At the start of each cycle, Miroslava queues with the miners beneath the blue‑white glare of the diagnostics arch, palms flat against the chill panel as the system scrolls her metrics: elevated neutron scatter, borderline lung efficiency, compliance confirmed. The arch hums, a thin insect whine under the deeper vibration of passing ore trams. Cold seeps into her fingertips as the sensors bite through skin temperature, blood oxygen, microfracture density in bone.
“Hold,” drones the arch in clipped corporate Standard. A red line flickers, then steadies to amber. Someone behind her coughs, a wet rattle that makes the security drone swivel its lens.
She listens to the numbers the way others listen to prayers, counting beats between each status ping. Eighty‑two percent lung capacity; she maps that to Shaft K‑7’s methane seep, to the tight squeeze above Reactor Spur 12 where the scrubbers wheeze. Radiation dose: 0.[^41] cycle‑adjusted; she files it beside yesterday’s 0.[^37] and the week before’s 0.[^33], extrapolating the curve in her head like any other decay function. The display doesn’t say “how long until failure.” The system doesn’t track that. She does.
“Step,” the arch commands.
She steps. The floor under the arch is grated steel over alien smoothness, and she can feel, faintly, a different vibration through the soles of her boots, an off‑rhythm pulse from deeper in the Kovalev Ring. The alien substrate’s way of counting, maybe.
Ahead, a skinny kid from M‑13 fumbles his ID tag. No bracelet, just a reprinted QR code on worn plastic. The arch hesitates, cycling through languages to reissue the same phrase: “Unauthorized respiration cluster detected. Report to allocation.”
The boy’s shoulders hunch. Sergei’s clerk, posted at the side console, doesn’t look up. Her stylus ticks a box. “Next.”
Miroslava watches the boy’s metrics flash red, then switch to muted gray as the system shunts him into “temporary review.” Non‑existent, on paper. Like the whole M‑13 shaft. Like her, if she ever misses a scan.
She rolls her shoulders, forcing her breath to stay slow, shallow. Elevated neutron scatter means one less hour crawling in unshielded conduits this cycle if she wants to pass again tomorrow. One less favor she can trade the rebels for parts. One more calculation in a life that is all margins.
Behind her, someone mutters an old proverb about air and God coming from same place. Miroslava snorts under her breath.
“Air comes from filters,” she says, not turning around. “And filters come from quotas.”
The arch beeps a confirmation tone, mistaking her mutter for an acknowledgment of corporate policy. Compliance reaffirmed.
She runs her days like stolen bandwidth, syncing her path to tram rotations and ration bells so that to cameras she is only another gray jumpsuit in the flow. When the first siren blares for distribution, she is already above the crowd on a maintenance catwalk, boots quiet on the grating, watching Sergei’s clerks bark allotments by badge class. Blue for full citizens, yellow for contracted miners, no color at all for people who officially don’t breathe here.
When a dispenser jams, pressure equalizes wrong, or some clerk “accidentally” throttles flow to the back of the line, she is ready. A service hatch yawns at her touch, seals overridden with an obsolete hex‑key and a strip of alien conductor hidden in her sleeve. She drops down between pipes, shoulders scraping, toolkit clattering soft.
Corporate stencils on the panel read DO NOT TAMPER in three languages. She snorts, pries it open, and guts the logic valves, shunting a tiny surplus toward the end‑of‑line tap. Enough that M‑13’s recycled bracelets still flash green instead of red, enough that “unauthorized respiration clusters” get one more day before the system notices the theft.
On the trams themselves, wedged between ore bins and exhausted crews, she traces stress fractures in the bulkheads with gloved fingers, mapping hairline faults that don’t yet exist on Zoran’s clean holographic overlays. Her touch lingers on a spot where the vibration has gone from steady to shiver; she files the change beside a dozen others, a ghost‑map overlaid on corporate schematics. Each jolt and screech is another variable in the silent equation she runs in her head: where the next collapse will hit, which unofficial shelter will lose air first, which “accidental” shutdown will give the regime excuse to thin a troublesome shift. She notes which carts carry loudmouths, which corridors Sergei has overfilled, where Irina will see the bodies.
After hours, she ghosts down forgotten ladder wells into the warrens, following the faint warmth of stolen current bleeding through alien alloy like a low pulse. Children tug at her sleeves, asking if the next blackout will be long; elders press her for whispers of new quotas and impending sweeps. She crouches by improvised junction boxes, fingers buried in illegal splice work, bleeding charge from fat corporate trunks into hair‑thin community lines, smoothing out the worst spikes from Zajcev Systems so the lights only dim instead of die when he shunts power to some premium corridor she will never see.
By the time a day’s worth of numbers‑litany compiles into Zoran’s efficiency decree and Sergei’s “temporary” ration cut, she is already in the crawlspace overhead, palms flat on sweating conduit, listening through the metal. Below, Sergei invokes her as proof the system still cares, “Markovska’s got the leaks under control, comrades”, while, on distant consoles, her name pulses in quiet red. Flagged asset. Containment priority. Indispensable in every column that justifies keeping the ring alive; expendable in every scenario modeling how to keep it obedient.
Her days begin before official shift-chimes, patched boots already in a service corridor no census log lists, badge clipped where cams can see it and transponder quietly spoofed where they cannot. On paper she is “Senior Tech (Provisional),” a neat line of corporate code with no attached family allotment, no housing block, no voting hash for the ration councils whose air she keeps moving. In practice she is a ghost with a clearance level someone forgot to revoke, passed from one emergency work order to the next because it is cheaper than admitting the ring needs another full crew. The contradiction, trusted with circulation of oxygen, denied a legal claim to any of it, hangs around her like the frost on underinsulated pipe.
She signs into the system under one ID and walks three sectors under another, stacking aliases like patch plates. The cams log a dutiful engineer entering Shaft K-4; the sensors in a maintenance lock two levels down catch an “unregistered transient” slipping through. In Zoran’s telemetry, the traces merge into background noise. In the warrens’ rumor mill, she is the woman who walks where the system says there is only wall.
On the decks, she speaks corporate spec when she must (“throughput,” “margin,” “incident avoidance”) nodding through Sergei’s briefings as if “provisional” is a temporary state and not a quiet sentence. In the warrens, she drops back into rough dialect, trading filter cloth for news, tools for secrets. She files official fault reports for public corridors and commits the rest to memory: which bypass feeds an extra dozen sleepers, which vent you never close all the way or the back row of bunks wakes up coughing.
Her pay code is tied to “temporary placement,” renewed every quarter with a rubber-stamp digital signature that never quite resolves into a human name. The corporation calls it flexibility. Miroslava calls it leverage. On their side, never hers. They can pull it in a cycle, cut her access with one clean command. She can only keep walking before the chime, slipping in ahead of the day’s new rules, fixing what must not officially exist so that, for another shift, everyone breathes.
Work orders reach her as half-phrases and forwarded alarms, stripped of politeness and context by too many relays: negative pressure spike on K-7, anomalous resonance in an alien conduit, localized temperature shear near an unindexed fracture, “possible biofilm event” flagged then hastily scrubbed from the ticket trail. She reads between the gaps the way others read prayer icons. A three‑second delay between alert and routing means Sergei’s clerks argued over whether to classify it. A mismatched priority code means Zoran’s algorithms saw something they didn’t like and then pretended they hadn’t.
She moves along forgotten catwalks and through service locks never meant for refugee traffic, ducking low where bulkheads have sagged, keying in overrides she technically should not know, palms memorizing the feel of each keypad like old scars. She follows vibrations through her boots and the subtle shift in air that says a seal is about to fail, the taste of copper on her tongue when alien conduits begin to hum off‑note. By long habit she tags nothing she fixes in the official logs if it touches an irregular tunnel or an extra pod bolted where no pod should be, leaving corporate history as full of holes as the ring itself.
Sergei folds her into his public narrative with practiced ease, voice carrying over the tram-line concourse and the grind of ore carts. “Markovska’s on it, comrades; you know she won’t let us suffocate.” The words fall like a ration chit tossed to a crowd. Heads turn, some nodding in real relief, some tightening with the sour knowledge that so much of their continued breathing has been outsourced to one narrow-shouldered woman with burned hands. A few glance up toward the glass box where he stands, seeing benevolence; a few see a man buying time.
She keeps her gaze on the floor when she passes his office, counting floor‑plate welds instead of looking at him. Through the transparency his outline looms: a broad silhouette, thumbs hooked easy in his belt like any shift uncle, while his terminals bloom with red-flag names and rebalanced rosters. She knows those rosters: the way he shuffles whole families onto opposite shifts so they only meet in passing, how “incident mitigation” becomes a pretext to post extra security near talkative mess-hall tables, how a quiet update to access lists locks her cousins out of the few corridors where cams still mysteriously drop. Every new restriction pens her work routes tighter, her official world shrinking even as he invokes her as proof that the system still cares.
On council days he says “our best fixer” and the room exhales; on his encrypted channel he signs off on adjustments that leave her neighbors too tired to organize, too bone-sore to stand in line and argue. Each signature nudges her deeper into maintenance shadows: decommissioned shafts, blind spots between cams, the spaces where his authority blurs and hers, unregistered, begins. He makes her a symbol in the open and a ghost in the logs, and both uses are a kind of leash.
In M‑13’s stale air her legend sheds the headaches, the vomiting fits in zero‑g, and grows teeth. In retellings she halts a decompression cascade with one lazy twist of a spanner, turns a bad scrubber cycle into a gas attack on some faceless patrol. Old women add her beside saints and cosmonauts. Kids practice her supposed code‑taps on bulkheads, rehearsing escape routes they might never need but cling to like extra oxygen. Miroslava walks past their chalked diagrams and whispered passwords without correction, knowing the story keeps people leaning toward one another instead of the void, teaches them that steel and alien stone can be argued with, that systems, even sacred corporate ones, can be made to stutter.
Somewhere behind Zoran’s clean reports and Irina’s casualty graphs, a thinner red line trails her name through encrypted systems: cross‑referenced incidents, anomalous access bursts, undocumented pressure normalizations that arrive seconds before official teams respond, ghost‑tags on alien interfaces no one authorized her to touch. On corporate dashboards she is an outlier flagged for “enhanced observation,” a statistical burr that doesn’t yet justify open removal: a problem best left in circulation until the next convenient sweep can write her off as collateral. Walking home along an unlit duct, Miroslava feels the weight of that unseen ledger as keenly as the wrench at her belt, as real as the ache in her irradiated bones: useful enough to keep breathing for now, too dangerous to ever be allowed to stand still, already half‑filed as a future incident report waiting for a time stamp.
She learned the feel of the perimeter before she ever saw it marked: that faint hitch in the cursor when a plotted point drifted too far, the way the alien‑curve of a shaft wall seemed to tug her line off the orthodox grid. Her training module called it “boundary normalization.” The old hands called it “don’t get clever.”
On her first solo shift a warning sigil pulsed amber when she tried to record an extra three meters of drift in a maintenance crawl. “Coordinate set outside certified volume,” the console scolded in corporate clean‑speak, then locked her tools behind a compliance checklist: confirm sensor error, re‑calibrate, discard anomalous data. There was no button for “keep the truth.”
She tried again, manually keying depth and bearing. This time the overlay itself glitched. The neat lattice of sanctioned corridors reasserting like muscle memory over the top of her raw inputs, snapping them back into the nearest legal node. To unlock the board she had to lie, pruning the world until the software purred green approval. When she signed off, the official map showed a corridor that ended a full body‑length before the place where her hand had brushed cold alien stone.
Later, a drilling crewman from Shaft K‑4 brought coffee to her station, hands still shaking. “Got my ass flagged blue,” he muttered in pidgin, showing her the reprimand. His file read “improper survey annotation.” What he’d actually done was log a cavity that opened sideways off a known vein, big enough for a family pod and some crates besides. The system had frozen; a supervisor had noticed. Two days after he pushed a corrected, regulation‑shrunk report, internal security walked him out in front of his cousins.
They said he’d falsified safety metrics. The maps said the cavity didn’t exist. The tram gossip said nobody should have been standing in a place the overlay didn’t recognize.
Watching his wife tear their shared locker in half for redistribution, Miroslava understood the logic with an engineer’s clarity. If the only spaces that “counted” were the ones that terminated on corporate endpoints, tram stations, ration depots, meter hubs, then every undocumented alcove, every hidden bolt‑on container, was treason just by being real. The software wasn’t protecting them from xeno‑reactivity. It was shaving down the universe to fit inside an invoice.
The unspoken central crime was uncounted space. To admit a gap in the ledger was to suggest there might be air that hadn’t passed through a corporate valve, square meters of gravity where no one paid for standing. Logging an unregistered shaft meant admitting there was somewhere you could stand that wasn’t already priced into an oxygen schedule and amortized against ore tonnage. Even sketching a curve that didn’t snap to an approved node risked audit flags.
Mentioning a bypass corridor in a mess‑hall story drew sudden silence, spoons pausing mid‑air, glances knifing toward ceiling vents where cheap lenses might blink red. Whole jokes lived on that knife edge: you could say “shortcut,” never “side‑tunnel”; “old service loop,” never “new room.” Even the word “warren” settled on tongues like contraband, an admission of density beyond the quota charts.
Formal complaints about overcrowding came written in strained euphemism. No one referenced improvised bunks welded into dead corridors or stacked containers bolted three high in a shaft wall; those were “temporary storage solutions,” “unplanned equipment staging,” if they were mentioned at all, ghosts folded flat between lines of approved coordinates.
Around M-13, the ban took on a personal shape, pressed right into people’s mouths. Mothers taught children to say they lived “near Docking Spindle East,” “below the tram noise,” never in the shaft that didn’t exist on any screen. If a school form or ration query popped, the answer was always a legal node, never the welded maze they slept in. Extra scrubber filters were “loaned” from nobody to nowhere, their serials scraped down with acid and recoded in Sergei’s back‑channel rosters as routine attrition and “dust ingress failures.” Power taps were “balancing work,” never theft. Miroslava’s people spoke of their home in sideways phrases, “down the spine,” “past the dead fans, before the echo turns”, because naming it clean and straight was an invitation for someone with a badge and a tablet to come make the numbers match, to sand their lives off the map with a few keystrokes and a compliance notice.
Deeper still ran the alien channels, the core taboo threaded under every bolt and bracket. Any diagnostic ping that brushed raw, untranslated strata made Zoran’s gallery bloom with sharp, hungry sigils, auto‑tagging origin nodes as “xeno‑reactive vectors” before security scripts began to triangulate. Training vids looped slick simulations of crews sublimated into mist by invisible fields when they “tampered,” hazard glyphs blooming like flowers around their screaming outlines. The old shaft bosses just snorted at the theatrics, muttering that real death never looked so pretty. Everyone knew what followed a flagged access attempt wasn’t instant vaporization but a slower suffocation: badge credentials going quietly dead in the turnstiles, work orders rerouted away from your name, then a discreet escort to Irina’s deeper corridors on “precautionary observation.” People said no one walked back out through those inner cryo doors with the same eyes. Or at all.
In Sokolov’s hall, Sergei mouths the same phrases to angry delegations letting the jargon roll out smooth as worn prayer. Miners nod, not from belief but from shared translation. Everyone has their own quiet ledger of forbidden gaps: hidden bunks, shadow kitchens, ghost conduits. The only real question is which of them you’ll damn yourself to protect.
Miroslava hunches over a corroded junction box in a half-mapped corridor, boots braced in the gummy grit where lubricants and dust have congealed. The overhead strips here strobe on a slow, nauseous cycle, throwing her tools into alternating shadow and glare. She balances the cracked tablet on one knee, thumb smoothing the spiderweb fracture across its surface, and begins dictating in the stiff cadence Irina’s clerks have trained into everyone.
“Node J‑seven‑alpha. Voltage at point of contact: three‑one‑two nominal. Thermal creep within tolerated gradient. Visible corrosion localized to legacy human couplers. Alien substrate: no observable deformation. Recommend… deferred replacement, one shift window.”
Her accent flattens on the technical lingo, vowels clipped, consonants hard. She lists component IDs, tolerance bands, stress factors in numbers and codes that file clean into medical-administration and Zoran’s telemetry both. Each phrase is a little brick in the wall of “normal operations,” exactly the kind of bloodless certainty the clerks want to see scroll past their tired eyes.
She does not mention the third conduit nested behind the junction’s faceplate, the one that doesn’t exist in any corporate schema. To the tablet she says, “Auxiliary relay: inactive, sealed,” while her fingers, moving below the camera’s sightline, finish tightening the improvised coupler she welded from scavenged brackets and a slice of alien conduit sheath.
Official records show the line terminating against a dead bulkhead three meters back. In Miroslava’s pocket, a thin paper sketchbook (contraband as any gun) carries the truth in smeared graphite and coolant stains. In her drawing the conduit bends like a living root, curving down through cross‑hatched walls and question‑mark spaces, diving toward the unlabeled cavity she knows as home.
She’s mapped it from memory: “down the spine,” past a pair of dead circulation fans, then along the place where your footsteps stop echoing and the air tastes of boiled grain and cheap soap. Every time she extends the line, another risk sprouts, another place Zoran’s scripts might someday notice a discrepancy between planned load and actual draw.
“Work complete,” she finishes, letting a trace of fatigue roughen her voice to match her file profile. “No xeno‑reactive anomalies. Logging out.”
She taps the submit icon with a knuckle scarred by old acid burns and waits for the tablet’s connection light to flicker green. A brief link to the distant servers that tally who lives on how much kilowatt. When it does, she feels the usual pinch of panic, the moment where some hidden algorithm might decide the lies nested in her clean numbers add up to a pattern.
Nothing happens. The corridor remains a forgotten throat of metal, humming faintly with redirected current.
Behind the open junction, the unregistered conduit thrums with a shy, stolen life, a trickle only. It isn’t enough to light a whole warren, not yet. But it will keep one more heater coil glowing through ration curfew, one more air scrubber cycling a little stronger than Zoran’s graphs predict.
Miroslava closes the box, seals its latches with an official hiss, and chalks a private symbol on the inside lip before it shuts. A crooked root curling downward. On any future inspection cam, it will just look like another maintenance scrawl. For her people “near Docking Spindle East,” “below the tram noise,” it marks a new vein tapped, another invisible thread binding the illegal shaft to the sanctioned ring.
She shoulders her kit and steps back into the half‑light, already composing the next lie in Irina’s approved syntax, another small, careful cut against the hand that owns their air.
At the next sensor hub, where three corridors knotted around a fat bundle of cabling, she popped the access shroud and made a show of wrestling with a stuck latch, just in case some distant cam happened to be taking an interest. Inside, the array cluster blinked a steady corporate blue. She jacked in, thumbed through calibration menus, and let her breath slow.
“Routine sweep alignment,” she dictated for the log, eyes on the tablet, hands on the manual toggles. On-screen, neat cones of coverage painted themselves across a schematic of the junction. With two extra taps, one cone kinked three degrees off nominal, its edge now skimming past the narrow service notch where a stolen feeder line slipped under a “no‑access” floorplate.
“Minor drift corrected to within tolerance,” she added, saving the profile. Zoran’s scripts would see clean numbers, the variance lost in the usual thermal noise.
Three meters down, in a dead-end culvert that smelled of rust and old sweat, she worked faster. A rust-flaked panel hid a mess of mixed human and alien metal. She cracked it, muttering curses in broad dialect about “xeno stone” and “cheap bolts,” for any watching mic, while her real focus narrowed to the fat live bus running across the back.
She clipped on an unlogged bypass bracket: two scavenged clamps, a shaved-down alien contact ring, and a length of insulated cable braided with someone’s old ribbon charm. The bracket hugged the bus with deceptive delicacy, bleeding off a slow, steady sip each cycle. Not enough to spike draw curves, just enough that M‑13’s load meter would breathe a little easier.
On the tablet she recorded, “Panel corrosion addressed. No unauthorized junctions observed. Line integrity verified.” Behind the metal, the new vein of power began its quiet drip toward the warrens, a ghost entry in a ledger that would never reach Sokolov’s hall.
Down in the warrens, that invisible trickle resolves into small miracles: a tired extra glow‑strip wired above the communal cookpot so the stew can simmer past curfew, a battered gravity pad under a stack of bunks that doesn’t cough out and leave sleepers drifting into bulkheads. Condensation beads on the ceiling instead of freezing in corners; someone’s grandfather breathes a little easier without seeing his own breath fog.
Parents drill their kids like militia. When the patrol’s boots start echoing down the shaft, little bodies snap to their marks by the hatch, faces scrubbed, voices bright.
“Safety first, for profit’s worth: report all faults, avoid all hurt,” they chirp in clean corporate cadence.
The instant the armor clank fades, their song collapses into low, sing‑song Slavic: crooked rhymes about hungry vents that eat inspectors, about kind ghosts in the pipes who steal back warmth and air from “up‑ring thieves.” One boy taps the glowing strip with reverence, whispering the nickname they’ve given Miroslava (root‑witch, wire‑mama) half joke, half prayer.
No one corrects him. In M‑13, survival runs on such stories as much as on stolen watts.
In the Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, Sergei leans back while a delegation from M‑13 stumble through a petition for extra filters, voices hoarse, signatures on the slate jagged from sleepless hands. Ration graphs float above his desk in cool corporate blue; he squints at them with a practiced wince.
“Capacity already at redline,” he says, letting his tone carry just enough weary sympathy to travel across the hall. A few nearby shift bosses glance over, catching the performance as he stamps the request: “Denied : atmospheric allocation exceeded.” The denial will echo down-shaft as proof that his hands are tied like everyone else’s.
Later, with the outer lights dimmed and clerks gone, he scrolls deeper into the inventory ledger, past the clean columns Irina’s auditors favor, to a cluttered subpage no one bothers with during day cycle. There, a pallet of mask cartridges is flagged as “impact‑damaged in transit, slated for parts recovery.” Half of them merely scuffed, still good for a few more shifts in bad air.
He ticks a box, recodes the lot as “scrap,” and routes it to a dead-end maintenance bay on a disused tram spur. No announcement, no memo. By next shift, a cousin on his quiet list will walk that crate down toward M‑13, where one particular family, vocal in meetings, but always urging patience at the critical moments, will find it waiting by their hatch like a blessing no one can ever officially thank him for.
On manifests and audit trails the Kovalev Ring reads airtight. Every lumen, every breath costed and recited in triplicate. But between Irina’s overworked clerks miskeying serials and Zoran’s scripts smoothing spikes into baselines, there’s slack enough for quiet edits. In those gaps people learn which faults to report and which to “forget,” which signatures to forge and which truths would mark them for airlock burial.
When the scheduled drill rolls across the ring, it comes wrapped in corporate phrasing: “Routine Contingency Validation, Tier Two.” On the deck of the Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, the phrase means something sharper. Status panes blossom across the main display like frost, each one a sector schematic with little living dots, heat signatures, badge pings, air-flow traces, trapped inside corridors about to slam shut.
“Lockdown sequence, series delta,” Zoran says, more to his implant than to the room. “Execute.”
The gallery lights dim half a tone as processors surge. Along the outer arc, his engineers murmur checks in clipped pidgin, eyes on their assigned slices of the ring. Tier by tier, bulkheads answer him: green icons flipping to amber, then red as they cycle closed.
Except one.
On the east-mining cross-spine, a set of blast doors above an unstable alien fault-line take a breath that isn’t in his script. Their status bar crawls, hesitates, jitters back a fraction. Telemetry strings flicker through his visual field (buffer overrun, command echo, something tagged deep as “substrate arbitration”) before smoothing to compliance. The doors slam home. On the master log, the variance compresses into a harmless two-digit value.
“Latency variance, within tolerance,” one of the junior techs reports automatically, reading the sanitized line as it scrolls past.
Zoran doesn’t answer. The hesitation didn’t ride the human systems. He’d felt it elsewhere: a soft, cool pressure along the metallic seam at his temple, as if some distant mass of logic he hadn’t called on slid its weight across the same rails as his command, testing fit.
He isolates the corridor’s feed, calls up raw signal traces. For three heartbeats, the alien-linked channels form a pattern he can’t parse, nonlinear spikes, recursive dips, then re-quantize into neat corporate blocks. His implant offers a suggested annotation: “environmental interference; recommend filter update.” He dismisses it with a blink.
“Run it again,” he says quietly, to no one in particular.
“Sir? Drill iteration complete,” another tech ventures.
“Not the drill.” Zoran tags the anomalous doors, locks the file behind his personal credentials. “Simulation loop, local node only. I want to see how it learns.”
The word hangs there, learns, just a shade off from the corporate-approved “adapts.” No one challenges him. In the corner of the gallery, beneath a transparent floor panel, the faint alien glyphs limn themselves in a dim, answering pulse, a heartbeat out of sync with the ring’s standard power rhythm.
His implant hums, a phantom taste of metal on his tongue. For a moment, he has the unnerving sense that he is not the only one watching the replay.
In a half-lit maintenance crawl three decks below any named corridor, Miroslava braces one boot against a sweating pipe and leans into a seam that shouldn’t exist. The bulkhead here is mostly alien, black, glass-smooth, overlaid with human patch plates and foam. Her lamp catches a hairline fracture she logged as “stable” last shift, now threaded with faintly luminescent filaments sinking into the crack like frost veins.
She snaps her patch kit open, thumb hovering over the micro-welder trigger. Before she can fire, the fracture flexes. Not with the jagged shudder of stress release, but with a slow, viscous motion, as if the material remembers a previous shape and is easing back into it. The crack pulls itself closed in a glassy ripple. Her pressure cuffs tick upward: 0.[^7] kPa gain, leak curve flattening clean.
On her wrist-slate, the automatic report stamps it as a transient thermal deviation, corrective action “none required.” Neat, believable. She stares one heartbeat too long, then deletes the anomaly tag she’d started. In her private log, the line for this segment stays blank.
“Next junction,” she mutters, shoving off down the crawl, moving faster than the checklist demands.
Between ore-cart departure calls and safety announcements, another voice ghosts through a main tram intercom, riding the same channel as the corporate jingle. “You are not, ” Natalya’s cadence, clipped military consonants undercut by miner slang. The line hard-cuts mid-syllable; the speaker pops, then resumes with, “…a valued asset in our Kovalev family.”
A dozen miners on the platform freeze a fraction, eyes flicking up to the battered grille, then sideways to one another. No one smiles. No one speaks. But the knowledge passes: someone has threaded a route through supposedly closed comm relays. Security’s not airtight.
In the Sokolov Resource Administration Hall overhead, Sergei pretends not to hear. He just frowns thoughtfully and lingers on a flashing sidebar: “unexplained signal noise. Source indeterminate.” He doesn’t clear the alert. He tags it private and locks it with his own passphrase.
In the warrens, a jury-rigged heater hums on power no one admits tapping, its casings warm with stolen current that shouldn’t exist on any ledger. The lights flicker exactly three times, agreed signal that someone has tripped a transient draw from an unregistered vein threaded through alien hull. Up in Irina’s cryomed archive, a cluster of anonymous psych flags pulse for that same window, sleep disturbances, derealization spikes, shared reports of “walls breathing”, before the system smooths them flat and auto-classifies the cluster as routine “environmental stress.”
After a sixteen-hour cycle triaging crushed ribs and filter-burned lungs, Irina scrolls the anonymized psych cluster again, overlays it on infrastructure feeds she should not access: lagging bulkheads, phantom power sips, ghost-broadcast timestamps, maintenance flags that clear themselves. The overlap is obscene. She tags the composite “Pattern Drift,” hesitates over the mandatory causal field, and, hand steady but jaw tight, leaves it deliberately blank.
The cost of living this way shows first in the bodies Irina catalogs: lung capacity shaved off year by year, bone density charts shifting too fast for age, stress markers that never reset to baseline. On morning rounds her tablet pings with familiar red and amber flags, each one a little worse than last quarter, each one tagged to a worker ID, a warren alias, a shift code. In her infirmary, “chronic fatigue” becomes a blanket code for what she knows is structural suffocation, but the forms have no field for that, only boxes for individual weakness and compliance with rest orders no one can afford to follow.
She listens to the same litany in different throats: “Just tired, doc. Just need stronger stim patch. I can still pull my hours.” Their pupils are wide from black-market boosters; their hands tremble even when they lie still. X-rays show microfractures spidering through ribs and femurs like hairline cracks in overstressed bulkheads. Early-onset cataracts from bad weld arcs. Hearts thickening from years of thin air and heavy gravity shifts. The station is re-writing their biology around quota.
Irina scrolls through archived medlogs from a decade back, overlays current graphs: the curve of decline steepens each year. Corporate templates tell her to tick “lifestyle risk factors” and “noncompliance with safety equipment.” There is no checkbox for “air rations cut to make quarterly targets,” no diagnostic code for “policy-induced organ failure.” So she writes what will be accepted and adds a private, encrypted note in her own shorthand: RING-PRESSURE, PHASE 3.
Sometimes, when a miner’s lungs finally give out in their thirties, or a refugee child’s growth plates close too early from chronic under-oxygenation, she stands alone in the cryo archive’s half-light and watches frost curl along old pod seams. The cold hums in her bones like distant engines. She files another death as “complications of pre-existing condition,” then locks the true pattern away with the others, a ledger of slow suffocation that no one in corporate ever has to sign.
In the warrens of M-13, Miroslava’s off-hours look like another shift: patching jury-rigged exchangers, tracing condensation leaks with a headache that never fully fades. She crouches on a rattling catwalk while a torn heat wrap spits sparks, palm pressed to the pipe to feel where the temperature drops. “Is like old man’s arteries,” she mutters, half to herself, half to the teenage runner holding the lamp. “Clog here, everything downshaft get cold.”
Her fingers twitch even around a tin mug of thin soup, sketching invisible schematics in the air while elders joke too loudly about “engineer’s curse” to hide the way they watch her for signs of collapse. Someone tops off the heater with a handful of illicit fuel pellets; no one asks from which tram crate they fell. Children hop between scuffed deck plates, trading rhymes about which bulkheads to avoid and how many breaths you owe corporate for a stolen kilowatt. At lights-dim, as the hum of siphoned power dips and stabilizes, Miroslava lies awake counting microvibrations in the walls, mapping every shudder to a fault line only she believes is moving.
In the Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, Sergei lingers a beat too long by the memorial wall, thumb smoothing a crease in the cheap laminate before he clips the new strip into place. The brief murmur of the crowd swells, then flattens as he intones the standard words about sacrifice and solidarity, his cadence practiced enough to sound sincere.
He watches through lowered lashes: the widow who doesn’t cry, just stares at the tramline; the shift-mate who flinches whenever a cam irises; the young cousin whose jaw sets like he’s memorizing an enemy. Faces, postures, filed against roster IDs.
Back in his glass box, the ritual shrinks to numbers. A few keystrokes: the dead man’s air and water credits cascade into new columns: most to the registered dependents, a quiet sliver detoured into off-ledger “contingency” funds. That pool will buy extra filters for one family, a delay in relocation for another, a favor from a gang foreman who suddenly finds a safety violation overlooked. On another screen he nudges shift assignments, scattering the loudest mourners onto opposite rotations, ensuring their grief never quite has time to solidify into a meeting.
In the Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, that same death is reduced to a flicker in a statistics column: one red marker drifting into a green band labeled “acceptable loss variance.” Zoran blinks away the alert, approving a revised power-routing algorithm that trims two, then quietly three percent off safety margins in overworked shafts, his implant feeding sleek projections of improved ore yield and bonus tiers. When a junior tech mutters about compounded failure probabilities, he highlights the model’s confidence intervals, overlays corporate tolerance thresholds, and moves on, tagging the deviation as “process refinement” instead of structural warning, another micro-risk buried under optimized throughput.
Sleep never comes clean; it’s always bargain, never gift. She rubs at the old burn scars on her wrist, feeling phantom heat where alien conduits once arced. Somewhere above, a tram screams past, vibration translating through the hull into a stress-map only she can hear. By the time she reaches the hatch, her headache has already spiked into decision.
The anomaly flag takes her out past the familiar hum of M-13 into a stretch of tunnel where the lighting shifts from patched orange to cold corporate white, then abruptly dies altogether. The last strip flickers once, like an eye rolling back, and goes dead.
Miroslava stands still until the afterimage drains from her vision. “Tak,” she mutters under her breath, gloved thumb finding the dimmer on her pad. She kills its brightness down to a ghost-glow, enough to keep from cracking her head, not enough to blow her night eyes, and clips it to her collar, lens turned toward her chest so the light spills sideways.
