. “They’ve booked an external calibration from Annex Bay Three to Auxiliary Lab K‑17. No escort logged, just standard technician clearance. If we rewrite this as a personnel transfer for ‘specialized operator support,’ Zhang’s cover fits inside the existing auth chain.”
Liang studies the timestamps, comparing them to the handwritten schedule pinned by the coffee unit.
“That drops her into the connector exactly when Ming’s loop disturbance hits,” he says.
“And thirty-two minutes before Xiao Feng starts his little performance in the cargo ring,” Hong adds. “Plenty of time for her to vanish into the maintenance crawl before anyone starts reconciling headcounts.”
She zooms in, capturing the ticket structure. Field lengths, approval tags, supervisor initials. The bones of a believable fiction already blessed with a corporate rubber stamp.
“All we have to do now,” she says, saving the segment to an encrypted buffer, “is lie exactly like the truth they’ve already told themselves.”
Nanyue’s trade concourse runs loud and bright down its center, but the edges are where rules fray. Ming works those edges.
He drifts along a line of mesh-front stalls, eyeing trays of stripped boards and tag clusters, until he finds what he needs: a rack of orphaned access tokens hanging like dead beetles. The keeper is a narrow man with nicotine fingers and a laugh that never reaches his eyes.
“Old revisions,” the man says, rattling the rack. “Collector’s items.”
Ming plucks an orange-edged puck stamped with Heliodyne’s hex logo, tilts it to catch the etched serial. Expiry buried three fiscal quarters back. Not fresh, not ancient. Sweet spot.
“Obsolete junk,” Ming says. “Two drink chits.”
They settle at five and a half, paid in split denominations to keep the trail noisy. Ming pockets the token, fingers brushing its worn edges like he’s already mapping its circuits.
Back on the Changxing, he lays it on a mag-mat, pops the casing with a pry-spudger, and fans its internals under a strip light. EEPROM, RF coil, trace antennae: familiar anatomy. He patches a lead into the debug pads, watches its handshake burble across his slate in compressed bursts of authentication noise.
The token still chats in Heliodyne, just with an accent from last year.
“Good bones,” he mutters.
He doesn’t overwrite so much as redirect. Version tags are bumped, a couple of deprecated opcode calls swapped for their modern twins, checksum behavior nudged until it passes casual pattern checks. The trick is not to make it perfect. Perfect flags.
He lets the original telemetry layer ride untouched. Minute voltage fluctuations, timing jitter, the characteristic drift of hardware that’s lived a little too close to a reactor housing. Automated filters will see the same dirty heartbeat they expect from field gear.
Finally, he splices the rehoused chip into a nondescript tool-handle in his kit, burying the antenna under scuffed plastic. To a casual glance, it’s just another contractor’s multi-probe.
To Annex infrastructure, when he brushes that handle against a maintenance panel, it will whisper the right greeting in an old friend’s voice, claiming the modest, boring authority of a tech cleared to tickle secondary air-loop controls.
Just enough legitimacy to open a door no one thinks they’re opening.
Zhang spends an hour hunched over a standard‑issue datapad at the Changxing’s tiny table, coolant stains and bolt scars framing her workspace. She boots it into diagnostics mode, strips the consumer shell down to bare system calls, then begins layering the lie.
Color palettes first: Heliodyne’s washed‑out blues, the particular gray she remembers from six years of late‑night status checks. Menu nesting comes next, the exact illogical path a tech has to take to reach “Equipment Calibration – External,” because no one ever fixes legacy layouts. She sets font weights on warning prompts, re-creates the ugly pagination bar, even codes in the half‑second hitch between tab changes that screamed “overloaded Annex console.”
From memory she builds a fake intranet frame: header with rotating compliance slogans, sidebar of irrelevant quick‑links, a breadcrumb trail marching “HOME > OPS > MAINT > ACTIVE TICKETS.” Inside that, she drops Hong’s drafted work order, massaging field labels and timestamp formats until they match the rotation Hong pulled. Clickable‑looking but empty anchors stub out to nonfunctional URLs; the illusion of depth without the danger of real calls.
Liang leans in once, squinting. To him it’s just another corporate screen. To the Annex, in the half‑glance of a harried technician, it will read as exactly what it pretends to be: an internal maintenance viewer on a borrowed device, not contraband walking itself out of a secure wing.
Xiao Feng walks the cargo ring twice at off‑peak hours, counting handholds, blind corners, and camera cones along the route from his planned altercation site toward the independent berths. He notes which bulkheads ring hollow, where the decking vibrates with pump rhythm: ambient noise to hide in. At a maintenance junction marked only by flaking hazard tape, he cracks open a seldom‑used locker, finds it empty but for a few dusted‑over zip ties, and tucks in a rolled gray coverall, a bland contractor vest with no logos, and a compact med kit with coagulant patches, bruise‑mask film, and a throat spray to roughen his voice. He memorizes the locker’s scuffed number, the chipped corner of its latch, the exact sequence of steps from the nearest mag‑tram hatch. When the time comes to break away from the staged fight, he’ll have somewhere to vanish, strip identifiers, patch bruises, and emerge hunched and anonymous, just another tired dockhand drifting off shift.
He tags the manifest to a broker he’s used a dozen times before, someone whose name means “trustworthy” mostly because no one’s ever found a reason to look closely. No hazardous flags, no special handling codes, no declared passengers. Just displacement, mass, and a quiet slice of delta‑v. Paperwork, not piloting, will get Zhang through the Annex’s shadow.
Liang floats half‑reclined in the Changxing’s pilot couch, harness snug across his chest, the shoulder webbing rasping softly each time he shifts. The launch clearance hovers in his peripheral display, a translucent stack of authorizations and vectors ghosted over the forward port where Nanyue’s dock wall fills the view like a gray cliff.
He calls the corridor assignment into focus with a blink‑gesture. The route blossoms in schematic: a pale arc through local traffic, transit nodes pulsing in muted amber, conflict bands shaded red where he is explicitly not allowed to be. He drags it against Ming’s fuel projections pinned on the opposite side of his vision. Mass budget, tank temperature gradients, pump efficiency curves. No jitter, no outliers. Ming’s conservative burn estimates sit neatly under the port’s mandated thrust envelope.
He scrubs through time, advancing the simulation in quarter‑second ticks. Departure thrust, roll to align with the corridor spine, the long, slow climb out of Nanyue’s gravity well. He watches predicted separation minima ripple along the path, checking distance buffers against two visiting corporate ferries and a tug inbound from a high‑inclination mining cluster. The autoplan maintains generous margins. No excuses there, either.
He hunts for flaws anyway. A narrow tweak to periapsis here, an extra half‑percent thrust there: things that, on any other day, he’d file as efficiency optimizations and argue over with a bored traffic controller. Today, anything that looks like uncertainty is a beacon. The numbers line up too cleanly to contest without inviting a human review.
He lets the sim run to main‑engine shutdown, confirming attitude windows for a hypothetical immediate return. The abort profile is ugly, fuel‑hungry, but technically viable. Only technically. All of it assumes that when they light off, they’ll still be just another cargo run.
His thumb hovers over the commit icon. Backing out would mean sending a cancel down the same pipe that just blessed him with a slot. Anomalous enough to spawn a discrepancy ticket, maybe even ping a live controller who still remembers his call sign. More eyes is exactly what they don’t need.
He tastes the metallic tang of the cabin air, counts out a slow breath, then taps. The flight plan slides down into the shuttle’s guidance buffer with a muted acknowledgment tone, the kind of unremarkable chime that has accompanied thousands of safe, boring launches.
The Changxing is now a scheduled event in Nanyue’s traffic lattice, pinned into a specific future. Any deviation from here on won’t be a question in an inbox; it will be a violation.
In a cramped admin alcove off the colonist ring, Hong braces one boot in a wall loop to keep from drifting and zooms the forged work order to maximum. Line by line, she traces the routing string on her slate, lips moving silently as she walks the approval path: originating lab code, intermediate reviewer IDs, final Annex sign‑off. Cost centers get a second pass; they have to look dull. Maintenance budget, not R&D. She pulls up a real, low‑priority ticket in a side window and matches phrasing, punctuation, even the pattern of typos common to overworked supervisors.
Her heart rate ticks up as she reaches the embedded signature block. The stylus‑rendered scrawls are copied from dozens of grainy captures she’s hoarded over years of quiet audits, each stroke reconstructed until the algorithm that checks for forgery will see nothing but familiar noise. Her thumb hovers over submit. She imagines the audit trail that will blossom: timestamps snapped to drill prep, cross‑references to training memos, legitimacy accruing with every automated rubber stamp.
She exhales, sends. On her slate, the request flips from editable form to queued asset, swallowed by Heliodyne’s internal mesh as workflows begin cocooning it in corporate procedure.
In the Changxing’s dim corridor, Zhang props one shoulder against a locker and thumbs her modified datapad awake. The screen fills with Annex traffic: compressed status pips riding on low‑band maintenance telemetry, the only channel she trusts not to be aggressively scrubbed. The safety‑drill notification blooms across half a dozen internal lists. Lab calendars, shift briefings, a terse memo from Facilities about “temporary access profile adjustments.”
She pulls up a sectional of the western sectors, fingers splaying and pinching until the schematic resolves into fine lines and node IDs. Evacuation arrows begin to pulse, animating the planned flow of bodies. She traces the route meant for her escort, then the thin side spur of the maintenance connector with its patchy sensor icons. In her head she overlays blind spots, timing, badge‑swipe cadence. That thin, misaligned seam in Heliodyne’s surveillance fabric is no longer a theory on a lab whiteboard; it is the corridor she will step into or die near.
Xiao Feng drifts near a cargo-ring bulkhead, one boot hooked into a deck loop, ostensibly checking a pallet restraint while his gaze tracks guard patterns. Two‑by‑two patrols, lone floaters cutting corners, the ones who stop to flirt with loaders. When a sharp corporate chime pings in their earpieces and half the line peels off toward drill muster, the access spine thins just as Ming predicted. Feng adjusts the straps on his tool harness, fingers brushing the innocuous wrench he prefers as a bluff weapon, and silently tags the choke point where a clumsy shove, a shouted accusation over misrouted cargo, will blossom into a shouting match big enough to pull eyes and cams: without spilling a drop of blood.
The Changxing’s central corridor runs in a dim ribbon of amber, panels humming softly as life-support cycles tick over into drill prep. Zhang flattens an imaginary crease from her sleeve, adjusts the collar of her nameless gray, making herself the kind of forgettable competent no one remembers at shift’s end. The datapad nestles against her ribs, weightless but heavy with consequences, its shell an anonymous corporate rectangle hiding Zhang’s carefully nested ciphers and sensor‑spoofing routines. Facing Liang at arm’s length, she lets her gaze catalog him with a scientist’s precision: pulse steady at his throat, shoulders loose, eyes narrowed in that way that means he is already simulating contingencies three branches deep. No visible doubt, no last‑minute rescue from the edge. She feels the subtle shift as his fingers ghost over the bulkhead intercom, not pressing yet, just testing his own resolve. Her chin dips: the smallest consent she can give without feeling she has ceded control. Through the hull, the first soft chimes of the impending safety drill ripple along Nanyue’s spine, a distant, artificial birdsong. Each note shutters options, hardening the timeline they have manufactured from stolen signatures and induced faults. In Zhang’s mind, vectors collapse; there is no longer a safe state for the system, only paths to failure she must ride and bend.
Status bars crawled, numbers fluttered into new equilibria as the control logic tried to compensate. The AI bled a little more airflow through the Annex’s western duct tree, trimmed circulation elsewhere, then flagged the variance for human review within the next drill window.
On the Annex side of the wall, that translated into a soft chime in a half-dozen tech cubbies and a quiet icon change on the duty engineer’s main panel. One more orange petal opening on an already cluttered schematic. Routine noise. Exactly where the scheduled fire-suppression drill was about to funnel bodies and attention anyway.
Ming kept one eye on the mirrored station display, one on Changxing’s own pressure graphs. His exploit forked in three directions now, like cautious feelers:
One thread kept stroking the filter load upward in hairline increments, forcing the Annex’s internal system to propose “field inspection and possible replacement” in the next task batch. That would populate a work order queue, generate door permissions, and shuffle airlock priorities.
A second spun up bogus cross-checks on a pair of redundant sensors, so that when the Annex’s AI tried to sanity-check the anomaly, it saw corroboration instead of a single noisy probe.
The third stayed wrapped around the handshake with Changxing’s transponder, translating any corporate query into the expected stream of boring maintenance telemetry. As far as Nanyue’s core was concerned, Liang’s shuttle was a good little contracted service boat, docked and compliant and full of nothing more dangerous than filter cartridges and overworked mechanics.
Ming exhaled slowly, flexing his left hand until the faint tremor masked itself as impatience. If he pushed the variance faster, he could probably force a yellow alert and lock half the Annex down: but that would bring senior oversight and forensic traces. They didn’t need chaos; they needed predictable irritation.
On his panel, the Annex’s route optimizer began redrawing flow maps, shunting nonessential corridor traffic away from the “degraded efficiency” sector and opening a few maintenance paths instead. Access tunnels, service hatches, pressure-managed crosslinks. Doors that rarely cycled, about to get a perfectly logged reason to unlock.
There. A slim corridor of opportunity, exactly as modeled.
“Hooks are in,” he murmured over the tightbeam crew channel, keeping his voice level. “Annex west ducts showing degraded. Maintenance paths will open on the next task push. You’ll have your door shuffle in… forty to sixty seconds.”
He watched the timestamps update, felt the familiar, queasy satisfaction of a plan leaving the realm of simulation and entering the messier physics of people and institutional laziness. No more modeling; from here, it was all live data.
The Annex’s environmental AI does what it was built to do: reshuffle inconvenience down the hierarchy.
Within thirty seconds, the maintenance scheduler proposes a patchwork of “on-foot verification” tasks, auto-assigned to the lowest-clearance facilities profiles on shift. The algorithm is considerate enough to cluster the new jobs along the already planned fire-suppression drill path, no need to waste extra suit cycles, so its optimization kernel lights up a string of seldom-used side corridors and service crosslinks as “temporary preferred routes.”
West-duct access hatches that normally sit gray and unopened for weeks flick over to amber: “AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PENDING.” Door controllers pre-stage pressure checks, cycling seals in slow, almost sleepy test pulses. The Annex core requests a brief window of routing authority from Nanyue’s main traffic manager and, receiving automatic approval, pushes a revised corridor-priority map to local bulkhead brains.
In the freeport’s underlying mesh, Changxing appears as an obedient node participating in the same housekeeping ballet, helpfully offering its own filter inventory as potential replacement stock. On paper, ship and Annex are simply cooperating to keep corporate air clean, nothing more.
On the Annex control boards, a neat cluster of orange “AIR-LOOP EFFICIENCY < 92%” petals blooms along a subsection of the HVAC schematic just as the drill notification propagates. A pair of techs mid-joke fall abruptly silent, the punchline dying as they lean in.
“Seriously? Now?” one mutters, thumbing open the alert pane.
Low-priority, noncritical, recommended on-foot verification within the current drill window. The tags are clear: nothing you can kick upstairs, everything you’re obligated to note.
“Facilities’ll get stuck walking it,” the other says, already composing the grumbling message in his head. “We’re just logging monkeys.”
Still, he taps ACKNOWLEDGE. The scheduler spools a fresh line of work orders into the queue, routes shifting in the background while they turn back to their consoles, annoyed but compliant.
As the Annex drill controller automatically folds Ming’s fabricated anomalies into its scenario tree, it pushes a revised task list to corporate scheduling: a maintenance sweep aligning perfectly with the flagged ducts, timestamped inside the drill window. Routes ripple across the internal map. At the same moment, in a quieter corridor near the main concourse junction, Hong steps up to a wall panel, presents her borrowed contractor badge, and keeps her face set in the practiced boredom of support staff on a thankless call, shoulders loose, gaze unfocused, as if already thinking about her next assignment.
The panel’s access node chews on Hong’s falsified credentials, crunching them against Ming’s freshly injected “HVAC anomaly resolution” ticket. For a heartbeat the status ring hangs yellow, background threads reconciling the mismatch between her debt-bond profile and the borrowed contractor ID, even pinging a distant oversight cache. Then the signed work order wins arbitration; the ring flips green, the Annex door unlatches with a muted clunk, and her entry logs as forgettable maintenance traffic folded neatly into the drill.
First phase lands cleanly
The low-priority “air-loop imbalance” flags ripple outward from the Annex like a slow, invisible leak, exactly where Ming’s injected faults said they should be. On Nanyue’s master maintenance tree they flower as a tidy cluster of yellow petals, each tagged with benign language: efficiency drift, thermal offset, noncritical variance. Not a single node crosses the red-line thresholds that would wake a human supervisor or trigger an auto-lockdown. Instead of sirens, there is the quiet bureaucracy of work.
Task-generation daemons chew the anomalies, cross-check them against the ongoing drill profile, and spit out a chain of routine tickets: visual duct inspections, filter checks, valve verifications. The system categorizes them as “drill-adjacent opportunities,” the kind of chores you tuck into a preexisting exercise to make productive use of already-disrupted traffic.
Annex routing software takes the hint. On internal maps, corridors blush amber one by one, not in a hard quarantine pattern but with the polite shading of “temporary access optimization.” Wayfinding overlays redraw themselves; standard routes kink sideways, sending non-essential personnel two turns out of their way under the guise of efficiency.
Technicians heading for coffee find their wristbands buzzing with suggested detours. A junior analyst frowns as her usual shortcut grays out, replaced by a gently pulsing alternative. Above their heads, wall strips flip to “DRILL ROUTE ACTIVE – EXPECT MINOR DELAYS,” turning annoyance into resignation.
In the middle of this quiet reshuffle, a single maintenance path threads clean and green through the growing amber. On the schedule, it carries a perfectly ordinary label: HVAC ANOMALY REMEDIATION – PRIORITY LOW. On the ground, it overlays exactly onto the line Hong and Zhang are walking.
Their badges handshake with the updated pathing table; in the Annex’s sensor space, they resolve not as outliers but as the answer key. Cameras tag them as “assigned responders,” door controllers flag their approach as expected. Every bulkhead on their route pre-selects for pass-through instead of challenge, shaving seconds from authentication checks, smoothing travel.
To anyone glancing at a status console, the pattern looks like what it claims to be: a routine, mildly irritating maintenance sweep folded neatly into a scheduled safety drill, overseen by no one and trusted by everyone because the system says it’s fine.
Controlled shuffle
Inside the Annex, bulkheads cycle in a practiced rhythm, one door sealing as another irises open a section away, herding lab techs and junior analysts along revised walkways. The motion propagates like a slow wave through white corridors: status strips blink from steady green to pulsing amber, then back again once a group has been siphoned past.
People adjust without thinking. A pair of spectrometry techs pivot mid-conversation when their usual shortcut ghosts out on their wrist displays. A courier reroutes with a muttered curse as a familiar junction flashes “TEMPORARY NO-THROUGHWAY – DRILL PATH ACTIVE.” The ambient AI voice repeats its clipped, neutral apology every few minutes, changing only the segment IDs: “Attention. Short-term routing optimization in progress for Sectors B-12 through B-17. Expect minor delays.”
Trolley wheels rattle over threshold ridges as carts are nudged into side corridors. Clustered foot traffic stretches and thins, pulled into new channels that keep critical labs fed while quietly starving Zhang’s target wing of casual witnesses. To anyone watching from inside the flow, it’s just another low-level drill inconvenience.
Disguises in motion
Zhang matches Hong’s pace, calibrating her stride to the weary, unhurried shuffle common to people paid by the hour, not the breakthrough. The unmarked gray of her jumpsuit is a perfect median. Too plain to attract curiosity, too regulation-cut to read as colonist. Around them, other contractors in near-identical fabric trudge past illuminated sector tags, a moving camouflage of logo-less backs.
Her borrowed ID token handshakes cleanly with each checkpoint they pass, latency and packet size within expected norms. The forged HVAC work order seeds her profile with just enough granular noise (subsystem codes, vent-tree IDs, maintenance history stubs) to satisfy pattern-matching audits. No red flags, no escalation, just a low-priority avatar gliding through a system that believes it already understands her.
Eyes in the cockpit
Changxing’s forward displays bloom with stacked overlays: Annex schematics ghosted over Nanyue’s traffic lattice, door segments ticking from green to amber in a slow, methodical ripple. Liang tracks Zhang’s tag as it hops checkpoint to checkpoint, each handshake throwing a brief confirmation glyph onto his HUD. Every clean sync tightens his model of Heliodyne’s hidden spines: and narrows the window for improvisation.
At Docking Collar C-7, Liang leans into his harness and runs branching trees in the back of his mind, pruning anything that doesn’t match the Annex telemetry streaming past his HUD. The restricted service shafts Zhang flagged tick over to “maintenance priority” exactly on schedule. Her annotations align with port ops metadata, reducing unknowns, sharpening his launch deviation from speculative excuse to calibrated lever. He holds it unsent, cursor resting on transmit, watching for the first hint of controller irritability in the shared chatter, overlapping complaints, cross-talk, a supervisor’s clipped tone, signals that their distraction budget has finally tipped into exploitable chaos.
Annex-wide, the “minor” faults ripple outward in uneven, overlapping waves.
In a regolith analytics lab on Level–3, a CO₂ differential pops red for half a second, long enough for the local system to flag “airflow anomaly” and nudge the control algorithm into rebalancing mode. Dampers whir, vents in adjacent corridors shunt open, and a trio of white-coated staff curse as the room temperature dips two degrees below their comfort band. Their supervisor taps a priority override, but the request drops into a queue already half a screen long.
Two levels up, a pressure sensor on a secondary airlock stutters between valid and null. The supervisory AI, conservative by design, spikes the channel as “verify before cycle” and locks the door in a safe-fail state. Traffic that normally shortcuts through that junction is re-routed three bulkheads over, forcing technicians into a longer loop past a security node that wasn’t scheduled for this much footfall. The node’s facial-recognition buffer starts dropping frames as it struggles to reconcile new load with its baseline profile.
In instrumentation storage, a humidity probe reports an impossible value: dry vacuum in a sealed locker. Diagnostics spin for three full seconds before downgrading it to sensor drift, but the exception still spawns another low-severity ticket on a console already silted with warnings, acknowledgments, and “defer to night shift” tags.
Each tiny glitch hands control back to default safety logic, which pushes bulkheads open or closed, alters preferred walkway paths, and subtly reshapes Annex internal traffic. The neat, straight transit lines planned at the start of shift fracture into zigzags and detours. Maintenance consoles flash soft amber at the edges of technicians’ vision, a constant, low-level nag: acknowledge, reschedule, create work order, assign body.
No single event justifies escalation. Aggregated, they thicken the background noise, turning the Annex’s monitoring fabric from sharp to grainy.
Liang tags every spike on his console (rerouted tugs, delayed customs scans, a mis‑timestamped docking clearance) mentally sliding them into his timing model until a narrow valley of inattention begins to form in the controller rotation two cycles ahead. It’s not a gap yet, just a soft spot: the same name reappearing too often in the queue, the same voice on channel three getting taut around the edges as they juggle override codes and apology macros.
He zooms the traffic lattice down to a ten-minute window, watches colored vectors creep, stall, then realign as Annex logic nudges paths around Ming’s seeded faults. Three heavy lifters stack up on the far-side approach, their captains grumbling about holding burns and propellant penalties. A customs team at Dock B-2 requests “temporary staffing relief” after being pulled to cover an unplanned Annex egress sweep. Each complaint is another data point, another increment of cognitive load on the duty controller who will, if the curve holds, rubber‑stamp anything that looks routine, properly formatted, and just urgent enough not to question.
A side channel crackles with an unmuted sigh, then a clipped, too-loud, “Not again: who seeded gremlins in the air loop?” The junior controller’s accent pegs him as local colonist, sleep-deprived and overclocked. Liang watches the transcript auto-scroll beside his traffic lattice as the same voice fires off a formal request: temporary downgrade on all non-critical departures, citing environmental instability and staffing constraints. The code block is textbook, but the phrasing is pure frustration, macros half-edited and pushed live anyway. That is the specific flavor of bureaucratic fatigue he’s been modeling toward: a harried human nudging the system to shed complexity. In that moment, a small, properly formatted, out-of-plan shuttle departure will look like a problem already solved.
In the Annex corridor, Hong matches her stride to Zhang’s, eyes front, shoulders relaxed to the point of boredom. The implant in her neck hums once, then again, as it handshakes with the local grid. Updating her route authorization, contract status, biometric baseline, and stress flags in a burst of encrypted telemetry she can almost feel, like ghost fingers trailing her spine.
For a heartbeat she sees it all mapped out in cold system language: that single sync-ping fanning through Heliodyne’s audit lattice, stitching her contract ID to this corridor, this forged task tree, this fugitive asset; a future compliance officer scrubbing the log and finding her name. She folds the panic flat, taps her pad, and confirms arrival at the first checkpoint.
The gate’s scanner bar tracks up and down once, bathing Hong’s chest in antiseptic blue. Microfilaments in the contractor badge fluoresce on cue, feeding the sensor a string of identifiers that aren’t supposed to exist yet still sit snug inside Heliodyne’s own pattern libraries. The bar reverses, pauses, Liang can almost feel the half-second latency over the link from Changxing’s cockpit, then the status tile in his peripheral flicks from amber query to solid green. On the bulkhead in front of her, the strip-light over the hatch echoes it with a soft, approving ping.
Hong doesn’t let herself flinch at the sound. She counts the breath in her lungs and keeps her shoulders loose, her gait that of someone underpaid and over-scheduled. The Heliodyne ID number that Ming threaded through a retired contractor profile flickers in the corner of her vision as her implant cross-checks local access lists. She already has it memorized, down to the checksum digits and department prefix; she could recite the linked work-order code backward if a bored guard decided to make sport of her.
No one does. The security tech in the glass-fronted booth is halfway through a pre-recorded safety briefing, lips moving out of sync with the audio bleeding from an overhead speaker. His eyes never actually land on her face; they skate from the glowing green on his console to the corporate logo patch on her borrowed coverall, then past her to the next pair in line.
A dashed yellow stripe on the composite floor curves away from the checkpoint bulkhead, labeled in both characters and blocky Roman: AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE. Hong lets her gaze rest on it as though it’s the only thing that matters, falls into step with its arc. The line leads inward, toward deeper pressure hulls and higher security ratings, a literal path through the Annex’s intestinal loops. She fixes on it the way she used to fix on evacuation routes in training simulations: something simple and bright to walk along so she doesn’t look like she’s counting exits and cameras.
The implant in her neck murmurs again as it rides the security field gradient, logging her as present, compliant, on-task. A ghost overlay blooms at the edge of her sight: schematic arrows, fire-suppression icons, the soft blue halo around the “faulty” air-loop segment Ming has tagged as their nominal destination. The forged work order nesting in her datapad pings a silent handshake with the Annex scheduling core: task acknowledged, route optimized, time-to-completion slotted in among a hundred other minor crises.
Hong matches her breathing to the pacing dots sliding along the floor stripe, the way station med once taught her to mask stress spikes on a monitor. Every step she takes under the white, logo-stamped ceiling is one more line binding her contract history to this moment, this lie. She files that away like she does everything else, under future cost, not present problem, and follows the yellow line into Heliodyne’s throat.
Beside her, Zhang folds herself down into the background, spine slightly rounded, shoulders canted inward the way long-term techs do when they’ve learned that invisibility is safer than pride. The datapad sits in the crook of her arm at an angle so casual it might as well be a reflex, its surface alive with the slow crawl of a maintenance ticket: sector codes, airflow deltas, a pulsing red outline around the “faulty” loop.
She makes a small show of it, just enough for cameras and any half-interested passerby. Thumb nudging the scroll bar. A quiet huff through her nose at an inflated completion estimate. A fractional shake of the head at a line item calling for additional sign-off. Petty bureaucratic friction every Annex support worker knows too well. The pad’s backlight throws a muted glow up under her jaw, painting her in the same washed-out tones as the rest of the maintenance stream.
From Changxing, Liang watches that little rectangle of output on his feed’s sideband, seeing only a gray jumpsuit, bowed head, and a task window indistinguishable from a hundred others swallowing the Annex’s attention.
The guard in the glass-fronted booth doesn’t even pause his slow scroll through an internal feed: some training module about ergonomic lifting practices running in a corner of his display. He squints once at the badge telemetry overlaying Hong’s chest on his monitor, then lets his gaze smear across to the thumbnail of Zhang’s face hovering beside her autogenerated “tech support” profile. Whatever subroutine is supposed to prompt a deeper check never fires, or he’s long since learned to ignore it. One desultory tap of his finger on the screen pushes their ticket from pending to active. “ROUTE CONFIRMED” blooms in corporate blue across his console and, a second later, across the hatch’s status strip. The inner gate unlatches with a soft, hydraulic exhale, just another cleared task in a shift built from them.
Overhead, corridor cameras pan just enough to grab angles on their faces, limb proportions, gait signatures, long enough to burn fresh hashes into Heliodyne’s movement index, then lazily tag both suits with generic maintenance IDs before handing them off to the next node. The whole gray-sleeved column is herded toward the highlighted air-handling junction, their two bio-traces dissolving into a statistically perfect contractor swarm flagged for “minor environmental irregularities” and nothing more.
On Changxing, in the cramped glow of the cockpit, Ming tracks the Annex’s task queue schematic as his injected ticket ID hops from “acknowledged” to “in progress” across nested subsystems. With each quiet handoff, permissions broaden (bulkheads dropping from restricted to routed, sensor flags downgrading from alert to advisory) until Hong and Zhang’s corridor compiles itself as the least-risk, auto-preferred path in Heliodyne’s own optimization model.
He feels the impact as a dull, padded thud through his suit. In one-sixth g it should have spun him a neat quarter turn and left him muttering an apology. Instead, Xiao Feng lets the motion roll through his hips, loosens every joint, and surrenders to it. His body corkscrews away from the magwheeled loader with a lazy grace, arms flaring wide, knees folding and unfolding as if he’s lost all control.
“Fuck. Watch it!” he barks in Mandarin, the word stretched, riding the motion so it arrives a beat after the contact, louder than necessary.
The loader operator, startled out of his wrist-feed haze, yanks at the manual deadman. The pallet jerks, vibrations shuddering through the floor grid. A stack of sealed containers rattles, one flexing just enough to trip its internal accel sensor; a tiny amber triangle blinks to life on its side, a visual itch that makes every nearby worker glance over.
Xiao Feng palms a ceiling handhold and kicks off, amplifying his rotation into a long, theatrical tumble that cuts across two traffic lanes. His boots scuff a painted hazard stripe, his shoulder barely misses a hanging umbilical. He adds a sharp, panicked gasp over open channel for good measure, letting his suit mic carry it to half a dozen neighboring helmets.
Heads turn. A pair of independent riggers in orange coveralls pause, ratchet guns dangling. A customs assistant freezes beside a crate scanner, eyes tracking Xiao Feng’s spin instead of the green-clear icon on his console. Above, one of the corridor cameras slews a few degrees to keep him centered, its attention-cone swinging just off a junction node he knows Ming has marked as sensitive.
“Hey, hey, calm down,” someone from dock services calls, tone annoyed but curious, drifting closer on lazy pushes. “You’re fine. Didn’t hit you that hard.”
Xiao Feng slams his open palm against the passing loader frame as he comes around, letting out another sharp curse. The slap rings metallic in the thin, recycled air, a percussive sound that bounces off bulkheads and tightens shoulders.
“You blind?” he snaps, voice tight with manufactured outrage. “You want to put me in med-bay, you better have the credits for it.”
The operator’s cheeks flush under his visor. He flicks his comm private, then forgets, his next words going out to the general dock loop. “Stay in your lane, independent. These corridors are for scheduled traffic, not, ”
It’s exactly the line Xiao Feng needed. A couple of nearby haulers snort, one muttering about “corporate lanes” just loudly enough to register on mics. The tone in the air shifts: not yet a mob, but gathering irritation, the kind of low-grade grievance every colonist carries ready to ignite.
Xiao Feng lets himself drift backward another meter, deliberately crossing into the sensor shadow he mapped two cycles ago: a dead patch between overlapping camera arcs where auto-tracking goes soft. His theatrics are still visible to human eyes from three directions, but for a span of seconds, the system’s view of his posture and trajectory degrades into jittery approximations.
Perfect.
He grips a rail, yanks himself short with a showy jolt, and kicks one boot out as if bracing. The sole catches the loader’s side panel. Not hard enough to dent, but solid enough to rock the pallet again.
“Stay back,” the operator protests, his own boots scrambling for purchase on the deck mesh, overcompensating for the gentle sway. The loader’s safety system pings a proximity advisory, flashing amber across his HUD and flagging a “minor incident” marker up the chain.
Across the cargo ring, security’s triage algorithm ticks another box: physical contact, elevated voices, flagged equipment. A minor incident in an overburdened bay, but one with people drifting out of standard lanes and into each other’s workloads. The sort of thing that pulls a live body to the scene, because cameras and autologs can’t placate a cluster of annoyed workers.
Xiao Feng sees the first security ping light up on a public task board down the corridor, just a color shift, just a new icon sliding into the queue, and hides his satisfaction behind a fresh scowl. He lifts his chin at the operator, rotating himself so his back is to the nearest still-functioning lens, careful to keep his gestures broad and obvious to everyone else.
“You file a report on me,” he says, each word clipped, “I file one on you. We’ll see whose quota gets docked.”
Around them, bodies are beginning to collect, conversation thickening into a low, buzzing knot. Dock schedules slip by seconds as people ease off their tasks to watch, the freeport’s attention drawing in like a tightening ring around a single, messy human problem. Exactly as planned.
The loader’s bulky frame slams into Xiao Feng’s shoulder at an oblique angle, a soft-bodied impact wrapped in composite plating. In one-sixth gravity it should be nothing. Just a gentle nudge, a shared grimace, two gloved hands raised in apology. Instead, he lets the hit roll through him untouched, refusing every instinct that wants to brace.
He loosens his spine, unlocks his hips, and lets the contact spin him, arms spilling outward like he’s been blindsided. His boots shear off the deck mesh, toes lifting clear of the mag-grip. He exaggerates the drift by snapping his knees and twisting his torso, his center of mass sliding just wrong so the tumble stretches into something long and ungainly.
A ceiling handhold flashes past; he palms it, not to stop, but to add torque. The touch is light, perfectly timed, kicking his slow rotation into a broader, sloppier arc that eats up half the corridor width. Limbs pinwheel, suit fabric whispering against recycled air, helmet light strobing across bulkheads.
It looks uncontrolled. It looks dangerous. And every nearby gaze snaps to him, away from everything else that matters.
He lets his spin carry him another half-meter, then snags a stanchion with his left hand, fingers curling tight. The tendons in his forearm stand out as he snaps his body to a sudden, whiplike halt, boots skidding and then biting into the deck mesh. For a heartbeat he hangs there, shoulders squared, chest heaving in short, deliberate breaths.
He lets the mask slip. Just a little. Anger flares across his face, raw and unfiltered in a way he almost never allows in public: jaw clenched, nostrils flaring, eyes bright with something that looks a lot like the old security-brawl temper he’s worked years to bury.
The shove that follows is anything but wild. He plants one boot, drives through his hips, and puts both hands flat against the loader operator’s chest plate, right over the harness ring. The motion is clean, compact, all force channeled into a single sharp pulse.
The operator shoots backward in a slow, ugly parabola, boots scraping uselessly at the deck before losing maglock entirely. His back hits a railing with a hollow clang that rings down the corridor, metal vibrating under the impact. The sound is big, theatrical, the kind that makes everyone flinch and look.
He bounces off with a grunt, momentum bled but bones intact: no broken ribs, no whiplash, just bruised dignity and a HUD full of flashing proximity warnings.
Shouts bounce off the curved bulkheads, overlapping in Mandarin and dock cant as workers and loiterers drift in, boots skittering on the mesh. The knot swells, orange and gray coveralls mixing with a few corporate blues. Xiao Feng backpedals, hands up, voice risen in indignant complaint about “unsafe corporate tin” as he angles them sideways, herding the confrontation onto the decking Ming quietly flagged. Where misaligned lenses and occluded sightlines leave controllers squinting at grainy feeds, unable to pin who threw the first shove.
On Changxing’s forward repeater, Liang watches sector-flag codes blossom around Cargo Ring D, security bands tightening, adjacent cams dropping to low-res failsafes as controllers re-task focus. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t move more than a fingertip. A launch-corridor variance request slips from his console into the queue, phrased in bloodless audit-safe boilerplate, cross-citing three obscure traffic directives harried controllers approve without reading.