She walks by feel more than sight. The usual painted arrows and numeric stencils have worn to ghosts under grime, but the old maintenance tags are still there: shallow cross-hatch marks and tiny notches cut where panel meets bulkhead, a code passed down foreman to apprentice, not in any corporate manual. Her fingertips trace them like prayer beads: three short scratches for a coolant loop, chevron for power spine, the double-dot that means hidden bypass.
Her boots scuff over uneven deck plating; somewhere overhead a tram rolls by, vibration dull through the alien mass. Here the air tastes thinner, cold edge under the metallic tang, as if the scrubbers don’t quite bother with this stretch. She pulls her collar up, more habit than insulation.
At the flagged coordinates, the tunnel narrows, ceiling lowering until she has to hunch. The bulkheads show hairline fractures feathering out from a central seam where human steel meets the dark, polished alien surface beneath. Someone’s slapped a yellow hazard stencil over it years ago, half-peeled and curling.
The access hatch at the fault-line junction should open on a standard junction box; instead, she finds it buckled inward, metal bowed like something pressed from the other side. The frame is warped, sealing pins sheared. A micro-quake, maybe, but the pattern of deformation is wrong: no radial buckling from a single shock, more like slow, deliberate pressure.
She sets her palm flat against the cold metal. The panel breathes out against her skin: stale, colder air, faint whiff of long-dried coolant and dust that never rode station circulation. No hum of live cabling beyond, no standard junction resonance. Just a dead, hollow quiet that makes the hair along her arms lift.
Her pad pings a low-priority safety warning. Structural variance outside tolerance, recommend reporting to supervisory. She snorts softly and mutes it. If she reports, Zajcev’s people will seal the line and she’ll never see what tripped the anomaly in the first place.
“Sorry, kapitan,” she whispers, more to the metal than to him. “I look first. Then maybe I tell.”
She unclips a flathead, works it into the bent seam, and levers. The hatch groans, protesting, flaking rust from human welds that never properly bit into the alien edge. After a minute of careful prying and one sharp curse as the bar slips and skins her knuckles, the deformed panel shifts enough to open a hand’s breadth.
From inside, the cold deepens. Not vacuum but old, uncirculated air, carrying a faint, almost sweet chemical note that doesn’t belong to any corporate sealant she knows. Her headache, always there like low static, sharpens behind her eyes.
“Fault-line, my ass,” she says, voice barely above breath. “You’re hiding something.”
She threads her fingers into the gap, feeling the sharp, torn metal, and starts to widen it, slow, careful, listening for the telltale creak that means the whole assembly wants to let go. The corridor around her feels narrower with every centimeter she wins, the dark pressing close, as if the ring itself is holding its breath to see whether she dares to crawl inside.
She shrugs her tool sling off one shoulder, lets it slide down to her hips, then eases it ahead of her through the opening. The gap is narrower than it looked. Metal ribs rake along her coveralls with a teeth-on-edge squeal; loose flakes of paint and insulation dust sift down into her hair and the back of her collar, cold and itchy against sweat.
She goes in on elbows and knees at first, then on forearms and toes when the ceiling drops, spine bowed, cheek scraping condensation off the upper plate. Each breath fogs the metal a handspan from her face. After three body-lengths the tunnel flattens further, forcing her to shove the kit in front with the soles of her boots, inchworming after it.
Somewhere in the constriction, gravity slips sideways by a few degrees. Her inner ear complains. It feels like the floor wants to roll out from under her toward the left bulkhead, like she’s crawling along the inside of a bent wheel. Her muscles overcompensate, shoulders tightening as she fights not to lean.
Her pad, clipped low on her chest, vibrates once. She cranes her chin down far enough to see its edge flashing amber against her sternum. Orientation error, then a soft chime and the border flips to solid red: UNMAPPED SEGMENT. No coordinate lock. No maintenance overlay. Just a blank gray void where her path should be.
“Of course,” she breathes, bitter amusement threading the word. “Because why would map match tunnel, da?”
She pushes on anyway, counting ribs under her palms, thirty-two, thirty-three, until the pressure ahead suddenly gives way. The metal lip vanishes under her hands and she pitches forward, catching herself with a grunt on mesh that isn’t standard deck plate. The gravity skew lurches again, then settles, leaving her stomach a half-second behind.
She stays on all fours for a moment, head low, listening. No tram rumble. No familiar pump thrum. Just a low, unfamiliar vibration under the grating, like distant machinery running out of sync. Her heartbeat thuds loud in her ears as the realization clicks into place: by every corporate record she’s ever pulled, there should be nothing here at all.
Her first instinct is to tag the place and crawl the hell back to a mapped corridor, let some supervisor sign off on a closure order and pretend none of this exists. But the anomaly readout keeps chiming in her ear like a child tugging a sleeve. She swallows down the urge to bolt, forces her breathing into slow counts, and thumbs through her instruments instead.
The multimeter’s graph crawls and snaps, jitter-dancing between overload and dead zero as if it’s biting into two separate grids at once. Her phase tracer projects not clean station-standard sine waves but tight, rotating spirals that refuse to settle into any stable pattern.
“Ty chto, izdevayesh’sya?” she mutters at the gear, knuckles rapping the casing. The plastic stings her already-burned fingers. The readouts don’t settle. If anything, the numbers grow more spiteful.
Voltage vectors insist the strongest potential is bleeding in from a direction that, on her pad, is nothing but solid alien hull and blank corporate gray. No junctions, no trunks, no tagged equipment: just “non-interactive substrate.”
The noise floor rides high and ugly, a narrow-band hum right on the edge of hearing. It crawls up her jaw, sets the fillings in her molars buzzing, a bone-deep vibration that makes her want to grind her teeth until they crack.
She inches along the gradient to its source: a drooping conduit trunk, corporate stencil half-eaten by rust and alien frost. Expecting the usual cheap copper snakepit, she scores a cautious window with her cutter, pries it back: and freezes. No bundled cable, no numbered jackets. Instead: a honeycomb of black-glass threads nested in impossibly tight hex cells, every curve slipping sideways from Euclid, like her eyes keep trying to snap to right angles that aren’t there. The filaments drink her worklight into their depths, returning only a skin of almost-color at the edge of human sight. Her meter, waved close, climbs past any sane range, hiccups, then collapses to a flat horizon, as if the numbers themselves refuse to testify.
For a long breath she just crouches there, light held steady, fighting the urge to slap the panel shut, mark it “inaccessible,” and crawl away pretending this is some other engineer’s headache. Then a distant tremor ripples through the ring; the honeycomb flexes almost imperceptibly. Not a tired sag but a smooth, wave-like tightening, like muscle under skin bracing to a touch. The hum strokes her eardrums in a cadence too regular to be noise, and the geometry of the “fault-line” suddenly reorders in her engineer’s brain: this isn’t a break, it’s a junction. Not shattered rock they’ve bolted through, but a live vein of intention, a buried control spine the corporation has been nailing brackets into as if it were just more dead hull.
She flicks her thumb against the tablet bezel, cycling views, thermal, structural, power routing, then full systems integration, until the gesture is automatic and her temper’s riding just under her skin.
Each new overlay settles like dirty glass over the same bullshit picture: a polite ghost of the shaft she’s standing in, conduits washed out to corporate gray, little iconography tombstones along the walls declaring “NO ACTIVE LINES,” “PASSIVE DEBRIS,” “NON-CRITICAL SUBSTRATE.” Flow traces read dead flat. Monitoring flags: dormant. Hazard tags: “structural nuisance, low priority.”
Her jaw ticks. The multimeter hooked to her belt is still hissing in tight bursts, numbers spiking red whenever she angles closer to the alien honeycomb, but on the pad everything’s a morgue. She backs out, calls up archived revisions, fingers tapping in a sharp, irritated rhythm. Same schematic six months ago. Same a year. Same three years back, right after they opened this sector.
Nobody ever updated. Or somebody updated very carefully.
“Konchiny,” she breathes, not quite loud enough to kick an echo down the shaft. This isn’t some lazy clerk forgetting to tick a box. This is a page scrubbed and re-posted over and over, all anomalies sanded down to “nothing to see here.”
She digs deeper. Engineering notes: boilerplate. “Zone classified: buffer. Load-bearing only. No install rights.” Safety bulletins: “Micro-quake risk; limit dwell time.” No mention of live power. No mention of alien interface. Just enough red ink to make supervisors herd crews through fast, heads down, overtime high, signatures sloppy.
The instruments in her hands are screaming one thing; the sanctioned reality in her palm insists on another. The dissonance rasps through her like a misaligned pump impeller. Screens lie sometimes: cheap sensors, bad calibration, she’s seen it. But this isn’t noise in the data. This is someone wrapping a blindfold around the whole damned ring and calling it standard procedure.
She kills the safety filters, punches in an override string she’s not supposed to know, and the tablet’s polite gray schematics shudder, then slough off like old paint. Underneath, the ring shows its real circulatory system. Raw telemetry spills across the display: hair-thin filaments of charge and pressure differentials sketching themselves through the “dead” buffer zone, jagged and too clean to be artifact. Currents bloom in false color (icy blues and hard amber) threading the corridor walls in a mesh that pulses in perfect counterpoint to the main life-support beat she carries in her bones from a lifetime of listening to pumps.
The empty shaft isn’t empty at all; it’s a buried bypass spine. She watches flow-vectors jump corporate metering nodes like smugglers slipping past a checkpoint, diving into the alien honeycomb and reappearing downstream inside primary trunks. Routing tables update in microscopic script, lines of code insisting “NULL PATH” even as volumes surge toward familiar sector tags: overcrowded habitation clusters, undocumented add-ons, M-13’s unregistered load signature ghosting in along the edge. Someone has stitched a secret systems umbilical through the alien substrate, feeding air and water to people the official maps pretend aren’t there.
She follows one filament, then another, fingertip hovering a hair above the glass as the path dives under metered junctions like a rat through wall-void, slipping past every sanctioned choke-point. Downstream, it surfaces clean inside a life-support trunk with no accounting tick, no debit against any family’s breath or liters. The ledger says vacuum; the lattice is moving air like a second, secret lung.
Whoever burned this route into the alien bone did it with intent and patience, braiding power and oxygen through gaps the corporate software literally refuses to see. An invisible artery threaded under quota gates and safety locks, humming right beneath the boots of miners told they’re one overdue shift from losing their air. And never told the hull itself is cheating on their behalf.
It snaps into brutal alignment: “buffer” stamp that let planners cram overheating exchangers against raw alien bone, reroute half-dead crews through here whenever another shaft flagged yellow, bury real-time alarms under phrases like “elevated fatigue.” They’ve been pushing flesh hardest exactly where the most fragile, undocumented splice between human rigs and alien substrate runs naked. No shielding, no acknowledgment, just meat over a live fault.
Mama’s hands on a ration valve. Old man Goran dropping in Shaft K-7, eyes wide, lips blue while she checked a box that said “acceptable load.” Names, not incident numbers, stampede up through her stomach. The lattice glows steady beneath all that paper death, proof that someone high signed off on bleeding people out along a vein they knew was vital and lied anyway.
She pages down through sub-attachments and revision notes, jaw tightening. The primary “contained anomaly” docket blossoms into a branching tree of linked forms: thermal drift justifications, fatigue trend analyses, micro-quake reassessments. All of it symmetrically neat, as if a machine had combed the mess of real time into a story you could sign your name under without losing sleep.
Zoran’s block sits at the top like a keystone. Raw logs from his implant flash for a second: dense strings of telemetry reduced to a single, confident summary: deviation localized, predictive models stable, no cascading vectors. His annotation carries that crisp, optimized cadence she’s heard in his briefings: “Substrate echo corresponds to prior minor events. Recommend classification as background anomaly; no immediate remediation required.” The green tag beside it isn’t just authorization; it’s performance metric, proof to corporate that their golden engineer can stare into alien noise and call it harmless.
Beneath, Irina’s contribution slots in with surgical precision. There’s a risk assessment keyed to worker vitals from the test shifts run after the spike: elevated stress markers, slight uptick in reported disorientation, one fainting incident in a hauler bay. Each bullet is paired with a mitigation note: hydration protocols reinforced, optional counseling offered, follow-up scheduled. At the bottom: “No evidence of emergent pathology attributable to localized anomaly. Recommend continued monitoring within standard occupational parameters.” The phrasing is so smooth Miroslava almost doesn’t notice the missing words: no insistence, no demand for isolation, just a quiet endorsement that nothing here justifies slowing the drills.
Sergei’s file is last. His handwriting font is that same broad, affable scrawl he puts on ration chits and condolence postings. “Teams report some discomfort but no sustained loss of capacity,” it reads. “With proper rotation and clear communication, we expect workers to adapt. Disruption to output should remain minimal.” Two sentences, and the whole corridor becomes a footnote in his ongoing sermon about miner toughness.
Taken together, the three statements interlock like a pressure seal. Technical, medical, administrative: a perfect ring of agreement, signed and time-stamped, encasing the anomaly in comforting bureaucratic language. Looking at it now, knowing what hums beneath her boots, Miroslava feels like she’s staring at an autopsy report that calls a crushed ribcage “non-fatal bruising” because the heart happened to keep beating for a few more minutes.
Every line was written by someone trusted to say when enough is too much. Every signature turned a live, snarling fault into a tidy, negligible deviation. And because the loop closed so cleanly, no one down in M-13 ever saw more than the memo that followed: “Local conditions stable. Resume scheduled operations.”
She drags in the raw environmental feeds from that week, kills the auto-smoothing, and lets the noise sit naked on her display. Line by line, she stacks them against the lattice schematic ghosting in her vision. There it is, clear as bruise: a thin, persistent ache in the numbers. Particulate counts riding a few hairs above baseline. Micro-spikes in CO₂, marginal O₂ dips that recover just fast enough to dodge red. Heart-rate surges from the crew wearables, clustered exactly where the alien grid under her feet flares hottest.
Each flag gets choked to the same verdict tag: within corporate tolerance. “Short-term adaptation response,” the algorithm notes, and she watches whole blocks of yellow alerts fade to green after a scheduled review interval, no human comments added. On the console, the corridor sits in comfortable amber, a “moderate strain” zone wrapped in soft gradients and statistical confidence bands.
Under her boots, the lattice thrums like a live artery misfiled as scar tissue. The gap between map and metal claws at her. Someone had all this in front of them. Someone looked straight at the ache and decided it was acceptable.
She digs deeper, peeling back filter menus until the raw roster data sits exposed. Shift IDs, biometrics hashes, reprimand flags. Numbers stacked like bones. Buried mid-column is the transfer that has been itching at her since she saw the docket header: a disciplinary hop from M-13, stamped in Sergei’s clipped, almost bored shorthand. “Minor insubordination. Redirect to high-need maintenance zone; consider for reinstatement after evaluation.” High-need, she notes, not high-risk.
The name unlocks the face. Thin shoulders swallowed by an oversized work jacket, nervous fingers smoothing tape on a cracked conduit panel. The kid had cradled the diagnostic wand she’d slipped him like contraband, eyes too bright, too eager to please. “I earn my way back, eh, engineer?” he’d joked, half-shy, in that sing-song M-13 cadence. A stupid little grin, like the transfer was a test he could ace if he just kept his head down and did the dirty shifts.
Corporate maps tagged his previous post as marginal strain, one notch above “comfort zone.” The reassignment drops him straight into this corridor, this officially harmless scar in the hull, where the anomaly docket says nothing is alive enough to hurt anyone. The job code on his new schedule is bland: localized seal inspection, support to senior tech. No mention that the line crews were ordered to “push through the discomfort and finish” directly over a humming fault-line the paperwork refuses to name.
On the schematic hovering next to the roster, his new waypoint icon sits almost exactly where the alien lattice flares brightest. Someone had matched a “teachable” infraction to a spot the algorithms classified as background noise and the administrators called “good for discipline.” One keystroke from Sergei, one quiet redirect, and the kid went from breathing thin but honest M-13 air to walking the edge of a live, lying system that everyone with a signature swore was safe.
The medical overlay shows a follow-up that never really was: Irina’s team logging a brief flare in stress markers from the reassigned crew, then a clean, confident plateau of “no further anomalies recorded.” No clinic visit slot, no incident note tied to a body: just a statistical ripple smoothed flat. The next time his identifier surfaces, it’s as a casualty token folded into a bulk “maintenance mishap” digest, routed past Zoran for structural trend analysis and back through Sergei’s terminal for compensation calculus and next-of-kin ration adjustment. Down in M-13, his face ended up on the memorial wall with a burned-out lamp and a strip of conduit tape; up here, he is a resolved ticket, a closed workflow, a sanitized blip that helped justify keeping the corridor open and the drills running.
Heat thrums up her bones, humming answer to a question none of them bothered to ask. Their names sit on the docket trail like seals of consent, decor on a kill order written in probabilities and tolerances. Miroslava flexes her burned fingers, feels the lattice answer again, and understands: if the ring will have a guardian, it will not be one appointed from above.
She works fast because hesitation is where systems kill you. Fingers move in tight, economical arcs over the scavenged diagnostic pad jacked into an unauthorized junction box wedged behind a nest of sanctioned wiring. Sweat itches under her collar where the insulation foam scrapes her neck; she ignores it, thumbs tapping out bypass strings in a rough, syncopated rhythm. The pad’s cracked display coughs up the local grid in choppy layers until the air-scrubber loop feeding M-13 resolves: a red-lined artery veining off the main trunk, choking on particulate flags and “non-critical” alerts that have sat unresolved for months.
Non-critical, she thinks, as if coughing children and old men with lungs full of dust are a rounding error.
Miroslava peels back the corporate veneer: glossy UI, friendly icons, the illusion of control. Under it lies the skeleton: raw addresses, legacy calls, mismatched firmware patches from three different contractors. She opens a hidden console layer she should not have, a maintenance backdoor she found years ago and never reported, and starts prying. The standard safety checks complain in neat, blinking text about authorization scopes and risk thresholds; she ribs them out of the way one by one, spoofing signatures with stolen admin tokens scavenged from dumps and half-remembered logins breathed to her in confidence by drunk techs.
The junction panel under her boots ticks as relays cycle, a nervous heartbeat. She digs past the human routing tables until the signal map fuzzes, resolution slipping where it touches alien substrate. There (faint, like phosphorescence seen through dirty water) the filaments she has learned to feel more than read. She threads a narrow command pathway down into that glow, an ugly splice of maintenance script, gray-market debugging tools, and half-understood glyph-addresses she painstakingly brute-forced from anomalous log noise.
Any corporate auditor seeing this would tag it as sabotage, neuromancy, madness. The implant in some upper-ring captain’s skull would flash red. Irina would get a sealed file and a request for full-body imaging “for the good of the station.” At best, they would space her clean and quick as an example. At worst, they would cut her open to see how far the alien current had already crawled inside.
The pad stutters once as her code bites, then the status graph snaps over, lines replotting in a new geometry that isn’t in any manual. Under her boots, the deck’s vibration drops half a tone, a subsonic chord sliding into alignment. Somewhere below, dampers that always groaned against load suddenly ride it smooth.
The alien lattice doesn’t balk, doesn’t trip any of the polite red thresholds the corporate layer expects. It just drinks. Rerouted amperage and pressure spill into its buried veins; on her improvised diagnostic overlay, those half-mapped conduits flare from background noise to sharp relief, pale arcs brightening like muscle fibers under stim. She nudges the flow higher, waiting for the first angry bark of a watchdog daemon. Nothing. Just a deepening thrum and a slow, coherent rebalancing as ghost channels wake and start carrying what the official pipes cannot.
At the edge of M-13’s loop, pressure deltas jump hard enough to make the software flinch, then settle into a flat, impossible plateau. The flow trace goes glassy, perfect laminar throughput, no turbulence, no backwash, washing downline with clinical, indifferent force. Rust-scabbed duct walls flex against the change, then crackle as scale and congealed condensate shear away in sheets. Old filters, long past any sane replacement date, register load spikes that should have shredded them; instead, their resistance curves smooth as if something upstream has slipped around the crud, unkinking every choke point at once.
Particulate counters begin to fall. Then they plunge. Months of accumulated dust, oil mist, and combustion grit vanish from the feed, not burned off, not flushed to waste, simply gone: erased from the sensor profile as though excised from reality. Her display blooms green, not in jittery fluctuations but in a steady, rolling transition, compartment after compartment tipping over into “nominal” with machine-serene finality.
It feels wrong. It feels like cheating. It feels, to the animal part of her brain that has lived under bad air since childhood, like crouching beside a sleeping giant and prodding its flank, only to feel it turn just enough to shelter you from the wind.
The corporate wrapper dutifully logs a minor “transient anomaly,” already flagging it for compression and archival. No billing events trigger, no ration tallies adjust. According to their meters, M-13 is still choking politely on its allotted trickle. According to the thing cradling their infrastructure from below, one tiny corner of the ring just inhaled.
In M-13, the numbers come back wrong in all the right ways. CO₂ plummets, volatile residues flatline, velocity curves smooth out across end-of-line cubbies that never used to get more than a sour backdraft. Patchwork grav still hiccups (cups drift, then thunk back down) but when the air rolls, it rolls clean. Scrubbers that used to wheeze like dying lungs stop cavitating and fall into a deep, even draw, gulping full-volume cycles without screaming for maintenance. On some upper rack, a kid sits up too fast, hacking in surprise at how thin the metal tang has gone; two bunks over, an old woman realizes her chest isn’t grinding and blinks at the absence of that soft, perpetual alarm whine.
On the corporate dashboard that should mirror her view, barely a ripple. Master meters twitch inside tolerance bands; ration daemons purr, convinced the same stingy drip still feeds the warrens. She drops into raw trace and there it is, obscene in its simplicity: the sanctioned loop is a pinched capillary skimming the edge of a vast, self-pumping lung the alien substrate keeps cycling, indifferent. Central has clamped a single valve and wrapped it in sermons about limits, trusting no one would ever get fingers on the main line.
It hits like a schematic snapping into focus. All the “temporary” cuts, the sermons about red dwarfs and hard limits, the DENIED stamps because “grid can’t support more”: every excuse has been riding a crust of capacity thin as rust on a pressure skin. Beneath, a lung big enough to purge half the ring in one exhale sits leashed and muzzled. Scarcity isn’t physics; it’s policy. Calibrated hunger, a manufactured choke that keeps miners obedient and refugees clawing each other in the dark. Her hack is a pinprick beside that hoarded ocean, but it proves the lie, and the realization burns hotter than the lattice humming under her boots, hotter than any reactor she’s ever nursed on the edge of failure.
The ghost current doesn’t just surge; it thickens, like a hidden vein swelling under the metal skin of the Ring.
She feathers the improvised throttle (two scavenged couplers, a misregistered sensor, and a diagnostic line no one was supposed to bridge this way) and the alien lattice answers. Not with a neat, engineer’s response curve, but with a lurch, a shiver that ripples out of phase with every human metric she has.
Under the grated deck, the dark surface she’s learned to ignore wakes.
Faint glyphs bloom along the obsidian panel seams, not in their usual lazy drift but in a sharp, hungry sync with her injected signal. Lines rise out of the old etchings like caps of weld-arc, twist, and then re-settle into a pattern that is not hers and yet is. Her crude override rendered back at her in finer resolution, curves corrected, inefficiencies smoothed. It’s like watching a child scrawl copied by a master’s hand, same strokes, different understanding.
Her console jitters as the loop stabilizes. Flow rates jump. Noise falls away. On the board, it registers as a clean, narrow spike of efficiency where there should be jitter and dropouts. A miracle, if you believed in those.
She doesn’t. Miracles don’t look up at you.
Because that’s what it feels like: not a dumb substrate flexing under load, but something under the human scaffolding turning one lidless eye toward her, considering. The hair along her forearms lifts under the work suit; sweat itches between shoulder blades gone suddenly cold.
“Ne smotri tak,” she mutters to the deck on reflex (don’t look at me like that) and kills three auxiliary taps in a row, just to prove she can. The lattice obeys the command path, dutiful as any circuit; the glyphs ignore the gesture, flaring one fractional beat longer than they should before they gutter.
Then they’re gone. The light drains out of the alien seams, the symbols relaxing back into their habitual, unreadable geometry, flat and inert. The human diagnostics, blind to any of it, settle into a new equilibrium curve that would make a corporate efficiency auditor weep with joy: no anomalies, no alarms, just more throughput for less cost.
On paper, it’s perfect. In her bones, it’s wrong.
Noise is life in these systems, friction, loss, the stupid little stutters of cheap hardware on the verge of failure. This… smoothness feels like air that’s been sitting too long in a sealed room. Her patch is still in place, every bypass she soldered humming along the way it shouldn’t be allowed to. And yet the only sign is that spike: a thin, elegant finger raised in the middle of a flatline, daring anyone to notice.
No one at Central will. Their dashboards don’t show the layer that just answered her. They’ll see numbers inside tolerance, load obeying quotas, a minor maintenance blip in a forgotten shaft.
She sees the echo of her own signal, copied and improved by something that was never meant to acknowledge her at all.
For a heartbeat, she hesitates. Hand hovering over the manual break on the patch, fighting the sane impulse to cut and run. If the lattice pays this much attention to a hacked scrubber loop, what happens when someone like Zoran starts shoving real commands through on purpose? What happens if she keeps talking back?
The conduit under her boots thrums like a distant engine room, steady and patient. The ghost current has already moved on, folding itself into the Ring’s deeper breathing, but a residue of that regard lingers in her nerves, a prickling sense that she has knocked on a door and it has quietly unlocked on the other side.
She retracts her tools with slow, deliberate motions, logging nothing, altering nothing in the official trail. Above her, M‑13 inhales clean, unmetered air. Below, the alien lattice waits, unreadable and now, terrifyingly, aware that someone up here knows where the valve really is.
The sync hits her body like feedback off a live bus. Her pulse stutters into the same off-beat cadence as that brief flare, ventricles trying to march to a rhythm that isn’t quite human timing. For an instant she can almost see him: Zoran in his polished exosuit, pupils blown wide and unfocused as the implant floods his cortex with cross‑section views and risk curves, living half a breath ahead of everyone else because the Ring whispers in his ear.
She’s spat on those stories in mess‑hall arguments, engineers who come to prefer the machine’s smooth logic to their own dirty instincts, who’d rather feel load graphs than lungs, but now a jagged, unwilling sympathy crawls under her ribs. If a crude piggyback on one forgotten loop can do this to her, what does a full neural jack feel like? How long before your own heartbeat sounds like background noise?
Whatever he chases in those heightened states, she’s brushed the edge of it with no sanctioned silicon, only salvaged couplers and stolen diagnostics strung in a forbidden topology the manuals don’t even have words for.
Instinct yanks her hand back. She slams the patch closed, snapping relays in a hard sequence, yanking the improvised feed out of the lattice and forcing the conduit back into its neat, lying, documented configuration. On the board, M‑13’s scrubbers sag into their usual, anemic draw off the official grid: acceptable inefficiency, certified shortage, all according to sermon. But the sensation doesn’t drain with the current.
If anything, the room feels thinner, stretched. The metal skin of the Ring has lost a layer of opacity; she can’t quite convince herself it’s just bulkhead and duct anymore. Even with her tools powered down and stowed, a residual overlay hangs behind her eyelids, a ghost schematic burned into her vision that refuses to blink away, humming at the edge of thought.
Every tramline she’s ridden, every filter stack she’s signed off on, redraws itself in her head as a palimpsest: corporate overlay up top, all quotas and red zones, and below that a living circulation the forms pretend not to see. She can almost hear Sergei’s careful phrases about “allocation pressure” crack and splinter against it. Putting any of this into a maintenance log would be like confessing blasphemy in the margin of a sermon. The boilerplate phrases, “within tolerance,” “recommend scheduled review”, stick to her teeth. Neutrality isn’t ignorance anymore; it would be active collusion, and her fingers twitch at the thought of typing the lie.
It hits with a weight that’s more than thought, like extra gravity settling into her bones. Quotas, ration charts, Sergei’s careful sermons in the hall about “stability” and “carrying capacity”. They all peel back at once, exposed as choreography, not truth. Numbers tuned to keep hands obedient, not lungs full. Under that pageant runs the deeper circulation she’s just touched, a vast, indifferent metabolism that will answer to hands other than corporate’s if you come in sideways. She braces in the half‑lit crawl, spine pressed to sweating conduit, spanner slick in her grip, and admits she’s stepped over something she didn’t know was there: out of the cramped superstition that “there is no other way” and into the brutal clarity that the walls are placed, not natural, and walls you can map, you can route around.
She clamps her teeth until her jaw creaks and wills the tremor out of her fingers. Inhale. Hold. Let the scrubber‑tainted air scrape down her throat and out again. She counts beats on her tongue, the old shaft song rhythm her father used against panic when rock started to move. The hum in the conduits steadies into something she can name: coolant loop, fan lag, a little harmonic off in the tertiary pump but nothing that screams audit. She waits for the thin, insect whine that means Zoran’s implant has reached down the line to sniff her work: no shift in frequency, no ghost handshake crawling up the metal. Just the ordinary cough of pumps, the tick‑tick of cooling brackets, the faraway thunder of an ore tram shuddering past.
Protocol lines up in her head like icons in a shrine: flag irregularity, preserve logs, notify command, await remote. She’s mouthed them a hundred times in drills, signed them on a dozen incident reports when some kid cracked a casing or a compensator glitched. Those were surface sins: shaved a tolerance here, backdated a filter change there to keep M‑13 from a ration slap. This. This is different. This is hands inside the bones of the Ring, touching the thing under the steel.
Her thumb finds the recorder stud by habit, the little raised circle that would start the official narrative: “At oh‑seven‑thirty‑two, technician Markovska observed…” She can almost hear Zoran’s clipped approval if she plays it clean, Irina’s cool nod over a clean file. Safe. Predictable. Contained.
The stud is cold under her glove. Miroslava holds it there for one breath, two, feeling the weight of all the reports she’s filed that never changed anything except whose rations got cut. Then the weight tips. Her hand slides past, knuckles brushing the conduit, to the recessed manual override toggle the corporate schematics pretend doesn’t exist outside training sims. It’s dust‑gritty, stiff from disuse. Not for them, this one. For when the system lies and you still have to keep people breathing.
“Dobrá,” she mutters under her breath, a bitter half‑prayer to no one. “We do it my way.” And she hooks her thumb under the override lip and pulls.
With a staccato sequence of keystrokes on the local panel, she throws up a hard maintenance lockout, shunting control authority to “local tech override – safety drill,” a flag no one ever questions because it gums up schedules. The status strip flips from corporate green to dull amber. She reroutes the live sensor feed through a dead relay bank three junctions down. A diagnostic stub she remembers tagging “irreparable” two years back when parts were tight and auditors were tighter. They signed off its retirement in some buried spreadsheet; as far as Command is concerned, it doesn’t exist.
Raw numbers bloom across the diagnostics window in a dense waterfall: voltage jitter, phase angles, sub‑harmonic bleed where the alien lattice pushed back. Miroslava scrolls backward through the last fifteen minutes, markers ticking by like heartbeats. Jaw clenched, she writes her own ghost into the stream: a rolling checksum fault that ripples over the anomaly, re‑framing the alien surge as a smeared cascade of bit‑rot. To any remote parser it becomes a brief hiccup in a fatigued cable run, flagged, auto‑corrected by routine firmware, and quietly forgotten by every system that matters.
She drops the annotation into the log in neat, impersonal tech-script. NO FURTHER ANOMALIES ANTICIPATED. RECOMMEND ROUTINE CABLE FATIGUE MONITORING ONLY.”: stripping her own hands out of the sentence until it reads like any other sleepy maintenance note. The cursor blinks, accusing, while the lie settles over the raw memory of what she felt in the lattice, fine as dust over a still‑hot weld.
She tabs into the routing options, jaw working. High‑priority audit, cross‑check with Systems Command, attach live trace. Each option a straight line to Zoran’s implant. She scrolls past until she finds the bulk upload pool: low‑priority, non‑blocking, queued for end‑of‑shift batch analysis. One tickbox. She flags it there, hides it among a slurry of fan warnings and filter lag alerts, the kind no human ever reads unless something has already failed.
Only then does she crack the conduit casing again and slide out the jury‑rigged length of shielded cable she smuggled in with her tools, hands steady now that the choice is made, breath slow. Working by touch more than sight in the cramped dim, she peels back insulation and bites in micro‑clips, splicing one end into the alien lattice at the precise node where the ghost current first answered her, feeling a faint, almost animal thrum through the glove, like muscle twitch under skin that isn’t human. The other end she routes along the service crawl, lashing it flat against forgotten brackets and rusted tag plates, looping it past a dead sensor cluster, until it disappears into an unregistered junction box she’d earmarked cycles ago. A blind corner that sits a few meters off the official grid but rides directly on M‑13’s life‑support spine, close enough that a whisper on this line will touch every refugee lung.
She seals the panel, wipes her prints from the casing, and pulls herself hand‑over‑hand through the narrow duct toward the sanctioned corridor network, every scrape of her coveralls against metal a reminder that she has just redrawn the map in her head. The bypass is fragile, illegal, and entirely hers: a covert vein tapping the buried heart of the ring for people who don’t exist on any roster. For a moment she imagines Zoran’s clean telemetry overlays skating right past her little parasite line, blind. As the familiar glow of marked access hatches comes into view, Miroslava feels something in her harden and pivot; she has not just dodged a report, she has claimed a sliver of the structure’s hidden will and, in the privacy of her thoughts, pledged it to M‑13 and no one else: an oath as binding as any contract, signed in stolen current instead of ink.
The week that follows smears into one long shift chopped into different lighting cycles. Corporate workorder after workorder: replace a fouled carbon bed in K-7, recalibrate a balky dampener ring over Spine Three, crawl forty meters into a wheezing riser to kick a stubborn valve with the heel of her boot until it remembers which way is open.
On paper, she is model compliance. Her wrist tab pings green on every task; her logs are meticulous, clean, boring. On the ground (on hands and knees in cramped ducts with her shoulders scraping bulkhead insulation) she catches her own sins coming back to her wearing other people’s tongues.
“Feels like new scrubbers in here, eh?” a hauler mutters up through a grate as she works above, voice drifting with the steam. “Fresh, like back when they still changed filters on schedule.”
In a transfer lock where she’s swapping out a cracked sensor plate, two cleaners gossip over mop handles.
“Neighbor’s kid swears if you talk nice to the vent, it kicks extra flow,” one says. “Say please in old tongue, yeah? Whole bunk went from headache to singing in one rotation.”
“Bullshit,” the other scoffs. “It’s just corporate testing premium feed lines on some warrens. See who worth keeping.”
Later, squeezed behind a rattling panel above a mess queue, she hears it distilled into a single, infuriating line:
“Got cousin in M-13 says someone there can make the ring remember you exist.”
She flinches hard enough that her spanner clanks, ringing through the duct. Conversation below pauses, then resumes in a lower, more excited murmur.
On her own bunk level, the stories arrive with the laundry and the soup pots.
“You hear, Mira? Miracle air downspine. Filters don’t clog. Kids not coughing so much.”
She bares her teeth around a fatigue-roughened laugh. “Miracle, my ass. Some idiot finally banged their compensator straight. You want clean air, file maintenance like everyone else.”
“No, no, they say is special.” A woman from two bunks over leans in, eyes shiny with exhausted hope. “Not corporate. Someone who knows alien places. Knows how to ask.”
“People talk too much,” Miroslava snaps in station pidgin, harsher than she intends. “You start telling stories about magic vents, corporate come looking. Then they shut something for real.”
The rebuke ripples away, muttering and side-eyes following her down the corridor, but it doesn’t kill the stories. If anything, they sharpen. Next cycle the miracle lives in M-11 instead of M-13, with a different name attached. Cycle after that, it’s a “quiet engineer woman with burned hands” who can “rewrite the quota on your lungs.”
She changes her route patterns, cuts conversations short, refuses to answer leading jokes. It doesn’t help. The tales keep getting more detailed, feeding off some data stream she can’t tap. Pressure anomalies, unlogged flow surges, maybe the quiet adjustments she’s already made to keep a few ducts from choking M-13 entirely.
They are triangulating her with her own handiwork, she realizes, lying awake in the thin dark between shifts. Every rumor is a sensor ping. Every hopeful whisper is one more coordinate someone like Zoran, or someone hungrier, can solve for.
She stares up at the condensation-silvered ceiling and feels the ring’s slow hum under her spine, the alien substrate thrumming just out of human hearing.
“Shut up,” she mutters to the walls, to the unseen conduits, to the stupid, desperate mouths of the warrens. “Shut up before you get us all killed.”
The ring, as usual, does not listen. The next day, a loader passing under her ladder grins up and calls her “Saint Filter” like it’s a joke they both share.
“Miracle air” crawls faster than mold through damp insulation, mutating along the tramlines with every retelling. In one mess hall it’s a hushed legend about alien ghosts nursing refugee lungs, old miners swearing they saw pale lights moving behind the vent grilles when the flow picked up. Two junctions over, it’s a tale of a secret corporate patch, premium scrub algorithms pushed in quiet to warrens marked as “high-yield genetic stock,” a reward for those who don’t complain when their dead get counted as equipment loss.
By the time her shift rotates her up the ladderways over the ore spines, she’s collected three incompatible versions of herself, saint, saboteur, and sellout. In one, she blesses ducts with burned hands and old-tongue prayers. In another, she’s the one who almost collapsed a shaft, now buying absolution by diverting flow. In the ugliest, she’s cutting side-deals with Zoran to test experimental feeds on her own people.
None of it close enough to map, all of it close enough that if the wrong ears start pattern-matching, they’ll find her.
Corporate readouts swear M-13 is boring as dust: branch at baseline, no anomalies, no ghost amperage in or out. On her tab the graphs are textbook: clean curves, no spikes, everything snug inside tolerance bands marketing loves to print on safety posters.
But she can feel her bypass in there the way you feel a cracked rib when you breathe. Tiny overperformance ripples, pressure settling faster than it should, CO₂ curves drooping just a hair too smooth. Someone upstream has gone in after her and ironed the wrinkles flat, massaging the trendlines until they look like factory defaults.
The thought sits sour in her gut. Either central diagnostics are even lazier than she always swore. Or there’s another hand on the numbers. Admin, rebel, or both, carefully trimming the evidence so the miracle air stays a rumor and not a flag on Zoran’s console.
It’s near the end of a double when the contact finally materializes: she’s braced in a sanctioned duct above a hammering tramline, arm buried past the elbow in a balky damper, when the access hatch clangs and slides aside without the usual preface of boots on the rungs, no shouted “maintenance” up the ladder. A thin boy in an oversized hauler jacket crouches in the opening, eyes too steady for his age, grime smeared in careful lines that don’t quite hide the newness of his boots, and rattles off a request to “calibrate phantom loaders for ghost tonnage on unlogged pallets” in a singsong cadence that makes the hairs rise on the back of her neck, every wrong word slotting perfectly into places she once bent in the schematics.
The jargon is wrong on purpose, phrases lifted from falsified schematics she once doctored to hide unmetered junctions, marking him as a messenger from someone who’s been reading between her lines and maybe tracing her ghosts. Before she can snap at him to clear the hatch, he steadies himself, hand not shaking, and holds out a chipped data-tag etched with a freight code she knows was retired after a fatal collapse she helped clean up in vacuum suits, names still scratched into her memory. In his other hand: a scrap of plast marked with a hand-sketched chain of maintenance junctions that don’t exist on any official map, but match the negative space in her own contraband overlays. “Pilots who know the blind spots want a word,” he says in flat, rehearsed pidgin, accent scrubbed of clan markers, then drops out of sight into the clatter and brake-scream below, leaving her balanced in the duct with the weight of the tag in her palm and the sudden, unwelcome certainty that her private allegiance to M-13 is no longer private and somebody has started playing her game without asking.
Miroslava burns a quarter shift pretending she never saw the boy or his tag. Another quarter telling herself she’s too tired to chase ghosts through undocumented holes in the ring. By the time the next split rolls around, the headache behind her eyes is a steady knife and she’s memorized the sketched junction chain so well she could trace it blind.
She times it for the lull between ore surges, when the tram dispatchers are half-asleep on caffeine and the cams are busy arguing with each other over cargo priorities. One more “routine damper check” logged on her slate, one more plausible alibi in case Zoran’s telemetry decides to get curious.
The path he’s given her doesn’t exist in any admin schema, but it sings against the negative space in her own black-market overlays. She crosses a catwalk over the K-7 trunk, counting the rhythm of carts slamming past until her body falls into the old cadence: four beats of loaded axles, two breaths to slip between. At the far girder, she ducks under a peeling hazard placard and shoulders through a cluster of coolant pipes, boots skidding on condensation slime.
There. The first mark. A single screw head on a junction panel, wrong shade of red, bleached out by age instead of factory gloss. She runs a thumb over it, feeling the faint, deliberate roughness of sand-scored paint. Not an accident. A code.
The “sealed” panel beside it looks legit: tamper tape, stamped inspection dates, a faded corporate seal half-flaked away. She palms the edge anyway, working her fingers under the lip. The metal gives with the kind of resistance that’s been trained, a half-stripped latch, a gasket slit and re-glued, just enough fight to pass a cursory tug from a bored inspector, not enough to stop someone who knows where to lean.
It pops with a soft sigh of pressure equalizing, and a wash of hotter air breathes over her face, dense with metal dust and the sweet, choking tang of old lubricant. Inside is not a crawlspace so much as a throat: a narrow cable run dropping away and then doglegging under the tram spine, barely wide enough for her shoulders. Bundles of conduit and fiber snake along the walls, bound with mismatched clamps and bits of cloth.
She swings her legs in, twisting until she’s on her belly, boots braced against the panel frame. The hum of the loaded carts above is a live thing here, transmitted bone-deep through the alien hull and human steel. Every time a tram screams past, the whole run vibrates, a subsonic shudder that blurs her teeth together and smears dust across her tongue.
“Idiots,” she mutters in her home dialect, more habit than prayer, feeling around for handholds that aren’t carrying live current. Someone has tied lengths of braided grounding wire to the heavier bundles, knotted just so. Grips for hands that have done this before. She eases forward, one elbow, then the other, ribs scraping, shoulders threatening to jam if she breathes too deep.
Above, a fully loaded string hits the junction. The vibration spikes, a hard, stuttering roar that makes the run groan around her. For a heartbeat she imagines a misaligned coupler, a cracked mount: one bad jolt and the tram drops a centimeter, kisses the cable tray, and shears this whole hideaway open like a tin can. Her lungs lock. Old memories surge up: vacuum frost creeping over visors, loose bodies pinwheeling in a shaft gone open to the stars.
She swallows them down, forces herself to keep moving. Whoever built this path knew the tolerances; alien shell doesn’t flex like cheap station alloy. Still, the sound pins every nerve on edge. She times her shoves to the gaps between axles, learning the rhythm the way she once learned pump cavitation, trusting oscillations more than numbers on a corporate dashboard.
By the time the run kinks left beneath the tram spine, the air has slicked her skin with sweat and dust. Her breath rasps loud in her own ears, harsh and too fast in the cramped space. She claws forward anyway, deeper into the throat someone carved under the company’s blind, comforted by one stubborn thought: whoever mapped this route did it from below, not from an office. One of hers.
At the second and third marks, the pattern deepens. What read on paper as standard service plates turn out to be stage scenery: panels on greased hinges that sigh inward at her touch, revealing throat-sized gaps shored up with scavenged beams and re-bent struts, every brace wrapped in braided grounding wire to bleed off stray charge. Someone has tied family prayer ribbons to the wire (faded cloth strips inked with names, birthdates, old mineshaft numbers) fluttering faintly in the convected heat.
Icons lurk in the corners where a corporate inspection cam would never look: tin saints wired to conduits, chipped cosmonaut mission patches glued to alien glass, bits of that same glass set like jewels, catching a color that isn’t quite any human spectrum. Silent witnesses, watching every body that has squeezed through here, counting who comes back.
She never sees her escorts. Only the world tilting wrong for a breath. The subtle, stomach-tugging lurch as some hidden hand or remote hack nudges a gravity compensator. Her weight thins, boots skimming metal; she drifts across a black, unguarded shaft whose depth she refuses to imagine, then drops back into herself on another unseen ledge, knees flexing to swallow the fall.
The deeper she crawls, the more the corporate station skin gives way to insurgent carpentry: cable bundles yanked off prescribed brackets and laced through hand-drilled braces, their insulation patched with mismatched tape and cloth. Emergency glowstrips run along the ceiling, factory-white once, now painted over in dull blues and rust-browns that swallow light instead of throwing it at cams. Junction tags are scratched out and overwritten in a tight coder’s shorthand she only half understands. Hashes for blind spots, little triangles for stolen amperage, spirals for places the alien substrate “talks back.”
Twice, she skirts the edge of active maintenance nodes, pausing while distant work crews curse in oblivious proximity, unaware that a hidden valve upstream is bleeding just enough waste heat from her route to keep her off Zajcev’s thermal maps. Somewhere, a grav plate coughs and re-stabilizes, but never under her hands.
It’s not just a shortcut; it’s a guided tour of a second Kovalev Ring, one folded into the gaps of the first, riding the negative space of corporate oversight. A ghost infrastructure, held together with prayer ribbons, stolen watts, and the quiet certainty that official schematics are only one version of the truth.
At the final symbol, a child’s shuttle scrawled into flaking primer with something sharper than a nail, the deck simply isn’t there anymore. A narrow throat of a shaft yawns open, walls lined in scavenged shock-foam and insulation blankets stamped with half-erased corporate logos. A last, deliberate gravity dip kisses her boots loose and slides her like bundled ore, boots skimming, elbows knocking padded ribs, until the shaft spits her into a dim, low-ceilinged cargo bay sealed off from official traffic. Rust-ringed doors are welded from the inside; corporate sealant has been cut, reheated, and carefully reapplied in counterfeit inspection patterns. Overhead, rigged work lamps glare down on the gutted carcass of an old shuttle, skin peeled back to bare stringers and frames now serving as jury-rigged gantries, weapon mounts, and perch points for sentries who aren’t here right now.
Waiting beneath that bare-boned fuselage is Natalya: flight suit patched with miner symbols, boots planted, hands empty but every tendon wired for launch. Around her cluster a half-dozen insurgents. Grease-streaked mechanics, ore-hauler pilots with vacuum burns on their knuckles, a nurse whose Irina-issued badge has been acid-filed blank at the name. They don’t bother with slogans or whispered oaths. In low, steady voices they walk Miroslava through what already runs without her: pirate broadcasts that hijack entertainment bands mid-song to slip in code-threaded warnings, “equipment failures” timed so patrol trams die in blind stretches and sit there for hours, med crates peeled open at Irina’s outer caches, labels swapped, vials pocketed and walked, body by body, into M-13’s unregistered sickrooms.
The accusation lands like a wrench in spinning gears.
“You’re the one who pulled air out of nowhere,” Natalya says.
No challenge, no awe. Just a statement lodged in the space between them like it’s already been tested to failure load.
Miroslava’s first instinct is the old one: duck, deflect, bury the spark before someone builds a pyre around it. She lets her shoulders roll in a tired half-shrug, mouth already shaping the lines she’s used on inspectors and jumpy foremen since she was old enough to stand a watch.
“Ring does strange things near fault-lines,” she mutters. “Sensors burp, compensators chase ghosts. You get a hiccup in one manifold, telemetry looks like miracle six sectors over. Nothing new.”
Her voice comes out flatter than she means, scraped raw by too many shifts and too little sleep. It sounds like lying even to her own ears.
Natalya doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t glance at the others, doesn’t seek backup or a tell. She just folds her arms across her chest, weight shifting the bare minimum, boot soles creaking on worn deckplate. Her gaze tracks Miroslava the way a pilot tracks debris fields: measuring vectors, waiting for the right trajectory, not the first one.
Silence settles, not awkward, just deliberate. Around them, the gutted shuttle ticks and sighs as cooling metal gives up heat to stale air. Somewhere above, a tram rattles past, muffled to a distant thunder by the cargo bay’s insulation. One of the insurgents clears his throat and then thinks better of speaking.
Miroslava fills the space with more words, because empty air feels worse. “You get enough legacy code stacked on alien substrate, sometimes valves open wrong. Pressure equalizes in places it shouldn’t. I was in K-7 that night, anyway. Ask station logs.”
“They’re asking already,” Natalya says mildly.
Her tone doesn’t sharpen, but something under it does. She tilts her head, studying Miroslava like a hull crack she’s not sure is superficial. There’s no heat in her stare. Only the steady, unnerving patience of someone who’s watched patrol schedules, ore tallies, and ration lists until patterns emerge like bruise under skin.
If she’s disappointed by the dodge, she doesn’t show it. If she’s impressed, she doesn’t show that either. The denial passes over her the way a gust passes over rock.
“I know what compensator lag looks like,” Natalya adds, almost conversational. “What a real glitch does to numbers. This wasn’t that.”
Still, she doesn’t press. She just waits, arms locked, jaw loose, like they have all the time in the ring and no one outside this bay is tightening noose or vise. As if Miroslava’s story, the true one, the one with alien glyphs and forbidden access threads, is inevitable, and the protest she just heard is a brief, uninteresting weather pattern before the real climate reasserts itself.
The counterpunch is detail, swung with surgical aim.
Natalya doesn’t raise her voice. She just starts laying out timestamps like charges on a demolition line: the exact minute M-13’s manifold graphs stop seesawing, the half-second later when sector valves re-balance instead of choking, the hourmark where filter load drops off a cliff instead of grinding into the red. She flicks two fingers; one of the insurgents taps his wristset, and a holo-scrap of logging data ghosts up between them, numbers crawling in pale green.
Then she brings it home.
“Three kids,” she says. “Yelena. Miro. Petko.”
No drama, just names lined up like inventory. But Miroslava can hear their mothers in those syllables: the scuff-drag gait of Yelena’s mama hustling water rations, the uneven stomp of Miro’s father after a double shift, the quiet, exhausted shuffle outside Petko’s bunk when the coughing got bad.
Natalya scrolls; a crude overlay highlights three microzones in M-13, oxygen partials nudged just above standard while the rest of the warrens ride the ragged edge of hypoxia.
“Glitch doesn’t pick favorites,” she says, gaze never leaving Miroslava’s face. “Someone told the system which lungs to stop crushing, and which ones could keep chewing dust.”
An insurgent with oil up to his elbows steps forward and slides a scuffed tablet across a cargo crate between them. The others fall a half-step back, as if giving the evidence its own pressure bubble. On the screen, Miroslava watches a familiar sin from the outside: her falsified work order, stamped with forged clearance, slotted seamlessly into the maintenance queue exactly eighteen minutes before M-13’s “miracle” spike. Someone’s annotated the log in sharp, color-coded strokes: alien-glyph echo here, compensator lag there, a neat ring around the point where human protocol hands off to something older.
Telemetry feeds kink and blur around the anomaly the way only alien-linked interference ever does, raw data smeared like light through warped glass. The overlay traces back along a corporate mirror channel she thought was blind, a diagnostics relay buried in Zajcev’s telemetry stack. Root-path tags scroll by: SYS-GAL-PRIM, AUD_MIR-12, flags she’s only seen from behind locked admin panes.
“Sergei thinks this relay reports straight to Zajcev’s gallery,” the mechanic mutters, thumb tapping a side-note: local cache > reb_key. His accent is thick shaft-Slavic, words chewed down to metal filings. “Turns out it reports to us first, when we ask nice. Little echo line, no one bother checking, da?”
There’s pride there, but also a warning: you’re not the only one pulling ghosts through the wires.
If they can see this (her forged signatures, her access routes, the precise moment alien substrate flexed to her touch) they can see almost anything. Every quiet cheat, every side-channel she thought lived only in her head and the ring’s black bones, suddenly feels exposed, naked under someone else’s cursor.
Natalya leans in and, without ceremony, turns the knife on herself. She flicks to a new file: a scrolling list of names, sectors, shift tags. Sympathizers in M-13, hauler crews, med techs who look the other way, cooks who salt extra calories into ration stews, runners who ghost through waste shafts with smuggled meds. Miroslava recognizes door codes buried like prayers in the notes, half-illegal power taps riding her own bypass lines, the nicknames of people who held her nieces when air scrubbers failed and sang stupid songs over coughing fits. “This is everything we’ve built under their noses,” Natalya says quietly. “If you’re plant, you hand this to Zajcev and we’re finished. If we’re lying, one sweep with this and he vacuums your warrens for ‘contamination control.’”
The bay feels smaller, ceiling pressing down, bulkheads listening. Miroslava’s engineer brain runs load calculations on trust: tapped mirror channel Sergei never sniffed, proof her tricks glow bright on someone’s scopes, a kill-list if it walks. Natalya doesn’t crowd her; just breathes, waits, eyes steady. In the hum and coolant stink, choice crystallizes as cold math. Whose betrayal vents her people fastest: corporate with its polished slaughter, Sergei with his slow strangling of rations, Zoran wired straight into the ring’s spine, or this pilot who throws her cards on the table and dares Miroslava to call it. The nod, when it comes (short, almost angry) isn’t yes so much as: fine, then. We burn together or not at all.
Natalya starts from the human misery before the alien math, voice flat with the kind of anger that’s already burned once. She talks about families squeezed by “efficiency targets,” how each quarterly bulletin from corporate is just new numbers for suffocation. Air and water quotas that look small on a screen (two percent, three) turn into real choices in the warrens: which room gets the weaker scrubber cartridge this month, whose shower time quietly vanishes, which kids sleep closer to the vent because their lungs are worse.
“On paper is just optimization,” she says. “On floor, is grandmother choosing if she boil soup or medicine.”
She walks Miroslava through it like a preflight checklist. Every “temporary adjustment” to circulation in M-13 comes paired with a sermon about personal responsibility and communal discipline. Extra liters of potable water show up only for those who hit impossible ore targets three weeks running, or who volunteer for hazard shifts deep in the alien fractures. Sergei’s ration tweaks, always framed as ‘local discretion’, just happen to land hardest on warrens without formal work contracts, places like M-13 that can’t file grievance without admitting they exist.
Minor infractions become currency. Someone late to shift twice in a cycle? Supervisor “regrets” to report their household loses heat priority for a week. A mother argues when med dispensary refuses antibiotics for her kid’s infection? Next audit, her whole block is flagged for “consumption anomalies,” air mix dialed lean until they’re too tired to complain. Medical exemptions for crush injuries or radiation headaches get quietly revoked if the patient spends too much time near known meeting spots, if their name shows up too often on Sergei’s unofficial visitors list.
“Is not just hunger,” Natalya says. “Is teaching people their own breath is permission-based. Make them grateful for not choking today, so they don’t notice hand on their throat tomorrow.”
Only then does she pivot to the infrastructure itself, fingers tapping through menus until the misery turns into schematics. She lays out a pattern of “tests” buried inside routine dispatches. Sections where oxygen margins are shaved half a percent below reg, then held there for a quarter just to log how many fainting spells turn up in Irina’s triage queue. Hab blocks where food pallets arrive consistently four, five packets light every shipment, while clerks are instructed to “observe informal redistribution behaviors.” It’s all written in bland code, but when Natalya translates the experiment shines through.
Zoran’s new neural-linked bulkhead locks, stamped as efficiency upgrades, bloom across the map not random but precise. They crop up at cross-corridors feeding three, four warrens at once; at tram choke-points where security can stack rifles, at service rings around life-support trunks. One silent command from his implant and a whole district can be pinched off like clamping a vein. What looks, in isolation, like sloppy logistics resolves into a clean lattice of thumbs ready to press down on any throat that moves.
Miroslava’s mouth tightens; doubt still there, a hard little knot. Natalya exhales through her nose, drags a calloused thumb across the projection table and starts feeding it meat instead of theory. Tram timetables bloom first, looping in steady cycles. Over them she throws security patrol arcs: tight where ore runs fat, looser where “unproductive” warrens squat. With a few clipped commands, Irina’s public quarantine bulletins ghost into view, their cordoned bays lining up with “temporary” closures of ventilation spines. Last, she drops in red-tag maintenance blackouts that cluster, by pure coincidence, around rumor-hungry mess halls and shaft chapels.
Stacked as raw data the pattern is ugly: movement, air, and talk all squeezed into narrow arteries the regime can pinch shut with one command.
She slides in the stolen alien-stress layer, jagged, wrong, until Miroslava, frowning, reaches through the projection and begins to work. A few tight, economical gestures: rotate, normalize, invert. The warped ring flexes, then locks to her own hidden grid. Under familiar shafts and warrens bloom pale fault-veins, brightening wherever human drills bit too greedy. When she shifts thresholds, tram lines and quota-fat corridors snap into alignment with rising micro-quake bands, like someone laid the routes on top of a slow detonation map and called it logistics.
In the last composite, the Ring hangs hollowed-out in false color, stress bands pulsing like infection around a bright, broken halo. One more quota spike along those fault-veins and the shock would rip through bolt-on warrens first, M-13 brightest, before cracking back into the “productive cores.” In the margin, corporate notation calls it “acceptable volatility.” In Miroslava’s head, it’s a triage sheet already filled out: undocumented bodies as sacrificial buffer, numbers you bleed off so equity curves stay smooth. Natalya doesn’t need to say it aloud; the highlighted clusters are close enough to home that Miroslava can smell M-13’s tin walls and stale air, can hear which children would cough last.
Natalya flicks aside the corporate veneer and drops in a rougher skin: pirate field maps, line-noisy and uneven, stitched out of cheap sensor passes and whatever telemetry her pilots could steal on the run. Over that, she layers maintenance logs Miroslava knows too well, compressed, tagged in the blunt, efficient shorthand she uses when she thinks no one is looking too closely. Her own signature pings back at her from half the bay.
Thin veins of alien conduit burn through the human geometry, not neat lines but strange, braided filaments that don’t care about bulkheads or corporate zoning. In the murk of the projection they pulse at irregular intervals, pale as bone under bruised flesh. Natalya’s gloved fingertip traces them with the unthinking ease of muscle memory, cutting across tram lines and hab grids.
“We’ve had ghosts for months,” she says, voice gone flatter, more technical. “Stress spikes that don’t track to blasts, gravity dips that don’t match the compensator curve. Readings you can’t replicate, no matter how hard you prod. They come, they vanish, they leave some bastard in Security filing it under ‘sensor noise.’”
She zooms a sector where the alien vein kinks through a stack of worker barracks. “These filaments? We only see them when someone up top orders a power redistribution and the Ring…argues.” Her mouth twists around the word, like it tastes wrong. “Then, maybe, for three seconds, four, the conduit shows its teeth.”
Data tags bloom beside each anomaly: incident numbers, scrubbed just enough to pass in corporate archives, but with the origin engineer still stamped in their metadata. Miroslava’s name, her ID hash, her condensed work-notes sit next to status codes that read “UNRESOLVED VARIANCE – NO FAULT FOUND.”
Natalya expands a list of those codes; it scrolls far longer than it should. “Every time someone upstairs can’t blame dust, corrosion, or some idiot with a wrench,” she says quietly, “your mark is in the wiring. Maybe you don’t leave slogans on walls, Markovska. But the Ring reacts different around your hands.”
She starts matching each anomaly to its lived texture, sanding off any chance Miroslava might call it coincidence. That “hiccup” on a personnel hatch? On her display it replays as a three-frame stutter in the lock cycle on Spur 7B, just long enough that the red “SEALED” glyph blinked to amber while a line of inspectors shuffled past in heavy boots. In those eight stolen seconds, three families without numbers slid through a maintenance crosscut that only someone with internal schematics and very particular timing could have trusted. Miroslava remembers the way their youngest had clung to her leg days before, asking if the air in M-13 ever ran out.
Next: a gravity compensator recalibration, logged as routine balance tuning on a dead shift. Natalya overlays tram telemetry: a runaway hauler barreling hot, wheel assembly locked, trajectory straight through a loading queue. For two terrifying heartbeats the local g spike goes soft, impact curve flattening into a bruising rebound instead of paste. One kid walks away with cracked ribs and a story; the rig creaks, not crumples.
Then M-13’s scrubber cluster, officially flagged for “progressive filter fatigue.” Natalya peels back the compressed log: saturation curves spiking, CO₂ load trending to lethal inside four hours. Somewhere in there, an unsigned patch throttles nonessential fans, shunts reserve flow through a half-dead secondary manifold, and suppresses the redline alarm to yellow. On paper, it’s nuisance maintenance. In the warrens, it’s a night where no one quite suffocates before replacement cartridges “miraculously” arrive.
An insurgent mechanic at the back, grease streaked, arms folded tight across a stained coverall, clears his throat and throws his own captures into the mix. Grainy feeds from scavenged consoles, debug dumps from subverted maintenance drones; he blows them up until the corporate GUI peels thin and the alien substrate bleeds through underneath in jagged glyph-echo. Certain junction relays, he points out, don’t just take an override and snap to it. They flex around the command, bending pressure and amperage into ghost channels that don’t exist on any human schematic.
He freezes three sequences: control packets with Miroslava’s login nudging some modest parameter, followed, milliseconds later, by a second, unlogged correction propagating deeper. Not noise. Not random drift. Like something under the deck plates adjusting its grip after she pushes.
As they talk, the gutted shuttle around them becomes an anatomy lesson in divided loyalties: human panels pried off to expose alien-black ribs, stripped wiring dangling over crates of stolen medpacks and ration bricks, a pirate transmitter gut-tied into an emergency beacon. The air smells of old fuel and ozone from half-disassembled thrusters, underscored by the sour tang of too many bodies working too long and the faint medicinal bite of cracked ampoules. Miroslava watches her own work orders scroll past on a handheld, tiny, careful interventions she thought lost in the noise of breakdowns and emergency patches, now plotted against refugee rescue timings, rebel exfiltration windows, and glitches in Zoran’s surveillance grid that coincide a little too neatly with pirate broadcasts going mysteriously unjammed. Every coincidence Natalya circles makes the skin between Miroslava’s shoulder blades tighten, like the Ring itself is breathing down her neck.
The verdict lands not as flattery but as sentence. “You’re not just flipping breakers for your neighbors,” Natalya says, voice low, eyes fixed. “Whatever you did when you went too deep into its skin: the Ring notices you. It leans.” The mechanic grunts assent, knuckle-tapping a final graph where alien glyph-noise spikes in phase with Miroslava’s logins, yet Zoran’s usual red-flag telemetry stays eerily flat. In that cramped pool of half-light, with fuel-stink in her nose and alien ribs glimmering under stripped panels, Miroslava finally sees the outline of what they want: not another saboteur, but the risky bridge between human consoles and whatever waits below. A living fault line who can make systems misbehave just enough to save people without calling corporate fire down or waking something older in the dark.
Miroslava’s first answer is a flat, muscle-memory “no,” out of her mouth before she’s finished shaping the consonant. It drops into the stale air between them like a tool slipped from a greasy hand. Her jaw stays locked after, as if she can keep the rest of the fear from leaking out just by clenching hard enough.
M-13 survives because it’s blur on scan, smudge in ledger. On rosters it’s “decommissioned maintenance adjunct,” on air-usage it’s a neat downward adjustment when the numbers don’t match. Being forgotten is not shame there; it is armor. To let Natalya tie that forgotten shaft into anything loud feels like peeling the rust off that armor and painting it in bright corporate hazard yellow.
She pictures it too easily. Zoran in his glass gallery, implant humming, that distant look he gets when the Ring’s telemetry blooms in his head. A faint anomaly flag in some quiet corner of the grid: unregistered draw in M-13, airflow curves not matching the starvation models. His attention skews, narrows. What was a nameless dead zone on his map acquires index numbers, highlighted boundaries, a blinking overlay of “investigate.” Men in sealed suits at their hatch. Clipboards. Guns they pretend are just for “environmental enforcement.”
Her throat goes tight enough she has to swallow twice before she can get breath past it. She remembers the little spike in his logs the night she cheated the scrubbers, the way system alerts had pulsed and then…gone flat. Lucky, she’d told herself. Noise in the alien skin. Now, with rebel eyes on her and alien glyphs still ghosting behind her eyelids, she knows better. There are no lucky blind spots once someone like Zoran decides to look. One wrong alignment with Natalya, and the Ring’s indifferent gaze might finally swing down onto every thin wall and sleeping child she’s spent her whole life keeping out of sight.