Hong slows a fraction as the connector door seals behind them with a soft magnetic click, the drone of the main Annex corridor cutting off like a held breath. The air feels different in here: slightly warmer, less aggressively scrubbed, with a faint resin smell from aging insulation. The maintenance passage is barely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side, shoulders almost brushing, lined with insulated conduit bundles and access hatches marked in faded stencils; its anonymity is its shield, a space usually traversed only by bots and junior techs chasing work orders.
She reaches up without looking, fingers grazing the underside of a junction box until they find the recessed status nub she remembers from an old schematic. The tiny LED buried in the housing is solid green. No silent alarm, no temporary isolation field spun up around this section.
“Keep your pace,” she murmurs, Mandarin clipped and low. “Bots expect average transit time. Cameras flag dawdling.”
“I know,” Zhang answers, equally quiet. Her voice is steady, but Hong can see the tightness at the corners of her mouth, the way her free hand hovers just short of fidgeting with the datapad.
A maintenance drone whirs toward them around the gentle curve of the passage, its stubby chassis riding a ceiling rail, articulated arms folded close. For an instant Zhang’s throat works in a dry swallow. Hong shifts her contractor badge a little more into the drone’s field of view, angles her body to make their silhouettes read as “in the way but authorized.”
The drone emits a bored chirp, polls their badges in a burst of near-field handshake, then swings one arm to glance a wall tag. Satisfied, it hums past, brushes of displaced air tickling the hairs on Zhang’s neck.
“Annex traffic model says this corridor is low-value,” Hong says, half to reassure herself. “Too many redundancies. If they’re chasing anomalies, they start with main trunks, not back guts like this.”
Zhang exhales slowly through her nose. “Unless someone rewrote the model after I left.”
Hong’s jaw flexes. “If they did, we’d already be vented or boxed. We’re still breathing.”
She pauses at an intersection node where three conduit runs diverge, pale plastic shells spiderwebbed with old hairline cracks. The stenciling here is almost illegible under layers of patch paint, but she doesn’t look at it; she looks at the floor, at the subtle difference in scuff patterns where boot traffic has polished the mesh a little smoother.
“Left,” she decides. “Lab-tier feeder. The right leg dumps you into logistics.”
Zhang hesitates half a step. “You’re sure?”
“No,” Hong says. “But Ming is. He pulled the last twelve months of power routing logs. Labs pull steady draw on this leg.”
That lands. Zhang nods once and falls into step again, adjusting her gait to the weary trudge of a double-shift tech. Overhead, the ventilation hum remains maddeningly ordinary.
“Airflow’s constant,” Zhang murmurs. “No differential pressure. They haven’t sealed any segments between here and the vault.”
“Good,” Hong says. What she doesn’t say is that if they do, the Annex will do it silently, doors locking with the same gentle click they just passed through, oxygen composition changing by a few percent at a time until compliance or asphyxiation. She’s read the procedures. Signed acknowledgment forms.
A faint tremor starts in her left hand. She curls it into a fist in her pocket until her knuckles ache.
“After this,” Zhang says quietly, eyes forward, “you walk away. Debt, oversight, all of it, I can make sure you have leverage.”
Hong’s mouth twists in something that might be a smile. “Get your data first,” she says. “Then we can both find out who’s still holding whose leash.”
The corridor curves again, and ahead the green of the status strip reflects off a door frame with a different sheen. Newer metal, heavier hinges, a cluster of discreet sensor bumps like moles around the jamb. The vault tier is near enough to taste in the recycled air.
Zhang keeps her datapad angled just so, tilt calibrated to the Annex’s habits rather than her own comfort. The forged maintenance ticket floats on the display in workmanlike gray, populated with believable typos and shortcut codes Ming lifted from real logs. If a ceiling lens sweeps this segment, if a microdrone drifts close enough to sniff badges and screens, they will see a mid-priority filter recalibration order tied to a minor air-loop anomaly: exactly the sort of nuisance job no one remembers running.
She forces her shoulders down, spine loosening into the mild stoop of a support tech three hours past the end of shift. Her steps scuff instead of glide. To anyone glancing twice, she is the picture of exhausted compliance. But her gaze never really dulls. It flicks, under lowered lids, along the overhead status strip: an uninterrupted river of green. No amber segmenting, no pulsing red halos of local lockdown.
On a side panel, airflow and mix scroll in tight columns: steady cubic meters per minute, oxygen fraction unchanged, pressure flatline-stable. The Annex, for now, treats her as a credential, a barcode, a line item. Anything but Zhang Lian.
Ahead, the connector doglegs left toward the lab tier, where, three junctions down and one level below, sits the sealed archive vault that holds the mirrored physical substrate of her process. Zhang can almost feel the layout through her boots: the graded descent to the cooler zone, the temperature kink where cryo-lines braid into the main trunks. In her head she reconstructs the vault’s geometry, each angle and interface: composite racks stacked like organ pipes, cryo-stabilized wafers slotted into shock-damped cradles, checksum routines she hid in what the documentation called routine calibration modules.
She remembers sleepless shifts writing those routines, embedding tripwires in fan curves and vibration tolerances. Now, for the first time since she fled her assigned lab, that distance is measured in corridors and stairwells instead of risk models and contingency trees. A space that can be crossed by walking, not only by scheming.
She risks a glance sideways, catching Hong’s profile in the flat maintenance light. The other woman’s jaw is locked, a small tendon jumping near the old scar at her temple, eyes ticking from ceiling node to corner sensor with ingrained, corporate-issue paranoia. No nod, no spoken reassurance: only that deliberate, measured stride of someone who has already crossed an invisible line and catalogued every penalty clause that will follow. Zhang reads the message anyway in the angle of Hong’s shoulders and the way her hand hovers near an imaginary sidearm: they’ve slipped past the outer filters, into the narrow band where authentication scripts and stochastic bad luck are all that stand between them and the point of no return.
The ventilator hum and distant pump-thrum fold around them, a manufactured surf of white noise that makes the corridor feel, for a deceptive heartbeat, almost domestic. Zhang lets one breath out slower than she should, fingers whitening on the datapad as she tastes the Annex’s colder, cleaner air and the nearness of what she came to steal back. One more corridor, she tells herself: one more door between her and the vault that turned her from asset into liability, from line item into bounty. If the system is going to notice, it has to do it now, while their names are still passing as maintenance call-signs and not flashing red in some supervisor’s queue.
The amber wash paints Zhang’s cheekbones, flattening her face into planes of warning color. She looks up on instinct, breath catching as if the light itself has weight. “That’s not good,” she murmurs, voice too calm for the drumbeat spike of her pulse.
In this place, colors are a grammar you learn or you die. Green is background noise, the base layer of survival: air moving, pumps turning, no one important enough to notice. Amber in a connector means the system has stopped taking normal for granted. It means some algorithm buried three levels down has decided that the odds just twitched.
The thin, needling tone vibrating through the deck plates is the accent on the sentence: anomaly, investigate.
She feels it through the soles of her boots and the bones of her prosthetic cuff, one continuous tremor that turns her skin to glass. Her gaze tracks the status strip running overhead, watching it pulse in steady intervals tied to some heartbeat she can’t hear. No sirens. No bulkhead crash. Just that soft insistence that somewhere, a process is waking up.
Zhang forces her shoulders to drop a fraction, pulling air in through her nose, out through her mouth, the way they taught in safety drills she used to mock. Her hands want to move, check pockets, feel for the data wafer laminated into the spine of the bogus tool case, but she keeps them still at her sides. Movement gets tagged. Patterns get matched.
“Localized?” she asks, low, angling the words toward Hong without turning her head. The connector is a narrow cylinder of brushed metal and exposed conduit, too short to hide in, too long to sprint through without looking like you’re running from something. At each end, the bulkhead doors sit half a second heavier in her imagination, as if already thinking about closing.
This could be a pressure kink, she tells herself. A miscalibrated valve, a dust clog in an intake. She’s written fault trees with thousands of such branches, lived inside probability distributions until they felt like weather.
But amber in a monitored tube, with her identity smeared across half the Annex’s log history, is not weather. It’s a searchlight.
Her tongue feels thick. “Tell me this is just environmental,” she says, almost conversational, as if testing a hypothesis in a lab where the outcome isn’t already aimed squarely at her throat.
Hong doesn’t answer at first.
Her world tightens to the faint lattice of icons ghosted over the corridor, airflow vectors, badge IDs, hatch permissions, then shrinks again to the jagged red glyph blooming at the far edge of her vision. Debt-bond channel. Priority routing. Heliodyne seal rolling like an old ache behind her eyes.
She swallows once, dry, and accepts the push.
The overlay blanks to slate gray, then fills with a terse block of system script: SUBJECT: ZHANG LIAN // CLASS: EMPLOYEE-TIER R2 // STATUS: UPGRADE – CRITICAL STRATEGIC ASSET. The words carry their own gravity. She’s seen that phrase exactly twice, in scrubbed training decks not meant for colonist eyes. CRIT-STRAT meant reactors, life-support cores, things you sealed the base around.
Not people.
Below the line, fresh directives knit themselves together in hard-edged font: ALL MOVEMENT CORRELATIONS SUBJECT TO AUTOMATED ESCALATION // OVERRIDE CHAIN: SECURITY OPS → ANNEX DIRECTORATE → CENTRAL RISK.
Each clause lands like another hand on her shoulder.
A side panel unfurls without waiting for consent: correlation filters, anomaly weights. Her own ID sits there, already linked to Zhang’s in a pale-blue trace labeled PROXIMITY CONTACT – UNSANCTIONED.
She doesn’t have to gesture; a tiny scrape of tongue against molar is enough to pull the system apart. The registry view deepens, flattening into stacked panes of data. Zhang’s employee ID, biometric hash, lab credentials, items that used to sit in separate silos, have been hard-bound into a single, glowing object flagged HIGH SENSITIVITY: TRACK-ALL.
Around it, a live anomaly sweep spins up like a collapsing star. Threads lance outward into access logs, camera indices, airflow records, badge pings, even vibration signatures off floor sensors. Hong watches as one status line at the periphery darkens, then snaps from neutral gray to warning yellow: LAB ACCESS 7F-ALPHA // ENTRY: 03:[^12] // EXIT: , .
The missing timestamp is reclassified from “transient fault” to “unresolved discontinuity.” The sweep circles it in a pulsing ring, then begins firing off queries. Locating every biometric echo, pressure shift, and unauthorized motion vector within fifty meters of that door from 03:[^12] onward. Correlation weights tick upward as it digs, building a branching tree of “possible egress paths” in real time.
One of those paths terminates exactly where she’s standing.
Outside the overlay, the connector is still just a narrow tube with handholds and conduit bundles, but Hong can feel the invisible net tightening, threads cinching around their path with every step. The anomaly process she’d once seen as neat flowcharts is now a live, predatory thread clawing its way up privilege tiers. Log scrubber, automated correlation, duty analyst queue, then beyond. Each ascent drags in wider datasets, finer heuristics, more cross-links between names, biometrics, movement vectors. More chances for someone to notice that Zhang is walking down a corridor she has no right to be in under a name that, according to the system’s own gospel, should still be entombed behind a sealed lab door.
“Keep walking,” Hong says, voice low, buying processor cycles more than distance. In her overlay’s corner, the escalation bar inches toward the band that hands this off to a meat-ops chair. Once it crosses, some undercaffeinated analyst in a clean, white room will inherit this contradiction and start annotating why a critical asset appears to have tunneled from sealed lab to gray corridor. She can’t rewrite core logs from here. But maybe she can fuzz timestamps, muddy vector certainty, bend probability curves just enough that the first human eyes see “possible sensor drift” instead of “live breach.”
She needs a story the system will tell itself.
“Contractor,” she tags, drilling down into Zhang’s profile bubble until the implant throws up the usual warnings about privilege boundaries. The scientist’s personnel object is locked under five nested security domains now; whatever Heliodyne flipped when they upgraded her to critical asset has wrapped her file in legal barbed wire. Hong can’t touch the spine, can’t retcon an exit event, can’t magic up a legitimate work ticket that walks Zhang from lab to tube. But the periphery, annotation layer, escort flags, exception justifications, that she can still smear.
She bites the inside of her cheek, opening an override form meant for field auditors. The URL string alone carries enough legalese to make her stomach turn. Reason for accompanied movement? She scrolls through canned options: behavioral instability, contamination incident, emergency maintenance, disciplinary transfer. Any of them will light up half a dozen different oversight channels.
She settles on the blandest poison. AUXILIARY TECHNICAL SUPPORT – TOOLCHAIN CALIBRATION. She slaps it on Zhang’s presence like a bad bandage, linking the “contractor” tag to her own ID as supervising investigator. In system terms, Zhang stops being a principal researcher who has mysteriously leaked through a sealed door and becomes a pair of hands following Hong around to tighten bolts.
A progress wheel spins while the Annex’s policy engine chews on the new relationship. For a second, she imagines it spitting the request back with a hard rejection: asset locked, movements pre-authorized only by executive signoff. Instead, the alert tree stutters. The anomaly node downgrades from CRITICAL PATH – UNEXPLAINED EGRESS to ESCORTED MOVEMENT – AWAITING CONFIRMATION, still flagged but shunted sideways into a different review queue.
“Buy me cycles,” she whispers, to the implant, to the system, to dumb luck, as the escalation bar edges back a fraction of a millimeter, its color shifting from raw, angry red toward a less urgent amber. Not safety. Just slightly slower doom.
She scrolls the cramped interface with a practiced flick of her eyes, fingers hovering uselessly at her side, ghost-gripping a keyboard that isn’t there. The implant’s UI renders as nested panes and color bands overlaid on the tube’s dim metal, but under it all she can feel the hard wall of privilege she’ll never be allowed to cross. Full log rewrite is off the table; the sandbox the debt-bond gives her can tweak annotations and attach justifications, but it can’t touch the Annex’s primary audit spine without raising a tamper shriek that would cascade straight into lockdown protocols and a bonus opportunity for whatever investigator bagged her.
“Come on,” she mutters, barely moving her lips, more muscle memory than hope, as the escalation bar climbs another thin notch toward the human-review threshold. Once it crosses, some junior ops analyst will own this problem. From here, the best she can do is poison how the anomaly is described. Swap out “unauthorized egress” and “critical asset displacement” for “escorted irregular movement,” turn a red siren into a yellow shrug buried under three other blinking tabs.
She digs deeper into the personnel lattice, calling up Zhang’s corporate shadow-object: asset ID string, clearance stack, an emaciated work-history stub already half-scrubbed and tagged for “internal optimization.” The real file lives down in legal vault space Hong will never see, but a few fringe fields still dangle in her reach: bond-enforcement notes, escort roles, incident justifications. That’s the seam. She wedges her cursor into it and splices a new edge: ACCOMPANIED CONTRACTOR – TRANSFER SUPPORT. She binds it to her own active maintenance order, effectively telling the Annex that this isn’t a principal investigator phasing through sealed architecture, just a disposable tech with a toolbox matching steps beside a bonded investigator. A body doing what it’s told, under watch, on the way to fix someone else’s problem.
The implant flashes a yellow glyph then grudgingly writes her alteration into the mesh, stitching a “pending hand-off to field enforcement” stub onto Zhang’s status. It’s an obvious kludge. Any human skimming the log will see the dissonance between a ring-fenced strategic asset and a generic contractor escort, but automated filters don’t skim; they bucket. For a few precious processing windows, the anomaly tumbles sideways into the noisy heap labeled “ops coordination latency” instead of the sharp, bright drawer stamped “ongoing extraction event.”
Hong exhales slowly, noticing only now the burn that’s been coiled in her chest since they left the Annex proper. The escalation bar hesitates a hair’s breadth under the threshold that would light up some ops cubicle, jittering as the system chews on her new annotations. “You’re my paperwork now,” she tells Zhang, voice dry, forcing a thin, brittle smile as virtual branches freeze, some collapsing into lower-priority amber. It’s camouflage made of forms and footnotes; it won’t survive a curious operator with full-clearance tools, but it buys them a thin sliver of time, enough, if they move, to be somewhere else when the system decides which anomalies to seal in place.
The tube seems to tense around them.
The low thump shivers through its ribs before Hong can finish tracing the alert tree’s branches; she feels it more in her boots and teeth than her ears, a blunt pressure running up through the flex-couplers in the deck. A half-beat later, a series of hollow clanks rolls down the connector like someone racking a giant metal spine; the sound chases the air ahead of it, a faint pressure wave and a rustle of dust from the seam-lines.
The far bulkhead’s status strip snaps from calming green to hard, arterial red. The shifting light throws Zhang’s face into sharp planes, pinning the scientist in a sudden emergency-wash that makes her look even more washed-out, eyes wide and reflective. The iris plates at the far end hesitate, one fractional stutter as the system double-checks authority, then scissor inward in overlapping petals and seal with a final, teeth-on-edge click that reverberates through the handholds.
Zhang’s hand twitches toward the closed door, then aborts halfway, fingers curling into a fist. “That…wasn’t you?” she asks, voice low, flattened by the tube’s narrow acoustics.
“If it was me, it’d be on a timer,” Hong mutters, more to herself than to Zhang. Her tongue feels dry. Conduit labels and diagnostic glyphs float over her vision, all of them trying to resolve at once. The tube’s ambient hum shifts almost imperceptibly as dampers re-balance, a new, tighter rhythm in the airflow.
Behind them, the “open” end of the connector keeps its reassuring green strip, but a thin amber band begins to trace itself along the frame, a pre-lock halo. Hong can almost feel the clock starting, the system pulling more context, correlating anomalies. The tube is suddenly too short, every camera dome too bright, every sensor blister an eye narrowing to a squint.
Hong’s first snap-judgment is that some human in Annex ops has slammed a manual override in response to her edits, but the overlay blooming sharp and insistent in her implant tells a different story. The authorization trail on the bulkhead event is all machine, no human stamps: pure policy cascade.
She pulls the thread. The root cause glyph pulses three nodes over from where she pushed: Ming’s induced air-loop glitch, the little asymmetry he’d promised would stay local, has propagated one junction further than planned. A pressure variance pinged a sleepy “secondary diagnostic” routine that hasn’t spun up in months; now it’s very awake and hungry for correlations.
On her HUD, a new branch extrudes from the environmental management tree like an inflamed capillary, blossoming in angry amber. Sub-processes bud off it in quick succession, child tickets with autogenerated prose (“localized deviation,” “possible micro-leak,” “verify integrity”) and begin to crawl outward across a wireframe of the Annex’s maintenance lattice. Each hop lights another segment. One of those new nodes flares brighter than the rest, its coordinates snapping into sharp relief.