The nurse (face still marked with the faded elastic lines of a respirator mask, eyes red from recycled air and no sleep) steps into the gap Miroslava’s “no” leaves. She doesn’t argue with ideology, just starts listing numbers in a quiet, hoarse voice: how many inhaler cartridges were supposed to last the week, how many actually did. How two shifts ago the gauges ticked empty while the monitors in Sergei’s hall still showed “within tolerance.” Children propped upright beside jury-rigged filters made from cut-up scrubber pads and old fan housings, their chests rattling like loose bearings. Elders taking turns napping in chairs because lying flat means fluid pooling in lungs that never really clear.
Then the nurse reaches into her jacket and unfolds a crumpled printout, paper gone soft with handling, ink slightly smeared from damp fingers. Corporate stamp. Sokolov header. Phrases like “persistent noncompliance” and “redistribution to more productive environments.” Miroslava doesn’t need Natalya to translate. In her head the bland words resolve into routes and load ratings: whole family blocks shoved into already overstressed shafts, margins shaved to nothing, one unlogged micro-quake away from being entombed where no one will bother to dig.
The mechanic’s graph still hovers on the gutted shuttle’s bulkhead, its alien glyph-noise flickering like a low fever across the scarred metal. Lines spike and shiver where her unauthorized logins brushed something they were never meant to touch. Miroslava doesn’t really see it. Her gaze has slipped inward, back to the layered stress-maps burned behind her eyes: translucent shells of the Ring stacked like ribs, blood-red fault-lines threading directly beneath the warrens, little hazard chevrons corporate never bothered to annotate because refugees don’t rate a legend key.
In her chest the remembered chorus of wet coughs in stale air starts up again, ghost lungs laboring against bad numbers. Every ragged breath is another variable in her endless failure analyses, another data point in a catastrophe curve she’s been quietly watching steepen for years. Doing nothing no longer feels like caution; it is just a slower, quieter version of the same collapse, one where she gets to listen to them die in proper order instead of all at once.
She drags her attention back to Natalya, ramming the fear down into something with edges she can use. “Spell it,” Miroslava says, voice rough but leveled by habit. “No slogans. Parameters.” So Natalya lays them out like a mission brief, not a sermon. She talks about “misalignments”: bulkheads that lag a fraction when patrols try to seal a cordon, fire doors that hiccup just long enough for bodies to slip through; maintenance alerts blossoming in clean corridors while the real breach stays ghosted; power and airflow nudged so forgotten pumps and scrubbers “miraculously” outlive their rated hours while some pristine surveillance cluster up in corporate spine-land keeps suffering inexplicable brownouts and sensor drift. Leaks, blurs, little stutters in the machine. They are not asking her to make the Ring do tricks: only to lean on faults already there, turn background noise into deliberate cover.
The trade-off crystallizes as something almost contractual in Miroslava’s engineer’s mind, like signing off on a risky override. “My people stay out of your raids,” she says, meeting Natalya’s gaze. “No conscription from M-13. You keep them off your casualty lists, your broadcasts, your martyr boards. No heroes made out of kids choking on bad air.”
Natalya’s jaw works once, considering, then she nods. “Agreed. Warrens are sanctuary, not stockpile.”
There is a brief, taut pause before Natalya extends her forearm in the old miners’ clasp, the gesture at once ceremonial and businesslike, a contract older than any corporate seal. Miroslava hooks her hand around it; their grips lock, rough palms and burn scars pressed together, pressure calibrated like testing a weld.
In that contact she feels the Ring’s distant pulse through the deck, a slow, arrhythmic thrum crawling up her bones as if some buried relay acknowledges a new circuit closed. For a moment her implantless nerves tingle with phantom schematics: doors that will fail on command, alarms that will learn to lie. From this point on, any “safety cascade” or corridor failure she engineers won’t just be a ghost fix from the ducts: it will be an openly chosen act in a wider fight, with signatures written in stress fractures and altered airflow curves instead of ink.
The hum drops in stages, like someone ratcheting down the world. First the ore tram under the hub brakes hard, its magnets whining. Then the crowd noise thins cut off mid-word as public address chimes bark for silence. By the time the tannoy clicks open, even the air-handlers seem to hold their breath.
“Transit Hub Epsilon-Seven entering Suppression Protocol Theta,” the ceiling speakers rasp in clean corporate consonants, Zoran’s accent ironed flat by filter. “All non-cleared personnel: assume prone position, hands visible. Noncompliance will be met with corrective force.”
Miroslava feels the shift through her ribs before she hears it, the vibration pattern of the hub changing as blast shutters align in the walls. She’s belly-down above it all in a slit of space between alien hull and human ductwork, hip bone grinding against a bolt head, coolant-stink in her nostrils. Below, security drones spill in from three access points at once, black ovoids with pupil-less optics and flexing jointed limbs, moving with that same over-smooth timing that always makes her skin crawl.
They fan out along the platform edges, sensor clusters pivoting in tight arcs, each step a measured thud on the grating. Targeting lasers comb over bodies forced flat on the deck. Someone whimpers; a drone’s speaker pops a warning burst, volume calibrated just shy of pain.
Zoran’s voice follows, thinner now, bouncing up through expansion gaps in the bulkhead. “Theta-phase: lock and clear. Authorize search grid nine by nine. Asset priority: Markovska, Miroslava. Engineer-grade. Alive if compliant.”
Her own name lands like a dropped wrench in her skull.
She swallows against a flare of nausea, presses closer to the mesh under her, feeling the faint static sweep of drone scans graze the metal inches below her face. One more sweep pattern change and they’ll start pinging the maintenance voids, start noticing irregularities in the thermal map. Her breath, her heat.
They’re early, she thinks, anger sparking under the fear. M-13 chatter said Theta drills for next week. Zoran pushed schedule. Hungry bastard. Eager to show off his implant’s predictive metrics to corporate.
She flexes her cramped fingers, knuckles slick with coolant and alien dust, and listens as the hub’s familiar chaos is pressed flat into that brittle, regulated quiet she’s learned to hate.
Instinct snarls at her to back-crawl into the dark, vanish along the maintenance spine the way she’s done a dozen sweeps before: be ghost, be rumor, not target. Her knees twitch toward retreat. She forces them still.
“Net, ti ne begesh,” she whispers into the duct, forcing the words through clenched teeth.
She clamps her jaw until it hurts, twists in the cramped space until metal bites her ribs, and reaches for a corroded junction box she tagged weeks ago with a smear of grease and a mental note: alien bleed-through here. The cover plate is fused on one side; she levers it with a chipped driver until it snaps loose, vibration shivering up her forearm.
Inside, human cabling sits like crude stitches over something older. Alien filaments glow faintly where insulation has sloughed away, soft as bioluminescent mold. She slots in her improvised tap, a tangle of scavenged interface prongs and stolen diagnostic leads, and the Ring slides into her like a breath of winter.
Cold, not-quite-electric sensation floods up her arm, spidering across her collarbone, brushing the back of her skull. Her vision tightens at the edges; radiation headache spikes into a white, needled halo.
“Come on, starucha,” she mutters, not sure if she means herself or the structure.
Her palm trembles on the tap as she pulls up the half-legal diagnostic overlay she built in stolen hours. Corporate command trees flicker in standard icons: LOCKDOWN_THETA // GRID_SEARCH // DRONE_PRIORITY_ASSET_MIR. Beneath them, deeper in the feed, alien glyphs ripple. Angled spirals, recursive arcs the translators only half-understand.
She doesn’t ride around Zoran’s orders this time. She goes through.
Teeth gritted, she threads her intent through the interference layer, nudging human protocol flags aside, forcing her signal down into the alien substrate. Glyphs distort under her touch like oil under pressure. Standard lockdown branches shudder, re-route. Where Zoran’s implant pushes for seal-and-pin, she drags pathways sideways, prying open alternate routes, deliberately corrupting his pristine Theta tree into something crooked and wrong.
The Ring hesitates: then takes the new path.
The Ring answers like a sudden intake of breath, a system-wide flinch. Below, the first set of bulkhead doors that should slam shut instead snap open with a gunshot crack, pressure seals coughing white vapor as they wrench wide. Further down, secondary hatches follow suit in a staggered cascade, turning Zoran’s clean grid into a ragged mouth of exits. Air-handlers roar into overdrive, compressors whining past safe tolerances, and the long corridor becomes a howling wind tunnel that shreds formation discipline. Drones buffet and yaw, stabilizers oversaturating, auto-gimbals hunting uselessly for true level. Emergency strips along the walls don’t go to the calm amber of corporate protocol; they stutter into a jagged red pulse that knives through smoke, overloading optical feeds and painting officers in broken, staggering frames, like targets in a failing sim.
Status bands over the tramline spit static, then knit into a blunt, unauthorized string: ALIEN-SUBSTRATE ERROR // SAFETY CASCADE ENGAGED // ROUTE OVERRIDE: M-13. Not corporate code, not any Theta-script. Faces turn up into the strobe. Someone breaths, “M-treynadtsat,” like a prayer. For a heartbeat the hub hangs between fear and something sharper. Drones jitter, pathfinding against ghosted fault trees; squad leaders curse, helmets crackling with conflicting directives. The smart ones read the room. And the error. “Retrograde, retrograde, hub is red,” barks a clipped command, and security formations peel back in uneven segments, shields raised not against the crowd but against the suddenly treacherous Ring itself.
When the last drone peels away and the wind gutters down to a ragged wheeze, a stunned hush holds the corridor: just the drip of condensate, the soft clatter of someone dropping a tool. Then a single voice (cracked, disbelieving) throws out a cheer that snags in a dozen tight throats and suddenly breaks loose, swelling into a roar that ricochets off rusted plates and buried alien stone alike. Above, sweat stinging her eyes, Miroslava sags in the crawlspace and lets her helmet rest against cold metal, pulse hammering so hard her vision grains out at the edges, nausea licking at the back of her throat. She knows she could have buried the override inside anonymous maintenance chatter, ghosted it through routine self-test subroutines, left nothing but a corrupted timestamp in some underpaid tech’s diagnostics queue. Instead she carved M-13 straight through the event like a weld-line signature, and feels (sharper than the headache) how the Ring’s faint answering thrum rises under her palms, not just power flow but a slow, syncopated pulse, as if the old machine is listening now, and remembers her.
In the days that follow, the story acquires edges and extra angles, sharpening every time it changes hands. In M-13’s kitchens, between ladled stew and muttered ration tallies, people lean closer over steam and clatter, talking in low voices that still somehow carry. An old welder swears there were three full squads, all with riot shields, trapped behind doors that “just… forgot them.” A girl who’d been at the far end of the tramline insists the drones fired on each other in the confusion, guided by ghost orders. Someone’s cousin claims the emergency glyph sequence on the panels wasn’t corporate at all, that if you tilted your head and squinted you could see an old alien word home: hidden in the pattern of strobing lines.
Memory gets bent, annealed, reforged. How many officers? Depends who you ask. Which doors moved first? Depends on which end of the corridor they were standing. Whether the flashing symbols meant anything at all splits tables into factions. Younger ones argue the glyphs were talking directly to them, to “our people.” Older ones snort into their bowls and say code is just code, and the only thing it talks to is pumps and fans. No one can agree on the specifics, but everyone agrees on the feeling: for one heartbeat, the heavy hand of the regime slipped, lost its grip on the vents and doors and air, and the Ring itself seemed to twitch in their favor.
Word bleeds out of M-13 with the steam from its pots. By the time it hits the shafts, the “alien error” has grown teeth. Shift crews in K-4 repeat a version where the doorframes spat sparks that leapt away from miners and snapped at armored boots. On the tram platforms, someone adds that the status bands spelled out not just “M-13” but a whole route: safe paths, if you knew how to read them. By the third day, the story is no longer about a scared, overclocked engineer in a crawlspace; it’s about the Ring choosing a side, just once, and the sudden terrifying possibility that it might do so again.
Ritual creeps in around the edges of routine, thin as dust at first, then settling. Someone daubs the crude “Mira arc” sigil beside old memorial names, a wobbled line of Ring with one defiant slash through it, and candles (or the closest thing, hacked glow-strips taped into stubby cylinders) burn beneath it at shift change, their housings warming the metal just enough to leave faint scorch halos. Kids argue over whose aunt actually saw the first one go up; no one admits to painting it, but the paint keeps turning up anyway, scavenged primer in rust-red, coolant-blue, whatever sticks.
In M-13, mothers teach children to knock three times on the bulkhead before sleep, knuckles soft on cold plating. “Raz, dva, tri. So she hears you, so the Ring remembers,” they murmur, half-lullaby, half-instruction manual for a world where doors have opinions. Some of the older miners sit back in the steam haze and frown at the superstition, muttering that you don’t tease stone that’s kept you alive this long, alien or not. But their hands still hover a moment over the sigil when they pass, and they don’t scrape the paint off either.
Along the shafts, the legend turns practical, then logistical. Mining captains quietly swap routes over smokes and lukewarm tea, reassigning their most accident-prone crews toward galleries rumored to be “under her eye,” close to alien seams Miroslava once flagged, years back, as overbuilt and forgiving. No one writes this into shift manifests; it lives in side comments, in a finger tapped twice against a corridor name.
When a buckled tram rail that should have sheared a hauler instead gives way in exactly the right direction to throw the cart into a maintenance buffer, the incident report calls it “lucky flex within tolerance.” The hauler’s family knows better. By next watch, a tiny wire ring bent into the Kovalev arc hangs from the tram’s control strut, polished by nervous thumbs before every run.
The music changes faster than the paperwork. A collapse ballad that once named only greed and bad rock as killers now carries an extra verse, sung softer at first: about a woman who learned to “read the buried pulses” and turn them back on the hands that throttled vents and lungs. The line seeps from locker-room murmurs to half-drunk harmonies in grime-slick showers, then to full-throated choruses on the trudging walk back from K-4, until even Sergei’s clerks can hear it drifting up through the tram grates like a pressure warning. Pens pause over ration ledgers; someone mutters, “Careful what you sing, da?” but the refrain keeps rising. The melody is the same; the address of the warning is not.
All of this swirls tighter around Miroslava each time she risks the warrens. Kids who once ricocheted off her legs now fall abruptly silent, watching her like she’s half-story, half-fire hazard, as if one wrong word might void whatever pact she has with the metal. Adults edge aside, making her a thin corridor of passerby’s blessing and wary audit; some nod like to priest, some like to foreman, some just stare, measuring sinew and burn-scars against the songs. A skinny teen with coal under his nails darts close, presses a thumb-warmed scrap of etched plating into her palm and mutters, “Za zashchitu, engineerka,” before vanishing up a ladder-well. Reflex takes over; Miroslava pockets it like any other maybe-useful bit of metal, something to file or bend when a fix demands it. Only later, belly-down in a humming service crawl, alien glyphs ghosting faint under the human cabling, does she realize she’s taken it back out. She turns the charm over and over between forefinger and thumb, tracing the crooked Ring-line, feeling callus catch on each scored groove while her other hand hovers over a manual override. The weight that settles is not the scrap’s, but the invisible drag of a thousand whispered knocks on bulkheads, of shift captains quietly betting lives on a rumor in the stone. It lands on her shoulders and behind her eyes, a pressure front building a heartbeat before the regime’s first neat, official denials begin to scroll across the public screens outside, trying to name the Ring, and her, back into something ordinary.
The first bulletin rolls out mid-shift, catching people between breaths. In tram hubs, in mess queues, in the cramped alcoves where workers hunch over lukewarm stew, the static-filled ad loops stutter, smear, then snap to the same feed: Zoran’s face, sharp in corporate-neutral lighting, logo turning lazy at his shoulder like it owns the air.
“Attention, Kovalev Ring personnel,” his voice comes through the ceiling grids and bulkhead speakers, ironed flat of any local accent. “You may have experienced brief safety drills this past cycle.”
Behind him, the projection wall shifts from his profile to schematic overlays: green wireframes of the Ring, node after node blinking amber where the lockouts happened. A neat infographic blooms, icons of little human figures under stylized vents.
“These were scheduled alien-interface scenario tests,” he continues, the implant-glaze in his eyes just visible if you know to look. “Our priority is redundancy and protection. Only licensed, neural-linked experts are cleared to engage with core systems. This is for your safety.”
On the lower half of the screens, legal text scrolls in tight columns: clauses about unauthorized access, liability waivers, disciplinary matrices. Most people don’t read that. They watch the b-roll he’s talking over. Archival cuts the corporate editors always keep ready.
A corridor buckling in grainy black-and-white. Animated decompression models: red silhouettes sucked through a ruptured hatch, numbers ticking up in the corner: -47 lives, -162 lives. A slow pan across a memorial wall from some other station, candles and family icons blurring at the edges. Overlay: WHEN UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL INTERFERE.
Zoran’s voice threads cold through it. “You may have heard… alternative explanations for these drills. Folk stories. Claims that someone can ‘speak to the Ring.’ These are dangerous superstitions. The alien substrate does not distinguish intent; improper contact can trigger cascade failures.”
The feed cuts back to his face, jaw set in benevolent concern. “If you suspect tampering, report it via standard channels. Do not spread unverified rumors. Panic costs air. Panic costs lives.”
In the warrens, someone snorts, “Panic you make yourself, kapitan.” In the shafts, miners glance up once, weigh the warning against the song caught in their teeth, and let the bulletin wash past like another layer of dust.
By late-shift the tramline outside his hall is a slow, grinding river, so when Sergei calls an assembly it fills fast: shift bosses smelling crisis, aunties from M-13 wrapped in patched blankets, a few young hotheads pulled along by older hands. The old ore bay hums with overlapping grievances, voices bouncing off sheet metal and faded slogans until Sergei steps up beneath the repurposed union banners, their colors washed out under cheap LEDs.
He lets it run first. Complaints about “haunted” doors, frozen lifts, patrols locked in their own corridors; mutters about a protector, a saboteur, the Ring choosing sides. He stands with his hands on the rail, jaw set in weary patience, until the volume crests.
Then he lifts both palms. “Vsyo, vsyo. Enough. We breathe first, da?”
Grudging silence settles. He taps a tablet, throwing crude graphs onto a hanging display: oxygen margins, recycler runtimes, ration curves skirting red.
“Listen. You think I don’t hear stories? I hear. But rumor is worse than glitch. Air doesn’t care if you sing about it, it just runs out.”
He jabs a finger at a dip in the line. “You see this drop? That’s when someone ‘played’ with maintenance access last week. You liked that lockout on patrol, eh? Funny, until scrubbers lag and your kids wake coughing.”
A murmur; a woman by the rail folds her arms tighter, picturing cramped bunks and wheezy lungs.
“I don’t care old ghosts, new heroes,” Sergei says, voice softening into foreman’s reassurance. “Whoever is poking where they shouldn’t, they gamble with all of us. With your babushki on level three, with babies in M-13, with men still in K-7 right now.”
He never says Miroslava. Just “someone,” “tamperer,” “idiot with a panel key.” But each time, his gaze flicks not to the refugees but to a knot of young techs near the back, seeding the thought that the danger lives closer to their own crews than in any whispered saint in the ducts.
“We handle problems together,” he finishes. “Through channels. Through me. Not through panic, not through fairy tales. You want to keep breathing? Then you report glitches, not glorify them.”
When the hall finally drains to a low murmur and ore-tram thunder, Sergei ghosts back into his glass box, shuts the door on the crowd’s heat, and starts the real work. Physical ledgers first, old habit, ink scratching new footnotes into past shift reports: a junior valve tech who once bypassed a lockout “for efficiency,” an apprentice caught joyriding a maintenance sled. Then the digital layer, cleaner and more dangerous. He resurrects a dead technician from archival blur, tags him with “historic access irregularities,” lets that phrase echo across three separate incident clusters. Names that meant nothing yesterday begin to accrete sin in the logs. Over a tightbeam channel, he packages the pattern for Zoran: neat risk profiles, disciplinary options, a menu of martyrs and fools to spend instead of saying “Miroslava” out loud.
At console log-in, timers grey out controls until the briefings run. Chirpy infographics show cartoon workers “trusting the process,” arrows guiding them away from glowing alien conduits toward smiling avatars in corporate blue. Fine print scrolls: unauthorized access voids life insurance, relocates families “for safety.” The spray-paint icon blinks, then dissolves into a schematic of an exploding corridor, risk percentages pulsing red.
In Irina’s wings and the deeper shafts alike, the same lines leak from different mouths. Med techs, eyes on vitals, recite briefing scripts warning patients not to “indulge stress fantasies about friendly glitches,” logging any insistence as early neurosis. In canteen briefings, security folds Mira-stories into “panic propaganda” seeded by off-station agitators and “uncredentialed technicians.” Zoran flags any ad-hoc diagnostics on anomalous behavior as potential breach probes, rerouting logs straight to Systems Command; Sergei mirrors that language in council minutes and ration rulings. The pattern settles like dust: the Ring is “neutral infrastructure,” made safe only by licensed interfaces, while unauthorized faith in its favor is reclassified as instability, sedition, or both: something you learn not to voice where cams can read lips.
Corporate denial turns into cartography.
In Shaft K-4, the first arc went up between rust streaks and an old union slogan. By the next shift it’s grown teeth. Tiny hatch marks climb its curve, each scrawled with a date and a shaft code; next to some, someone has added a little sinking line and then a hard up-tick, like a stress graph catching itself at the last moment. Old-timers tap those marks with knuckles as they pass, muttering, “That was the Tuesday shear. Remember? Tram should’ve gone into vacuum.” The younger ones whisper that Mira “leaned” the Ring, that the gravity spike came half a second early and pinned a loose support before it snapped. Nobody writes “luck” on the wall. They write “HER” in chipped paint and busted chalk.
In M-13, the stories shrink down to finger-length and breath. Kids drag frost-damp fingertips through bulkhead condensation, drawing the arc until it beads and runs. They whisper rules like playground physics: “If you leave food on the common rack, conduit see you.” “If you lie to headwoman, Ring close vent on your bunk.” Adults argue in low, hoarse voices over tea brewed three times from the same leaves. One old man swears the conduit helps those who share their ration top-ups; a younger woman with meter-burn scars insists it only moved for them after they hotwired a corporate counter and “took back what was ours.”
On mess lines, in tram queues, waiting out micro-quake pauses under flickering strips, the talk shifts registers. People compare notes the way techs compare fault logs. That air-scrubber hiccup on K-7. Just noise, or did it cycle clean right when the kids’ cough got bad? The camera dropout over M-13. Power sag, or someone “blinking” the eye so a smuggled med crate could slip through? They start sorting anomalies into piles: dumb glitch, angry Ring, kind Ring. Someone coins a phrase. Lists appear in the margins of shift schedules and on the backs of ration chits:
, light flicker before quake = warning
, tram stall, then resume after patrol pass = protection
: door jammed on inspector, not on us = joke
The taxonomy spreads mouth to mouth, code-switching with dialect. “System mood bad today,” a hauler says, patting the bulkhead like a sulking animal. “No, no,” a canteen worker answers, pointing at the sigil scratched above the hatch. “She’s watching. Just thinking who to favor.”
The sigil itself fractures into dialects, picking up accent and attitude with every bulkhead it crosses. On miner levels it goes hard-edged and technical: the clean arc bristles with angle-brackets and crossbars, extra lines notched with tiny shaft codes, pump IDs, scrubber serials. Someone etches pressure readings beside them in microscopic script, circles the ones where “something” happened. Scratched initials of whole crews cluster there, like signatures on a maintenance report nobody filed. A bored tram tech adds little overload symbols where a surge tripped just in time; an explosives chief carefully inks the delay between a mistimed charge and a last-second auto-damp.
In the warrens, the same arc softens, rounded by candle smoke and children’s hands. Curling lines suggest breath and flow; painted lungs, water-drops, stylized heater coils halo it like saints on a portable altar. Charms hang from conduit clamps beneath it. Near a forgotten service hatch by Irina’s infirmary, someone draws the arc over a crude cryopod outline, vents sketched as ribs. In shaky block letters they add: WE WILL WAKE: half promise, half threat to whoever buried the past in ice and calls it protocol.
By the third or fourth retelling, cause and credit have nothing to do with each other. A three-second dead zone in a ration-cam, caused by a worn relay in a junction Miroslava has never even plotted, gets baptized as “Mira turning her face from shame so we could take what’s ours.” A pallet of antibiotics that Irina herself ghosted off the official manifests and into an overrun ward becomes, by next meal-cycle, “the Ring pushing medicine where the ledger locked its teeth.” Every time a patrol hatch coughs, reverses, then grinds open, some watcher under their breath says, “She touched that line.” Script upload fails? “She jammed the mouth.” The phrase travels faster than memos, slotted into jokes, prayers, and half-coded work orders alike.
Natalya reads the drift in the rumors and leans into the blur. In scrambled low-band pirate casts, her flattened, modulated voice never quite says one woman bends the Ring. Instead she loops refrains: “Be the unauthorized conduit in your own sector,” “If one of us can talk to metal, all of us can listen.” The hacked feeds show maintenance schematics ghosted with the sigil, a single redrawn line cascading through pumps, vents, tram brakes. She urges crews to tag their own quiet sabotage with that mark, to route a little air here, a little power there, as if the structure already tilts toward whoever dares to reroute its flows. And to speak of any resulting “luck” as Mira’s will, not their own.
By the time stories lap back to M-13, the line between glitch and gospel is gone. A stalled riot-gate in a crowded tram hub, just a jittery script retry, gets retold as “the Ring remembering who rides its spine.” A night of uncannily smooth gravity in a twitchy warren, courtesy of some exhausted tech’s compensator swap, is chalked up to Mira’s favor. Any reprieve from ration cuts, any unlogged maintenance cycle that just happens to tilt toward the poorest blocks, is laid at the same invisible hand. The Kovalev Ring stops being dead alloy and legacy code; in mess-hall whispers it’s a sleeping thing, restless, picking through its own conduits for friends. “Mira” becomes the name people give that stirring: whether or not Miroslava has ever laid a wrench on the affected line.
The meeting in the communal kitchen starts as a favor and curdles into an inquest.
The room is a long, low container stripped of its original freight markings and painted over with icons. Condensation beads on the ceiling ribs; steam from a battered samovar fogs the strip-lights until everyone’s faces are smeared into ghosts. The table is a salvaged duct panel balanced on oxygen crates, its surface already etched with knife-scores and old heat-burns.
Shift reps crowd one side. Jackets still dusted with ore, ID tags flipped blank-side out. Opposite them, three grandmothers in layered shawls sit like a tribunal, hands folded over prayer cords and ration chits. Two of Natalya’s ground contacts wedge themselves into the doorway, keeping an eye on the corridor, rifles broken down into component pieces in their duffel so no one can say they came armed.
Miroslava stands at the narrow end of the table, close enough to the samovar that the metal warms her hip. She’s shed her outer jacket, sleeves rolled to the elbow, old chemical burns pale against the thin film of sweat. A flex of the bulkhead with every passing tram makes the spoons in their chipped mugs rattle.
Natalya leans against the side wall, boot heel braced on a lower pipe, arms folded. Her voice is low but relentless, the clipped pilot cadence softened into warren slang.
“Look, Mira. When you poke system, you leave bruise, da? You say when you can bruise. We move around it.”
She taps the table with a blunt knuckle in time with her list: if they can time their moves to Miroslava’s access windows they might slip whole families past checkpoints, black out a camera stack just as a shuttle undocks, or freeze a security barracks in its bunks for sixty seconds before it deploys. Each request is wrapped in survival, “this block loses kids in sweeps,” “that corridor is only exit if shaft K-7 collapses”, never in banners or manifestos, but the pattern is clear.
They want a schedule. They want doctrine. Something reliable enough that Natalya can plan extractions on it, that shift reps can swear by it in mess-hall arguments, that the grandmothers can fold into bedtime stories: when the Ring blinks twice, run; when it hums low, hide.
Miroslava drags a fingertip through a patch of spilled tea on the metal, sketching absent lines (junctions, pumps, choke-points) more to think than to share. The murmurs hush as if she were drawing borders on new land.
“Is not magic,” she says finally, the Slavic burr sharper when she’s tired. “I steal maintenance windows, da. I ride on bad logging. I cannot just (” she snaps her fingers, “) switch off captain’s teeth every time you feel like biting him back.”
A grandmother with milky eyes leans forward, bracelets clinking. “No one asks for miracles, devochka. Only that when you already turn screw, you tell us which way.”
“Then we can stand in the slipstream,” one of Natalya’s contacts adds from the doorway. “Or get out of blast.”
Requests start to stack, overlapping. A rep from the upper bunks wants a guaranteed ten-minute pressure-stability band during clampdowns so kids can cross to communal toilets without suffocating if a valve hiccups. Another argues for predictable brownouts along the tram spine: just long enough that corporate escorts have to switch to manual override, eyes off the crowd. Someone else brings up heater cycles in a corridor where the elderly sleep; if rations cuts are coming, could “Mira” at least time the cold for when the young are on-shift?
The words tumble into one another until they stop sounding like favors and more like laws they expect her to write.
Miroslava feels the skin between her shoulders tighten, a crawling awareness of all the eyes pinned to her, of the Ring beneath their feet humming its indifferent, alien baseline.
“You think I draw little sigil on bulkhead and Ring listens,” she mutters. “I am engineer, not… not priest.”
“Priest or not,” Natalya replies, pushing off the wall, “you are already in their stories. Either you choose pattern, or pattern chooses you.”
Pressure converges from beyond the warrens, too.
The medic who brings Irina’s request smells of antiseptic and cheap spirits, sleeves rolled to hide the worst of the needle-tracks. He waits until the kitchen thins out, then slides a folded strip of sterile wrapper across the table like contraband.
“From doc,” he mutters. “She says you read numbers better than sermons.”
Inside, Irina’s hand is precise as ever: a narrow outage window, twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds, with start and end times pegged to life-support tick not local clocks. During that gap, telemetry from several beds in her infirmary would “intermittently desync,” letting undocumented patients slip off official monitors while they are wheeled into the cryo archive. The language is all clinical necessity: projected mortality curves if they remain in standard wards, risk-weighted justifications for “temporary record discontinuity.”
Underneath the math, Miroslava hears it anyway: Irina staking her career, maybe her life, on a ghost in the circuits.
At the same time, whispers from Sokolov’s hall seep down-shaft. Ration sheets “mysteriously” tilt toward blocks rumored to be under Mira’s protection; bins arrive a little fuller, water counters tick a little slower. Families left out slam cups on mess tables and demand to know why the Ring listens to some and not others, why one painted sigil on a bulkhead means their children eat while another corridor freezes.
Exhausted and boxed in, Miroslava finally drags a grease-stained tray aside and starts scratching lines on the bare metal table with a scavenged nail. Fine curls of paint dust gather under her hand. She blocks out sectors where she knows the alien substrate will still answer her pulses, little rectangles shaded with the side of the nail; circles nodes already under tight corporate watch; and drags hard, gouging crosses through choke points tied straight into Zajcev’s gallery: places she refuses to touch for fear of waking subsystems even he, with his implant, doesn’t fully control. As she works, the room quiets by degrees. Elders tilt in closer, Natalya’s people trade sharp, wordless looks, and the samovar’s hiss becomes the only sound. To them it looks less like a diagnostic sketch and more like a battle map, an invisible front line overlaid on passageways their feet have memorized since childhood. What she marks becomes, in their eyes, where they may live: and where they may be allowed to die.
When she warns them she can’t reach certain pumps without tripping Zajcev’s analytics, tempers spike like bad pressure. A young mother from the frostbit outer tiers slams her fist on the metal, demanding why her kids’ heaters stay dead while some other corridor gets “Mira’s” warmth. A miner rep fires back that without stable air-buffers along the tram spine, ore stops, quotas fail, and then everyone’s rations vanish. Old shaft rivalries surface, families trading blame over who “always gets saved first.” Natalya, eyes narrowed, lets it crest just long enough to show Miroslava the vacuum she’s drifted into: every grievance, every memory of neglect, now argued in terms of where the Ring “listens.” When the shouting peaks over which block deserves the next clampdown’s air-buffer, it cuts off together: as people realize they’re all waiting for Miroslava to speak.
She hates how their faces ease when she says “rotation,” how need turns to faith the instant she sketches fairness into the metal. Still, she forces her voice flat as she assigns buffer tiers and blackout corridors, makes them repeat back siren codes until even the oldest tongues stumble less. Natalya’s quick corrections tighten those timings into ambush clocks. When someone mutters blessings at her retreating back, Miroslava flinches harder than she would at a rifle report.