It’s the connector they’re standing in.
“Not my signature,” Hong says. “And I don’t spoof this ugly.” Her right hand flicks and pinches at empty air, chasing layers only she can see. The connector schematic collapses down to a thin, pulsing segment around them, the rest of the Annex ghosted out. One end is a solid block of corporate red where the bulkhead iris just sealed; the other still glows green into the maintenance tier, but a translucent yellow band is bleeding around its perimeter, thickening with each heartbeat. Text tags blossom beside it: “environmental review,” “pending validation.” A new glyph spawns above the tube, an austere timer icon, and spins up, digits marching silently downward. Zhang tracks it, throat working, then glances at the nearest camera dome as if it might speak.
Hong drills down into the environmental ticket and feels her throat go dry. The auto-routine has already queued a “localized pressure validation,” Annex euphemism for staged isolation: grace-period sampling, then both ends of the tube hard-closed, airflow ratcheted to bare-minimum survival, and full camera/biomonitor stream mirrored to Security Analytics. Their improvised hideout is one subroutine away from becoming a quarantined anomaly box: with them neatly tagged as the anomaly of record.
She strangles the urge to swear and starts pruning procedures at the root, trying to shunt the validation cycle into a sleepy neighboring duct, but the escalation bar for the original anomaly surges in her periphery: “queued” blinks once and hardens into “pending operator review.” Human eyes-on in under three minutes. The controller finally assigns a number to their coffin: ninety seconds until the auto-purge tries to “equalize” pressure in this flagged segment. Between the looming lockdown that will turn the tube into a slow suffocation cell under perfect surveillance and an analyst about to notice Zhang never exited her lab, Hong’s carefully grown buffer collapses into a brutally short window measured in held breaths and the length of a single bad decision.
Hong forces her pulse down, feeling the flutter in her neck where the debt-bond implant sits like a second heartbeat, and yanks open a stripped-down pane of the Annex emergency tree. No pretty UI this time, no rounded icons and calming color gradients; she drops straight into the raw event stack. A vertical lattice of timestamps, process IDs, and terse Mandarin-English hybrids only investigators and system techs ever see.
Events scroll past her inner eye in tight monochrome lines, a waterfall of routine: filter swaps, badge pings, oxygen mix tweaks. Buried three-quarters down, the validation anomaly she seeded as harmless noise glows an innocuous gray. For a fraction of a second she allows herself to believe it’s still parked there, camouflaged among hundreds of maintenance quirks. Then two new tags attach themselves like leeches: one for Ming’s off-nominal pressure curve, the other for Zhang’s missing exit scan.
Cross-link complete.
The status tile shivers, then flips state. “Queued” drains from soft gray to a glaring amber “pending operator review,” corporate-standard urgency tone humming at a frequency just under conscious hearing. Beside it, a service-level clock snaps into existence from nowhere, bold digits punching through her peripheral HUD: 02:[^47], already ticking down, 46, 45.
That number isn’t a process estimate; it’s a promise. Two minutes and change before a live security analyst in some chilled back room, someone trained like she was, with time to think and a mandate to doubt, gets this anomaly stack dumped into their queue. Someone who can see patterns, correlate cross-shift gossip with access logs, remember that Heliodyne issued a sealed alert on Zhang this morning and wonder why a lab door shows an entry with no exit.
Automation swallows lies if you feed them in the right format. Humans pull at loose threads.
Hong tightens her jaw until it aches, watching subroutines branch off the main ticket: provisional biofeed mirror, camera resolution bump, predictive routing suggestions lighting up the exact connector they’re standing in. The system is helpfully drawing a dotted line between Zhang’s ghost-step out of the lab and this little unremarkable maintenance tube.
She can almost feel the future analyst’s attention sliding along that line, curiosity sharpening as the timer rolls through 02:[^30].
She knifes past the pretty abstraction layer and drills into the controller for their exact atmospheric segment, slicing through nested branches until the raw parameters sit naked in her sight. Ming’s widened glitch registers here as a slow, ugly ripple in the pressure curve, and the controller has already escalated from “anomaly sampling” to a pre-emptive safety script.
A ninety-second countdown toward “localized pressure equalization” pulses into existence, a stark red band hammering across the bottom of her HUD. 90. 89. 88.
Hong doesn’t need the euphemism unpacked. Equalization in Annex-speak means one thing: carve out the noisy volume, wall it off, and if the numbers stay wrong, dump part of its atmosphere to bring the rest of the loop back into spec. Isolating and potentially venting this narrow tube, this three-by-twelve-meter pocket of shared air, to keep the larger system clean.
The conflict tree blossoms in her peripheral display like a frost pattern: one branch marching toward purged, heavily monitored dead space; the other climbing into a human queue. An overburdened safety officer staring at Zhang’s ghost-trail through lab access logs and asking why the lines don’t balance.
She stabs at a workaround anyway, fingers twitching in micro-gestures no external camera should map as anything but idle fidget. Reclassify the connector as “under maintenance override review,” shove the purge request sideways into a neighboring duct that’s already flagged for half-depressurization and suit-only access. On paper it’s perfect: dirty air wants to go where dirty air’s supposed to be.
The controller humors her, accepts the re-tag… as “pending authorization.” The hard countdown bars don’t even flicker. Ninety seconds of grace, no more, no less.
Under the main environmental script, another process flowers open, ugly and familiar. She remembers the training sim: “suspected sabotage, confined volume.” Isolation seals start to pre-charge around both hatches, micro-actuators ticking in her imagination. Camera profiles quietly step from corridor-wide to face-resolution, noise filters dropping away as acoustic mics slide into high-gain pattern recognition. Cough, whisper, stress-cracked word choice: everything about this little tube is about to become data.
If the safety AI flags a contamination vector or intentional tamper, the procedure is automatic: lock both doors hard, freeze every latch, and package the whole event stack, live video, respiratory patterns, implant telemetry, anomaly inheritance, into a neat forensic bundle. That bundle will land on the same analyst console that, any second now, is going to light up with a different alert: one sealed lab door showing Zhang Lian’s entry… and no registered exit, politely labeled “priority clarification required.”
Zhang flattens her palms, feeling the faint vibration of pre-charging seals through composite. She doesn’t ask which death Hong thinks is cleaner. “Manual?” she breathes. Hong’s gaze ticks to the bypass by Zhang’s ear, then down to the hatch. “Both are logged. Both scream intent.” Her jaw flexes. “We need something that looks like system error, not us.”
She chokes down the urge to swear and instead starts savaging the procedure tree, pruning branches, forking subroutines, trying to shunt the validation cycle wholesale into that neighboring half-depressurized duct. For a heartbeat it looks like it takes: then the escalation bar for the original anomaly surges, “queued” blinking once before hardening into “pending operator review.” Estimated human eyes-on: under three minutes, assuming the duty analyst isn’t already bored enough to jump the queue. In parallel, the environmental controller quits with euphemism and slaps a concrete number on their trap. Ninety seconds until the auto-purge script attempts to “equalize” pressure in this tagged segment. Between a looming lockdown that will turn the tube into a slow suffocation cell under perfect, forensic-grade surveillance and a live operator digging into Zhang’s missing lab exit, Hong’s carefully modeled buffer collapses into a brutally short window measured in held breaths and micro-gestures.
The maintenance subwindow in Hong’s vision, previously just a reassuring strip of green and amber in her peripheral HUD, snaps a red prismatic border and swells half a degree brighter. Xiao Feng’s “routine” distraction on the cargo ring stops being abstract telemetry and sharpens into a stitched, low-latency feed: grainy overhead, a side corridor cam, one chest-level lens tracking the arc of his shoulder as he pulls back from a shove that was supposed to look like an accident.
The system doesn’t buy “accident” anymore.
The overhead camera slews, mechanical and intent, centering his frame. A Heliodyne security overlay knifes over the generic base UI, pushing out the port authority watermark. The label over his image, PASSERBY, smears into a band of gray static as the recognition engine pulls historicals, resolves facial vectors, reconstructs incident logs from two, three fiscal cycles back. Hong feels each processing hop like a faint pressure behind her eyes.
The tag snaps into focus: PRIOR‑INCIDENT, hard orange, outlined with a compliance timestamp and an internal case ID she doesn’t want to read. Someone on the Annex side has just yanked his old file out of archive cold-storage. The status bar beside his silhouette ticks from passive to “monitor,” then to “active correlation,” and the system abruptly stops treating his presence as random dock noise.
On the schematic, Xiao Feng is no longer just a blue colonist icon drifting through Cargo Ring B. A thin halo pulses around him in one-second beats, linked to a confidence value climbing through the seventies. The heuristics fold him in as a reappearing variable in a half‑remembered equation: one that already includes “unscheduled Annex environmental variance” and “unresolved lab access by Dr. Zhang Lian.”
In the corner of her vision, the connector’s own alert stack blooms another leaf. The same operations node now feeding on Zhang’s missing exit time-stamps Xiao Feng’s location to the second, combs for path overlays with their maintenance order, and starts sketching dotted lines through the map: possible vectors, possible accomplices.
A second icon irises open beside Xiao Feng’s tag: “manual analyst note appended.” Not an automated heuristic this time. A person. Hong watches, throat suddenly dry, as the text resolves (“possible coordinated interference with Annex systems?”) and a thin, animated filament stitches from his camera tile to the same internal console cluster that is currently stepping through Zhang’s missing lab exit.
Her distraction, engineered to live two layers down in the statistical haze of port disorder, has just been hauled up into the white light of Annex attention.
The console cluster’s border thickens, shifting from cool operational blue to a warning-amber reserved for “live investigation.” Subpanels begin to spawn: historical incident overlays on Xiao, proximity graphs of crew interactions in the last seventy-two hours, a demand-poll on maintenance work orders touching Annex bulkheads. Her forged ticket sits there among them, no longer buried in background queue but highlighted for “expedited verification.”
On the timeline bar running along the bottom of her HUD, separate strands, Zhang’s anomaly, the pressure variance, Xiao’s scuffle, snap together into a braided thread. One judgment call from an underpaid analyst has just collapsed their compartmentalization strategy.
The correlation engine does its work in the background, but its effects bleed visibly into Hong’s HUD: status tiles shiver, reorder, acquire new borders. Xiao’s scuffle on the cargo ring and the flagged pressure variance in their connector segment are now grouped under a shared incident header, a fat, hex‑edged capsule stamped with an Annex case number. What had been distinct, plausibly unrelated glitches (one human, one environmental) get wrapped in a single, pulsing “MULTI‑SITE DISTURBANCE” envelope that unlocks a more aggressive response profile and exposes deeper tools in the security stack. Cross‑domain rulesets snap online. Heliodyne’s protocols, tuned for asset protection, stop sampling and begin to hunt, treating the whole cluster of anomalies not as background noise but as a coordinated breach‑in‑progress.
On the network map, subtle changes cascade outward in cold, procedural increments. Generic base security calls are silently pre‑empted by Annex‑tagged reinforcements, patrol paths redraw to prioritize any corridor with line‑of‑sight to Docking Collar C‑7 and the western maintenance trunks, and a high‑priority request propagates for elevated, near‑real‑time camera access on every conduit feeding their connector. Hong feels the topology tilt against them and understands with icy clarity: the system is no longer just hunting a missing scientist, it is iterating toward a conspiracy graph, and Liang’s crew are lighting up its nodes and edges one after another.
The corridor tile in her HUD thickens, inheriting the same hex‑edged case capsule as Xiao’s feed. A new line of text burns in under the segment ID: “candidate vector between Annex and cargo ring disturbance : elevate to active watch.” Hong’s throat works. This tube isn’t just a shortcut anymore; it’s a labeled artery in someone else’s incident model, waiting for clamps.
Hong’s gaze tracks the status bands along the tube as if she can will them back to yellow. The far bulkhead’s outline has gone a solid, accusatory red; the near hatch at their backs jitters between amber and orange with each micro‑adjustment of the air‑loop. The color shifts feel like a pulse failing.
She thumbs open a low‑level maintenance menu on her wrist pad, the familiar cascade of engineering glyphs and vent‑tree diagrams blooming over her vision. Muscle memory wants to dive three layers down, into the overrides she used to audit for other people. Her thumb hesitates over a diagnostic flag: and that’s when the implant fires.
It’s not a shock, not even pain exactly. More like a muted, prickling ache that spreads up from the base of her skull and washes down the tendons of her neck and shoulder, the way a limb tingles when blood flow is cut and then restored. A haptic whisper with teeth. The implant’s way of clearing its throat: I see you.
Her HUD blooms a tiny, semi‑transparent icon in the corner of her vision: debt‑bond compliance stack, active. A transaction counter ticks over by one. Every query, every override, mirrored into a corporate ledger she will one day sit across from, under real lights, while someone in a clean jacket scrolls through and asks why.
“Come on,” she breathes, not sure if she’s talking to Ming, to the system, or to the numbers in front of her. Her fingers flick the menu closed halfway through an authorization gesture. The prickling fades back to a dull, constant presence, like someone resting a hand lightly at the nape of her neck.
Her instincts, the old investigator reflex, say: touch the system, shape the anomaly, get ahead of the algorithm. Her contract, invisibly coiled through her nerves and credit accounts, says: stand very still and let the machine decide whether you’re loyal.
Hong curls her hand into a fist to keep from trying again. The tube hums softly around them, status bands still bleeding the wrong colors.
Zhang, pressed tight against the connector’s ribbed wall, watches the pressure readouts stutter, then settle into an uneasy plateau. Microvariances chase each other across the graph, never quite damping out. “If he pushes it any further, the algorithm will classify this as a leak cascade,” she mutters, more to the numbers than to Hong. “It’ll jump straight to isolation protocol.”
Her gloved fingers hover over the recessed emergency equalization lever, the bright pull-tab incongruously simple amid the nested glyphs of the maintenance panel. One sharp tug and the system would slam all the microvalves to baseline, smooth the variance, and likely convince the automated supervisor that this was just a transient glitch in an old loop.
She can almost feel the airflow profile that would result, can see the line of the diagnostic falling back inside acceptable bands. She can also see the audit trail: a hard, physical datum burned into three separate logs. Mechanical interlock engaged, manual override from this hatch, this timestamp, this operator class.
Her hand withdraws a centimeter. “They built it to prefer hardware events,” she says quietly. “You can’t argue with a lever in their system. You can only blame whoever pulled it.”
Between them, the options collapse into narrow corridors of probability, branching and then snapping shut as new flags propagate. The route forward, toward the lab tier, is still technically green on the schematic, but the color lies. It’s now threaded through a dozen freshly woken sensors, all retuned for anomaly cross‑checks: badge cadence versus heart rate, gait pattern versus declared shift, micro-delays at each choke. One twitch out of profile and the system will start knitting a story about them.
The way back is shorter but worse: a hard choke under two dome cameras that have just flipped to “elevated relevance,” their feeds peeled off the general pool and piped into an active analyst queue. Any abrupt movement by a misclassified pair there won’t just increment an anomaly score; it will sprout a case file and a reference number.
She skims the implant’s quiet telemetry, reading the corporate mood the way she once read suspects’ micro‑expressions. New glyphs splice into her profile: context variance under review, proximity pattern anomaly, strategic‑asset adjacency. It means this whole sequence, her hesitations, overrides, location pings with Zhang beside her, will be replayed in slow motion later. Even if they walk out clean, those frames can be cashed in to lengthen her debt, ratchet down her family’s oxygen band, or draft her into “cooperative operations” with Heliodyne recovery teams. Every second she stands here is another line in a case file she hasn’t seen yet.
Hong exhales once, slow, then ghosts her pad dark and angles herself down the tube. “We go now,” she says, committing to the forward path before software and policy can ossify it to red. The calculus is brutal but clean: Ming has to arrest the variance before the supervisor promotes it to isolation, and Xiao Feng has to keep cargo‑ring attention bleeding upward instead of letting analysts back‑propagate timing and badge traces into Annex maintenance. For a handful of cycles, their survival depends on two remote distractions holding just long enough for a third, unseen play to finish coming online.
For a moment he just stares at the sigil, the kiosk’s steam-loop animation flickering green across the inside of his visor. Yutu. Not a minor surface clique either; this is the co-op layer, the one Jin always claimed was “more rumor than governance.” Somebody out there has stitched those rumors solid enough to hijack an obsolete maintenance band and hang their emblem off it.
He flicks the nav bundle into sandbox view. A skeletal route blossoms in his retinal overlay: hop arcs laced in faint blue from Nanyue to the far-side terminator, then a broken necklace of ground tracks between tagged craters. Each node is a dead asset: survey beacons he remembers from old maps, an abandoned reflector station, a derelict comms mast Jin once used for shelter in a solar flare. Someone has done the homework he thought only he and Jin had bothered to do.
The second layer peels back as he zooms: time windows, power budgets, even projected corporate sensor coverage scraped from public NOTAMs and black-market leaks. A thin, off-plane burn at the end of the chain curves them up to a nonstandard parking vector, where an unregistered tug waits with its transponder pre-burned to slag. Beside the tug icon, a single line of text resolves in simple trade cant:
CLEAN CORRIDOR. NO MANIFESTS. NO ECHO.
Below that, like the punchline to a joke he doesn’t like, three more words:
WE WANT HER.
No mention of Zhang by name, but the bundle includes a mass estimate keyed uncomfortably close to a single suited human and a data payload weight that matches what Ming flagged on Zhang’s chip. They’re not guessing.
His jaw tightens. Jin’s improv checksum woven into a co-op handshake; their old maps repurposed into a smuggler’s spinal cord. Somebody on the far side has been watching the same board he has and is moving faster.
He pulls the stub closer to his chest, heart rate ticking up against his ribs, and scrolls to the footer. One final clause waits there, tagged PRIORITY:
DEVIATE FROM CURRENT ORBITAL PLAN. DELIVER SUBJECT + PROCESS DATA TO YUTU CONTROL. CO-OP GUARANTEES: PROTECTION FROM HELIODYNE RETRIEVAL. SHARE IN DOWNSTREAM LICENSING.
They’re not asking him to carry a fugitive anymore. They’re offering him a seat at the table that decides what her invention does to the system.
The first packets arrive as dirty snow, error-correction chewing through bit-rot on a maintenance band that should be as dead as the hardware it was specced for. Latency blooms, collapses. The carrier wobbles, then settles into a staggered cadence he hasn’t heard since a bad winter on the far side: Jin’s old improvisation on the checksum handshake, the asymmetrical beat pattern she came up with in a Yutu workshop to slip past lazy diagnostics. Here it’s longer, cleaner, nested with extra parity steps she never showed him.