The crackdown hits without warning bells. No klaxon, no polite pre-alert from Admin, just the gut-knot snap of wrong gravity. M-13 lurches sideways as if the whole shaft has rolled in its sleep. Bunks and bodies shear off their habits, slamming into bulkheads; cookware and children and shrine candles become one tumbling cloud.
For a heartbeat there’s only the low animal roar of hundreds of throats realizing at once that down has betrayed them.
Miroslava feels it half a second before the first compensator screams in her local feeds, a sour twist in the Ring’s pull that doesn’t match any of her stress models. “Ne tak… that’s not maintenance,” she spits, already braced. Her shoulder clips a conduit and she uses the impact to swing herself into the nearest wall console, boots skidding on a floor that now slopes like a bad memory of open sky.
Corporate “safety recalibration” notices stutter over dead channels, pale blue text flickering and ghosting as gravity spikes again. Somewhere up-chain Zajcev is pushing a clean narrative: anomaly, precaution, nothing to see. Down here it looks like deliberate punishment.
Miroslava slams into manual, palms flat, jackknifing past official presets. The schematics she scratched into that mess-hall table are already alive behind her eyes. Red-line zones flare across her overlay. Child corridors, kitchen clusters, the narrow run that feeds into Irina’s overflow sickbays.
She kills three compensators outright and shunts their capacity sideways, cursing as load bars bleed into the red. “Hold, suka. Hold.” Gravity in the play-tunnels dips from bone-crushing to merely brutal; storage stacks and gambler dens she marked expendable peg hard and stay there, eighty, ninety percent over spec. Somewhere, vertebrae are turning to powdered glass so that a lower tier of kids can still reach a ladder.
Sirens misfire in the pattern she designed (three short, two long) as Zajcev’s remote command packets collide with her dirty overrides. The tone warbles, cuts, comes back jagged. To untrained ears it’s panic noise. To the ones who sat in that room with the samovar, it’s gospel.
A woman hauling a toddler by the wrist freezes only long enough to bark, “Tri-kratko, dva-dolgo, go!” and shoves them both toward the green-stenciled hatch that, yesterday, was just a jammed service door. A half-drunk tram mechanic blinks at the skewed ceiling, hears the second long wail, and slams his shoulder into a coolant locker exactly where Miroslava told him the panel would pop, revealing the crawlspace that bypasses a choke-point now crumpling under G-spikes.
In a side corridor, a teen who’d rolled his eyes at “Mira’s drills” still finds his body moving before his pride can argue: hooking his arm under an old man’s, pivoting both of them around a blind corner just as loose bunks scythe past. Above the din: the remembered rasp of her voice, flat and unimpressed. You don’t run fast enough now, you don’t run at all when it’s real.
Sergei’s watchers, posted like always at junctions with nothing in their hands but clipboards and quiet eyes, talk into encrypted mics about “chaotic, uncoordinated flight.” Screams, yes. Stumbles, yes. But in the background of their shaky clips, the same doors keep opening, the same ladders see traffic in the same direction, and the same three-short-two-long cadence drives it all.
Up-chain, the report packages reach Zajcev wrapped in standard admin phrasing. Panic stampedes in M-13. Civilian compliance degrading. No mention of pattern resonance, of the way the so-called chaos flows along corridors Miroslava shaded with the side of a scavenged nail.
Back in the heart of the warrens, braced between two groaning bulkheads, Miroslava rides the feedback storm. Compensator graphs sawtooth; alien substrate readouts flicker with glyph-echo. She feels the Ring’s distaste at being used this way like a pressure behind her eyes.
“Come on, devushka,” she mutters to the megastructure itself, forcing another power reallocation through a route corporate thinks is dead. “You wanted to listen? Then listen to them.”
In the stuttering half-light, Natalya’s team ghosts through a supposedly sealed bypass, boots kissing ladder rungs in practiced silence as dust shivers in the skewed gravity. The hatch that “never cycles” yawns for exactly five seconds. Just long enough for six bodies and a crate of signal amps to slip past the frozen security patrol Miroslava’s earlier “malfunction” habitually strands near Docking Spindle East. Suits gleam corporate blue, faces behind visors red with fury and centrifugal blood as the grav-glitch pins them in place; one reaches for a sidearm that refuses to rise against his own weight.
As the first priority locks ripple outward from Zoran’s remote commands (sector seals iris shut, tram brakes slam on) Natalya rides the rising panic like it’s a carrier wave. “Slot now,” she snaps, and her tech punches the payload into the emergency net. A hijacked broadcast worms into the gaps between corporate alerts, replacing sterile evacuation schematics with raw feeds from M-13: children spidered along handholds in tilted bunks, elders pinned under dislodged containers, shrine candles tumbling in dirty arcs.
Over that imagery she burns in the sharpened sigil: Kovalev’s arc, the single unauthorized conduit, and now the stark, angular profile of Miroslava turning toward a corona of alien glyphs, the pulse rate matched, by design, to the Ring’s deep, unseen heart.
The caption lands like a dare and a promise both: “SHE HEARS THE RING. WE ANSWER.” In blocky Slavic script and jagged station pidgin, it crawls across cracked displays and jury-rigged holos, letters stepping over dead pixels and impact scars. It flashes on handhelds yanked from tool belts, maintenance schematics in tram junctions, even ration terminal splash-screens in Sokolov’s hall before his clerks swear and yank breakers, plunging half the office into sallow emergency light.
In Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, the image ghosts across a secondary telemetry pane for three full seconds. An eternity. Long enough for Zoran’s implant to spike, tracing its injection vector through supposedly isolated subnets; long enough for the alien glyphs under the floor to kindle in eerie co-phase with the stylized halo around Miroslava’s head: before a purge command sears it blank.
Down-ring, hunched in skewed corridors, miners and refugees feel the stutter in systems they’ve lived inside all their lives. Alarms cough, lights hiccup, the Ring seems to draw breath with them. The broadcast’s vanishing syncs too neatly with that pulse. To people who survive on patterns and superstition, it reads like something else: not a hack, but the megastructure itself pausing to look back, to mark one of its own.
In the warrens and along the ore trams, the crude graffiti sigil mutates overnight. Where there was once only an arc and conduit labeled “Mira,” rough hands now add a face in harsh black strokes: the close-cropped hair, the hooked nose, the pale, intent eyes turned not up toward corporate emblems but sideways, as if listening through the walls, head cocked toward unseen glyphs. Young men shear their hair with dull cutters in wash-station mirrors, laughing too loud to hide the tremor; women stitch the conduit line in contrasting thread along their jacket sleeves, turning work-wear into quiet uniforms; children press their fingers to the painted jawline before ducking into drilled escape holes when alarms cough in the wrong key, whispering, “Slyshish, Mira? You hear us?” Sergei, watching a line of workers file past a fresh mural outside his glass office, their gazes flicking to the image, not to him, realizes the symbol has slipped beyond his ability to reframe. Metrics and memos will not pull it back into his orbit; he can only decide whether to feed Zoran more data, selling the myth for favor, or try, belatedly, to ride the wave himself and risk being dragged under when it breaks.
She bares her teeth in something not quite smile, not quite snarl, and mutters, “Durjat’sya, malaya,” as she shunts another surge sideways, feeling the alien substrate flex around her code like muscle deciding whether to clench. Somewhere up-ring, Zoran will see this blip and hunt the ghost in his systems. Down here, flesh and rumor and scratched paint have already outrun him.
Security visors bloom white with target locks as armored squads pour through the warrens, stun-pulses and baton strikes reducing familiar doorways to choke-points of bodies and spilled ration bowls. The first impact rolls through M-13 like distant thunder. Boots on ladderwells, mag-clamps biting metal, the clipped bark of corporate command Russian chopped thin for helmet mics.
Miroslava is three junctions in when the noise hits. She’s elbow-deep in a jury-rigged heat exchanger, fingers numb from microshocks, when the overhead bulkhead shivers and a child’s scream cuts off mid-note. She freezes only for a breath, then slams the access panel shut, smearing rust dust over the faded hazard stencils.
“Shut down open feeds,” she snaps in pidgin to the boy on lookout, no older than twelve, who’s hanging off a conduit like some alley cat. “Kill all bright. Now.”
The kid bolts, slapping breaker paddles as he goes. Lights gutter. Half the creek of wiring goes dark. But the corporate floodlamps blooming at the main access don’t care about her stolen amperage. Cold white sheets down the throat of the warren.
In the entry galleries, refugees spill from their stacked bunks, pulling cloth partitions aside, coughing as the first canisters bounce and spin, hissing pale vapor. Tear-gas analog snakes low along the deck, denser than air, searching ankles and knees before blooming up into lungs and eyes. People try to climb, onto bunks, up cable ladders, into crawlspaces, but the gas follows, blooming in slow, oily curls.
Armored troopers move in behind it with methodical calm, visors sealed, HUDs alive with ghostly silhouettes. Stun batons crackle blue as they clear each side corridor, shock-fields tuned just shy of lethal. One trooper kicks through a curtain painted with saints and star-flowers, drags out an old man clutching an oxygen canister, tags him with a wrist-scan, and shoves him toward a waiting restraint line.
Overhead, loudspeakers crackle with a doctored reassurance in corporate-standard: “Medical quarantine operation. Comply and you will not be harmed.” The voice echoes off container walls, distorted into something hollow and predatory.
From her vantage on a maintenance rung above Junction C-5, Miroslava watches one of the primary exits seal under a descending bulkhead, gas haloed around its edges. She bites down on the urge to run straight at it. Her brain, overclocked and ruthless, is already mapping bypasses: waste conduits, disused pressure valves, alien-cut fissures she’s not supposed to know reach this deep.
“They’re sweeping by work-crew lists,” she mutters to herself, hearing the cadence of the squads, ordered, sector by sector, just like a maintenance schedule. “Sergei, you snake.”
A stun-round slams into the wall half a meter from her head, splintering old insulation. Someone below had tried to rush the line with a welding torch. Now he jerks on the floor, limbs spasming, while a trooper plants a boot on his wrist and strips the tool away.
Behind the front lines, med-drones marked with Irina’s crest float in, sampling air, tagging collapsed bodies with color-coded adhesive tabs. Red for critical, yellow for transport, gray for “no resource allocation.” The drones do not ask permission; they simply decide and move on.
Miroslava tastes metal at the back of her throat, eyes watering from the residue creeping up the shaft. Around her, the warrens (the only home left for too many) are being reclassified in real time: not as a community, but as a containment zone.
She forces herself off the rung, deeper into the maze where corp schematics say nothing exists. If they are turning M-13 into a cage, she will have to use the one advantage they still don’t understand: the alien seams behind the walls that, when coaxed just right, open for her and no one else.
Gravity spikes slam on and off in vicious pulses down adjacent shafts, turning whole corridors into invisible hammers. One second bodies are light, almost floating as panicked feet leave the deck; the next they’re crushed downward with three, four gees, knees buckling like cheap struts, forearms snapping when people throw hands out to catch themselves. A man in a loader harness goes down screaming as the exo-frame, suddenly half again its weight, punches his spine into the grating. Children cling to ladder rungs until their fingers peel loose and they slam to the floor in crying heaps.
The gas rides those pulses, a dirty tide. Each spike drives it low, ramming it into vents and under door-seals; each lull lets it billow upward in slow, greasy curtains. Miroslava can feel the timing in the tremor of the metal under her boots, the engineer’s pattern hidden inside the cruelty. Zoran is throttling the field like a machine tool, shaving away options, turning escape routes into kill-boxes without firing a single live round.
Sergei’s “limited” intel proves surgically precise. Squad leaders advance with tablets flickering names and old shift photos; they move straight for certain pods and curtain-marked cubbies, ignoring others as if the walls themselves whispered. Named sympathizers are yanked from hiding at gunpoint, wrists zip-banded, IDs pinged and cross-checked against Sergei’s roster notes. Any hesitation, any wrong accent or familiar touch, is enough to sweep up siblings, spouses, grandparents. Their families are shoved into restraint lines that snake along the main shaft, knees pressed to cold grating, heads forced down.
Irina’s med-teams arrive behind the shields, white coats under flex-armor, with stretchers and sedation kits stamped “PROTECTIVE CUSTODY.” The ampoules hiss softly as they go down the line, offering sleep instead of answers.
In Docking Spoke E-9, Natalya’s off-grid corridor dissolves into panic when one of Zoran’s silent overrides slams a remote lock mid-cycle, shearing the auxiliary dock in two. A shuttle kicks free on emergency launch, half-empty, while those left on the wrong side hammer bleeding fists against sealed hatches, faces strobed red-white by beacons and venting frost.
By the time the grav-fields stabilize and the gas thins to a rancid haze, whole family pods are gutted, bunk frames twisted where people tried to brace doors. Hand-painted saints lie face-down in puddled soup and vomit; cloth icons hang half-burned where stun-grenades flashed. What’s left of the living is sorted (wrist-tagged “patients” and hooded detainees) while smeared blood, dropped shoes, and scorched blankets show where the uncounted dead went down and were dragged out of sight.
Miroslava stumbles more than walks, boots slipping in half-dried streaks where scrub drones haven’t passed yet. The air tastes of burnt propellant and cheap sedatives, undercut by a sour, animal reek of fear. Her head throbs, radiation hangover braided with too little sleep, and every new corner shows her another thing she doesn’t want to see.
She knows these boots. Knows that patched green jacket, that homemade scarf twisted under a slack throat. Knows the way a man’s hand still curls around the dented tin mug he took on every night shift. She forces herself not to kneel, not to touch, because if she starts matching names to faces she will not get back up.
“Gde ty, tetya Rada…” she mutters without meaning to, scanning the busted curtain of an elder’s cubby. The old woman’s woven blanket is there, trampled and wet, but the cot is empty. So are half the little shrines wedged into wall seams where quiet organizers used to sit and count filters, assign extra water shares, pass along her messages with a nod and a shrug.
Gone. Not dead here. That’s worse.
She moves faster, ducking under a buckled frame where someone tried to barricade a passage. A child’s shoe lies mashed in the grate. No twin. No parents. The absence howls louder than any siren.
At a junction, she pauses, fingers brushing the hatch lip where a hidden crawlspace opens behind a loosened panel. Scrape marks gouge the metal; the panel hangs warped, the narrow duct beyond dusted with the fine glitter of stun-grenade residue.
They dragged them out of the vents too.
Her breath comes short and hot. For months she mapped these warrens, balancing load on stolen power lines, counting heads, building redundancy in people as much as in pipes. Never one point of failure, she told herself. If corporate cut south corridor, they still had east bypass; if one elder went down, three others held the names, the plans.
But the emptied bunks and stripped shrines tell a different story: key organizers lifted whole, not scattered. The quiet ones, the ones who remembered old shaft songs and knew which families would follow which word, have vanished as neatly as if an algorithm selected them.
Zoran’s sensor nets. Sergei’s rosters. Her stomach twists.
She crouches by a cracked bulkhead where a tear-gas canister rolled and stuck, its casing still warm, and touches the ceiling panel above. Under the scuffed paint, alien conduit hums faintly against her palm, a low, off-key vibration.
“You watched,” she whispers to the unseen substrate. “You let them come in here.”
There’s no answer, but for a heartbeat the hum flickers, syncs to her pulse. Useless. Too late.
A choked sob cuts through from a side cubby. Miroslava slips inside to find a boy maybe twelve, smeared with soot, clutching a blanket that still smells of sleep and canned stew.
“Ty ch’ya?” she asks, voice rough.
He blinks at her, then at the wrecked corridor. “They took baba. Said hospital. She was just singing.” His accent marks him as one of hers, M-13 born and raised.
Hospital. Protective custody. Isolation wards.
Miroslava feels the shape of the trap now: those not left bleeding on the grates have been funneled into Irina’s clean white boxes, into Zoran’s logs, into Sergei’s neat columns. Organizers, elders, loudmouths, anyone with too many visitors at meal shift. Peeled out of the warren like ore from a seam.
“We find new baba, ponimaesh’?” she says, hauling the boy gently to his feet. “New elders, new runners. They think they clean us, da? We grow back in cracks.”
Her hand drops from the alien panel. Somewhere beneath the station steel, the hum quivers again, as if listening.
She squares her shoulders, catalogs the wreckage like failed infrastructure. Broken supports, lost redundancy, nodes to be rebuilt or rerouted. Loved ones killed, others captured, but the system is not yet dead. Not while she’s still breathing in its ruins.
In Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, Sergei stands at his glass desk while the tramline hums below, fingers moving in steady, workmanlike rhythm across a tablet. Incident summaries scroll past: “deployment of non-lethal dispersal agents,” “limited structural damage,” “minimal casualties pending medical confirmation.” He approves each with a thumbprint, adding minor edits. Nothing that would trigger a full audit from off-ring or stir panic in the shift briefings.
On a second, private screen, a narrow pop-up masked as maintenance logs, another list unspools: detainee IDs, provisional charges, transfer destinations. Sergei’s gaze catches on family names, clan tags, notes from floor stewards. He flicks through, flagging some entries with invisible exemptions: a cousin rerouted to “medical observation only,” a loyal shift captain quietly marked “released to community oversight,” a troublesome but useful negotiator reassigned to “critical infrastructure duty.”
Others, organizers he never trusted, loud youths with smuggler cousins, he lets stand. The system takes them. On paper, everything will look balanced, regrettable but necessary. In truth, the ledger tilts cleanly toward his own.
In Irina’s wards, beds fill fast with coughing children and gas-burned elders, segregated behind “quarantine” drapes that hide more than they shield. Medtechs move like ghosts, muttering protocol codes instead of names, logging exposure levels, not family ties. The worst cases (organizers with bruised ribs, young runners with stun scoring around the skull) don’t even pause in triage. They’re tagged, scanned, and wheeled straight past the curtained bays into locked evaluation suites flanked by security in soft-armor and sterile boots.
On Irina’s slate, their files carry bland headings: “neurological assessment,” “behavioral risk index,” “implant compatibility review.” She signs requisitions for sedatives and scanner time, jaw tight, knowing that in these rooms “treatment plan” is just a cleaner phrase for interrogation schedule.
In the docking shadows, Natalya listens to clipped comms as her shuttle crews choke out numbers instead of names. Half the rendezvous beacons blinked out mid-approach; cargo cams show only empty airlocks and drifting tear-gas haze. To cram in the few they do find they kick precision-drilled ammo crates into vacuum, trading firepower for screaming, living weight.
Word of vanished kin and locked med-bays runs faster than ore trams, carried in hoarse whispers at mess tables and along tram catwalks. Old talk of strikes, boycotts, “next time we push back” dies mid-sentence. People count who’s missing, not votes. Clusters that once passed knives and codes now melt apart, limping into side-tunnels, leader-thin and radio-silent.
In M-13’s choking corridors, where the gas rolled low and yellow under stuttering lamps, Miroslava stopped pretending she had margin left.
The emergency overlays in her head were a mess of half-finished schematics and redlined warnings. Every time she yanked a panel, the metal burned her palms through the gloves. She jacked a bypass coupler straight into a live conduit, teeth clenched as the line spat blue.
“Hold that,” she barked in guttural pidgin to the teenage runner at her side. The girl’s eyes streamed from the gas, knuckles white on the cable. “If arc jumps, you let go. I mean it.”
A few keystrokes on her pad, a muttered curse in her home dialect, and the air valves to B-tier pods hiccupped, then reversed. Stale, half-scrubbed atmosphere from a shut laundro loop surged into a cluster of sealed family containers three decks down, just enough to flush the irritant mist and keep the smallest kids from drowning in their own lungs.
Another patch: she pulled ten kilowatts off a tram spur Zoran’s people thought was dead, dumping it into a network of contraband heat exchangers that also powered hidden fans. Little M-13 eddies of breathable air spun up, pockets of clear sight where gas had been thickest.
Each save was a spike: power blooming and collapsing in irregular nodes, valves chattering in patterns that should not exist in official maps. On Zoran’s end, in the clean chill of Systems Command, those spikes stitched into a ghost-signature as distinctive as handwriting.
Miroslava knew it. She could feel the pattern in her bones as clearly as in the schematics. Years of crawling through this alien-corrupted metal gave her a sixth sense for when she was no longer just riding the systems, but dragging them to her.
“Last one,” she muttered, punching in another illegal sequence, forcing a compressor to reverse cycle and push clean mix back down an access spine. “After this, I am ghost, da? No more heroics.”
But the Ring did not care for promises. The alien substrate under M-13 flexed in ways her models never predicted, swallowing and re-routing some of her changes with a slippery, inhuman logic. Valves she opened closed three seconds later and then opened again, slightly out of phase, as if the structure itself was trying to mimic her hack.
On Zoran’s consoles, those echoes lit up like a trail of phosphor breadcrumbs.
Her slate pinged with a faint, wrong-latency lag: packets doing an extra hop through something that wasn’t human hardware. She frowned, fingers pausing over the pad, a slice of pure fear cutting through the pragmatic triage mindset.
He’s watching now.
The realization came not as a thought but as a pressure at the back of her skull, like standing too close to a reactor shielding. Somewhere above and inward, in the polished alien bowl of Systems Command, his implant would be narrowing in, cross-matching every surge she forced with her old maintenance logs, her badge history, the ghost records of times she’d already cheated death here.
“Move,” she snapped to the cluster around her, forcing her legs to keep going as another tremor ran down the shaft. “We change routes. They see us in power map now.”
A wiry uncle with a coughing child strapped to his chest stared at her, bewildered. “Routes are. You just opened last one that breathes.”
“Then we walk where maps say no walking,” she answered, voice flat. “Before Captain Glass-Skull drops ceiling on us.”
They cut down into a maintenance bypass Sergei’s people swore was “dark”: no cameras, no active grav plates, just old alien ribbing slick with condensate. Miroslava felt the hairs on her forearms lift anyway. The walls had that too-clean hum, like a cable live under bad insulation.
“Fast, heads low,” she ordered, hustling the coughing uncle and the runner girl ahead of her. Behind, two younger miners dragged an oxygen crate between them, boots thudding in the patchy micro-g.
Three steps in, the floor lurched.
Not the usual Ring shudder, not a shaft settling or a tram passing overhead. This was a needle-pain drop in her gut as localized gravity spiked sideways. Her feet ripped out from under her. The corridor twisted around the group like a centrifuge finding a new axis.
Bodies slammed into bulkhead and ceiling with sick, wet percussion. Her left shoulder took the hit first; something cracked, then her forearm went bright-white and then distant, no longer part of the map.
Her slate tore free, spinning. Her head followed, rebounding off alien alloy. The thrum of blood in her ears swallowed the screams, leaving only a high, piercing ring.
Zoran, she thought dimly, through the fog. He tuned this section like instrument. He is playing us.
The gravity snapped again (off this time) and they hung for a heartbeat in a bruised, blood-salt silence before drifting down in a slow, mocking fall.
Her stomach heaved. Her left hand did not answer when she tried to flex it.
By then Natalya’s shuttles were already burning hard for off-grid docks, holds half-empty, transponders squawking emergency codes that bought them seconds but not space. M-13’s echo came thin over Miroslava’s earbud, panicked counts, names cut off mid-syllable, then even that went to static as she limped toward the last service lock she’d marked three years ago as “if all else fails.”
Its status ring glowed dead corporate blue, not the amber she expected. Magnet clamps engaged, bolts fused. Her override string bounced, rejected on a channel her badge had never been meant to see.
She forced the alien backdoor, fingers trembling over the pad. Glyphs rippled under the lock’s casing, answering her like stirred phosphor.
No seam opened. No pressure equalized.
Something deep in the Ring just…took note.
Security squads, masks gleaming in the jaundiced haze, hunted her by pulse and thermal bloom, Zoran’s implant painting vectors while Sergei’s “regrettably incomplete” manifests funneled them ever closer. They boxed her amid buckled containers and hissing conduits; outgunned, half-blind from gas, she swung wrenches and cutters until a shock-baton kissed her spine and darkness folded her beside the children she hadn’t reached.
The hum answers her pulse like an echo with its own intentions, rising when her fear spikes, dipping when she forces her breathing flat. Above the mask of clinical concern in Irina’s face she reads calculation, not cruelty, and that is worse. They don’t think she is problem near the systems anymore. They think she is system.
Sedation haze thinning, she tests the restraints with numb fingers and feels the faint, wrong give of alien-grown material under the leather. Not straps, she realizes slowly. Roots. Filaments. Whatever the corporation has spliced into the old cryo-archive hardware has crept up through the padded frame of the cot, skin-temperature and damp, curling around her wrists and forearms like patient hands. When she flexes, they flex back a fraction of a second behind her, as if learning her range of motion.
“Bozhe,” she murmurs, tongue cotton-dry. “You make me peripheral.”
Her voice comes out flat in the filtered air, swallowed by the steady hiss of ventilators and the soft chime of monitors. Above her, the ceiling is too smooth. Corporate white panels forced onto alien curvature, seams not quite matching. Where joints fail, translucent black ridges bridge the gap, pulsing faintly in sync with the ache behind her eyes.
The restraints tingle. Tiny, crawling pins of sensation move up her forearms to the crooks of her elbows. On the nearest display, green bars jump. She turns her head; the room tilts in slow lag, sedation still dragging at her vestibular system. A column of glyph-like tracery scrolls along one side of the monitor, human numerics braided with curving characters she’s only ever seen buried in power conduits and wall substrate.
“Response latency: one-point-two seconds,” someone says out of sight, clinical, bored. A tech, not Irina. “Stabilizing around predicted curve.”
Miroslava swallows bile. She curls her fingers again, this time deliberately wrong, stuttering the motion; the hum through the restraints hiccups, flares. The glyphs spike in messy patterns, not the pretty smooth wave the tech wants.
If they have wired her in, the Ring has her skin-side now. And the Ring remembers her.
The next time the room tilts and steadies she realizes the viewport isn’t glass at all but a narrow diagnostic aperture cut into the partition, its edges fuzzed where alien substrate has swollen around human framing. Through it, at a skewed angle, she catches fragments: matte armor plates moving in formation, the glint of visors under infirmary lights, a shoulder patch with Zajcev’s modified cog-and-spine crest. They’re not looking at her, not directly. Their attention is on the repeater bolted beside the door where Irina stands with arms folded, profile sharp against the screen’s glow.
Zoran’s voice leaks thinly from the wall speaker, flattened by compression but unmistakable in its calm. “Subject zero-one-M. Sedation baseline holding. Interface response within target window. Note micro-tremor at twelve-point-four seconds post-stimulus. Catalog as adaptive feedback, not rejection.” He pauses, implant no doubt scrolling her vitals behind his eyes. “Flag this pattern for deeper correlation with prior anomaly events in power spine sectors.”
No name, only designation. No history, only data. He is logging her like you would a new pump curve or a fault-tree branch, another variable in his efficiency equation.
She flexes against the living straps again, more to spite his tone than from any hope of escape. The restraints answer with that half-second echo, learning her anger too.
Irina’s questions come gentle but surgical, about access keys, about the first time the glyphs answered her, about which conduits “felt warm” under her hands, each one slipped between pulse checks and pupil tests as if it were just another reflex to tap. Cold sensor pads creep across Miroslava’s scalp, adhesive biting through sweat, mapping the same pathways she’s spent months hiding behind noise and intentional faults. A cap of filament mesh descends, its threads part metal, part the same faintly damp growth as the restraints, settling against her skull with a soft, sucking pressure. Each time Irina notes something (“elevated delta band,” “limbic correlation”) the mesh tightens a fraction, humming, and Miroslava feels the Ring listening through her own nerves, curious and hungry.
A far, bone-deep shudder runs through the structure, telegraphed up the cot into her teeth; gravity spikes, she realizes fuzzily, still punching in the shafts, snapping ladders, turning cross-corridors into choke-points she herself once over-braced. Somewhere beyond the infirmary bulkheads come the hollow booms of bodies meeting walls, the thin, animal screams: until the monitors at her side quietly increment new casualty bands, amber to red.
The harness lowers like a segmented spine and locks to the ports Irina has mapped along her scalp; cold teeth kiss bone, then bite. Around her, the wall-glyphs strobe in phase with her pulse, each flare stripping another layer of privacy. In the feedback surge she feels Zoran’s intent, corporate doctrine braided with alien curiosity: not erasure, but incorporation, pinning her pattern into the Ring’s own reflex arcs until Miroslava is no longer operator or saboteur, only conduit, a named error folded obedient back into the master schema.
All seems lost the moment Miroslava feels the alien lattice tighten around her thoughts, her own contingency trees dissolving into streams of data she can no longer fully call back.
At first it’s just drag (like thinking through syrup, like a bad fever where ideas slip sideways before you can pin them) but then the lattice catches. Threads of intent she’s kept compartmentalized for years, all the quiet worst-case diagrams she ran in mess-hall corners and maintenance shafts, spool out of hiding in neat, treacherous order. Shaft numbers. Bypass codes. Air-budgets. Faces. The system tastes them, tags them, files them.
She tries to dig in, to slam mental bulkheads closed the way she’s always done with interrogators and psych evals: count pump cycles; trace stress lines in imaginary trusses; run through airflow equations in her head until everything else blurs. But now the equations light up in the glyphs, floating in her vision, annotated in an inhuman script that folds her own logic back on itself. Every time she pushes a thought down, the lattice curves around it, curious, as if to say: ah, that is important.
Her “if-this-then-that” webs, routes through forgotten service pipes, timing windows in patrol rotations, the narrow band where a tram’s vibration masked a hacked relay, begin to unwind, tagged as optimization problems. A corridor she marked years ago as safe under micro-quake conditions flashes red in some invisible sim; the lattice nudges her with a faint sting of nausea, an implied correction. She realizes with a sick jolt that her secret maps aren’t being taken; they’re being improved.
Under the mesh, her scalp crawls. There’s a phantom sense of fingers riffling through drawers in her head, pausing at photographs, notes, scraps of shame and pride. The image of M-13’s central junction, children stringing cloth between stacked containers, heat exchangers whining, someone singing off-key, rises unbidden. She did not call it. The lattice did.
No, she thinks, teeth clenched, and tries to flood herself with noise: childhood songs in thick village dialect, half-remembered reactor schematics from a different station, the taste of rust on her tongue the first time she bit through a split lip. For a moment the glyphs flicker, desynchronize. Pain spikes through her temples, sharp and chemical, and Irina’s voice surfaces dimly, clinical, something about “resistance artifacts” and “don’t push, you’ll tear something vital.”
The Ring disagrees. Pressure builds behind her eyes as alien logic leans in, fascinated by this knot of refusal. Her rebellious subroutines, dead-man switches she meant to trigger only with hands on real metal, not through neural lace, light up in cascading overlays. Lockout command strings. Safehouse addresses encoded in ration discrepancies. Natalya’s call-sign buried in a power-grid checksum.
She feels Zoran at the edge of it, a cold, precise presence threaded through the same currents, not quite inside her head but riding the carrier wave. His implant pings against the lattice, requesting, querying, offering corporate directives as if they were mutually beneficial algorithms. In return, he’s shown slices of her: the way she rerouted alien conduits five levels below spec; the pattern of faults she seeded to hide her deeper probes; the quiet joy the first time the Ring answered only to her.
Those, too, are catalogued.
Her contingency trees: the ones where she escaped through waste ducts, where M-13 stayed dark and invisible, where Sergei stalled audits just long enough, where Irina looked the other way out of some buried oath. She watches them wither. Branch by branch, scenario by scenario, the lattice prunes them into probabilities, then into statistics, then into nothing at all.
She understands, abruptly, that this is not interrogation. This is integration. The system is not hunting for a single code or a guilty name; it is folding her entire risk-model into itself, making her instincts part of its automatic response. Next time a miner breathes wrong near an unauthorized airlock, the Ring will twitch with Miroslava’s own learned suspicion.
Her thoughts, once weapons, are being repurposed as corporate safety features.
For a heartbeat she thrashes uselessly against the restraints, not to escape but to feel something that is still purely hers. Blood pounding, ribs grinding against the harness, the raw animal panic that has no architecture the lattice can parse. Even that begins to be measured, heart-rate curves smoothing into data on a distant monitor.
“Idi na khui,” she whispers, or thinks she whispers; her mouth is numb. The glyphs pulse, absorbing unfamiliar syllables like a new subroutine.
In the hollow that follows, she feels something else moving under the corporate overlay, deeper in the Ring’s cold attention. Not Zoran. Not Irina. A delayed echo of her earliest hacks, little diagnostic pings and feedback loops she buried in maintenance sublayers, now stirring as the lattice maps her mind. Old, crude code that still carries her fingerprint.
A faint, off-beat shimmer runs through the glyphs, almost like a blink.
All seems lost (every plan exposed, every escape route modeled and weaponized) and yet in that misaligned flicker she recognizes one tiny, unfactored variable: herself, not as data, but as error. A flaw the system has chosen to keep, because it does not yet understand why she resists.
All seems lost in M‑13.
The first warning isn’t the hiss of the smart-gas valves, it’s the taste: metal-sweet, wrong, cutting through stew-smoke and sweat. Someone shouts “Zasekli filtri!” and then the corridor fogs with a pearly mist that doesn’t burn the eyes, just tightens lungs with clinical precision. Children vanish behind hanging cloths as mothers tear them down for makeshift masks, spit-wetting rags and pressing them to small faces.
Bulkheads thunk shut in sequence, familiar doors slamming into unfamiliar lockdown. Refugees who know every weld in this shaft hammer at them anyway, bare fists on cold metal, shouting names of shift-guards who cannot hear. The smart-gas curls around ankles, slithers up, tuned to knock people down without tripping structural alarms. A boy in a repurposed life-pod bunk starts seizing in microgravity fluctuation; his sister claws him toward a handhold, coughing too hard to scream.
Then the floor betrays them. Compensators in distant shafts spike on Zoran’s command, and what was level becomes a slow, pitiless slope. Loose crates, cooking pots, whole bunks groan and slide. Bodies follow. A woman with a busted leg tries to brace against a junction frame; the sudden weight of three neighbors tears her grip loose, all of them skidding in a tangle toward a junction that now feels like a throat closing.
Hand-painted icons tilt, candles smear hot wax across bulkheads as shrines shear loose. Somewhere above, ore-haulers rumble past as if nothing is happening, vibration bleeding through the shaft while people below scrabble for purchase on a world that has turned sideways beneath them.
Voices that yesterday argued over ration shares now break into high, wordless panic. Someone gasps Miroslava’s name like a prayer or a curse, but no one answers. Only the muffled clack of remote locks sealing, one after another, like the counting of a corporate rosary.
All seems lost for Sergei when the auditors’ quiet questions harden into formal accusations, their tone shifting from comradely curiosity to ledger-precise contempt. They slide printouts across his desk, movement logs, ration anomalies, names he thought buried under a hundred minor favors, and ask him to reconcile contradictions he himself engineered. He stalls with foreman patter, talks ventilation failures and misrouted ore, but they only watch, eyes flat, styluses still.
In that stalled silence he understands: every double-booked shift, every “accidental” reassignment, every blind spot he carved in the cams now tallies against him. The only currency he has left that corporate will still honor is Miroslava (the anomaly, the ghost in their systems) already sold once in whispers, now demanded in blood-stamped forms.
All seems lost for Natalya as overloaded shuttles claw away from the Ring on ragged burns, hulls creaking, warning lights strobing red across patched consoles. In every viewport, pale faces press to the glass, palms splayed, watching kin shrink into the closing dark of sealed bulkheads and gas-fogged corridors behind them, knowing the ones left will not all be there tomorrow.
All seems lost in Irina’s infirmary when the day’s “admissions” arrive flanked by security, wrists tagged with orange bands instead of med ID. Charts list no symptoms, only loyalty indices and risk scores; vitals are afterthoughts. She signs off on “observation holds” and “quarantine relocations,” each neat authorization code knowing shorthand for disappeared, her pen the last humane hand they see.
Ration manifests from M-13 cross Irina’s desk stripped of names, replaced by security IDs and behavioral flags: “COMMUNAL INFLUENCE: ELEVATED,” “UNAUTHORIZED TRANSIT: REPEATED,” “IDEOLOGICAL DEVIANCE: UNCONFIRMED.” Each string of characters is clean, cold, algorithm-straight. Each line item is a person she has treated under flickering lights, argued with over antibiotic dosages and work clearance, or quietly protected with falsified exposure reports and “lost” psych evals.
She scrolls down and the codes map themselves, unbidden, into faces. ID-7F3A: the older woman with the fused ankle who always brought contraband dumplings for the night nurses. High risk for “group cohesion leadership.” ID-9C21: boy with the miscalibrated lung graft, Miro’s cousin, who pretends he’s not winded so he can help haul scrap. Flagged for “refusal to cooperate with security interview.” ID-4B0D: a man who wakes screaming in three languages from cryo nightmares she can’t ethically document. Tagged “combat potential, unstable.”
Next column over: “RATION ADJUSTMENT: -15%,” “MED ACCESS: SUSPEND NON-CRITICAL,” “RELOCATION PRIORITY: HIGH (SEC. HOLD).” No mention of lesions, of rad counts, of how their kids tracked dust into her clean bays giggling.
The ink blurs for a moment because her eyes do; she presses thumb to pad, leaving the required biometric smear that will turn into digital authorization, watching her own print become one more field in the chain of custody. She knows refusal will not save a single one of them; it will only bring someone colder, someone from off-ring who has never sat through a warren funeral, to take her place and sign without even seeing M-13 in the header.
She hesitates only long enough to add small, almost invisible amendments: a downgraded risk score here, a “requires follow-up scan” there that will route one body away from a holding cell and toward a monitored bed she controls. Tiny resistances wrapped in corporate form.
The manifests keep coming, a steady, suffocating stream. She signs, again and again, each confirmation a quiet triage cut across a population she was supposed to keep alive.
In the warrens, tear-gas analogs cling to cloth partitions and children’s drawings, turning lullabies into coughing fits; the thin, repurposed freight doors that once kept in warmth now just funnel the choking mist along the stacked bunks. Miroslava’s neighbors slam those makeshift doors against faceless visors, boots thudding in the corridor outside, realizing in the sharp, chemical burn of each breath that years of careful under-the-table repairs and back-channel deals have bought them no shield at all.
Someone yanks a heat-exchanger off its moorings and turns the fan to blow the haze back toward the passage; it sputters once, then dies as power is cut upstream by a hand that has never set foot in M‑13. The patchwork gravity flickers under Zoran’s distant commands, pinning some bodies to the floor while others half-float, clawing at the air, at their own watering eyes.
Miroslava feels the alien substrate hum faintly through the shaft walls, a low, bone-deep vibration answering her half-forgotten probe keys. For a moment she weighs it: call down another “malfunction,” trade metal and blood, or keep that last card hidden while her world burns.
Natalya’s shuttles lift off half‑empty in the chaos, cargo bays echoing with the absence of those who could not claw their way to the rendezvous. Harness straps dangle where bodies should be. She watches M‑13 shrink in the rear cam and forward viewport both, the shaft’s crooked mouth glowing with intermittent emergency strobes. Each flicker writes a new tally on the inside of her skull: one more family caught in the wrong corridor, one more kid whose name she knows only from illicit passenger lists. Fuel margins, mass limits, patrol windows refuse to bend to her slogans about solidarity. Her hands stay rock‑steady on the controls; only her jaw shakes.
Sergei stands in his glass-walled office, the howl of distant tram sirens and crowd panic bleeding faintly through reinforced panels. On his terminal, reports translate broken families and ruptured corridors into neat progress bars that promise “restored order” in exchange for his silence and signatures. Each confirmation dialog pops up over another red‑flagged surname he pretends not to recognize.
In Zajcev’s gallery, the alien glyphs beneath the floor stutter and flare as gravity spikes pin fleeing bodies to decks and stairwells; Zoran watches casualty projections update in smooth corporate fonts, the algorithmic confirmation that every crushed spine and collapsed lung is an “acceptable systems correction” to a deviation Miroslava helped prove was possible. His implant purrs with approval metrics, efficiency gains, projected compliance curves, while a single flagged anomaly, her ID, keeps pulsing at the edge of his vision like a stubborn, unclosed wound.
The holding bay is little more than an overlit spillover corridor with stripped panels and a single recessed viewport sealed in opaque mode; coolant lines thrum in the walls like a distant heartbeat, and through the deck Miroslava feels the faint tremor of ore trams still running, indifferent to the names just added to Irina’s casualty lists. Mag-clamps bite into the bone of her wrists whenever she tests them, a quiet reminder that the restraints are keyed not just to force but to Zoran’s telemetry: any spike in muscle tension feeds directly into his predictive threat models. She turns her head as far as the padded collar allows, tracking the slow sweep of a ceiling node that dilates like an artificial pupil, and forces her breathing into the shallow, even cadence of someone sedated, giving the system nothing extra to chew on.
The air tastes of antiseptic and ionized metal, scrubbers on a slightly higher cycle than in the warrens, carrying a thin chill that seeps through the gurney pad into her spine. Above, the strip-lights strobe almost imperceptibly with power fluctuations from the main spine; Miroslava can read the cadence the way other people read shift bells. Somewhere up-ring a compensator is out of phase by half a second. Somewhere, no one is fixing it because they are busy zipping body bags.
A narrow diagnostic arm hums down from a wall mount and touches the side of her neck, cold and clinical. It hisses a microdose of something sedative-adjacent into her bloodstream. Not enough to fog her, just enough to smooth the curves on Zoran’s graphs. Compliance chemistry. She imagines his implant pinging as her stress markers tick down, his cool little nod when the model behaves.
Miroslava closes her eyes, not to sleep but to listen past the machines. Under the coolant pulse, under the tram tremor, there is a thinner vibration: alien substrate humming at a frequency she learned long before the raids. Before M-13 screamed. It prickles the old burns on her hands, threads of phantom warmth where she once touched unauthorized conduits and the Ring stirred back.
She reaches for it now, not with muscles the clamps can read, but with the habit of thought that used to slip between safety interlocks and dead-man codes. The Ring feels…distant. Like a line left open but put on hold. Latency where there used to be immediacy. As if something in the black glass is watching her be cataloged as asset and hazard and has decided, for the moment, not to answer.
The realization cuts sharper than the restraints. For all the corporate steel around her, for all of Zoran’s feeds and Irina’s charts, it’s that quiet retreat of alien attention that makes the light feel harsher, the bay smaller. For the first time since she crawled half-mad through unmapped ducts and whispered to cold geometry, Miroslava feels the Kovalev Ring not as reluctant accomplice, not as temperamental partner, but as something turning its face away.
Sound leaks through seams the corporation never bothered to seal: a burst of hoarse shouting from an adjacent triage bay, then the flat thump of a fist against metal and a medic’s voice snapping for calm. Somewhere farther down, a child’s thin wail cuts short under an exhausted lullaby, the words slurred half in old village dialect, half in spacer pidgin. Between them, the clipped, numb call-and-response of med techs relaying vitals and cause-of-death codes. Numeric strings Miroslava knows too well from maintenance reports, now repurposed to categorize the ruined.
When the gurney shivers with the rumble of a distant bulkhead being re-pressurized, an echo rides the metal, transmitted better than sound in air: M-13 slang, raw and unfiltered, someone swearing about “our warrens turned graves,” another voice spitting Sergei’s name like a curse. Miroslava’s chest tightens on reflex, breath hitching until the monitoring cuff at her ribs squeals a soft alarm.
Instantly, the overhead sensor pod dips a few centimeters, lenses iris-narrowing; a translucent overlay blooms across the far wall where she can just make out her own biometric graphs, cascading in the same corporate blue‑green fonts Zoran’s gallery uses when it tallies structural fatigue and projected body counts.
The intimacy of the interface feels almost obscene. Mag-clamps don’t just hold; they sip at her, microcurrents licking salt from her skin, sampling conductivity variance until her sweat rate flattens into data. Under her, the gurney frame thrums as hidden contact pads under each vertebra negotiate sync, building a clean signal path. In her head she traces the route the way she’d trace a clogged duct: pulses digitized, packetized, pushed up the life-support spine, merged with scrubber loads and oxygen flux, then handed off into Zajcev’s analytics stack. By the time she arrives there, she is no longer a person, just colored lines walking down a branching tree tagged “containment risk thresholds.” Once, that reduction would have lit a fuse in her; now, exhaustion erodes anger into a dull, echoing ache that tastes uncomfortably like surrender.
To keep from staring at the biometrics that now define her more completely than any personnel file or tribunal transcript ever could, Miroslava fixes her gaze on a patch of ceiling where condensation gathers along a hairline fracture in the paint. Droplets fatten, tremble in the overtaxed gravity field, then fall, one by one, splashing cold against her cheek like the ghost of coolant spray from a ruptured exchanger. Each bead becomes a metronome for memory: the timed overload she slipped into a vent fan to force an evacuation drill, the falsified stress readouts she injected into a tramline to stall a security sweep, the clandestine power shunts that dimmed cameras just long enough for one more family to slide unseen between sectors. In isolation, each act had been calculated, survivable, a controlled burn in a system already running hot; strung together in hindsight, under this clinical light, they look like a fault chain she herself laid across the Ring, priming it for exactly the kind of “stability operations” now crushing the warrens that sheltered her.
Somewhere between the third and fourth drip, as the air system cycles and a brief draft carries in the sharp tang of burned polymer from emergency welds in M-13’s wreckage, she realizes she is no longer sure where the alien substrate ends and the corporate shell begins. The clamps bite just enough to keep blood sluggish; her fingers, prickling with half‑numb pins of returning circulation, flex reflexively against cold metal. For the first time since she started whispering voltage into blind conduits and feeling them answer, the echo that comes back from the deep structure is wrong, faint, delayed, like a line with too much slack. It is not refusal; it is appraisal. The Ring feels distant yet intent, as if it has pulled its processes a layer out of phase to watch without touching. The awareness knifes colder than the bay’s recycled air. If the megastructure has begun to mark her as an active term in its own opaque equations, then every decision she makes from this gurney forward will propagate not only through ration charts and pressure curves, not only through the narrowing futures of miners and refugees, but through the slow, waking attention of something vast that no signed order from Irina, no lockdown code from Zoran, can fully bound or predict.
Irina arrives without ceremony, the door’s seal whispering shut on the corridor noise and leaving only the layered hum of pumps and monitors. Her medical coat carries a faint preserved chill, as if she’s stepped straight out of one of her own cryopods and into the infirmary bay. The orderlies move first, a silent, well-drilled orbit around the gurney: fingers testing restraints for play, eyes flicking across projected vitals, one gloved hand adjusting the drip regulator with a muted click. They do not look at Miroslava’s face any more than they have to; patients tied into corporate risk assessments are an abstract class of their own.
Irina hangs back for those first seconds, letting the choreography settle. Then she steps into the wash of holographic light blooming above Miroslava’s chest: layered biometrics, neural activity bands, and, ghosted beneath them, a schematic of Section M‑13. The map is color-coded in cold gradients. Structural breaches in deep indigo, atmospheric leaks pulsing in sickly green, casualty clusters a soft, almost tasteful bloom of pale red. Little numeric tags hover over each tight knot of dots where people suffocated, where bulkheads collapsed, where emergency crews never reached.
She studies both overlays at once, eyes moving in small, precise arcs. Heart rate spike as she scrolls past a particular container stack labeled with a warren family’s nickname; cortical stress lingering well past expected decay curves; micro-tremors in the fingers despite the clamps. The reflected glow from M‑13’s rendered wreckage washes across the fine lines bracketing Irina’s mouth, deepening them into something that looks less like age than accumulated verdicts.
There is no attempt at comfort, no softening preamble. She doesn’t ask about pain levels or sleep, doesn’t comment on the raided warrens or the screams still lodged behind Miroslava’s eyes. Her silence is not ignorance but triage: of all the possible openings, she chooses none. Instead, she adjusts the projection scale with a flick of her wrist, casualty halos tightening down to raw numbers, and begins to weigh, with clinical care, exactly how much of one woman’s remaining autonomy can be ethically traded against the lives flickering in those clusters.
When she finally speaks, the offer comes in clean, clinical clauses, like items read off an intake chart rather than a sentence pronounced. Supervised access sessions to the alien substrate, she says, conducted only from within controlled labs built into the safer ribs of the Ring; no more blind crawls through half‑mapped ducts, no more unsupervised voltage whispers into conduits that answer back. Her own handpicked team would sit on the other side of the glass, monitoring for neurological drift and physiological instability, ready with cutoffs and countermeasures when, not if, the alien systems pushed back.
In exchange, Irina continues, the paper fiction of M‑13’s nonexistence would be amended. The remaining warrens would be entered onto legitimate ration registries under medical exception codes, their power taps brought just inside tolerated margins, their coordinates quietly flagged in security protocols as protected convalescent zones. For a defined period, reviewed quarterly, she specifies, as if this were any other clinical trial, they would be insulated from further “stability operations” unless some blatant, documentable provocation occurred.
There is no promise of absolution in her tone, no talk of justice or forgiveness; only a narrow, fluorescent‑lit corridor of reduced harm, bracketed by forms, signatures, and the implicit understanding that triage at this scale still leaves people to die just outside its doors.
Miroslava listens, pulse thudding under the clamps, as Irina quietly concedes what the rumor nets have already half‑whispered: the raids flagged her sabotage in red on some distant auditor’s slate, turned it into legal pretext, and that more such narratives will be fabricated whenever the Ring’s numbers drift outside corporate comfort bands. “They will always find a reason,” Irina says, not unkindly. “Our choice is whether we narrow the damage.” Her eyes are tired rather than accusatory, pupils filmed with reflected casualty stats. She names the offer not mercy but triage at population scale: a way to slow the bleeding while they dissect the wound Miroslava has torn in the alien substrate, cauterize its worst vectors, and, if possible, redirect its next inevitable rupture.
Hours, or minutes; time blurs into the drip intervals, later, the light tints colder, bleeding toward blue as a secure holo-channel irises open at the edge of her vision and resolves into Zoran’s lean, composed face. Data strings crawl and stutter across his augmented pupils while he skims her file live, then he lays out a sleeker, cleaner echo of Irina’s offer: formally logged clemency, reinstatement with senior engineer credentials, upgraded quarters and ration brackets for “her people,” all neatly packaged under corporate seal. The price is equally polished: full transfer of her backdoor access methods into corporate custody and a neural implant keyed to their standards that will “normalize, stabilize, and safeguard” every contact she has with the Ring.
Nausea coils under the sedatives as she imagines the polished interface jack sunk into her skull, her scavenged pathways ironed flat into something repeatable, ownable, patent‑filed under someone else’s name. In her mind’s eye the crushed containers of M‑13 stencil themselves over Zoran’s confident features, over Irina’s tired ones. Sleep‑starved, guilt‑sick, she feels both offers pulling at her: not trust, never that, but the obscene relief of surrendering the weight. To let institutions and implants, clipboards and algorithms, take the yoke; to trade the raw, solitary terror of whispering into a half‑awake megastructure for sanctioned procedures and signed waivers. To be managed instead of responsible.
The lab feels wrong the moment they strap the cold sensor mesh around her temples: too bright, too clean, lights with that corporate blue cast that makes skin look like plastic. The bench under her shoulders doesn’t hum the way real structure hums; it just vibrates with air-cyclers and filtered fans, no honest freight rattle, no ore carts singing through steel. The alien conduit on the table has been cut down to a specimen strip and cradled in ceramic clamps, its surface dull under decontam mist, a dissected vein instead of part of some buried heart.
A tech in a crisp jumpsuit tightens the restraints around her forearms like he’s cinching cargo. Another checks the mesh leads at her temples, murmuring numbers in corporate Standard. Zoran stands just outside the yellow quarantine chevron, helmet off, exosuit polished, his gaze a fraction unfocused as his implant drinks from the same data feed now prickling across her scalp. Little readout ghosts flicker in his irises when he blinks. Irina watches from behind a second layer of glass, hands folded at her waist, lips pressed thin enough to blanch the color from them. Medical staff hover along the back wall, notepad slates ready, as if expecting her to convulse or ascend.
Cables snake from the exposed strand of alien material into corporate consoles, thick bundles sprouting adapter blocks and isolation filters where her own salvaged lash‑ups would have been bare wire and taped insulation. Every flicker in the conduit is already pre‑sorted by software: tagged, graphed, fed into pricing models three jumps away. Every spike in her neural data is cross‑indexed against implant templates she refused to sign.
Miroslava flexes her fingers once against the restraints, feeling the give of synthetic padding instead of worn railings or bulkhead ribs. Antiseptic bites the back of her throat where she expects dust, oil, boiled grain, the dense human stew of M‑13 kitchens. Even the air recyclers here have extra filters, stripping out smell, history, people.
Under these lights she can see what they see. Not Miroslava Markovska, who crawled leaking shafts to keep refugee lungs full. Not the woman who hears the Ring answer like stormwater in buried channels. Just a high‑risk interface. A fault‑prone tool on a clean table, ready to be calibrated, standardized, logged…or written off as defective and scrapped.
The mesh cools against her skin as someone somewhere approves the test on a console. A green telltale winks on over the conduit cradle, and for a heartbeat she has the vivid, sour intuition that in all their diagrams, the only disposable component in this circuit is her.
She lets her awareness lean, not lunge: two gloved fingers resting on the conduit’s matte skin, as if feeling for a pulse through ice. No words, no diagrams, just that old half‑superstitious habit: listen with the back of the skull, the way she did in forgotten crawlspaces and shaking bulkheads when all she had were bad odds and worse tools.
This time the answer does not flicker up eager and bright. It comes slow, grudging, like something dragging itself toward a hatch it no longer trusts. A deep, tidal pressure swells at the edge of her mind, not a voice so much as a change in weight, distant gravity tilting her inner ear. It used to meet her like quicksilver curiosity in the dark shafts. Now it feels…cooler. Recessed. As if the substrate itself remembers her last sudden withdrawals, the aborted surges, the chaos and sirens and collapsing corridors that bled out afterward.
The presence folds back on itself, not fully retreating but holding distance, offended and watchful. For a heartbeat she has the unnerving conviction of being inspected in turn: not by Zoran’s implant, not by Irina’s monitors, but by whatever half‑woken architecture runs beneath the Ring, checking her like a damaged tool it might choose not to pick up again.
Then something sharper, foreign, slams sideways into the link. A rigid lattice dropping over deep water. Corporate code, hitching a ride on her opening like a tick in soft flesh, unfurls neat decision trees: ON/OFF, OPEN/CLOSE, INCREASE/DECREASE. Little square verbs, clean toggles, marching in her head like a safety manual. The tidal pressure of the Ring is suddenly being sampled, quantized, force‑fit into menu hierarchies that try to catch each subtle swell and nail it to a standardized command.
Status prompts scroll unbidden at the edges of her vision, ghost‑HUD style, though she has no jack: lab projectors pushing a prefab interface at her, rehearsed pathways they hope she’ll collapse into. Her instincts get translated into sanitized verbs, acceptable risk bands, color‑coded thresholds. In that cold, clipped lexicon she feels herself shrinking: not worker, not saboteur, not stubborn refugee engineer, just a provisional driver for a future product.
They aren’t only measuring. They’re templating. Running live drills on how to strip her out of the loop and drop something obedient in her place: an implant, a daemon process, a tight little algorithm that will never flinch at screams in the tramlines.
Static hisses higher, but other pictures cut through the lattice: not this clean blue coffin of a lab, but M‑13’s crooked runnels, bulkheads sweated with breath and candle smoke, saints and old cosmonauts overpainted into alien saints, children’s chalk serpents curling round their home‑block. She tastes boiled grain, burnt dust on overworked exchangers, remembers grease‑blackened hands patting hull plating in thanks when lights steadied after her “ghost fixes.” Those people were never datapoints to trim from a curve; they were the whole damn equation. The idea of Zoran’s clean dashboards, or some far‑off boardroom, treating each warren like a toggleable sector, live/die on keystroke, crawls up her throat like acid.
The interface tries to sand that spike of disgust into a smooth, compliant curve, tagging her rising pulse as “instability,” whispering at Irina’s console about sedation bands and neuromod tweaks. Miroslava stares at the seam where alien skin kisses human cable and feels the forked future clamp tight: become a spec sheet, or stay a fault line they fear to map. The same hard, coal-black certainty that drove her first sabotage, no distant shareholder should sit at these deep switches, locks into place. She lets that conviction ride the link, jamming the override not only to keep herself unformatted, but to keep the whole system stubborn, local, and hazardous enough that only someone who has walked M‑13’s crooked corridors in bad air and flicker‑light will ever coax it to move.
The corporate routines spike in response, tightening their scripted grip: sedative cascades queue up, neural dampers begin to ramp, and a new set of “stabilization heuristics” tries to wall off the very channels she just grazed. A clinical calm message pings somewhere behind Irina’s eyes (subject exhibiting noncompliant response profile, recommend escalation to deep inhibition) while Zoran’s implant spits a neat red flag into his gallery: anomalous variability at node, containment protocol pending.
But the alien lattice doesn’t behave like their flowcharts. The more the routines bear down, the more the structure under her attention feels less like a circuit and more like deep, layered ice under shifting tide. Instead of sealing, it diffracts. The incoming control signal hits some invisible grain and fractures, splitting into multiple faint, out‑of‑phase patterns that slip around her like slow-moving currents in zero‑g coolant, recirculating instead of obeying.
Each current carries noise the corporate templates can’t quite quantize. Phase-lagged echoes of Natalya’s test bursts, bent and smeared by transit through maintenance relays no one logged as active. Work-songs she hasn’t heard full-throated since before the raids surface in the hiss: “Raz, dva, tri. Strop drží,” counting beats, calling shifts, but chopped, folded, replayed on delay. The rhythms map neatly onto the Ring’s own pulsing conduits, turn and return in sync with load-balancers spooling up and down along the Kovalev arc.
Miroslava realizes the alien substrate is not merely transmitting Zoran’s clean little toggles; it’s sampling them, too, then recombining with whatever human noise already swam there. Someone, Natalya, some half-dead relay crew, old miner kids cranky at curfew, once pushed those songs over illicit bandwidth, and the Ring listened enough to remember the pattern. Now, under pressure, it brings them back like a muscle reaching for a known motion.
Her corporate‑imposed sedation band registers rising agitation, tries to flatten it. The heuristics begin spinning off recommendations: narrow bandwidth, filter “cultural interference,” clamp sensor thresholds. Yet every time they brace to lock down a channel, the lattice flexes, slipping their clean edges into messy, overlapping beats. The stabilizers drown in syncopation, their response curves stuttering a half‑second behind, always just out of true.
In that half‑second, there is room for her.
She grabs those rhythms like rungs on a ladder out of a flooding shaft, locking her breath to the off‑kilter meter of a miner’s dirge-turned-code. “Raz (dva) tri. Where the corporate overlay demands smooth, continuous curves of compliance (perfect sine waves of pulse and neural firing) she jams noise into the line: deliberate arrhythmias, micro-stutters in her heart rate, fingertip tremors she rides instead of suppressing. She calls up the remembered cadence of M‑13’s mess at shift-change: metal spoons on steel trays, overlapping curses, lullabies leaking from cheap speakers, all that uneven human clatter humming in her teeth.
The link stops feeling like a clean conduit and more like a crowded corridor at low gravity, full of elbows and half-ignored side passages. The alien substrate ripples in sympathy, not with Zoran’s tidy command envelopes but with her jagged feed, favoring the crooked beats, amplifying them along pathways the lab’s sanitized diagrams never drew. Corporate filters reach to flag “artifacts” and “cultural interference,” but the lattice routes her discord like it’s a preferred protocol.
On a side-band diagnostic, the misalignment shows first. Biometric traces stutter, then smooth. Not toward her flagged agitation, but toward textbook baselines that don’t belong to this sedative curve at all. The graph redraws her as a compliant, well-rested test subject, quietly forging a healthier ghost wrapped around her failing body. Another monitor, a half‑second out of sync with Zoran’s implant clock, spits up a wireframe of the Ring: faint, self-tuning flows skirting red‑tagged damage zones, power bleeding “illegally” along maintenance ribs. M‑13 pulses a hair brighter than any ration ledger or repair log allows, like a lung over-breathing to keep the others from drowning. A tech curses, taps the casing; corporate error‑scrub surges and wipes it clean, but Miroslava has already seen enough to know the warrens are pushing back into the grid, rewriting load the way they rewrite their own maps.
Realization cuts through the haze: she is not the only improviser the Ring has learned from. Refugees rerouting heater coils, kids piggybacking toys on maintenance power, Natalya’s people slipping pirate repeaters into waste shafts. All of it has been teaching the alien substrate new patterns, little hacks layered over years like graffiti on bulkheads. The unexpected echo of songs and slogans is not hallucination but the byproduct of thousands of small, desperate workarounds, absorbed and re‑emitted along channels corporate telemetry writes off as noise or “cultural artifacts.” The Kovalev Ring, in its fractured, occupied way, is beginning to behave like the communities clinging to it, patchy, stubborn, selectively generous, answering most clearly to those who break rules just well enough to survive.
With that knowledge, Miroslava stops trying to overpower the corporate imprint and instead angles herself between its assumptions, slipping into the gaps like a rat in conduit-work. She feeds the lattice what their models most want: dropping apparent stress markers into a narrow band of “productive compliance,” smoothing visible neural activity into a disciplined, low-amplitude hum that screams good patient, good asset. Underneath, she lets the miner-song rhythms run dirty and off‑beat, a buried carrier wave that nudges the alien substrate to shunt hostile routines sideways. Into self-checks, canned simulations, harmless diagnostic loops that go nowhere. Instruments, hungry to prove a controllable subject, dutifully echo that lie back to Irina’s console, building a neat paper phantom of cooperation while the real Miroslava braces where she can move first.
Inside that illusion, Miroslava peels off a sliver of the alien substrate’s attention and feeds it a different task, the way you might whistle a counter‑melody under a hymn everyone else is singing. Rather than slamming against the mag‑clamps directly, an obvious tell in any log, a spike Zoran’s implant would taste like metal on his tongue, she teases at the edges of obsolete code buried under layers of corporate varnish. Half‑rotted maintenance trees, deprecated subroutines tagged in some forgotten dialect as “legacy field retrofit support,” still wired to real hardware no one bothered to unhook.
She slips a flag in there: not a command, just a quiet re‑labeling. Her restraints are no longer “patient containment” in the system’s ontology; they are “foreign conductive debris” clinging to a critical surface. Litter on the line. Contamination.
The lattice hesitates, then resolves the conflict in the most conservative way it knows. The bed’s local controller pulls a response pattern off the shelf: a disposal cycle meant for stray tools left across live busbars. In the guts of the frame, a maintenance coil that never shows up on Irina’s pretty diagrams spools itself awake, bites down on available amperage, and dumps a tight, ugly pulse into the mag‑clamp housings.
The shock is brief but surgical. Lockfields shudder, then decohere, not with the clean signature of an authorized release but with the messy, aging‑circuit hiccup of cheap insulation and dust. Error counters tick, then auto‑clear into a degraded‑but‑operational state. No red tamper flags blossom on the main console; instead, a sideband service log notes a “routine arc‑suppression event” and schedules a low‑priority follow‑up check sometime next quarter.
Simultaneously, a ghost process she has coaxed into being begins to nibble power from the restraint bus in neat, plausible increments. Not a dramatic dump, nothing that screams sabotage. Just a fractional rebalancing, as if the bed is slowly compensating for “patient normalization” and down‑regulating support loads. Each micro‑adjustment fits comfortably inside expected variance bands the predictive model has already declared safe.
To any watcher in the gallery, she is finally doing what good assets do: sinking into sedation, numbers obedient, curves well‑behaved. Beneath that paper‑thin calm, the clamps sit only half‑anchored, their fields patchy and forgetful, while the circuits meant to watch for exactly this kind of failure hum along, content in their own forged story of routine maintenance.
Inside that illusion, Miroslava peels off a sliver of the alien substrate’s attention and feeds it a different task, like slipping a side job to an overworked shift hand. Rather than slamming against the mag‑clamps directly, an obvious tell in any log, a clean spike Zoran’s implant would taste on the back of his teeth, she noses around the edges of old code buried under layers of corporate varnish. Obsolete maintenance trees, written in some half‑forgotten field dialect, still think in terms of busbars and stray tools, not “assets” and “patients.”
She nudges one such protocol awake and slides in a quiet edit, reclassifying her restraints as “foreign conductive debris” clinging to a critical surface. Trash, not property. Contamination.