His thumb hovers over the authorize glyph a fraction too long. If this is counterfeit, whoever forged it knows her habits better than they should.
He grants the handshake.
The encryption sleeve snaps shut around them, and the payload unfolds in his local buffer: no voice grain, no video jitter, no personal tag. Just a tight nav bundle, a block of timing keys, and a sender sigil that hits like a pressure drop: an angular spiral stamped YUTU CO-OP in minimalist trade strokes, overlaid on a ghosted projection of the far-side route-map he and Jin once stitched together by hand.
He pushes the schematic to his HUD and the concourse around him falls away into lines and numbers: a daisy-chain of surface launches threaded through narrow slots between Heliodyne’s scheduled ore lifts, suborbital arcs that kiss the horizon over unlit craters, and ground-track overlays that neatly skirt every active Nanyue transponder cone. Tiny glyphs mark dead survey beacons as rendezvous points, each annotated with power-budget estimates, predicted dust scatter, and forecasted sensor noise. Thermal clutter from nearby dumpsites, RF trash from old relays. Someone on the far side has spent time modeling his options with the same obsessive thoroughness he usually reserves for his own runs, then folded in variables only locals would know: windfall cargo drops, enforcement shift changes, even likely bribe windows at secondary locks.
The route’s end-point isn’t his neutral orbit rendezvous at all but a nameless, off-plane vector tucked between standard traffic layers, tagged only as an “unregistered auxiliary tug.” Its icon sits in his overlay as a featureless gray hull with no corporate prefix, broadcasting a spoofed registry string he recognizes from whispered dockside arguments years ago. When he drills down, the packet spills out a terse, meticulous text block in unornamented trade cant: landing slots already seeded into Nanyue scheduling under a disposable shell operator; cargo and crew manifests pre-authored with scrubbed, cross-consistent identifiers; customs queries with canned, statistically safe responses. Final line: a guarantee, anchored to Yutu co-op escrow keys, that once he commits to this profile, every official record will show Changxing running nothing more controversial than a routine far-side resupply arc.
Buried at the bottom, after escrow proofs and mesh-signed hash‑chains, they finally name what they care about: “priority asset: ZHANG LIAN + PROCESS SUBSTRATE,” then pages of anonymized helium‑3 disruption modelling that turns every capture bounty he knows into rounding error. No preamble, no inquiry. Just an assumption he’s already on board, the route presented as fait accompli. If the co‑op’s ragged relays can assemble this picture from Yutu, Heliodyne’s analysts won’t be far behind, and the slack in which he can still choose where Zhang’s trajectory bends has shrunk to hours, maybe less, before someone with more thrust and fewer scruples writes it for him.
Liang scrolls back to the header again, as if repetition might change it: “ROUTINE ORE-TRANSPORT CONSULTATION – YUTU NETWORK NODE.” The font is system-default ugly, the kind of autogenerated subject line that clogs his queue whenever some far-side rig wants a fuel quote or a favor. On any other shift, he would have flicked it straight into a later folder without breaking stride.
Only the origin tag stops his thumb: a stubby alphanumeric string burned into his memory, a relic callsign Jin once soldered into a jury-rigged repeater as a joke. Back then, they’d been sitting in her cramped galley at Yutu, legs hooked under table straps, arguing routes over oversteeped tea. She’d keyed the callsign in herself, laughing as she christened the node with a dirty proverb about stubborn traders and bad odds. No one outside that cluster should even know the identifier still exists, let alone use it to reach him through Nanyue’s throttled side-channels.
He takes the packet apart again anyway, verifying hops and handoffs. The routing path is ugly on purpose: bounced through retired survey stations, cold storage arrays, an agricultural dome he serviced two years ago. Enough noise layered in to look like a misconfigured automation script. But the cryptographic spine is clean: Yutu co-op keys, current and properly rolled, with a sub-signature from a broker handle he half-remembers from Jin’s message boards. This isn’t some random miner or Annex spoof. It’s someone plugged into the same loose, desperate economy Jin lives in, someone with reason to think he’ll listen.
The banality of the label feels less like laziness and more like a test. The sort of thing you send to a pilot who understands that the loudest warnings travel under the dullest names. If he ignores it, it files itself away as white noise. If he opens it, if he reads past the lie of the header, that’s him stepping over an invisible line into somebody else’s game.
Line by line, the “consultation” strips away his belief in operational opacity and replaces it with a forensic autopsy of his habits. Someone has stitched together blurry cargo‑camera stills of Dock C‑7 into a ghost‑montage: a tall figure in an unmarked jumpsuit slipping between bulkheads whose access logs show as idle; a shuttle airlock cycling against the posted schedule by a margin of ninety‑one seconds; a refueling log that shows Changxing drawing three percent more oxidizer than the manifest would require and venting heat in a pattern consistent with a concealed body‑load, not bulk freight. Another frame catches Xiao leaning a fraction too long against a maintenance panel, hand braced near a manual override. Yet another flags Hong’s badge passing a checkpoint twice in under a minute, once with her, once apparently in her pocket, time-stamped against a transient blind spot in the adjacent corridor feed.
Each anomaly is time‑stamped, cross‑referenced, run through probability bands, and annotated in a dry, technical cant that says: we saw you, we watched you, we modeled your intent and your risk envelope before you finished deciding what you were doing.
The next block drills deeper, into systems he’d assumed lived behind glass he could only fog up from the outside. Packet captures from Nanyue’s internal mesh scroll past: a narrowband spike on a maintenance channel, a sideband echo hung with a name he’s never seen in any public directory. Retired personnel profile: ZHANG, LIAN – Materials Division – status: archived. The broker notes, almost offhand, that her stolen lab ID bled onto the mesh for 0.[^37] seconds as she slipped within range of an Annex node, a phantom ping from some half‑disabled corporate tag she must have thought inert. They correlate that blip with Changxing’s hatch cycling and with a momentary aliasing in Hong’s official tracking feed, underlining that no one on his crew ever truly fell outside the graph.
Then comes the line that cracks his composure: Zhang’s full name, precisely rendered in both scripts, followed by a bounty schedule he’s only ever heard as dockside rumor: and that Hong’s debt-bond interface should show only as blacked-out tiers. The broker breaks it out like an invoice: base recovery, R&D containment, proprietary-process exclusivity, escalators for “live transfer,” “uncompromised dataset,” “cooperative debrief.” They even flag contingent uplifts for assisting Heliodyne in prosecuting any “collusive facilitators” if he plays it their way. The total climbs at the bottom of the block in stark, unornamented figures, dwarfing not just Changxing’s outstanding notes but the whole ten-year expansion ladder he has mapped in quiet insomnia. It lands with a single, ruthless inference: whoever is speaking from that Yutu node can see into the same vaults as enforcement, and they are choosing to peel back the curtain just far enough to prove it.
Finally, the analysis zooms out, abandoning minutiae for a board-level view he’d been studiously refusing to sketch. His “neutral orbit rendezvous” is dismissed as “fictional nonalignment,” a fantasy lane already bracketed by projected Heliodyne intercept cones, hard override hooks on Changxing’s transponder, and an accelerating pattern of enforcement audits keyed to independent departures from Nanyue over the last thirty days.
A second, denser paragraph traces far-side packet lattices and cargo loops like contour lines on a pressure map: co‑op relays waking and sleeping in timed arcs, tug routes bending around surveillance zones, off‑grid orbital shells quietly stockpiling consumables and reactor feed in anticipation of a post–Helium‑3 monopoly break. Neutral, the broker implies, is not a stance but a comforting story for people who haven’t looked at the data. By the time Liang reaches the footer (cryptographic signatures nested in signatures, a far-side co‑op crest rendered in bare ASCII) he knows his quiet gamble on Zhang never existed in a blind spot, and that Yutu’s operators have been rehearsing contingencies for the day someone like him ferried a wildcard out of Heliodyne’s cage.
It offers, almost apologetically, a “clarified duty summary” in softer font weight, as if tone could blunt impact: as duly bonded asset-monitor, Hong is to attest that Subject ZHANG, LIAN is physically present within Connector Segment D‑12, that vital signs indicate survivability for transfer, and that she remains within the effective custodial influence of Captain LIANG WEIMING and associated crew. No demand to move, no order to restrain. Just confirm. Let the system complete the geometry.
The phrasing is slicked with uplift jargon, every third word massaged to sound like reprieve. “Intergenerational uplift pathways,” “accelerated emancipation trajectory,” “stability provisioning for dependent units.” The interface underlines key clauses in a muted gold, the way some old religious text might highlight salvation verses. But the core is binary: confirm location, confirm status, and a switch flips on a corporate ledger that has stalked her entire adult life.
To the side, the graph doesn’t merely bloom; it animates in a slow, persuasive cascade. Housing bars for her parents ratchet down frame by frame until they hit a hard, reassuring zero with a soft chime. Her own debt band, once a thick, unbroken block spanning projected decades, contracts like a muscle exhaling, years sloughing off into nothing. Sub-lines tagged CHILD‑01 and CHILD‑02, which previously hovered in gray uncertainty, flare to saturated color: “comprehensive educational credit,” “enhanced life-support guarantee,” “priority medical intervention tier.”
Each benefit is hyperlinked to footnotes she’s already memorized from years of chasing smaller bonuses: clauses promising immunity from random housing audits, override protections against quota downgrades, automatic appeal rights if a supervisor tries to claw anything back. The system doesn’t bother to hide the bait; it itemizes it, polishes it, stacks it neatly in front of her.
The ACCEPT icon hangs there, patient and luminous at the edge of her vision, pulsing in time with the implant’s heartbeat sync. Not a button so much as a door: one flick of her ocular focus and everything she has been grinding toward, every extra shift, every careful non‑answer in prior interviews, collapses into a single, irreversible yes.
Below the headline offer, the system helpfully supplies “contextualized risk”: branching sims blooming in a side pane, color‑coded futures where she hesitates, dissembles, or looks the other way. In the refusal branches, her quota bands darken by slow degrees. Probability spikes for “disciplinary recalculation,” quiet notes about “performance misalignment,” a soft‑blinking advisory that supervisory review may trigger “redistribution of dependent units to cost‑appropriate habitats.” One slender, pulsing line item never quite resolves into text, hanging at the edge of her focus like a threat someone was too cautious to write down: relocation of her parents to a lower‑priority block, further from mainlines, closer to the cut‑off thresholds she’s seen on incident reports.
Another pane ghosts over the sims with a lawyer’s patience: legal reminder of asset‑tag protocols, clause citations stacked in narrow columns. Concealment or misrepresentation of a tagged asset like ZHANG, LIAN is flagged as “active breach,” auto‑voiding every scrap of good‑conduct credit she has scraped together. The countdown timer ticks down from 120 seconds, a thin red ring tightening in her peripheral vision, each heartbeat a metronome on which her entire ledger could flip from marginal salvation to free‑fall.
Footsteps shiver through the connector plating, a thin percussion under the throb of pumps. Hong keeps her chin level, eyes ostensibly on the bulkhead status strip, and watches Zhang’s profile only in the warped reflection of the pressure door: gaunt, alert, lips pressed thin over whatever physics problem she’s chewing instead of fear. Zhang has no idea that, in another skull half a meter away, numbers are marching toward a verdict.
Heliodyne doesn’t need her to shout or draw down or hustle anyone toward a scanner arch. Badge ghosts, pressure shifts, cycle logs. They’ve already solved the geometry. The system has pre-filled the form. One field waits for her moral signature: confirm presence, confirm viability. If she lets “true” stand, the authorization packet flies, Annex bulkheads iris open ahead, and security’s route snaps into focus without a single human word exchanged.
Her training kicks in, protocol unspooling in the back of her mind, “prompt compliance yields maximum discretionary mitigation”, like a lullaby written by lawyers, while older, rougher memories crowd close: her mother coughing in ration‑thin air, lungs rasping against a failing scrubber; her kids tracing condensation loops on a habitat wall they don’t technically own, asking if this block is “ours yet.” She pictures the Heliodyne rep who drafted this directive modeling her as a variable in some uplift simulator, placing her here, in this exact corridor, debt index and dependent count plugged in, testing how far a colonist’s spine will bend when the right family guarantees are dangled. Knowing she is being gamed doesn’t blunt the offer’s gravity; it only sharpens the insult of how precisely they’ve priced her soul down to the cubic meter of air.
When the countdown hits its final quarter, the interface sweetens the hook: a sketched‑out “post‑compliance life package”: brighter housing modules with double airlocks, thicker door seals, kids’ avatars tumbling through simulated playgrounds where no one checks oxygen every hour, ever. A sample statement pings across her vision (We recognize your loyalty, Associate HONG, WEI) already dated, ready to file.
Her thumb hovers a hair’s breadth from the implant’s manual acknowledge stud before she curls her hand into a fist instead, nails biting deep. The double‑cross, she realizes, is almost elegant in its passivity; she doesn’t have to betray Liang with a word or gesture, only allow the system’s assumptions to harden into fact by not contesting them. In a habitat where every action is monitored and archived, the most dangerous move she can make is deciding whether to let silence do the work.
Liang scrolls through the proposal twice, then a third time, not because he doubts the numbers but because he’s measuring the mind behind them. Each leg of the suggested route settles into the mental lattice of transfer arcs, blackout pockets, and half-forgotten maintenance relays he’s carried since his apprentice days, the invisible map that rides under every dock schedule and customs bulletin.
The co‑op’s plan treats Heliodyne’s sensor grid like a partially deaf animal. First hop: a routine cargo ascent to a near‑equatorial staging orbit that just happens, coincidentally, to intersect the shadow cone of an obsolete comms buoy he knows was written off three fiscal cycles ago. The next burn threads a window between two licensed relay sweeps, using the lunar limb itself as a physical mask, timing the ship’s thermal bloom to coincide with a scheduled reactor test on the Annex side: noise hiding noise.
They’re not improvising. Someone has pulled down old repair logs, de-orbit notices, irradiated beacon maps, and then woven them into a corridor that lives in the negative space of official traffic. In the packet margins, terse annotations run alongside the main plan: delta‑v corrections scrawled in a tight, slanted hand, hard caps on transponder power, suggested spoof IDs that echo long‑scrapped prospecting outfits. Here and there, he sees a question mark and a proposed alternate. Evident concessions to gaps where only a pilot on the day can decide.
It reads less like a broker’s pitch and more like a field manual compiled by people who have eaten their share of near-misses: “Acceptable reflection profile if hull temp < 290K.” “Do not hold longer than 40s; Annex sweeps drift.” The routes skim abandoned telemetry bands, pass handshake-close to derelict cubesats now serving as dumb mirrors, borrow the tail of a corporate logistics swarm before peeling off under cover of its encrypted chatter. No fireworks, no heroic delta‑v spikes, just cumulative slightness: each leg staying sub-threshold, sub-notice, shaving a few percentage points off detection probability until the whole thing becomes an exercise in statistical humility.
From Nanyue to the far side, their proposed flight path kisses the edge of Jin’s operating envelope without ever naming her cluster, hopping between surface beacon IDs he recognizes as “borrowed”: licensed once, quietly cloned, and now echoing in places the official registry thinks are vacuum. The last segment is pure ghostwork: a burn into a high, skewed orbit intersecting a patch of tracked‑debris clutter, masked transponder cycling through dead ship signatures, terminating at a dark platform identified only by a callsign and a timing gate. No registry link. No docking fee schedule.
Liang leans back, thumb hovering over the pad, and feels an old, familiar shiver: the one he used to get when his father first let him plot minor corrections on family runs. Only now the stakes aren’t a few hours of propellant and cargo penalties. This is a corridor built by people who expect to be hunted, and who assume the hunter owns the sky.
He forks the packet to a quarantined partition and drops the co‑op’s corridor into his own nav sim on the side console, keeping shipboard power deliberately uneven so the test run looks, to any casual watcher, like another of Ming’s endless diagnostics. The sim chews on the inputs, then spits back a route stitched out of razor-thin margins: burns that flirt with redline chamber temps, coast phases where any unmodeled drag means missing a timing gate by seconds that might as well be hours.
Fuel reserves come up as a sliver of green barely thicker than the warning band. Several legs flag dependence on far-side surface beacons whose IDs he recognizes as technically decommissioned, their continued existence an act of quiet defiance. The final handoff resolves as a vector spiral into a dark orbital mass that the sim can only label UNKNOWN-PLATFORM, cross‑section guessed from occluded starfield data rather than any registry file.
It is flyable. If Ming can bleed a few extra percentage points of efficiency from Changxing’s aging drives and if nothing unexpected crowds their lane. Watching the vector lattice bloom across his display, Liang feels his carefully neutral orbit rendezvous contract to a timid feint, an opening probe on a board whose full geometry he has, until now, treated as someone else’s problem.
The broker’s attached voice clip, thick with Yutu dust‑hab echo and the faint lag of far‑side relays, plays in his ear as he studies the projections. No sales patter, no flattery; just a flat voice sketching the economic picture in brutally simple terms. Heliodyne’s version of Zhang’s process means centralized reactors sited in corporate enclaves, metered access over licensed conduits, and price ladders tied directly to compliance scores scraped from every contract and oxygen requisition. Under that regime, even successful independents like Jin would be driven into multi‑year instruments where every kilogram of helium‑3 is weighed against their water and air allowances, with noncompliance quietly docking their children’s rations.
In the co‑op model, by contrast, the breakthrough is deliberately splintered: no single lab, no single vault. Different clusters hold different process stages, feedstock prep, catalytic profiles, reactor tuning, shared under hard‑coded mutual‑aid compacts and mirrored in off‑grid orbitals that can’t be easily embargoed or “accidentally” depressurized. Fail one node, ten others keep running. The clip doesn’t say “revolution.” It doesn’t have to. The numbers on his display show two futures: one where energy is another leash, and one where it becomes the only collateral the corporations can’t fully seize.
The hidden attachment strips away any pretense of neutrality. They don’t just want discreet carriage; they want him to choose a flag. Flying their corridor, accepting their escort tugs, adopting their relay keys, would nail his hard-won “independent” status to a far-side mast. In exchange: off-books overhauls for Changxing, co-op grade fuel at cost, and fractional participation in Zhang-derived licensing streams. Residuals indexed not to compliance scores but to throughput and mutual defense. The language is careful, contractual, but every clause hums with the same subtext: shared exposure, shared shield. Someone on Yutu has read his debt tables and route projections as closely as any corporate analyst ever did, and they’re betting that his idea of independence already includes picking a side.