The system responds with dull, dutiful reflex. A localized coil in the bed’s frame spools up and spits a tight, ugly pulse through the clamp housings. Just enough to scramble field coherence without throwing the clean signature of an authorized release. No red tamper banner blooms on Irina’s main display; instead, a buried service log records a minor “arc‑suppression event,” auto‑cleared to routine. In parallel, a ghost process she seeds on the restraint bus begins to sip current in neat, plausible increments, presenting as gradual “patient normalization” while the actual lockfields thin and forget their grip.
In the same undercurrent, she worries at a blind corner in the lab’s topology: a maintenance hatch long written off as fused when alien growth swallowed its hinges during some forgotten refit. Corporate overlays show it as inert mass, a dead node. The substrate remembers otherwise. Under her prodding, it quietly revises its own assumptions, treating that black, glassy overgrowth as flexible skin instead of bone. For the span of a few heartbeats, molecular lattices relax, sliding past each other like damp muscle. She doesn’t send an “open” command. That would light up every watchdog in the room. Instead, she tucks a single timid “cycle” into the tail of an automated filter-cleaning routine. To the supervisory AI, it’s a checksum smear in an obsolete script, a jitter in an old housekeeping pass buried three layers down. Logs annotate it as minor deviation, self-correcting, no action required. Metal sighs. Behind a stack of unattended monitors and idle diagnostic towers, the hatch irises open with a soft, wet exhalation, pressure seals parting just wide enough for a single, half-sedated body to slip through.
The illusion frays almost at once. Mag‑clamp telemetry stutters, a biosign feed hiccups as she shifts dead weight off the bed, and some dutiful little subroutine in Irina’s lattice blinks a low‑priority anomaly flag. Sirens roll from armed to live a beat too late; lockout scripts begin to fan outward through the gallery just as Miroslava is no longer where she’s supposed to be. She’s already knifed sideways through the half‑cycled hatch, profile ghosted to nothing as the substrate obligingly flattens the sound of stressed hinges and dragging metal, smearing the bed’s shrilling pressure alarms into the broad, meaningless hiss of environmental noise that every console learns to ignore.
The conduit beyond is narrower than any human design spec would permit, its skin a confused seam of patched plating and slick, light‑eating alien glass that seems to “relax” around her shoulders as she squeezes through, like bulkhead learning to breathe. Gravity flickers to a sideways drag, then a brief, stomach‑up tug as she worms along, guided less by sight than by that faint, bone‑deep sense of where the lattice thins and welcomes her. When she spills from the tube into a cramped junction throat above waste‑processing, the humid stink of chemical rot and boiled solvents slams into her, mixing with ozone and something almost sweet: coolant leak, she thinks distantly. In the dark below, a smuggled handlight flickers a tight, staccato burst-pattern she knows from old dockside drills, not corporate code but Natalya’s hacked cadence: short‑short‑long, pause, repeat. Shadows shift. Three figures resolve out of the ductwork, faces half‑masked in filter cloth and welding visors, eyes wide and white in the gloom. Callused hands catch her under the arms before her knees can fold, already working a vac‑rated thermal cloak around her, hood drawn low to break camera lines. Behind them, the crawlspace network yawns open in a spiderweb of rebel‑cut access ducts and forgotten service runs that point, improbably, back toward miner turf: back toward the wounded heart of M‑13, where the Ring still remembers her name.
The rebel‑cut crawlspaces funnel Miroslava and her escorts through skewed pockets of gravity, where loose bolts drift up in lazy spirals and then slam back to the grates with each distant tremor of the Ring. Every clang feels too loud. Natalya’s scout, a narrow‑shouldered woman with a miner’s stoop and a pilot’s quick hands, flinches at each impact, then forces her shoulders loose again, jaw working on some silent curse.
Miroslava’s wrists throb where Irina’s restraints once sat, skin scrubbed raw under the makeshift bandage tape. The phantom bite of injection ports and cold diagnostics cuffs lingers, nerves misfiring now that nothing holds her. Antiseptic still coats her tongue, a sterile sting that only half covers the copper film of fear‑sweat and the burnt‑dust tang of overtaxed wiring. Every breath pulls recycled air laced with solvent, old insulation, someone’s boiled‑grain dinner leaking through a vent three junctions over.
Every vibration through the hull runs straight into the bruised place behind her sternum. She feels the Ring more clearly than the hands gripping her elbows. A low‑frequency shudder rolls past and she knows, without looking, that somewhere along the outer arc a tram has braked too hard on warped rails; the way the echo comes back says that stretch of tunnel is already hairline‑cracked. Another tremor, sharper, carries grit down from a seam overhead; that one smells like M‑13’s crushed warrens in her memory. Voices ride those phantom pulses whether she wants them or not. Natalya’s cell, shouting over each other in a cargo bay that stank of cold metal and fear, arguing about whether to stand or run. Sergei’s practiced reassurance over a crackling PA, promising equitable rations with a foreman’s easy lie. Irina’s level voice in the infirmary, reading casualty numbers in a rhythm too steady to be anything but self‑defense.
The Ring is no longer just structure in her mind, no longer just stress maps and voltage drops. It is a bruised, half‑sentient body, nerves lit up in pain, and she has her hands in its opened flesh. Every bypass she’s cut, every sabotage routine she’s tucked into background noise, every quiet favor for M‑13 has bled into this. She rides the crawlspace like a splinter moving through an infected vein, her guilt and stubbornness a matched pair of weights.
The escorts think they are sneaking her through dead ducts. She knows better. The lattice is watching, flexing, re‑routing itself as if to test how far she is willing to lean into this wound she’s helped make.
Progress turns into a stuttering, improvised crawl instead of clean extraction. A bulkhead ahead grinds shut without warning, teeth of human steel biting into a seam of alien glass that ripples and then knits flush, erasing the gap like skin closing over a wound. No warning chime, no status blink on any panel. Just the hard, wet sound of the Ring deciding: not this way.
Natalya’s scout hisses a breath between her teeth. “Kurva. Not on diagram.” She snaps her handlight dark and shoulders them sideways into a narrower service vein, ribs scraping plating, fingers sliding along condensation-slick conduits furred with mineral dust and old tape. Gravity cants, light tools drift, then clack back as the compensators correct.
Twice they’re forced to double back. Once when a pressure differential moans through the metal like a throat about to tear, Miroslava smells a sour edge in the air and mutters, “Seal’s breathing wrong. Will go.” The second time, a shaft opens onto a lit corridor below, glossy armor and corporate visors moving in tight formation, stun‑rifles held careful in pressurized space.
Each reroute hammers home the same truth: corporate overlays are lies now, at best yesterday’s guess. What lives behind Miroslava’s eyes answers faster and more honestly than any sanctioned schematic. The Ring is redrawing itself around her, and if she listens, it will show her where it wants them to go.
Near a junction where air‑recirculation fans roar like distant surf, Natalya’s point‑watcher snaps a fist up and flattens them against the duct wall, killing her lamp with a thumb twitch. Noise and darkness swallow them. Sweat beads loose from Miroslava’s brow, hovers, then skitters sideways as the local gravity jitters.
A patrolling drone ghosts past an overhead grate, hull brushing cables with insect delicacy. Its optics comb the dark in a faint red rake of targeting beams, each line a quiet promise of stun‑charge and shackles. Breath goes thin in Miroslava’s chest. She closes her eyes and reaches. Not with hands, but with that thin, nauseating filament of awareness trailing into the alien substrate.
She shapes a single syllable of intent, soundless and sharp. Nearby lattice shivers. For an instant she feels metal remember another geometry, a different corridor.
The drone’s sensors flower with ghost returns, a bloom of impossible echoes: bulkheads where there is open air, heat‑signatures flickering like running figures, pressure doors cycling in dead ends. It hesitates, servos whining, then jerks away from their hiding place, reorienting toward phantom motion. With a soft burst of thrusters it trundles off down a side run, chasing a threat that exists only in warped telemetry and the Ring’s momentary lie on her behalf.
When they finally spill into the forgotten sump above the tramline (a low, circular cavity mottled with rust blooms and stalactites of calcified condensate) Miroslava’s knees nearly fold. Gravity here runs mostly true, a blunt, honest pull that drags sweat in stinging tracks down her temples, soaks the collar of her vac‑cloak, and makes every bruise announce itself. The muffled thunder of ore trams below drums up through the plating, syncopated with distant maintenance alarms and the faint, arrhythmic click of alien channels flexing under stress like overtaxed tendons. Curled on the cold metal, head pressed to a grate slick with old lubricant and grit, she lets herself feel the full ledger: Section M‑13 half‑entombed, rebels dead in failed extractions, families displaced by Sergei’s neat signatures, patients Irina could not pull back from vacuum and radiation. The comforting lie that she can disappear again into the infrastructure as a ghost (nudging valves, trimming power, always deniable) fractures like brittle insulation, flaking away to bare, live wire.
As Natalya’s people fan out to scout exits and tap quiet codes into the tramline’s forgotten maintenance panel, Miroslava sits up slowly, fingers splayed on the plating, listening to the Ring answer her heartbeat with its own uneven rhythm. The choice she’s been postponing resolves with the harsh clarity of a snapped support strut: no safe compromise, no slipping back into “shadow engineer” work whose sabotage stays invisible, deniable, blamed on bad luck and old welds. The alien pathways that yield under her touch more quickly than they ever respond to Zoran’s pristine implant aren’t a private sin to manage; they’re leverage, a crooked kind of mandate. She drags in a ragged breath that tastes of iron dust, recycled sweat, and old coolant and decides, there in the sump’s stale half‑dark, to stop apologizing to the structure for what she asks of it, to stop treating every override like a confession whispered into a confessional of pipes. If the Ring will listen to her, she will speak louder (turning furtive pulses into open command, test pings into re‑routed power and locked doors) even if it means breaking systems past repair, snapping loyalties like bad welds, and shattering the last certainties of who she thought she was when all this began.
Miroslava braces herself against the sump’s rusted rail, feeling the grit cut her palms, eyes half-closed. The air down here tastes of iron and old coolant. She does not reach for a single valve or conduit this time. She lets the familiar schematics fall away and sinks past them, into the cold, geometric strangeness beneath Kovalev Ring.
The alien lattice answers like a distant pressure in her skull.
“Davaj,” she whispers, more habit than command.
She stops compensating for faults and instead instructs them.
Localized gravity vectors yaw twenty degrees off true in three adjacent transit spines. To Zoran’s telemetry, it will look like a glitch, a brief surge in compensator load; to the boots on the deck, it turns familiar corridors treacherous. Security squads lurch sideways, body armor suddenly a liability as mass doubles against the wrong wall. Miners, warned by murmured code phrases hours ago, hug handholds and kick off with practiced ease, riding the skew.
Overhead lumen strips stutter, then settle into tight, repeating bursts. Three long, two short, one long. Old-timers glance up, eyes narrowing. It’s a pattern from half-forgotten safety drills, before corporate scrubbed the manuals: rally and advance. Kids repeat it under their breath like a game. In the halls of Sokolov’s administration bay, the flicker paints the ration queues in stripes of marching light.
In distant sectors, pumps and fans fall abruptly quiet as Miroslava cannibalizes their power. The sudden absence of noise is more shocking than any alarm; people freeze, hearing their own breath, the faint creak of metal around them. In M-13, mothers stop ladling stew, heads tilted to the silence pressing in.
She rides the new current of energy, shunting it hard toward the spine that feeds Zajcev Systems Command and the relay trunks. The alien substrate flexes under her intent, resistance, then a strange, eager compliance. Stress gauges along the Ring spike and then smooth as hidden buffers she never saw in any human diagram absorb the load.
Somewhere above, Zoran’s implant will be lighting up with contradictions. Somewhere closer, a dozen rebel teams see the code in the lights and start to move.
Miroslava opens one last set of paths the corporation thinks are sealed: bypass ducts, maintenance loops, dead sectors mislabeled on purpose. Doors that should take thirty seconds to cycle slam open in three. For those watching, it looks like the Ring itself has chosen a side.
On Natalya’s cue, ore-haulers that had been “accidentally” misrouted for days scream as their mag-brakes bite, slamming sideways across primary tram junctions. Steel-sided beasts grind and shudder, showering rust and ion sparks as they lock into place nose-to-tail, turning open arteries into armored chicanes. Tram signals glitch red-green-red, then die.
Rebel crews, already ghosting along catwalks, drop from access ladders in twos and threes. Cutting torches flare; they weld the haulers into the deck, plating over coupling gaps, sealing undercarriage crawlways. Plasma-cut arcs carve narrow man-sized sluices through the bulk: tight funnels where a single line of fighters can pass but security carts and exo-frames cannot. Someone spray-paints crude arrows and the old miner hammer-symbol on the fresh seams, a rough promise: this lane ours.
Above, dropships burst from shadowed maintenance cradles that were supposedly mothballed. They kick free in staggered pairs, riding slingshot arcs that skim so close to alien ridges their hulls paint faint blue wakes over surfaces Miroslava has momentarily softened. Engines howl blue-white as they pivot nose-down toward the newly narrowed corridor lattice, vectoring hard for the approach stack that leads straight to Zajcev Systems Command Gallery and the relay spines buried beneath it.
Along the Ring, every unsecured screen and half-functional wall projector spasms from static to a split image: Irina’s clipped voice listing triage tiers, vent paths, casualty projections, proper corporate emergency cadence, while Natalya’s pirate overlay seizes the routing mesh itself. Evac arrows stutter, then twist, every green line quietly reoriented toward the inner spine, toward the regime’s core. “Follow green corridor if you want air,” the loop insists in flat corporate Standard, then in rough station pidgin, then in old Slavic that bypasses training and hits childhood. Behind the schematic overlays, grainy footage rolls: M-13’s crushed bulkheads, bodies in frost-rimed corridors, a wall of hand-painted icons smeared with soot. Miners on break, refugees in stacked bunks, junior techs hunched over consoles all look up, measure the lie of safety, and start to move.
The assault crystallizes as overlapping surges instead of one clean spearhead. Welding brigades move like work shift on overtime, torches already spitting blue-white, masks flipped up so they can see who’s beside them. They carve through “sealed” maintenance hatches that Zoran’s scripts signed off as cold, slagging corporate seals into dripping lines. Elsewhere, M-13 folk and neighboring warrens lash oxygen bottles to scrap skids, muscling them along at a trot. Air for later, rams for now. The first doors they hit buckle with hollow, terrifying booms that vibrate in people’s teeth. Skirmishes flare in tight pockets: shock-batons crack ozone, pry-bars and spanners come down on armored forearms, a couple panicked trigger-pulls spit sparks off bulkheads before both sides remember what one bad hole in the wall would cost. After that, it’s grips and elbows and boots in skewed gravity, men and women slamming each other against handrails while lumen-strips strobe Miroslava’s code above them.
As Miroslava tightens the funnel around Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, the Ring itself feels as if it is leaning toward the conflict: inert alien surfaces along the chosen corridors emit a faint, synchronized glow, helping guide the human tide through blind turns and half-mapped passages, lumen-bands pulsing in the same off-beat cadence as her racing thoughts. In Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, reports stream in faster than Sergei’s staff can translate them and the hall’s long tables become ad hoc ops boards for factions he no longer controls, covered in grease-pencil vectors and ration markers repurposed as unit tags. By the time the first mixed wave of miners and refugees reaches sight of the Gallery’s armored access ring and the spines feeding Irina’s Cryomed Archive, the separation between sabotage, uprising, and full-scale assault has effectively vanished; to the people in the crush, it is all simply motion toward the place where air, power, and blame converge.
Natalya commits everything she has left to the void and the math. Fuel tallies, engine hours, stress limits: she shoves them all off the board with a clipped, “Burn it,” over squad channel. Old ore-haulers that should be bolted to rail spines are instead slung into wild, overlapping ellipses around the Kovalev Ring, guidance software spoofed, attitude jets firing in jittery bursts. Half-gutted dropships with open decks and missing armor plates tumble through precise chaos, their skeleton frames glinting in the ruddy light of the dwarf star. Patched civilian shuttles, family ferries, med-pods, old union transports, run their engines in hard overthrottle until nacelles glow dull orange and warning sigils scroll unanswered across cockpit glass.
“Kick them,” Natalya orders, and crew in mag-boots and vac-patched suits muscle jammer buoys out of cargo bays by hand, shoving with shoulders and boots until each battered cylinder drifts free. Improvised antennae unfold like bent insect legs, sparking once, then vomiting dirty power into the approach lanes. Bands of the near void fill with ghost chatter: cloned corporate callsigns, screaming mayday loops from nonexistent ships, telemetry that shows full thrust and zero velocity, zero thrust and impossible spin. Radar returns blossom like metal blooms; LIDAR maps turn to snow.
On clean corporate charts, the approach corridors to Kovalev Ring are neat blue funnels. In real space, under Natalya’s hand, they become a scrapyard storm. Hulks drift in slow ballet, but never quite where a prediction script says they should be. On Miroslava’s quiet cue, one low-band burst piggybacked on a coolant status ping, Natalya tweaks thruster bursts in milliseconds. A derelict ore barge rolls five degrees more than expected, turning a “minimal avoidance maneuver” into a pinball run. A gutted dropship slews just enough that a patrol corvette threading the needle will find its plotted lane replaced by a slalom through spinning girders and jagged hull ribs.
And beneath that visible chaos, Miroslava’s invisible hand tugs at gravity itself, dropping sudden soft wells and sideways shears where the debris is thickest. Any corporate craft that punches through the jamming and the lies discovers too late that its charts, its sensors, even its inertial sense of “down” have all gone crooked, while Natalya’s battered swarm waits just outside every blind spot, engines hot, guns dark, ready to strike.
Deep in the alien hull’s shadow, Miroslava leans fully into the lattice and lets the sanctioned consoles go dark around her. Human UI lags by whole instants; the thing under the Ring responds in fractions. She threads her awareness through stress maps and EM veins like fingers through wiring looms, tagging flex points, dormant coils, regions that feel “soft” in some math she doesn’t have words for. A nudge there throws off a compensator’s rhythm three decks away. Another, sharper, introduces a microburst that twists local gravity like knots in cloth, then smooths it before corporate diagnostics can flag more than “transient anomaly.”
Cargo conduits that once carried ore now become lethal cul‑de‑sacs for incoming gunships; plotted lanes kink sideways for a heartbeat, slamming hulls into bulkheads or stalling them in blind pockets where Natalya’s people drift with engines cold and grapples primed. At the same time, Miroslava gentles the paths leading toward Zajcev Systems Command Gallery and Irina’s Cryomed Archive. Pressure doors anticipate approaching crowds, mag‑rails brake softer, air handling evens out, lumen-strips strobe in a steady, beckoning rhythm that even panicked workers can follow without quite knowing why.
Irina has drilled for hull breaches, for plague, for quiet culls ordered from above; none of her scenarios quite match this. She overrides her own red‑flag templates with a flat, “We go mobile,” and the Archive stirs like a kicked anthill. Fixed triage bays are stripped in minutes, crash carts lashed to gurneys already piled high with medkits, portable monitors, transfusion rigs, auto‑sealers, spare filters. Doors that once guarded sterile boundaries cycle open and stay open.
“Out, into flow,” she snaps, and her senior nurses nod without argument. They push into corridors where pressure warnings strobe and the roar of bodies thickens, white coats vanishing beneath slapped‑on vac vests and improvised clan armbands. Each pair of hands becomes a moving node: logging crowd density and casualty tags on wrist slates, subvocalizing updates into encrypted channels even as they staple flesh, spray coagulant foam, shove anti‑shock and anti‑rad ampoules against sweat‑slick necks.
In her office, Irina palms codes she swore never to use lightly. Deep cabinets sigh and unlock, revealing neatly racked vials and injector strips reserved for fantasies of someday catastrophes: reactor flash, alien spore bloom, corporate “population adjustment.” She sweeps them into satchels and into waiting palms.
“Two each, no hoarding. Combat stims blue side, cognitive clears green. You see tremors, confusion. Green first. No hero dosing,” she says, voice hard enough to cut through sirens.
The drugs leapfrog ahead of the med teams, passed hand to hand along the press of bodies. Fighters about to break from exhaustion blink as clarity snaps back into place for a few precious minutes; civilians on the edge of panic steady enough to follow corridor light cues instead of bolting for sealed hatches. A boy barely old enough for a work badge gets a microdose that quiets his shaking long enough to help push an overloaded gurney upslope.
Irina walks last out of the static infirmary, sealing only the deepest quarantine doors and leaving everything else open, bleeding resources into the Ring. For once, she chooses the living riot over the neat ledger of reserves, and lets the Archive’s medicine spill toward the same converging centers of power and danger as everyone else.
In the Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, Sergei gambles what remains of his authority on one last, desperate narrative. He sends trusted runners and shaky holo-bursts to the toughest mining clans and shift captains, promising retroactive amnesty for sabotage, restored rations, preferential shaft slots, even sealed‑record purges if they hold “our lines” and keep “outside agitators” from turning protest into suicide. He sketches ad hoc defensive grids on tables still scarred by years of quota arguments, his thick fingers tracing bulkheads and tram choke points as buffer zones, “no‑kill corridors,” face‑saving exits he dreams he can still broker. But as the Ring’s lights realign under Miroslava’s hidden hand, corridors ahead pulsing soft alien‑blue, alarm sirens warping into strange, almost musical patterns, more and more of those called‑up fighters drift past his suggested fronts. They move in tight knots, clan patches and refugee scraps intermingled, eyes fixed not on Sergei’s glass office but on the distant glow and rumor of where real control now lies, leaving his carefully plotted lines undermanned, his comms replies clipped, evasive, or laced with a new, dangerous habit: deliberate misinterpretation.
Zoran carves the Ring like a carcass, drawing his forces inward, trading breadth for depth. Curt override bursts strip patrols from water farms and ore routes, every loyal tech, drone swarm, and armored squad pulled into a tight spine from Gallery to Cryomed. Lights brown‑out in dorms, recyclers cough; he cannibalizes power for turrets, locking rings, overclocked sensor cones. His implant spits a stuttering storm of red: cameras flatlined, valves refusing handshake, ghost doors cycling on “unauthorized local.” He tags whole sectors as acceptable loss, eyes locked on the central boards where something keeps rewriting his lock trees half a second after he does. The Gallery hardens into a last redoubt (staff culled to those with clean loyalty metrics, drones clinging to gantries like steel insects) while beyond that shrinking perimeter the alien substrate ripples to Miroslava’s tune, flexing pathways that curve, inevitability‑sharp, toward the heart of his domain.
The umbilical breach happens in a blur.
Miroslava is wedged in the maintenance spine with three others, mag‑boots humming low, one hand on cold alien surface, when she whispers. Not in words, but in the tuned intent she’s been practicing like a superstition. The Ring listens. Somewhere beneath steel and polymer and corporate welds, a vector shifts. The spine kinks fifteen millimeters off‑spec, just enough to shear a gasket designed by humans who assumed the hull beneath them was inert.
Air goes feral.
Atmosphere rips out of the corridor in a single, teeth‑baring inhale. The world collapses into roaring absence and the needle‑sharp burn of sublimating sweat on exposed skin. Her lungs seize behind the seal of her mask; her visor blossoms with frost, HUDs screaming PRESSURE LOSS in three languages before cutting to flatline gray. One of her escorts flails, boots skittering free of the deck, tether line snapping taut between them.
Four seconds, she’s calculated. Maybe five, if nobody panics.
“Hold,” she grates over a dead channel, because old habits die slow. Her real grip is buried in the alien lattice, fingertips splayed on that impossible black material, shoving a single primitive demand into depths she only half understands: open.
The response is not human.
Ahead of them, in what should be solid bulkhead, a seam appears. No weld, no hatch outline. Just a circle of deeper dark that irises wide like a dilating pupil. No rushing equalization, no status chime. Vacuum yawns on both sides of the threshold, utterly silent, utterly precise.
Miroslava kicks off hard, dragging her spinning escort with her, trusting the Ring’s geometry more than the shrieking warnings in her suit. They pass through the black edge without resistance, a cold that isn’t temperature skating across her nerves, and then they’re tumbling into a narrow service crawl that never existed on any schematic she’s seen.
Gravity is a rumor here; the Ring forgets which way is down. She orients by memory and by the faint, pulsing glyphs under translucent panels. Alien characters answering the flutter of her thoughts with subtle brightness. Behind them, the pupil contracts, sealing the ruptured umbilical as neatly as a blink. Her suit’s pressure readout stutters, then settles. Atmosphere: thin but breathable. Human. Borrowed.
“Move,” she rasps, voice raw, throat still tasting vacuum. Her escort (two miners in cannibalized security plate, one gaunt refugee with a repurposed medic rig) scramble along the crawl, mag‑boots clacking on composite, ducking under fiber bundles and alien conduits that hum at the edge of hearing. Through grated floor sections she catches knife‑slices of the Gallery below: tiers of consoles, the central holographic Ring shuddering with error glyphs, security drones circling like angry hornets.
She touches the lattice again, gentler, and a maintenance panel three meters ahead sighs its bolts in sequence.
“Now,” she says.
They drop through the ceiling in a rain of dust and cold air, hitting the command tier’s polished deck in a knot of limbs and hard metal before the guards outside the official blast doors even register a pressure anomaly. Miroslava lands in a three‑point crouch that sends knives of pain up her overworked knees, the impact ringing her bones. Around her, light strobes red, status holos judder between Zoran’s lockdown schema and unreadable alien overlays. A siren warbles mid‑note into a strange harmonic and dies.
By the time the nearest drone reorients its barrels toward the intrusion, she is already on her feet in the heart of Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, the Ring’s forbidden pathways still tingling in her fingertips.
Zoran pivots on the central dais with inhuman smoothness, exosuit gyros whispering as his implant flares hot along the metallic seam of his temple. Telemetry slams into him in jagged layers: internal breach flagged on one channel and then instantly scrubbed from another, camera feeds rewriting in alien characters that stutter and blur, logs re‑time‑stamped to events that never officially happened. Warning glyphs, his, corporate, blink once before being overprinted by unfamiliar sigils that crawl too fast for any human parser.
Around him, his handpicked techs half‑rise from their stations, fingers hovering over lockdown macros they suddenly no longer trust. One curses under his breath in clipped Kovalev slang when a bulkhead status pane flips to nonsense script and then to flat green. Security drones on the upper gantries swivel, optics irising wide, gun clusters tracking between Miroslava’s intrusion vector and ghost signatures flaring and vanishing along the Gallery’s perimeter.
For a taut heartbeat, the Ring’s master of telemetry and quotas simply stares at the lean, oil‑smudged engineer who has just dropped into his sanctum, finally understanding that the invisible hand sabotaging his command tree has a face: and that she looks more exhausted, more dangerously done, than triumphant.
Their first clash is silent and invisible, a knife-fight inside the code. Zoran fans a rapid stack of priority overrides down the spine, sector purge, drone retask, turret retarget, partial atmospheric dump on three corridors feeding this node, feeling each crisp command leave his fingers and flash through his implant. For a microsecond they fly clean; then they hit something and shear sideways, splintering into recursive handshakes that loop back stamped UNRESOLVED, as Miroslava quietly braids alien glyphs between his packets like tripwire.
Status chimes detune into glassy, ringing chords, as if the Gallery’s ribs are vibrating; holo‑panels smear into double exposure: corporate schematics overlaid with raw, knotted pathways that answer her intent, not his. Drones jitter, weapons half‑raised, as the substrate stalls between two incompatible authorities, turning every keystroke, every neural flicker, into a contested vote the Ring has not yet decided how to count.
Zoran reins in the brute-force macros and lets his voice do the cutting, slipping into that smooth investor patter that’s sold a hundred ugly compromises as inevitability. He draws her a clean, contractual future: co‑signatures on the Ring’s command tree, her “anomaly” elevated to sanctioned interface program with hazard stipends, equity tranches vesting on output milestones. M‑13 re‑zoned as protected dependents with hardened bulkheads, extra scrubber capacity, medical rotations guaranteed. He even murmurs about air‑gapped segments, how he’ll personally firewall the worst extraction mandates, keep central’s more “enthusiastic” directives from ever touching her people. All the while, beneath the table of his words, he pushes experimental containment routines down his neural bus, trying to scaffold a sandbox around her signal. Miroslava feels the attempt not as code but as sensation: a grit of resistance coalescing around her commands, jagged, tin‑tasting spikes in the telemetry whenever the substrate leans her way. His fear flashes in those spikes, tight, clipped surges whenever a drone takes her priority over his, making the generous architecture of his offer read, in the Ring’s own shifting glyphs, like a cage welded from politeness and profit.
Miroslava stands amid the crossfire of data, every nerve jangling from fatigue and the low, insistent pressure of the alien presence that has become both ally and invasive thought. It lays out branching futures in the flicker of glyphs under the floor and along the gallery ribs, each scenario stuttering past faster than her conscious fear can track: Zoran left wired in as a corporate relay point, the Ring’s newfound autonomy slowly recaptured through his implant, M‑13’s protections eroded contract by contract; Zoran cut out entirely, leaving a wounded but freer system at a terrible cost, whole sectors going dark, bodies freezing in stalled corridors. Watching him, his poise too tight, jaw clenched, eyes flaring each time an automated turret refuses his retarget command, she understands that any compromise keeps a corporate knife at the Ring’s throat, its handle anchored in the metal seam at his temple. The realization hardens, cooling past anger into a single, irreversible intent that the substrate eagerly amplifies, glyphs around her shifting in alignment like muscles tensing for a blow, setting the stage for the brutal solution it is about to show her.
It hits her like sudden decompression. Black lattice flaring into three‑dimensional anatomy around her. Galleries, tram spines, med‑loops: the Kovalev Ring unpeels into translucent layers, human steel and alien glass fused into a single, breathing cross‑section. Zajcev Systems Command Gallery hangs at the top of her vision like a hard, bright tumor, Irina’s Cryomed Archive a pale knot lower down, and between them filament-thin conduits run like nerves, all converging on the cold spark where Zoran’s implant pierces the substrate.
Telemetry readouts melt into glyph‑veins. Corporate tags blur under sharper, older symbols the Ring prefers. One strand, braided half from human code and half from that deeper script, throbs in time with Zoran’s neural traffic, each of his commands a white pulse sliding along it, dipping into the alien dark and surfacing translated into action.
Across that braided strand, the Ring paints an option.
It is not a line so much as a wound waiting to happen: a jagged corridor of energy mapped in brutal clarity, lighting up in murderous crimson from her current foothold in the systems straight through to the metal seam in his skull. Gated symbols snap into place along it, phase inverters, polarity flips, feedback traps re‑purposed from maintenance safeties, stepped like teeth in a cutting bit. Labels float in her peripheral vision, some in corporate shorthand, most in that unpronounceable geometry she has learned to feel instead of read.
FORCED INVERSION, says the overlay in clumsy trade‑tongue. ROOT‑LEVEL DISCONNECT.
Her awareness follows the projected pulse as it would travel: down past redundant buffers, through hidden coupling relays corporate never documented for humans, into the spinal interface node welded to his implant. The crimson flare hits the junction and blooms outward, shredding control handshakes, collapsing authorization trees, then diving deeper, into the faint mirroring pattern the alien strata have grown around his presence like scar tissue.
In her own head, something tightens. The path is not one‑way. Each inversion stage the Ring queues draws down her privileges, reassigns lattice segments she’s been using as secret shortcuts into quarantine, burns through safe channels to make the surge clean and unambiguous. A faint gray shadow coalesces at the edges of her map: territories marked ACCESS DEGRADED, ACCESS TERMINAL, ACCESS NULL.
Pain comes as a heavy, inward drag, like her thoughts are being pulled through narrowing pipes. Vision halos; her implants, crude compared to Zoran’s, register only as a hiss of static up her spine. She’s not even hard‑wired, yet the Ring’s modeling threads her nervous system into the cost calculation anyway. Pathways she’s opened over months flicker as potential collateral. If she fires the pulse, those too will be seared, bricked, or forced into long, cold reboot cycles she might not live to see end.
No argument comes with the schema. No persuasion, no moral weight. The Ring offers no alternative versions where everyone walks away, no softened branches where Zoran steps back of his own will. On one side of her vision, green and amber flow diagrams show the current conflict dragging out: turrets cycling fire patterns, lockdowns ratcheting tighter, rebel routes constricting until all motion stops. On the other, the crimson cut: a single brutal discontinuity that drops his command graph to black and leaves spiderwebs of damage in its wake.
Efficient, the alignment of glyphs says, in a language older than cost–benefit spreadsheets. Clean, in the sense that infection will not return through that conduit.