For the first time since they sealed the hatch, she looks fully at Zhang. Not as cargo, not as payout, but as the fulcrum jammed under every fragile compromise she’s made. “You hearing that?” she asks, voice low, eyes unfocused on the HUD. Zhang studies her strained expression, then the faint corporate sheen reflected in Hong’s cornea, and nods once.
Hong’s HUD blossoms with the familiar, suffocating overlay: panes of microprint and code collapsing into a single, pulsing directive that overrides everything else in her vision.
CONFIRM FUGITIVE ASSET LOCATION FOR CONTRACT ADJUSTMENT.
The words sit dead center, occluding the connector walls, Zhang’s tired face, even the safety glyphs stenciled by the hatch. A countdown bar unspools beneath, a segmented worm chewing away her response window in fractions of a second. To the right, a secondary panel unfurls with surgical clarity: current family housing debt, current oxygen allotment penalties, projected reductions under “full cooperation,” amortized over the remaining term of her bond.
The numbers don’t lie. They never do. They just don’t say everything.
Her sister’s module ID flashes as a reference point in the margin, along with their father’s medical oxygen surcharge. Each line item is tagged with a little green arrow showing how far it will drop if she simply taps ACCEPT and speaks a room number into the mic. It’s all rendered in soothing blues and greens, the palette they use for “opportunity” notices, as if color can soften the vise.
In the cramped connector, the world narrows to that glow, the soft rasp of Zhang’s breathing, and the distant thrum of Annex circulation fans she suddenly hears as a metronome of corporate control. The fans have always been there, a low, omnipresent wash under every conversation, every argument, every half‑sleep. Now they sync in her head with the countdown ticks: airflow as a clock, life support as a ledger.
Her training says there’s no upside in delay. Every unacknowledged second is an algorithmic tick toward suspicion, another micro‑flag written into her file for some analyst to scroll past later. Non‑responsiveness at this priority tier auto‑tags as latency, then as possible obstruction. Enough of those tags, and her debt curve stops bending downward at all.
She flexes her fingers against her thigh, feeling the faint buzz of the implant at the base of her skull as it shunts more processing to the HUD, helpfully highlighting the “bonus multiplier” language. Provide not just confirmation but “actionable assistance,” and the reduction doubles, tripled if the fugitive is recovered without “material damage to corporate intellectual property.”
Actionable assistance. That’s the phrase they used when she walked informants into holding cells back on the security floor. The same phrase they stamped on the notice when her brother’s oxygen fines were halved after she’d closed a big case. It had felt like winning then. Like using their rules against them.
Now, boxed in between Annex metal and Liang’s shuttle, it just feels like a hand on the back of her neck, steering.
A thin red halo blinks at the edge of her vision where the internal risk model runs in parallel, a ghosted chart of how her “reliability score” will crater if she lets the timer burn out. The system is mercilessly honest: cooperate, and her family’s air gets cheaper. Hesitate, and the corridor of future options narrows. Harder assignments, lower trust, longer debt.
Her jaw tightens. She could look away, blink out the overlay, but that only ever pauses the display, never the clock. The prompt hangs there, patient and implacable, as if the corporation itself is standing in the connector with them, waiting for her to decide what kind of bondwoman she wants to be.
Zhang, watching Hong’s pupils dilate and then drift, recognizes the telltale “gone inward” expression of someone reading orders on the inside of their skull. She doesn’t lunge for the moment or accuse; instead, she eases her shoulders down, tucks her elbows in, makes herself smaller: less like a prize asset and more like another colonist pinned under the same invisible hand. The dynamic matters. Predators lash out at threats; co-workers share bad news.
In a low, even voice, she sketches what Heliodyne pitched her before she ran: centralized helium‑3 refinement hubs buried deep in Annex territory, every independent rig’s throughput funneled through those nodes on “preferential” contracts. “They call it optimization,” she murmurs, eyes on the bulkhead, not on Hong. “Streamlined logistics, dynamic allocation, all the right buzzwords. But it’s really about who owns the tap. You don’t get to sell power. You get to buy permission to keep your section’s lights on.”
She lets that hang for a beat, then adds, quieter, “And they bake the obedience right into the grid. Compliance scores map straight to how warm your family sleeps.”
As Hong’s focus flickers between the implant prompt and Zhang’s words, the world double-images: bright corporate overlays and the dim, scuffed connector fighting for the same slice of cognition. Zhang leans closer, turning her head so her lips move in the narrow cone between Hong’s cheek and the bulkhead, where the connector’s standard mics will mostly log breath and rustle. Her voice drops to a vibration more than a sound.
She sketches the control-layer diagrams she saw under NDA: multicolored flowcharts where “efficiency rebates,” “dynamic load shedding,” and “emergency rationing” terminate on the same slider: one master throttle with different euphemisms hung off it. The pretty UI made it look like policy; the math said choke point.
Then she drops the part that makes Hong’s jaw tighten and her implant’s stress graph spike: the Annex’s environmental control schema, the same one currently parsing Hong’s pulse, micro-sweats, and reaction lag into risk scores, still runs on an older supervisory layer Zhang personally audited. In that audit, buried three abstractions down from any executive summary, she flagged and then watched them ignore an entire class of override flaws: subtle timing attacks and priority inversions, paths by which a sufficiently motivated insider could spoof sensor clusters, smear real readings with synthetic noise, or delay alert propagation by just enough seconds that no “big red alarm tree” ever lights, only a quiet, deniable drift in the logs.
The implant shaves five more seconds off her grace period with a soft chimed nudge, and the raw appeal of surrender spikes hard: one biometric confirm, a murmured room code, and she could buy her family months (maybe years) of easier air. Zhang’s tone stays almost clinical as she fills in the rest: if Hong’s feed stays pristine and helps the Annex correlate bonded-staff micro-reactions under stress, those same analytics will anneal the leash across the base. Every flinch, every “harmless” falsified flow reading, every late acknowledgment becomes another datapoint in a predictive model that learns which blocks can be squeezed without revolt, which families tolerate tighter oxygen margins. “You send them an honest signal,” Zhang whispers, “and you’re helping them teach the system exactly who to suffocate first.”
The prompt in her vision flips from green to amber, warning, then pre‑violation, and that color change is all it takes for the familiar, icy knowledge to settle in: there is no branch where she walks away clean. Obedience today might shorten her personal chain, but it will also feed the very algorithms that keep everyone else’s chains from ever rusting through. Refusal won’t snap her bond or erase the debt line pinned beside her family’s housing block, won’t magic oxygen rations out of corporate storage, yet it will deny Heliodyne one more pristine training sample and one more neatly wrapped fugitive to slide into their reactor‑rollout Gantt chart. Between those poisoned options, she realizes, the only asset she still fully owns is the shape of her lie and the noise in her signal: what kind of data she lets them have, and whether her cooperation helps them sharpen the cage they’re welding around the moon.
Liang thumbs the reply buffer open but doesn’t send anything yet. The concourse washes around him in slow, fractional‑g currents: courier packs bouncing off handholds, a food cart drifting on its tethers, a cluster of dockworkers arguing over a pallet of vacuum‑wrapped algae bricks. He tracks them without really seeing, letting their trajectories blur into abstract vectors while his mind spins out branches.
Accept the Yutu offer and Changxing stops being an opportunistic hauler and becomes a declared asset in someone else’s fragile logistics web. Far‑side co‑ops live on razor‑edge margins. Patchworked solar, rationed water, parts cannibalized until there’s nothing left but scars. Tie himself to that, and every burn he plots will be underwritten by people who can’t afford a single bad bet. He imagines Jin’s cluster pinned between Heliodyne embargo lists and hungry new “allies” who see helium‑3 as leverage, not lifeline.
Refuse, and the board stays as it is: Heliodyne dialing in “dynamic load shedding” from climate‑controlled offices, colonist blocks carrying the risk delta in their lungs. Someone else will take Zhang; someone else will decide whether her process becomes a private throttle on the moon’s air.
Try to play both sides (Yutu’s co‑op on one hand, a deniable Heliodyne buyer in neutral orbit on the other) and he can feel the grind paths already. Corporate audit threads crawling back through tug telemetry, co‑op rumor nets piecing together inconsistencies in his manifests. There’s no silent middle lane here, just a narrowing gap between two machines, each perfectly capable of turning a single shuttle and its captain into example data.
He drags the far‑side route into his nav sandbox, overlays Nanyue’s patrol patterns from memory, and roughs a delta‑v budget against Changxing’s aging drives. The numbers line up, barely, but the neatness only sharpens the realization sluicing through him: the “neutral orbit rendezvous” he sold himself was always a comforting lie. Any vector that carries Zhang off this rock engraves a side onto his hull. When he commits to a burn, Changxing will emerge from Nanyue’s shadow not as “independent,” but as flagged, on someone’s console, as enemy tonnage.
He buries the corporate query in a cul‑de‑sac subfolder he once used for warranty spam, slaps a low‑priority auto‑ack on it and knows it buys him minutes at best before some Annex analyst bumps the flag. The Yutu ping he drags sideways into an obsolete diagnostic tunnel still mapped to Jin’s far‑side mesh, a backdoor bandwidth trick he’d meant to retire years ago. In the tight reply window he keeps his language knife‑edged: no mention of Zhang’s name, no admission he’s seen the process, just a conditional: co‑op escort and masking of Changxing’s departure vector from Nanyue’s primary arrays, or no deal.
As the packet queues for the next burst cycle, he ghosts into port operations and logs a Class‑C maintenance anomaly on C‑7’s forward clamp: “intermittent sensor mismatch, requires manual verification.” It’s nothing dramatic. Just enough to justify an unscheduled undock or a shifted launch slot, a bureaucratic cough in the timetable. On Heliodyne’s side it will render as low‑grade noise in a sea of minor faults, one more plausible excuse when his profile starts to drift off its predicted lane.
In the connector, the corporate prompt rolls over into a new directive (live‑confirm Zhang’s status, push continuous feed until relieved) and Hong feels the skin beneath her collar go cold where the debt interface rests against her nerves. A faint haptic pulse rides her carotid, counting down an acknowledgment window. She shifts her stance so her shoulder occludes the corridor cam’s line of sight, raises her wrist unit as if checking route data, and instead snaps a still of blank bulkhead and bench. She tags it as “visual confirmation: subject stable,” then drags a timestream offset across the metadata, just enough skew to survive automation but fail under hand‑audit. It’s a stall, not a shield, but in Hong’s calculus every misdirected minute is oxygen: time for Liang to move pieces she’s no longer sure she wants to see.
Zhang, strapped to the connector bench, watches Hong work with narrowed eyes, tracking the micro‑hesitation in her jaw and the way her fingers hover over the acknowledgment pad a fraction too long. “They’re asking for me?” she murmurs, voice dry, cracked at the edges. Hong answers only by tightening the harness one notch softer instead of harder, gaze skittering past Zhang’s. The choice is small, deniable, but it reeks of risk. Zhang silently rewrites her internal graph: not corporate stooges, not co‑op martyrs, but people already edging, step by step, out of Heliodyne’s gravity well. Her thumb finds the false seam in her sleeve where the data chip sits, warm against her skin, and she recalibrates how much of her leverage she’s willing to route through Liang’s hands instead of keeping it buried in contingency caches across the regolith.
On Changxing’s systems board, Ming sees the falsified clamp fault pop up alongside Liang’s new route sketch, recognizes it as misdirection rather than malfunction, and quietly locks the alert in a local-only sandbox. While he pre-loads a far-side transfer burn that leaves their official plan pristine in Nanyue’s logs, he also spoofs a handful of thermal signatures to mimic a sluggish, overburdened ascent. Xiao Feng, catching the shift in thrust vectors on a side display, wordlessly straps in and runs gloved fingers along the hidden cargo bay seals, feeling for any give in gaskets Ming replaced with off-book stock. He doesn’t need the details; the smell of rushed preflight and the angle of Liang’s jaw say enough. By the time Heliodyne’s misdirected response team storms a quiet, irrelevant corridor of the Annex, Changxing is already cycling through departure checks under the guise of routine cargo traffic, collision lights strobing lazily against the dock walls, the crew converging on a single, fragile objective: get clear of Nanyue’s immediate reach before the lies in Hong’s reports and Liang’s manifests unravel into vacuum and guns.
They clear Nanyue’s shadow on a burn that rattles Changxing’s aging frame, Ming riding the engine tolerances like a knife’s edge while Liang keeps their ascent profile boring on every external feed.
Inside the cockpit, the vibration comes up through Liang’s boots and into his shins, a familiar teeth-on-metal buzz that means the gimbal bushings are right at the edge of what Ming swore they could handle.
“Two percent over nominal on chamber pressure,” Ming mutters over comm, voice tight but fast. “Holding. Holding. If anyone’s watching the feeds, they’re asleep or drunk.”
“Let’s keep it that way,” Liang says. His tone stays flat, the way he trained it years ago: no spikes for the mics to pick up, no tells for any pattern-matching AI sampling pilot chatter.
Changxing’s nose pitches through the thin crescent of Earth, the planet’s blue-and-white smear sliding across the upper edge of the forward port. Nanyue’s lattice of lights falls behind, shrinking in fits as the shuttle’s ascent lurches from one guidance regime to another. On the public telemetry stack, they are just another late departure, a cargo hauler making an unremarkable climb to a holding orbit.
He watches three sets of numbers at once: their actual burn curve, the falsified stream Ming is pushing to the port authority, and the pre-filed “routine resupply” profile for a slow dogleg toward Yutu. The trick is keeping the deltas boring: within variance but not identical. Too neat is as suspicious as too wild.
“Course adjustment in thirty,” Xiao calls from the jumpseat, fingers wrapped around the webbing above his head. He looks relaxed, but Liang can see the whites of his knuckles where the harness cuts in.
“On my mark,” Liang replies. “We don’t twitch until we’re out of their horizon.”
Out of Nanyue’s line-of-sight, out of the Annex’s immediate reach. That’s the first gate.
“Heliodyne escort window just cycled,” Hong reports from aft, patched through on a secondary channel. “No launch in the last ten minutes. Their fast intercept’s still on the pad.”
Liang exhales through his nose. One probabilistic tree prunes away in his mind: the scenario where a glossy, overpowered corporate shuttle kicks its engines and comes up on an intercept vector before they can finish their translation burn. Not impossible now, but the odds slide sharply in his favor.
“Radiators are hot but not screaming,” Ming adds. “We can push three more seconds if we need it. Don’t make me need it.”
Liang lets the main burn run a heartbeat longer than the flight plan calls for, banking the extra delta-v as a private cushion. Then he eases the throttles back with two fingers, feeling the ship’s tone shift from a full-throated roar to a deep, thrumming growl that settles into the bones of the hull.
“Main cut,” he says. “Transitioning to trim.”
The acceleration drops. Everyone’s harnesses loosen fractionally against their shoulders. Liquid in the sight glass quivers and steadies. The low artificial gravity the burn provided fades toward the Moon’s lighter pull, that familiar lunar float returning to limbs and viscera.
“External feeds show nominal,” Ming confirms. “Port authority’s got us slotted as Flight C-7-19, delayed outbound, declared cargo mass within tolerance.” A beat. “No flags on the public board.”
“Private board?” Liang asks.
A longer pause. He can almost hear Ming’s fingers dancing over the console just behind the cockpit bulkhead.
“Heliodyne’s query pinged our transponder twice,” Ming says finally. “First on departure clearance, second during ascent. No follow-up. Their watch officer either bought it or logged it for later.”
Later. Liang files the word away next to a dozen others: audit, anomaly, inquiry. Time bombs with uncertain fuses.
He lets himself glance once at the aft camera feed. The freeport is already curving away, lights along the crater rim like a spilled necklace bending around darkness. Between Changxing and that receding ring is a cone of vacuum and probability. Every kilometer they open up now makes it more expensive for anyone to reel them back.
He taps the route overlay onto his primary display. The line they are publicly flying, an arcing, patient climb into a parking orbit that will, on paper, drift them neatly into a Yutu transfer corridor, glows in corporate-safe green. The line he intends to actually follow diverges from it twice, shallow deviations shaded in amber, each one tucked just under standard tracking resolution.
“First micro-correction in three minutes,” he says. “Ming, keep the scrubber on their side clean. If Heliodyne’s data cores sneeze, I want to see it before they do.”
“Copy,” Ming answers. “Their junction node’s already chewing on the junk we left in the environmental logs. They’re going to be very busy for at least the next couple of hours figuring out why half a corridor thinks it had a pressure leak that never happened.”
Hong’s work. Hong’s risk.
Liang keeps his eyes forward, but one mental branch forks briefly toward the colonist block where her family sleeps under rationed air. He had asked her for misdirection. She had given him sabotage.
“Xiao,” he says, pulling himself back to the present. “Any chatter from dockworkers? Rumor channels?”
“Nothing direct,” Xiao replies. “One of the tug pilots on the backline just pinged a generic ‘busy day in Annex’ to his group, that’s it. Could be anything.”
Or could be them. The probability tree splits again, branches fanning forward into cislunar space, some ending in tight gray nodes labeled INTERCEPT, others unrolling toward the far side and Jin’s underpowered rigs.
Liang doesn’t bother to suppress the calculation. He lets it run, a quiet background process behind his eyes.
Heliodyne’s minimum intercept response time from Nanyue. The time their analysts need to reconcile scrambled logs. The rotation period until Nanyue drops behind the Moon’s bulk relative to Changxing’s trajectory. Jin’s last recorded message latency from Yutu.
Numbers stack. Margins appear, thin and brittle but real.
“Three minutes to first correction,” he repeats, more to himself than to anyone else. “Then we disappear into the boring.”
As the freeport shrinks to a cluster of glints against the gray curve below, Hong scrubs and re-scrubs her own telemetry footprint, watching her debt counter silently tick upward in a corner of her private console.
As the freeport shrinks to a cluster of glints against the gray curve below, Liang keeps his gaze on the trajectory plot, but Hong’s status window sits pinned in the lower corner of his secondary display, a muted square of numbers and corporate glyphs.
A narrow band of text scrolls beside her ID tag: POST-EVENT REVIEW FLAGGED. COOPERATION INDEX: ADJUSTING.
He doesn’t need the translation layer to tell him what it means. Her debt counter ticks once, twice, tiny increments of obligation stacking like regolith grains. Years, compressed into a few digital heartbeats.
Aft, in her crash couch by the auxiliary board, Hong works in silence. On her own handheld, she scrubs and re-scrubs the telemetry from the connector: splicing in maintenance test pings, ghosting her biometrics behind a tech’s routine patrol, pushing a subtle timing skew that will make every frame of security footage argue with the next.
“Any of that going to bounce back on us?” Liang asks, keeping his voice even.
“Eventually,” she answers. “But not before we’re over the rim and out of their clean line-of-sight.”
Her console chimes once more. The counter climbs another invisible notch.
Zhang, still strapped into a jumpseat, flexes numb fingers over the patched cable Ming snaked to her console. The cabin’s low vibration turns every keystroke into a tiny misalignment; she compensates, forcing her breathing into a metronome rhythm as she pulls up the encrypted payload.
Not the whole process: never the whole thing in one place again.
She slices it into slivers: flow coefficients without labels, reactor tolerances with the material tags stripped, control-loop fragments that look like generic life-support optimizations. Each fragment lands in Ming’s offline storage node with a soft chime, an air-gapped cache buried under diagnostic noise.
Every transfer is a wager: that scattering her work across friendlier systems will make it harder for Heliodyne to ever put the weaponized version back in one box.
On approach to the far-side terminator, Xiao Feng powers down nonessential systems and bleeds Changxing’s thermal signature into the background glow, settling her into a long, low glide over the broken highlands. Outside, the regolith is knife-edged in gray-black relief; inside, the cabin lights dim to night-mode. Jin’s weak beacon flickers on their scopes like both promise and warning, right where Liang’s back-channel ephemeris said it would be. One bad ping from a Heliodyne relay, one curious patrol in the wrong orbit, and that little spike of RF could become a flare. Liang trims their vector anyway, sliding them into the beacon’s thin cone, gambling that the far side’s radio shadow and their own smallness are still worth something.
By the time Changxing drops into the shadowed basin cradling Yutu’s scattered rigs, the freeport is just memory and telemetry residue. The crew’s adrenaline hangover hits at once, leaving a hollow quiet in the cabin. What they’ve hauled isn’t just a fugitive scientist; it’s a live fuse, the sort of thing that decides whether coming heat can be dodged: or has to be met head-on, with no way back to neutral.
Jin met them at the lock with her helmet still clipped to her belt, eyes flicking past Liang to Zhang and the Changxing’s scorched nose. The pressure equalized with a dry hiss; Yutu’s air tasted thinner, edged with overworked scrubbers and boiled instant broth.
“You’re late,” she said in Mandarin, flat.
Liang unsealed his own helmet, letting it hang at his hip. “We brought you a reason to forgive us.”
Her gaze ticked to Zhang again. “She worth the extra oxygen you’ve already burned?”
“That depends,” Zhang murmured, voice rough from recycled cabin air. “On how you feel about never signing another helium-3 contract again.”
Jin snorted. “You independents all promise emancipation.” She jerked her head toward the corridor. “Talk in the galley. My rigs don’t like gossip on open channels.”
They floated-walked through the cramped tunnel, mag soles catching with soft clicks. In Yutu’s communal galley, under a buzzing strip of mismatched LEDs, Jin keyed in three mugs of broth from a dispenser that wheezed like an asthmatic.
“Start with what you want,” she said, sliding Liang a mug, not touching his fingers.
He wrapped both hands around it, more for the anchor than the heat. “Shelter for Zhang. Off-books. No transponder pings, no guest manifests. Long-term, if this goes the way it can.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s the kind of ask that gets people spaced when the water runs low.”
“In return,” Liang said, “you get first application of her process, adapted to your rigs. Higher yield, lower power draw. You jump the entire curve before Heliodyne or the big arrays even see it coming.”
Zhang set her mug down untouched. “You’d be the testbed and the proof of concept. Under your control. And if, when, we form a co-op instead of letting a megacorp patent this into a stranglehold, you get founding shares. Voting, not just dividends.”
Jin leaned back, prosthetic foot giving a faint magnetic tick against the deck with each slow swing. “You’re talking like you already have a corridor.”
“I have the skeleton of one,” Liang said. “Near-side to orbit. I need an anchor out here. A place corporate can’t casually lock down with a single override. You.”
Her jaw tightened at that pronoun. Independence was practically stitched into the patches on her coverall. “Tie my rigs to your route, I inherit your enemies. Heliodyne, plus whoever else smells margin pressure from your little science project.”
“You already have their attention,” Hong said quietly from where she stood near the hatch, hands folded, making herself small in the miners’ space. “They know your volumes don’t match your declared contracts. That only gets more dangerous as margins tighten.”
Jin’s gaze slid to Hong, then back to Liang. “So your pitch is: I’m screwed anyway, better to be screwed with friends?”
“With leverage,” Liang corrected. “With a stake in something they can’t easily nationalize or foreclose.”
Silence settled, filled by the distant pulse of a pump cycling somewhere in the habitat’s bones. Jin stared at Zhang.
“Your process,” she said. “Can you throttle it? Or is it all or nothing? I’m not burning Yutu down because you kick the market into cardiac arrest overnight.”
Zhang’s fingers worried at the seal of her mug. “We can roll it out in stages. Start with incremental efficiency gains that look like clever tuning, not a revolution. Hide the real deltas in the noise.”
“And if your data leaks?” Jin asked. “Because it will. Everything leaks out here, if there’s enough credit on the table.”
“Then,” Liang said, “being the first, and already networked, is the only safety anyone’s going to get. Once this is in play, there is no neutral. You’re either locked under someone’s thumb, or you’re part of the thumb.”
Jin exhaled, a short, sharp sound halfway to a laugh. “You romance me with talk of thumbs, Liang.”
His mouth twitched. “My timing is bad. I know.”
Her eyes softened for a fraction of a second, then sharpened again. “Shelter, first access, and a founding cut if you co-op this. In exchange, I become your far-side node and hang Zhang’s target over my door.” She tapped her mug thoughtfully. “I want veto on which buyers you bring through Yutu. I’m not hosting Earthside spooks or casino money launderers because they’re convenient.”
“Agreed,” Liang said immediately. “You curate the far-side end. I curate the flight legs.”
“And if Heliodyne comes down hard?” Jin asked. “Not a polite audit. I mean tugs in orbit, kill-switches on your docking rights, a reclamation team walking through this galley in clean boots.”
Liang held her gaze. “Then we use your back craters and my alternate pads. We scatter. But we don’t scatter alone. That’s the difference.”
The line between her brows deepened. Tying her orbit to his meant more than shared profit; it meant shared failure, shared reprisals. Shared air, if it came to that.
Zhang broke the quiet. “This isn’t safe,” she said bluntly. “For any of us. The only honest thing I can offer is that if you help me, you get to help decide the shape of what comes next, instead of waiting for some board in Shanghai or Quito to write it for you.”
Jin looked at the three of them: the fugitive scientist, the debt-bound ex-investigator, the over-cautious pilot who had somehow become the center of a storm. Outside, beyond regolith and rock and radio shadow, corporations argued over projections that would never show the taste of this thin soup or the tremor in Ming’s hand where it gripped a rail.
“First access to every iteration,” she said slowly. “Not just whatever you think is safe to share. Full transparency on risk profiles. If my people start dying because of your breakthrough, we shut it down. Non-negotiable.”
Zhang’s jaw flexed. Control was clearly a hard thing for her to hand away. “If the data says it’s lethal, we stop,” she said. “You’ll have the tools to see the data yourself.”
“And you,” Jin added, pointing her mug at Liang, “don’t route any other far-side operation through my basin without my sign-off. Your ‘corridor’ doesn’t get to turn Yutu into a traffic jam.”
Liang nodded, feeling the weight of each condition slotting into place like docking clamps. “You have my word. On-record, off-record, whatever level you want.”
“Words are cheap. Air’s not.” Jin studied him, then reached out her prosthetic foot, letting the magnet clack once, decisively, against the deck between them. “Fine. We try it your way. I shelter Zhang. I anchor your corridor. We tie our futures together and see if either of us drowns first.”
For a moment, the weight of the lunar regolith above them felt heavier than one-sixth g. Liang extended his hand across the narrow table. After a beat, Jin clasped it, her grip firm, pulse rapid against his skin.
Temptation and unease threaded the contact in equal measure. They were no longer two separate operators trading favors across light-seconds and supply runs. With one handshake in a dim galley on the far side of the moon, they’d turned their independent hustles into a single, fragile vector aimed straight through whatever heat was coming.
Hong rides the thin bandwidth back to Nanyue in the quiet hours, eyes grainy, fingers steady on the terminal. The override she slipped in the connector corridor is a bright flare in any clean audit; she can’t erase it, so she buries it in noise.
Her official report to Heliodyne reads like strained compliance: timestamps of “delayed recognition,” flagged “possible sensor ghost,” a note about “non-standard crew movement” near Dock C. She attaches scrubbed snippets of corridor footage where Liang’s crew are only silhouettes and Zhang is just another jumpsuit, annotating them with cautious speculation. Enough detail to look helpful. Not enough to close a loop.
On the secure backchannel reserved for bonded assets, she logs a self-critique: hesitation, confusion, fear of misidentifying a high-value target. The kind of weakness that invites “guidance,” not termination.
In parallel, she seeds her case file with dead-ends: mis-tagged cargo IDs, a false lead toward a rival smuggler she already dislikes, references to a “secondary handler” that doesn’t exist. Each breadcrumb plausible. Each one a few degrees off, enough to send some distant enforcement analyst down a different corridor while Liang’s new vector bends far out of reach.
Xiao Feng takes the far side personally. While Liang and Jin argue strategy, he walks Yutu’s tunnels with a mechanic’s flashlight and a brawler’s eye, cataloguing every camera blind spot, every hatch that sticks, every corner where sound dies. Over weak tea and stronger gossip, he trades stories with the cluster’s unofficial enforcers. Rig bosses with old security training, a medic who patches knife wounds no one reports, a tug pilot who’s been bounced from three corporate crews. With Jin’s grudging endorsement, he threads them into a quiet understanding: early warning protocols, prearranged “equipment failures” on key approach routes, a rota of eyes on external feeds. Not a fortress, Yutu could never be that, but a mesh of delays and misdirections designed to buy minutes when it matters.
Ming, recognizing Zhang’s schematics buried in black‑market mods he’s already nursed through inspections, starts stripping Changxing’s guts on the float back to orbit. He swaps in improvised heat exchangers, rebalances power loops, and codes around proprietary safeties, hands trembling just enough to scare him. If it works, the shuttle becomes a flying manifesto; if it fails, it kills them all quietly.
Zhang, persuaded that hiding forever only delays the inevitable, codes a partitioned release plan for her helium‑3 process (fragmented keys spread across co‑ops, smugglers, and dormant relays) set to auto‑broadcast if she’s captured or killed. The tripwire forces Liang, Jin, and Hong to accept a new geometry of risk: their strongest shield against corporate power is the very systemic chaos they’ve just agreed to wire into the moon.
Liang listens to Zhang outline the tripwire again, pressure of the straps across his shoulders suddenly too tight. Partitioned keys, dormant relays, co‑ops given pieces of a bomb they don’t know they’re holding. If she disappears, her process doesn’t vanish into a corporate vault; it detonates across the network.
He has spent two decades threading the gap between giants, proud of the way Changxing’s registry numbers slid harmlessly through inspection queues. Neutral. Replaceable. The sort of ship nobody remembered when audits rolled.
That fantasy dies somewhere between Nanyue’s shrinking arc and the far side’s black horizon.
“Once this goes live,” he says, half to Zhang, half to the humming bulkheads, “there isn’t any neutral left. Not for us.”
Zhang doesn’t argue. She only meets his eyes, exhausted and unwavering. “There was never neutral, Liang. Just delayed consequences.”
He thinks of Yutu’s patched modules, of Jin’s water rations running thin. Of Hong’s ledger ticking upward in some server rack, of Ming’s shaking hands buried in wiring. Of a thousand other crews who live inside margins corporations can erase with a memo.
The navigation display throws a soft glow over his face as he starts dropping new waypoints. Not single hops with declared manifests, but braided chains of small transfers: Yutu to an unregistered depot carved in a crater wall, depot to a fuel‑stripped tug, tug to an “equipment test” orbiting just outside normal shipping lanes. Cargo codes that double as message headers. Maintenance calls that are really rendezvous beacons.
Changxing stops being a lone trader and becomes a moving spine around which other independents can latch. Couriers, miners, co‑ops, smugglers. All given alternate vectors that don’t begin and end at corporate docks.
Every leg he plots deepens the flag on his name in some database he’ll never see: destabilizing actor, logistics risk, corridor architect.
He keeps plotting anyway.
Hong studies the notification in her implant feed three times, as if the numbers might blink back to sanity. Debt term: extended. Reason code: discretionary adjustment. No appeal channel highlighted.
They didn’t even bother to dress it up as penalty.
She pictures her sister’s cramped module, the wall readouts that gate their air and water. Those quotas haven’t shifted: yet. The message is clear enough: they can pull the lever any time. She just agreed to be the counterweight.
Fine.
She pulls up Heliodyne’s compliance dashboards, the ones she used to audit other people’s sins, and starts rewriting herself. Thermal anomalies that never quite cross alarm thresholds. Access logs that show her dutifully where she was supposed to be, five minutes after she’s already slipped away. Sensor streams with embedded noise that matches known hardware faults, signatures she learned to fear as an investigator.
She builds a second set of books: real movements, real meetings, real deviations, stored on a shard only Ming’s jury‑rigged systems can see.
Monitored asset on one screen; phantom saboteur on the other. Her family’s oxygen is now indexed to how long she can keep the two from touching.
Xiao Feng has always trained. A way to burn off restlessness, to be ready for the bad day that never quite arrived. Now he assumes the bad day is scheduled.
He starts codifying what used to be instinct and bar brawls. In a shared folder masked as engine diagnostics, he records drills: how you move in one-sixth g when someone’s trying to pin your air hose, how you rotate a corridor fight around camera blind spots and hull stress lines, how you fall back through pressure doors without leaving anyone behind.
He rewrites “muscle” into escort and extraction. Shuttle cross‑sections become annotated safe lanes; Nanyue’s cargo ring turns into a mental map of choke points and bolt‑holes. Independents ping him for “route advice.” He answers with timings, posture, where to stash stun batons in tool racks.
He starts identifying crews who can learn without getting cocky, pulls them into impromptu “maintenance safety” sessions in unused bays. No unit patches, no speeches. Just repetition until body memory takes over.
When Zhang’s contingency finally fractures corporate schedules and enforcement tightens, he intends there to be people who know how to move, fast, quiet, coordinated, because he taught them.
Ming, aware his neuromuscular condition will likely shorten his front‑line repair career, starts treating every jury‑rig and bypass as legacy, not improvisation. He archives step‑by‑step schematics of Changxing’s custom modifications and Zhang‑derived hacks into an encrypted “shop manual” keyed to crew biometrics, annotating failure modes and cheap substitutions, preparing for the day he runs a far‑side bay that keeps the fragile independent network breathing.
Jin listens, jaw tight, eyes flicking to the fuel and water columns more than the projected dividends. Her rig is three bad weeks from shuttered, and the far-side rumor mesh is already vibrating with talk of Heliodyne buyouts and “stability packages.” She taps the co-op clause, makes him add language about supply guarantees and voting rights for unregistered miners before she nods.
At a cramped fold‑out table in Changxing’s galley, Liang overlays a rough ledger of fuel, water, and risk onto the shared display. Numbers scroll in pale blue over a schematic of the shuttle: propellant margins, life‑support draw, port fees, bribes already paid, bribes still only hypothetical. Beside them, a second pane shows a stubbed‑out charter document, clauses waiting for names and signatures.
“This isn’t a one‑off,” he says, voice even. “If we get you clear of Nanyue and Yutu holds, we’re not just splitting this run. We’re founding something.”
He sketches it in with clipped gestures: Zhang’s process registered as non‑transferable equity held by a co‑op trust, not by any single individual. No outright sale allowed, only licensing under terms the trust defines. Profits from hauls, helium‑3, rare earths, whatever rides their corridor, broken into variable shares weighted by duty and exposure on each run: primary risk to pilot and security, baseline to technical maintenance, scaled participation for independent rigs that buy into the network.
Hong leans against the galley bulkhead, arms folded, eyes tracking the line where “performance bonuses” becomes “votes.” Xiao Feng, half‑perched on a cargo crate, frowns at a column labeled “security externalities”: a quiet way of saying he gets a bigger cut when things get dangerous. Ming, knuckles resting on the table edge to steady his hand, watches the maintenance allocation percentages, calculating how long he can keep the ship in the black with scavenged parts.
Liang flags a clause: co‑op membership requires a minimum commitment of tonnage or technical labor over a rolling period. No absentee shareholders. “If you want a say,” he murmurs, “you have to haul, or you have to build.”
He tabulates contingencies in silence for a moment, intercept probability envelopes, Heliodyne counter‑moves, Yutu’s supply volatility, then locks the framework. “This is provisional,” he adds, looking up at Zhang. “But it’s the line between us becoming just another small cartel, or a corridor that stays independent even if I’m gone.”
Zhang, still wary, drags the charter pane to her side of the display and starts typing, lips moving as if she’s back in a lab arguing with a review board.
“There’s a condition,” she says without looking up. “Technical veto. Hard-coded.”
Liang’s brow twitches. “Define ‘technical.’”
“Process architecture, deployment parameters, any modification to extraction yields beyond a five‑percent delta, any interface to high‑energy systems that wasn’t in my baseline design.” Her fingers move faster. “You can vote routes, price, tonnage. You don’t get to ‘optimize’ my work into a weapon or a monopoly while calling it an upgrade.”
She drops language into the charter: a standing technical panel, minimum three members, quorum required, records mirrored to multiple nodes: including Yutu. She chairs it by default, but succession rules are explicit: if she’s gone, the seat passes to another engineer elected by co‑op technicians, not investors or pilots.
“No unilateral override,” she adds, voice tightening. “Not from you, not from some future majority that forgets why this matters.”
Ming reads over her shoulder, nods once. “And if someone tries to bypass it?”
“Then any license using that forked process,” Zhang says, finally meeting Liang’s eyes, “is automatically void. Contractually radioactive.”
Hong waits until Zhang pauses to think, then taps a quiet corner of the charter. “One more pool,” she says. “Mandatory.” She sketches it in with precise, almost bureaucratic phrasing: a fixed skim off any surplus auto‑routed to a blind trust managed off‑books from Heliodyne’s systems. Beneficiaries: registered debt‑bonded families on Nanyue and Yutu, disbursed as housing stability and oxygen quota top‑ups, insulated from individual performance metrics.
Liang studies her, hearing the risk behind the legalese. “You know what you’re giving up,” he says.
Hong doesn’t blink. She scrolls to the line item for “capture contingencies,” deletes her own bonus triggers, and rebalances her share to standard crew risk. “Freedom’s no use,” she answers, “if everyone I leave behind is still choking.”
Xiao Feng and Ming push for a dedicated maintenance and escort fund, ring‑fencing a percentage of every future haul to keep Changxing flying and to seed armored tugs and sensor pickets along their eventual corridor. Liang resists, then concedes, recognizing that without hardened hulls, redundancy, and paid escorts, any paper equity in Zhang’s breakthrough stays hostage to the next corporate blockade or lien.
By the time Changxing drops toward Yutu’s improvised pad, a fragile charter exists, profit shares, vetoes, blind trusts, escort funds all sketched in, but key questions hang unresolved: where to bury Zhang’s data mirror in the far‑side dust, who bankrolls the first off‑books reactor cluster, what penalties deter defection, and whether any of them can enforce this order once other independents (and the corporations) smell the shift coming.
News of Liang’s far‑side “supply drop” didn’t leak so much as condense, frost‑like, along Nanyue’s dockside rumor nets.
By the time Changxing cleared the cargo ring, tug pilots were already trading versions in three languages over encrypted short‑hops and bartered bandwidth. An “empty” shuttle pulling higher thrust than its declared manifest; a supposed water‑and‑filters run being logged to a pad that hadn’t filed a shortage alert in weeks; a ghost transponder ping, for half a second, that matched a Heliodyne internal shuttle ID and then vanished.
In the Heliodyne Annex, down in a cool room where air tasted less metallic, a junior analyst named Rao Min watched a status dashboard repopulate after the brownout. The environmental feed from Connector 7F came back with a smear of static and a neat block of “data unavailable” exactly ten seconds long.
Exactly ten was the problem.
Ten seconds was the default timeout for a manual override test. Ten seconds was what the old training sims used when you walked new hires through hypothetical sabotage scenarios. It was not what errant dust in a sensor conduit did on its own.
She drilled into the raw logs. There: a biometric blip tagged to Zhang Lian’s file, followed by an auto‑classification as “false positive: sensor error.” The correction had the right checksum pattern, the right formatting, the right timestamp alignment with the brownout.
Too right.
Rao hesitated, listening to the low corporate chime that marked the top of the shift. Then she pushed the anomaly bundle up the chain with a low‑priority fraud flag, the safest category that still preserved her bonus potential. The system swallowed it without comment.
Minutes later, in a crowded corridor where colonists queued for water rations, Hong’s wrist cuff gave a single, discreet buzz. She palmed the display, angling it away from the cameras.
NOTICE: COOPERATION INDEX RECALIBRATION IN PROGRESS.
STATUS: PENDING REVIEW.
ADVISORY: MAINTAIN STANDARD REPORTING CADENCE. VARIANCE WILL IMPACT
FAMILY QUOTAS.
The words were flat, bureaucratic, but Hong felt them like a tightening collar. Recalibration meant someone had tugged at a thread: the brownout, the connector, Zhang.
Somewhere in the Annex, her debt‑bond file would have flipped from green to amber. Algorithms would be re‑running risk projections: probability of defection, leverage sufficiency, recommended corrective interventions. Her family’s housing and oxygen allotments, numbers she carried in her head like prayer beads, hung in a provisional state, no longer guaranteed, not yet cut.
She kept walking, slotting herself forward with the slow shuffle of the line, face professionally blank. The other colonists saw only another notification, another petty indignity from systems they all lived inside.
Inside, she counted cycles. Review windows. Which supervisors were on rotation this week. Which of them owed her favors, which could be nudged, which could be distracted when the next manual audit came due.
She had chosen. The system had noticed.
On the far side, Liang’s supply drop arced toward Yutu in the clear dark, its trajectory still labeled as routine. On Nanyue, beneath layers of procurement gloss and life‑support metrics, a small red icon lit up on a single analyst’s screen and stayed there, pulsing patiently, waiting for someone higher in the tower to care.
The Yutu communal galley had been cleared of crates and coil spools, benches dragged into a rough crescent around a projection of the far-side terrain. The air tasted of cheap broth and metal. Miners in mismatched coveralls and vacuum-burned faces watched Liang’s slow, precise hands trace arcs between craters and relay towers, and listened while Zhang, voice hoarse, outlined extraction yields and efficiency curves in numbers that made even the most jaded operators sit forward.
“Forty percent less waste heat,” she said. “Power draw low enough you don’t light up every corporate sensor net this side of orbit. If you share the process, you set your own terms.”
“That’s if they don’t glass us first,” a heavyset rig boss from Pit Three snapped. “Heliodyne sees off-book reactors spin up in one cluster? They cut water, cut filters, call it ‘unfortunate supply issues’ until someone crawls back on contract.”
Murmurs, sharp and brittle, ran through the room. Old grudges surfaced: near-side versus far-side, contract-breakers against quiet survivors, those who still had family on Nanyue and those who’d burned that bridge.
Jin sat near the center, one boot magnetized to the deck, prosthetic angled casual, jaw tight. These were her people; she knew who’d spotted her air debt once, who’d undercut her on ore pricing twice. She heard the fear more clearly than the bluster.
“If we do nothing,” Liang said, measured, “Heliodyne rolls this tech out anyway. You stay small, isolated, fighting over scraps while they raise quotas. This is a chance to move first. Together.”
“Together?” someone scoffed. “You fly out when it gets hot. Our habitats don’t have engines.”
Eyes pivoted to Jin. An older woman from the lava-tube rigs, who’d once patched Jin’s suit seals with her last strip of tape, raised a hand. “You vouch for this, Jin Yue? For him? For her?” A nod toward Zhang.
Silence stretched. Jin felt the weight of ration tallies, unpaid prosthetic maintenance, the bare trickle in her own tanks. Felt, too, the memory of corporate foremen telling her an independent with one leg wouldn’t last a cycle.
She pushed up, letting the magnets thunk as she shifted weight. “You all know me,” she said. “You know I don’t sign on to anyone’s banner. I’m not doing that now.” A ripple of wary amusement. “But I’ve seen the numbers. I’ve seen Heliodyne’s clamps tighten every year. This process, run our way, buys margin. Water margin. Air margin. Time.”
“Until they notice,” the Pit Three boss shot back.
“They’ll notice no matter what,” Jin said. “Difference is whether they’re reacting to one desperate rig cutting corners, or to a cluster with its own corridor, ships, and a charter that says nobody here gets sold out for a bonus.”
The word charter landed heavy. Contracts they all knew; charters were stories from training modules and old Earth civics.
“You think you can enforce that?” another miner asked. “When they start dangling debt relief, replacement lungs, visas?”
Jin glanced at Liang, then back at the circle. “I think I can enforce it on me,” she said. “That’s what I’m putting on the table. My routes, my pads, my name. If Liang and Zhang break what we write, I close them out. If any of you try to sell this process back to Heliodyne, I close you out.”
A low, incredulous laugh. “You and what airlock?”
“Mine,” Jin said simply. “And half the unregistered pads you’ve used when your life-support was running near vapor. You all know how thin your margins are. You cross this, you lose my safety net. For good.”
Silence again, deeper this time. The calculation was brutal, obvious. A few faces hardened, not liking the terms; a few looked almost relieved someone had drawn a line, even an ugly one.
Liang watched, hands still, understanding that Jin wasn’t just backing his plan. She was burning social capital she could never fully regain. Zhang watched too, eyes flicking from face to face, measuring how a technical breakthrough turned messy and human in the space between oxygen tallies and old favors.
In the end, no vote was clean. A handful of rig bosses walked out, muttering about suicide and heroics. Others stayed, not quite agreeing, not quite refusing, their consent conditional and prickly.
But when the session broke, and the improvised minutes were tagged into Yutu’s message board under a new heading, FAR-SIDE REACTOR CO-OP / PROVISIONAL, Jin’s name sat beside Liang’s and Zhang’s as a signatory.
In a place where signatures meant less than stored water and quiet favors, that still mattered.
Ming and Zhang hunched over the open rack in Changxing’s cramped bay, knees braced against cargo tie‑downs, a tangle of repurposed cable floating like algae in thin gravity. Ming’s hands moved fast despite the tremor, slotting Zhang’s stripped‑down reactor logic into a jury‑rigged test loop built from life‑support controllers and a gutted heater core.
“This is not how the manuals do it,” he muttered.
“The manuals work for them,” Zhang said. “We’re proving it works for us.”
He thumbed the improvised start contact. For a breath, nothing: then the loop came alive, a low, hungry draw pulling from scavenged auxiliary cells. Readouts climbed, stabilized. Waste heat: minimal. Emission profile: skewed, but barely kissing the thresholds Heliodyne’s remote sweeps watched.
“Off‑books,” Ming said softly. “It runs.”
They went out on suit radio minimums, helmets ghost‑lit by Yutu’s spillover glow. Jin threaded them between ridges to an unmarked lava‑tube maw, scrubbed from public survey grids. Ming’s improvised seismics mapped a cavity; Zhang’s encrypted substrate went into a drilled pocket, regolith tamped smooth. While Xiao Feng drifted sentry, shotgun mic hunting for patrol pings, Zhang felt the old corporate labs recede. If this team died, her revolution would sit here as cold pattern in dust, waiting for someone desperate enough to dig.
Back aboard Changxing, strapped in at the forward blister while Yutu’s scattered lights wink against the far‑side dark, Liang scrolls through Zhang’s projected output curves and Ming’s risk models. The covert reactor means spare kilowatts for air, water, burns nobody else controls. It also means Heliodyne’s algorithms will notice. Every surplus watt paints a tighter target on these tunnels, and on Jin.
Yutu’s communal galley had never been this loud.
Condensation beaded on patched piping overhead, catching the harsh LEDs in trembling points of light. Someone had dragged out a half‑functional speaker; it hissed out an old pop track under the roar of voices as miners compared panel readouts and shouted new ration numbers like lottery wins. Cheap power meant longer drills, warmer bunks, hot water that didn’t feel like a quarterly bonus.
On the galley’s edge, half in the shadow of a bulkhead where the vibration from below came through the floor more cleanly, Liang and Jin stood shoulder to shoulder over a flickering systems slate mounted to the wall.
Lines and blocks of data scrolled in cool blue. Surplus power estimates pulsed at the top: obscene, for a place like Yutu. Enough to triple life‑support margins, to run printers and heaters without begging Nanyue for spare kilowatts. Enough to make independents dream dangerously.
Below that, Ming’s overlays and Zhang’s cautions edged in red. Projected heat signatures. Detection probabilities as Heliodyne’s orbital sweeps updated their baselines. Response windows. Casualty curves.
“Assuming they come with drones only,” Liang said, fingertip tracing the steepest line, “we lose one, maybe two outer rigs. Ten percent fatality risk, localized.”
He tapped a different branch. “If they send a manned enforcement barge with gas controls and override keys…”
The curve knifed up, the shaded red spilling across habitat modules tagged with anonymous call signs that Jin knew by real names.
“They don’t hit like that, not first pass,” she said, jaw tight. “Too many reports. Too visible. They’ll do what they always do. ‘Random’ audits. Quotas. Quiet failures.”
“Until they decide an example is cheaper than subtlety,” Liang answered.
The slate shook faintly as the covert reactor cycled, a new bass note threaded through Yutu’s old infrastructure. Not the familiar whine of solar inverters, not the stuttering cough of aging batteries. Something denser, hungrier, running on logic stolen from the labs that owned the sky.
Jin folded her arms, the matte of her prosthetic catching a line of light. “We turn it down,” she said. “Slow. Make it look like panel upgrades. Spread the surplus across three clusters, not one. No spikes, no headlines.”
“Slower ramp means slower payback,” Liang said. “Slower buffer for your water and fuel.”
Her eyes stayed on the casualty graphs. “Slow is still faster than dead.”
He watched her in profile, saw the calculation behind the stubbornness. Independence measured now not just in credits and contracts, but in acceptable body counts. His corridor dreams grafted onto her tunnels, Zhang’s process wired into Ming’s patched‑together systems. Every advantage came with a curve like the ones glowing in front of them.
“Zhang thinks we can spoof some of the emissions,” he said. “Ming can smear the signatures into Nanyue’s noise floor. It buys us…a factor. Not immunity.”
“Nothing’s immune,” Jin said. “But if this holds, even at half output, we’re not begging for power anymore. We choose when to cut, who to help. That’s new.”
From the center of the galley, a cheer rose as someone announced extended heater cycles. Hong’s laugh cut through, bright and a little too sharp. Xiao Feng clapped a younger miner on the back hard enough to send her skidding in low‑g.
Jin tilted the slate, lowering the brightness until the red washed almost gray. Promise in blue, cost in red, sharing the same axes.
“You can still turn around,” she said quietly. “Drop Zhang at some station, sell the design to the highest bidder, take your corridor and leave this pit behind.”
Liang listened to the reactor’s hidden thrum, the miners’ voices, the recycled air moving through ducts never meant to carry this much hope. The graphs didn’t offer a future without risk: only different flavors of it.
“I could,” he said. “But then it’s their corridor. Their sky. Same story, just with my name on a nicer contract.”
Jin’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
“Then we do it my way,” she said. “Slow. Quiet. We grow into the power before it burns us.”
He nodded once, committing. On the slate, the model recalculated as he dragged down the output ceiling with two fingers. The blue peak flattened; the red curve eased, but never vanished.
The covert reactor hummed on in the rock below, and Yutu’s future resolved into a tight band between abundance and annihilation, balanced on choices made in the dim edge of a noisy room.
Hong eased away from the galley table, leaving her cup and an unfinished joke behind. The noise thinned with every step down the service spur, traded for the deeper, steadier pulse of pumps and the faint buzz of unshielded cabling. Low‑g made her gait floaty; habit kept it disciplined.
The maintenance alcove around the comms terminal was barely wide enough for one person. Condensation traced slow lines down raw rock where insulation had never been finished. The terminal’s status strip winked amber, then steady green as it recognized her ID.
Her debt account opened without ceremony. The new line item sat there in corporate gray: ADJUSTMENT – TERM EXTENSION: +5. No justification. No appeal link. Just a timestamp matching the hour they’d pushed Zhang through Nanyue’s connector.
Below it, in polite blue, a commendation: CONTRIBUTION TO SECTOR STABILITY. Minor oxygen bonus. Priority review flag.
Her back found the rock and stayed there. Five more years. Her daughters full grown before she was free on paper, if the definitions of “free” still meant anything.
The galley’s distant cheer bled faintly down the tunnel. She listened, drawing the sound in like borrowed air.
Five years for a little more heat, a little less fear in these walls. A quiet calculation: her leash shorter, their horizon longer. She thumbed the message closed, palms dry, expression leveling into the same professional mask the corporation had trained into her.
“Noted,” she murmured to the empty alcove.
Then she straightened, checked for watchers out of old reflex, and walked back toward the noise, already rehearsing the lie she would never tell her family. That nothing had changed.
In Changxing’s maintenance bay, where the deck plates thrummed with a tamer echo of Yutu’s new heartbeat, Ming killed the music feed with a tap that left the air abruptly too thin. The diagnostics frame expanded over the bulkhead screen, reactor interface spliced into systems that had never been on any corporate spec sheet. Sensor ladders, thermal gradients, fault trees: all within the safe envelope he and Zhang had bullied them toward.
And still, in the corner, a stubborn probability node refused to go to zero.
He isolated it, zoomed through layers of assumptions. Material fatigue in a relay he’d re-machined twice. His own predicted error rate trending up over years, a quiet variable he’d never written down. In the model, his hand drifted half a millimeter at the wrong moment; the spike that followed painted an ugly orange plume through life-support and guidance.
He hardened three more interlocks, rewrote the abort thresholds, watched the probability tick down another fraction. Never gone.
He saved the model, tagged it (ACCEPTABLE RISK, because nothing in this life-support cage ever lived under any other label) and for a long time just stared at the file tree.
Every system script bore his fingerprint: half-documented shortcuts, swear words in the comments, cable maps that only made sense if you remembered which inspection they were meant to fool. If he dropped dead tomorrow or woke up to fingers that wouldn’t close on a wrench, Liang’s independent corridor would hinge on whoever could read his ghosts.
Ming opened a new document. TITLE: CHANGXING CRITICAL SYSTEMS – HANDOVER NOTES.
The cursor blinked. He flexed his left hand; the faint tremor answered, an old argument resumed. He started with the power bus hierarchy, describing not just what he’d done, but why; the inspectors he’d outsmarted, the parts he’d lied about on manifests. He flagged the reactor patch with three different caution tags, wrote in plain language: IF YOU’RE HERE, I’M NOT, AND YOU DON’T GET TO PANIC.
Line by line, he imagined Xiao Feng squinting at it, or Hong on a bad day, or some kid they hadn’t hired yet. People who would need this ship to light and pressurize and burn when corporate space went cold.
The bay lights cycled to night mode, dimming around him. Ming kept typing, building a bridge for someone else to walk across the failure curve he could no longer pretend didn’t exist.
Zhang stood alone outside Jin’s rig in a patched suit, visor mirroring a cluster of far‑side domes now blazing at levels no corporate allocation chart would ever approve. Dust plumed at her boots in slow‑motion arcs. Over an encrypted short‑range link she pushed an open‑license stub of her process to three distant, barely‑legal habitats. And watched, on her handheld sky map, a Heliodyne patrol’s orbit kink, inclination shifting, burn markers flaring as its vector bent inexorably toward Yutu’s coordinates.
During an improvised gathering in a dust-hazed pressure dome, independents from half a dozen rigs argue over quotas, defense drills, and who speaks if corporate envoys arrive with offers or threats. When the shouting crests, all eyes tilt toward Liang; he sees Jin’s guarded nod, Hong’s steady, resigned gaze, Xiao Feng’s quiet readiness, Ming’s forced half-smile, and Zhang’s grave expectation: understanding that whether this ends in a new order or a crushed uprising, his name and ship will be written into the outcome, etched into Yutu’s rumor networks and Heliodyne’s risk models alike, too visible to ever slip quietly back into anonymous trade.