She tastes copper, realizes her jaw has locked. Around her, the Gallery’s lights seem to flicker in sympathy with the overlay, though she knows that’s just her own overstimulated cortex cross‑wiring senses. Still, the impression persists: the Ring’s attention, immense and indifferent, resting on the same node she watches, waiting to see if she will let it cut.
As she rides the crimson route outward, it kinks sideways, forking into a new, mandatory branch: a stabilization arc that must snake through Irina’s cryogenic backbone if the surge is to hold coherence long enough to bite through Zoran’s augmented buffers. The schematic re-renders around that decision, pivoting the Ring’s cross‑section until the Cryomed Archive swells to fill her inner vision, a fragile, luminous organ nested in the steel ribs of the habitat.
Power vectors coil through its cryopod rings like capillaries: feeder busses, quench coils, redundant life‑support monitors. As the surge path threads among them, whole subsections flicker from reassuring blues to jaundiced amber, then to a sickly, warning yellow. Each highlighted node pulses with annotated failure modes. Older pods with pitted seals, thermal tolerances long since exceeded, are tagged RUPTURE PROBABLE ON TRANSIENT OVERLOAD. Others carry different hazards: neural‑scarred veterans imprinted with combat reflex packages, redlined as RAPID EMERGENCE / HOSTILE DISORIENTATION; anonymous corporate assets flagged only as CLASSIFIED VECTOR. Alongside every marker, the Ring quietly stacks numbers: probability curves, projected casualty bands, estimated data fragmentation in Irina’s encrypted archives. It tabulates thaw cascades and panic scenarios with the same chill, mechanical poise it uses to chart micro‑fractures in bulkheads or fatigue in ore tram couplers, presenting the ruin of people and memories as just another acceptable loss column on an efficiency sheet.
Irina’s voice lances through Miroslava’s mapped corridors, punching a hole in the neat crimson geometry. Low, flat, stressed. “Unscheduled engineering override on Cryomed grid,” she says, medical priority riding on a carrier Miroslava can’t quite see, only feel as static in the glyphs. “Stop whatever you are routing. Now. A spike through my archive and I will have pods waking into chaos, some of them with black‑ops implants older than this Ring. We do not know what they remember, or who they answer to.”
Behind her: shouted dosages, the hiss of coolant being dumped to spare a bank of compressors, someone cursing in old military Russian. “If you need power, you coordinate it. No surprises.” The last two words are softer, almost hoarse.
The Ring obligingly overlays the meaning for her in projected casualty cones: no surprises equals no thawed kill‑teams stumbling out of history, no amnesiac experiment‑cases ripping through refugee wards looking for the war they were frozen in, no children in M‑13 screaming while something that should have stayed legend stalks the shaft. No massacres, Miroslava thinks. No new ghosts to add to walls already full.
Below, Natalya’s curt, breathless updates hammer across another channel: pinned squads, wounded ferried back through half-opened bulkheads, a tram junction turned into a killing lane by turrets Zoran still puppets through the fragment of link Miroslava has left intact. Grainy helmet feeds strobe: sparks sheeting from improvised cover, suit fabric flash‑boiling where rounds graze, a child‑sized shape hauled limp from a breached family dorm. “We’re stuck,” Natalya spits between clipped firing solutions and evac vectors. “Every time your alien friend twitches his guns, we lose another three meters. If he keeps those nodes, we bleed out here. Either you cut his leash or this uprising dies in a corridor.” The words hit harder than Irina’s warning. Because they match the Ring’s own projections, a cold overlay of sector after sector going dark.
She cuts the channels down to background thunder and holds one picture in place: M‑13’s cramped corridor, metal sweating cold, walls crowded with hand‑painted saints and crooked stars and children’s monsters whose lines echo the Ring’s own jagged script. Names spiral around them in flaking pigment, too many, always more: collapse victims, ration riots, Sergei’s tidy “pressure tests” that were never accidents, just line items. She remembers heat exchangers she built from scavenged coils so babies wouldn’t ice solid when corporate forgot this shaft existed; remembers scraping frozen condensation off a bunk frame to make room for another body, no priest, only recycled air and muffled sobbing. The alien substrate feels that knot of rage and obligation harden, and its cool, observing posture shifts: impedance values dip, dormant pathways unshutter like pupils widening in the dark, sacrificial buffers volunteering themselves along the crimson route. “Do it,” she breathes: not an order to Irina, not a curse for Zoran, but a pact with the vast, half‑sleeping structure under all their feet. Control sigils blossom along the conduit schematic in answer, their edges sharper than before; she keys final auth with a hand that won’t quite stop shaking, watching confirmation bands flip from QUERY to COMMIT. In that moment she signs away more than current. Accepting that some pods will rupture or wake wrong, that Irina will curse her name, that certain archived lives and memories will burn out like fuses, and that whatever strange, easy back‑and‑forth she once shared with the Ring will shear into something fractured, painful, and irreversible when the blow lands.
The surge knifes down the crimson route she opened, a pressure differential writ in code and alien geometry; for a fraction of a second, Zoran feels it as a taste of metal and vacuum at the back of his throat. It is wrong from the first microsecond. Too smooth, too synchronous, as if the entire Ring has inhaled at once.
His implant seizes the signal like it always has, reflex pathways spooling up, predictive filters unfurling to catch and categorize, to turn chaos into tidy telemetry. He’s already framing the spike as an exploitable anomaly, someone overreaching in the grid, a chance to tighten his net, when the handshakes come back twisted.
Protocol banners he knows by heart arrive mirrored, checksums returning as their own negations. Subprocesses he never asked for boot in his peripheral vision, their tags written in the same blocky corporate shorthand he trusts, until they peel back mid-render and reveal underlayers of cold, angular script. The Ring is speaking directly through his authorized channels, but it is refusing to be translated.
He tries to abort, to drop to safe mode, but privilege bits flip out from under him one by one: ROOT, ADMIN, SECURITY, each ticking over to some alien equivalent that his diagnostic suite can display but not interpret. The implant dutifully follows its last standing directive, maintain link, by opening every port it has. For an instant he exists as a hollow conduit, human tissue wrapped around a tunnel of unsheathed glyph-stream.
White burns across his vision, not the familiar overlay glare but a total erasure, an overexposed negative where the Gallery, the consoles, the faint corporate slogans all vanish. His limbs lock as if the Gallery’s artificial gravity has spiked around only him, joint servos in his exosuit whining protest. Somewhere below the roar in his skull he tastes blood, copper bright, and realizes he has bitten through his own tongue.
On the tiered consoles, his staff shout and reach for him, but their voices lag, stretched thin and slow. To him they look like flat images jittering on a damaged feed, while over their shoulders every screen in the Gallery blooms with symbols they’ve never been cleared to see: tessellated spirals, laddered strokes that climb and fold, crude stick-figures that might be human silhouettes dissolving into hard-edged maps of stress and flow. For a single vertiginous instant, the glyphs align with the data his implant was built to handle, life-support graphs, power curves, security routes, overlaying them, replacing them, as if the Ring is offering him a different set of equations in which people and corridors and quotas are merely variables in a deeper design.
He reaches for that pattern out of trained instinct, some part of him still hunting for leverage, for a way to turn this intrusion into profit. But the moment he tries to assign it value, to wrap it in the language of yields and penalties, the pattern shears sideways. Translation collapses. What’s left is raw presence: a vast, cold attention pressing inward through every open interface he owns.
He understands then, in a flash of panicked clarity, that this is not a malfunction. It is rejection. The same pathways that once made him indispensable, his private backdoors, his sanctioned override keys, have become arteries for something that has decided he is no longer acceptable as its operator.
He attempts one last command, a mental reflex honed by a hundred drills: LOCKDOWN GALLERY, CODE ZAJCEV-PRIORITY. The request doesn’t bounce or error out. It simply vanishes into that white field as if swallowed, leaving no trace in any log he can still sense. In its place, a single glyph hangs at the edge of his blinding vision, pulsing once in a rhythm that matches his racing heart before it, too, dissolves.
Then the pain arrives in earnest, hot, electric claws raking along every implanted filament, stripping his carefully cultivated distance to ash and dropping him back into his own body, trembling and trapped under a weight that feels like the whole Ring has chosen to rest on his skull.
Around the Kovalev Ring, the shock front manifests as a cascade of impossible latencies: doors that slam shut before command packets are issued, breakers that flip themselves open just ahead of protective subroutines, camera clusters that swivel away from crowds without any traceable instruction. Old hands mutter that the Ring is jumping before it’s pushed. Junior coders check time stamps twice, then a third time, watching logs rearrange themselves into nonsense.
In the Zajcev Systems Command Gallery, those same anomalies coalesce into open mutiny. Status bars stuttering, then resolving into skeins of alien script. Every surface blooms with glyphs that match, for a heartbeat, the children’s drawings in M‑13: crooked saints with too many arms, jagged stars, black mouths in the hull. Then the images overexpose and collapse into darkness, consoles guttering like candles in vacuum.
Zoran crumples when his implant finally hard‑fails, acrid smoke curling from the seam at his temple; the sharp tang of burned insulation cuts through recycled air. A junior tech lunges for a fire suppressant out of reflex, then freezes as her HUD updates and the Gallery’s master command tree wipes itself clean, branch by branch, until only a single, steady status remains at the root, pulsing amber in three languages and one unreadable script: “LOCAL ONLY.”
As the corporate lattice loses coherence, its failure radiates outward in jagged, asynchronous chunks, like decompressions no one ordered. In transit hubs, security shutters jam halfway, teeth meshed, leaving belly‑scrape crawl‑unders instead of sealed checkpoints; patrol drones hang mid‑stride over catwalks, gyros humming in confused, low‑pitched whines before their optics iris down to black. Relay towers that once rebroadcast Zoran’s prioritized alerts now spit only clipped bursts of static and half‑formed alien sigils that human firmware can’t cache; the polished corporate crests stamped on their housings flicker and die, exposing bare alloy and old weld scars from riot repairs best forgotten. In maintenance closets and break rooms, rank‑and‑file techs hammer uselessly at dead terminals, watching override passwords, escalation codes, every comforting ritual of the hierarchy bounce back as null strings and blank, waiting cursors.
In her peripheral vision, triage bays flicker to emergency amber as auxiliary systems choke, falling back to dumb analog. Nurses curse softly in three dialects; a junior orderly crosses herself at the first pod that blows, face haloed in freezing mist. Irina has no time for ghosts. “Living first,” she snaps, sealing off another row, even as half-remembered names on old manifests claw at her conscience. The Ring has stripped her hierarchy to brutal essentials: keep lungs moving now, let history rot in the dark.
Sergei sits inside his glass office, suddenly aquarium-bright and pointless. His console scrolls only error glyphs; even the corporate watermark in the corner gutters out. For the first time in years, he has no numbers to hide behind, no central directive to quote. A foreman slams a dead tablet flat on the nearest table, the crack like a starting pistol. Murmurs climb to open argument. Sergei reaches for the intercom out of habit, finds only his own reflection: a man with nothing left to mediate except the anger he’s carefully rationed into manageable queues, now bleeding together into something unscheduled and very close.
For a suspended instant, Kovalev hangs in a kind of mechanical silence: fans ticking over on failsafe, status bars frozen mid‑refresh, holo‑displays blank but for faint ghost‑images of old directives. Zoran’s voice does not bark from any ceiling speaker. No corporate jingle softens the edges. Just the base note of the Ring itself. Structure creaking, pumps breathing, human throats working.
Then, one by one, the subsystems Miroslava has pried loose from corporate control begin to reassert on their own terms. Bulkhead doors test their seals with short, cautious cycles, no longer waiting on some distant scheduling daemon but listening to stubby, long‑ignored local panels and the hands slapped over them. In one mining spur, a foreman flinches as a hatch slides open ahead of his keycode, then notices the old mechanical override lever he’d been told was disconnected twitch in sync, paint‑flaked and suddenly authoritative.
Power reroutes along shorter, safer paths that maintenance crews once only talked about in hypothetical complaints over thin stew. Ghosted red on Miroslava’s improvised schematics, those “impossible” lines thicken to solid green as alien conduits and human cable trays agree, for once, on the same load. Lights stop their panicked strobing and settle into an even, workmanlike glow that ignores curfew blocks burned into corporate firmware.
In shaft junctions and tram bays, people realize at roughly the same moment that nothing authoritative is speaking into their ears anymore: no quota pings, no curfew tones, no soothing lies about temporary disruptions. Instead there is the raw, overlapping noise of human breath and confused voices.
“Is it over?” someone asks near a stalled ore tram, words hanging in unpoliced air.
“Who’s in charge of this section now?” a shift elder demands in Docking Spindle East, looking not at cameras but at the faces around her.
On a catwalk above, Natalya hears the uncoordinated chorus rising from multiple decks, eyes narrowing. This is the sound she’s been waiting for: not orders, not slogans, but people trying to decide together, in the open, what comes next. In a cramped access crawl, Miroslava, skull thrumming from alien feedback, feels the same questions ripple through the system logs like pressure waves and, for once, does not try to damp them.
In Sokolov Resource Administration Hall, Sergei steps out of his glass office into air that smells of metal, sweat, spilled coffee, and the faint ozone tang of recently killed circuits. The transparent walls behind him, once a performance of visible, managed authority, now only mirror the crowd that has closed its ring around him. Faces he knows by first name and by injury report, by whose child is on which inhaler ration, no longer flattened into columns on a screen.
He feels, more than hears, the murmuring pressure of them. No security cordon, no corporate envoy at his shoulder. Just miners, shift reps, refugees with scavenged badges, watching to see who he is without the watermark glowing above his door.
When a young miner pushes through and holds out the pole of a corporate banner as if returning a bent crowbar, Sergei takes it without ceremony. No speech, no shrug. He walks to the nearest gantry ladder, boots ringing on old ore-stained rungs, and climbs until the hall lies beneath him like a stripped-out seam.
His hands, still steady from decades of knotting safety lines and checking harness clips, loosen the welded clamps and untie the last official colors. The fabric hesitates, then slides down in a slow, whispering spill against steel. No one orders him to stop; no one salutes. Some avert their eyes, as if from a body.
On the floor, the banner pools at his feet, gaudy insignia smudged with dust. Silence stretches. Then a child from M‑13, barefoot, eyes rimmed red from grit and grief, a makeshift respirator hanging empty at her throat, steps forward. She doesn’t ask. She snatches a handful of cloth, braces one small boot on the emblem, and begins tearing it into long, uneven strips with fierce, practical motions.
The sound of ripping synth-weave cuts sharper than any intercom chime.
Adults watch, say nothing. A former tram mechanic takes the first strip, wordlessly wraps it around a bleeding forearm nearby. Another twists a length into a pressure bandage for a cracked rib. Hands keep moving. The banner vanishes section by section into the crowd. Into tourniquets, slings, padding under improvised splints.
Up on the gantry, Sergei stands without his glass box or his colors, looking down at a hall that has finally decided what his symbols are good for. No one calls him Administrator. No one drags him away, either. They simply work around him, repurposing the last corporate standard into something that keeps their own alive.
Miroslava leans heavily on the lip of the central holo‑pit, pulse still stuttering from the neural storm she rode to jam corporate authority out of the lattice. Sweat stings her eyes; her fingers leave faint, greasy prints on polished alloy. The main projection, once an endlessly updating, logo‑cluttered topology of Kovalev, lies dark except for a low, unbranded wireframe of the ring’s core corridors and life‑support nodes: her improvised overlay, flickering but holding. She feels the alien conduits humming underfoot, not as a single will but as a dense tangle of responsive pathways; for the first time, the glyphs pulsing beneath the floor do not feel like eyes but like instruments waiting to be tuned.
Zoran lies slumped in a restraint chair off to one side, neural jack still plugged into a console Miroslava has gutted of its uplink calls. His implant status ribbon, once scrolling with corporate telemetry, now shows only local sensor noise and a flatline where remote priority directives should be. His eyelids flutter with low‑grade feedback, but the captain’s voice is silent in the gallery.
Around her, a handful of technicians and junior engineers stare at their live feeds, realize there is no relay handshake to any board or central AI, and then begin, hesitantly, to talk to each other instead. Sector tags crowd the wireframe as they mark failing scrubbers, brownout pockets, pressure drops. Old grudges flicker in narrowed eyes, then get pushed aside with muttered curses.
“North‑K‑7 has kids and elders, give them first pull on clean air,” a woman from ore‑processing argues, jabbing at a node.
“Pump three’ll cavitate if we push like that,” another counters, then catches Miroslava’s gaze and corrects himself. “We can stagger. Manual cycling, like old drills.”
Console by console, people slide into chairs without waiting for permission, shoulders hunching in unconscious echo of long shifts in cramped bays. Someone starts a handwritten list beside a dead terminal. Someone else tapes over a corporate logo on a status panel with a strip of ration wrapper, more habit than gesture of rebellion.
Miroslava watches their hands move, listens to the rough, overlapping pidgin of miners, med‑techs, junior coders arguing about which valves to open, which pumps they can risk stressing, what triage looks like when the only command structure is who’s willing to grab a console and be the name attached to a choice. The Ring hums back through her bones, pathways waiting. This, she thinks, is how it has to be now: not one voice riding the system like a whip, but many hands on a machine that might finally answer to the people breathing its air.
On the medical decks, Irina stands in the corridor between triage and cryo‑archive, visor hazed from her own breath, gloves stiff with half‑dried blood. Emergency strips have faded from seizure‑red to a working amber; every major monitor now shows a plain block script (LOCAL CONTROL: STABLE) with no crawling logo, no remote audit trace. Her status bursts across open‑band, naked voice instead of encrypted report: they lost people in the archive when the power swung and thaw cycles jumped the queue, pods blooming frost and panic too fast to catch, but core life‑support is holding; there is no upstream kill‑command left that can quietly trade her patients for a cleaner ledger. Around her, staff and whoever could be grabbed off nearby decks move stretcher to stretcher, splicing old field manuals with lived habit, arguing softly in pidgin over who gets scarce meds and who must ride it out on pain blocks and prayer. Irina braces one hand on the bulkhead, feels the slow, steady pulse of the Ring’s air moving past, and says into the open channel, more oath than update, “We decide here who fights on and who we let sleep. No board, no captain, no algorithm will close their lungs for us.”
Old union banners reappear from trunks, taped over dead advert screens as ad‑hoc notice boards: water‑rotation lists, watch shifts, arguments over whose refugees sleep near which air‑intakes. In one mess, a miner crosses out CORPORATE SAFETY DIRECTIVE on a faded poster and scrawls in grease pencil: WE KEEP US ALIVE. No one laughs. Someone underlines it, twice.
Ore trams that once ran with corporate precision now lurch according to shouted priorities and hand-scribbled tags: medevac first, then food, then anything that might be turned into air‑scrub components. The old digital dispatch boards hang dead and dusty above the tracks; in their place, scrap metal placards swing from overhead cables, painted with crude symbols for “blood,” “bread,” “filter.” Kids too young to work run alongside slow-moving carts with chalk, scrawling updates on side panels as orders change mid‑tunnel.
Junctions back up as drivers argue over who has override authority. Shift chiefs wave stamped chits from the Sokolov Hall, medics brandish emergency seals countersigned by Irina, and some rebel with a patched armband swears this line is “under community requisition now, ponal?” Voices bounce off the curved alien stone and human steel as three different chains of command collide, all of them frayed.
More than once, Miroslava is dragged in to reroute power or clear a stalled switch, pulled from half-sleep on a maintenance cot or from a jury-rigged console in M‑13. She arrives with eyes red and jaw tight, tool belt hanging askew, the crowd parting not out of deference but raw necessity. Her word carries weight not because of any title, but because the alien conduits flicker when she speaks into improvised interfaces. Stripped comm handsets wired straight into black, glassy panels the miners once feared to touch.
She squats by a junction housing, bare fingers resting against the cold alien surface, and mutters in a rough mix of dialect and tech-speak, coaxing a stubborn switch to cycle. Ghost-light runs in thin veins under her palm; somewhere deep in the ring, gravity hiccups and recalibrates. Drivers fall silent when that light comes, watching their tram indicators snap from red to green without any corporate command code.
“Da, da, you go,” she snaps, pointing. “Medevac track one, food on two. Filters wait five minutes or everyone choke anyway.”
A few months ago, no one would have dared challenge a dispatcher’s order. Now they argue with her, too but they argue in terms of amps and load and transit windows, because that is the language she will tolerate. And when the conduits dim and her shoulders sag, even the loudest voices lower, knowing that if she walks away, the tracks go dark and shouting alone will not move a single ton of steel.
Zajcev Systems Command Gallery becomes a dim, echoing shell of its former self, its pristine rosters patched over with paper slips listing names in three different handwritings and two languages. The big corporate slogan holo on the far wall is dead; in its place, someone has taped a hand-painted sign: “NO SHUTDOWN WITHOUT COUNCIL SEAL,” ringed with thumbprints. Zoran stalks the tiers with a headache he can no longer drown in data streams, trading neural immersion for direct arguments with exhausted techs and community delegates who insist on being present for every major systems decision, their breath fogging the glass of once-private consoles.
He keeps his implant throttled to low gain; every time he pushes it, the alien glyphs under the floor answer before the corporate schemas do, and that unnerves even him. A miner matriarch leans over his shoulder to see a stress map, jabbing at a red sector with a grease-blackened finger.
“Not cut heat there,” she says. “My people sleep in that stone. You shave quota from admin ring first.”
Zoran exhales through his teeth, recalculates manually, and for the first time in years, signs a power order with ink instead of a neural key.
In Irina’s Cryomed Archive and Infirmary, triage never truly ends. Overflow cots choke the junctions between humming cryopods, curtains made from surgical drape flapping in the breath of overworked scrubbers. Arguments over who gets surgery, who gets analgesics, who waits under a foil blanket flare into shoving matches; orderlies wade in with clipped curses, syringes in one hand, shock‑batons or stretcher poles in the other. Irina’s rounds become equal parts medicine and politics: she haggles with Natalya’s runners for armed escort to high‑risk shafts in exchange for antibiotics, quietly logs where agitation turns to paranoia, where grief turns to rage. The cryo anomalies that spiked during the uprising sit on her slate, blinking red; she postpones them again, and again, telling herself there will be time later.
Ad hoc patrols, patched‑jacket rebels, grim‑faced miners with repurposed cutting tools, and medics wearing red‑marked armbands, learn to pass one another in narrow corridors with weapons half‑lowered, trading updates and suspicions in the same breath. Each claims to guard “the people,” but each reports back to a different council or encrypted channel. Checkpoint chalk-marks shift hourly; passwords drift. Rumors of hidden stockpiles, lingering loyalists, and quiet score‑settling spread as fast as Natalya’s hoarse-voiced open‑band bulletins can try to counter them, and more than one airlock foyer becomes an improvised tribunal where no one is sure whose law is being enforced.
Beneath the human confusion, the alien megastructure’s reactions grow harder to dismiss as coincidence: gravity micro‑spikes flare not on corporate command but in response to overloaded communal kitchens and tense council gatherings; unused maintenance shafts bloom with faint, synchronized glyph‑light when Miroslava reroutes power around damaged grids, pulsing like a second heartbeat. As central directives fall silent, Irina, Miroslava, and even a wary Zoran begin to share fragmentary logs and corrupted telemetry, arguing over whether they are witnessing feedback, learning, or something like intent. Each, in their own clipped jargon, circles the same conclusion: Kovalev is no longer just a station shaken free of its masters. It is a convalescent organism whose next adjustment could either cradle their fragile autonomy or snap, catastrophically, around it.
The first reckoning comes in silence rather than celebration.
No speeches, no victory song. Just the scrape of boots and the thin hiss of test-gas at every weld. Miroslava moves through the red‑tagged sectors in a stained maintenance harness, slate clipped to her chest, flanked by a shifting escort: miners in dust‑filmed exoshells, medics with shock‑patched kits, refugee elders wrapped in patched blankets over vac-suits. Someone has painted crooked skulls over the red danger sigils; someone else has scratched them out again.
“Bulkhead C‑17, load‑test at seventy‑two,” a young miner calls, palm pressed to a vibrating brace.
“Seventy‑two holds, if nothing sneezes,” Miroslava answers. “We derate to fifty. No cargo, people only, single file, no running.” She taps the figures into her slate, marks the door with a faded orange stripe. Not safe, but necessary.
At the next junction, the air tastes of burnt insulation and spilled coolant. They stop before a warped hatch buckled inward, foam sealant bubbled like frozen surf. Miroslava leans close, lamp cutting across the metal. Microfractures glitter back at her.
“Seal and forget,” she says. “You open this, she opens you.” An elder mutters a quick Orthodox‑turned‑station blessing, fingers tracing a little orbit-sign over the hazard stencil before they move on.
They reach the collapsed tram tunnel at shift‑change dusk, when the ring lights dim and alien glyph-lines underfoot pick up the slack with a faint, sea‑green glow. The tunnel mouth is a jagged throat of twisted rails and frozen foam, choked by the slabbed remains of ceiling plates and rockcrete. Beyond the first ten meters, everything is shadow and dust‑coated ruin.
Sensors on the rubble’s edge still flicker: low‑power pings from transponders crushed somewhere in that tomb, echoing in irregular beats like a buried pulse. A medic checks the readings, shakes his head.
“No life signs. Just hardware ghosts.”
Irina meets Miroslava here, coat collar up against a draught that isn’t really there, tablet already displaying the same telemetry. Her face goes distant for a moment, the way it did during the worst of triage, listening to numbers only she can hear.
“We shut them down?” the medic asks. “Waste of power, da?”
Miroslava starts to nod but Irina’s hand comes up, small, precise.
“Leave them,” Irina says. Her voice carries in the tunnel, soft but final. “Beacon power is negligible. Structural hazard is not. We do not dig. We do not risk more bodies to retrieve…names.”
One of the refugee elders bristles. “Names are what we have. You freeze them under stone and call this mercy?”
Irina turns to her, expression unreadable. “You and I both know what happens when Command sends teams into unstable shafts for the sake of appearance. I will not reenact old mistakes with new uniforms.” She angles the tablet, showing the stress-map in false color. “See here? One wrong cut, the whole spine above us shifts. Then we add fresh ghosts.”
The elder stares at the glowing diagram, jaw tight, then hisses through her teeth and looks away. Someone in the back spits on the deck, more at fate than at Irina.
Miroslava crouches by the nearest beacon, fingertips brushing the scorched casing. Through the metal she can feel a faint, non‑mechanical thrum. Alien conduits under the tunnel, resonating in slow counterpoint to the transponder ticks. Kovalev listening. Maybe remembering.
“We can boost the telemetry into public loop,” Miroslava says quietly. “Route ID tags to the memorial boards. Every time they ping, names scroll. People see them.”
Irina considers, eyes narrowing in a tired kind of approval. “Do it. Flag in logs as ‘ongoing structural monitoring.’” Her mouth twists, almost a smile. “Corporate loved complete data sets. Let them have this.”
The decision settles over the group like grayscale dust. No rescue, no grand clearance. Just a choice to let the machines keep whispering from under the rock, a low‑power memorial humming at the edge of every systems readout.
As they turn away, the alien glyph‑lines in the tunnel floor brighten for a few heartbeats, then dim again. No one mentions it out loud, but more than one person walks softer, as if passing a graveyard that has begun, in its own way, to answer back.
In Irina’s Cryomed Archive, the damage is more intimate, almost obscene. The burned‑out tier of pods remains dark by deliberate choice; Irina flags them in the system as “awaiting forensic assessment” and then quietly locks the work order in a loop. Instead of stripping them for parts, families and old comrades drift in during off‑shifts to etch names, shift numbers, and half‑remembered jokes into the frost‑crazed visors. Where the inner glass has bubbled and run, they scratch around the scars, treating the warped surfaces like gravestones that tried to melt away.
Irina oversees a rotating vigil roster, logging it as “continuous microfracture monitoring.” In practice, it is sanctioned loitering: a place where people can sit under the blue ghost‑light and talk about the ones who never came back from early shafts, from black‑flag experiments, from nameless transports. Rumors spread that some of those lost pods held pre‑megastructure veterans, political undesirables, even vanished union delegates shunted here instead of home. For the first time, the question of who was chosen for preservation, and who now gets written off forever, is argued in open voices, over ration tea in waiting rooms and along corridor queues that bend past the silent, ruined tier.
Zoran’s transformation is both technical and social, and neither is clean.
After Miroslava’s final override severs most external hooks into his neural implant, Irina and a small team labor over him in a jury‑rigged med‑theater cobbled from crash carts and scavenged interface rigs. Cold light, hot arguments in low voices. They strip firmware like infected tissue, walling off the last channels that could be hijacked from off‑station, arguing line by line what control he is still allowed to keep.
He wakes to a narrower stream of data. No more full‑ring voyeur’s sweep, just coarse stress maps, power flows, life‑support thresholds. Enough to keep Kovalev breathing, not enough to rule by.
When he returns to the Systems Command Gallery, it is under escort and observation. Dockside engineers with scarred hands, M‑13 techs in patched vac‑sleeves, even a rebel comms runner take stations behind him, not as subordinates but as witnesses. Every command he issues is spoken aloud, double‑checked, logged on redundant slates. The alien glyphs in the floor still flicker against his nerves, but they no longer respond to him alone.
The message is plain in spacer pidgin and side‑eye alike: no single mind, implanted or not, will ever again claim the Ring’s senses as private property.
Sergei’s punishment unfolds in the gray zone between vengeance and necessity. Rather than airlock him or stage a show trial, the newly empowered councils draft a different sentence: he is required to serve as a walking ledger, accompanying allocation teams through the Kovalev Ring to explain, face-to-face, how past ration cuts and “accidents” were arranged, whose names he shifted on which manifests, what pressure he applied where. His family is relocated to a modest but well-guarded block near Section M-13, their safety guaranteed, and quietly leveraged, by the same refugee networks he once exploited. In every argument over food, shifts, or repairs, Sergei is present but stripped of final say, his knowledge mined while the Assembly debates whether true accountability can coexist with using him as a living archive instead of a buried secret.
Out in the warrens and aux corridors, the ordinary metrics of survival tilt in ways both hopeful and bitter. Air‑scrubber stats and water‑flow charts go up on bulkheads instead of hiding in corporate stacks; Miroslava bullies operators until glitch notes from soup kettles carry same red tag as alarms from rock face. But every shared graph, every open meet in reek of boiled grain and ozone, strips illusion. When one sector’s filters foul, another’s lumen grid goes brown; when M‑13 gets full med rotation for a week, some far K‑shaft swallows another month of bone‑deep spin because grav‑upgrade slips again. No one starves blind by algorithm now, yet as families bicker over whose cough, whose cold bunk, whose dark corridor is “acceptable” this cycle, harder truth settles like dust in lungs: autonomy did not erase sacrifice, it only nailed name and shift number to every cost.
The first Assembly sessions are messy enough that people later pretend not to remember the details.
On the first night, half the benches are still marked with faint quota tags from Sergei’s old regime; arguments keep slipping back into the old grooves. Shaft K‑4 blames K‑7 for “stealing” air draw during the worst collapse winter. A gray‑haired cook from M‑13 shouts down a tram foreman over whose people cut soup rations to pay for a failed grav upgrade. Someone throws a dented mug. The impact echoes all the way up the stripped gantries.
It takes three whole cycles just to agree on how long anyone is allowed to talk before someone else can cut in. They argue that too: is an engineer’s minute worth more than a hauler’s minute? Does Irina’s medical delegation get double time when they speak of epidemics? In the end they settle on a crude timing ring welded from scrap conveyor chain; when it makes a full clatter around the circle, you shut your mouth, no matter your badge.
Miroslava sits on the outer ring benches at first, one boot on a lower rail, grease still black in the cracks of her knuckles. Whenever shouting tips toward slogans instead of specifics, she drags a cracked tablet glass onto a sorter table and starts drawing.
“Look,” she says, tapping the screen with a chewed‑down stylus. Lines bloom in harsh colors: heat plumes, stress veins, coolant flows sketched over a schematic of the Ring that is part corporate blueprint, part guess, part alien echo. “You vent too much thermal load here”, she circles an alien conduit seam near the power spine, “this section goes bright, then dead. You like gambling with gravity spike over your kids’ bunks, fine, we keep screaming. Otherwise, we schedule.”
An ore‑hauler from K‑7 leans in despite himself. “So if we push double train through here on second shift, ”
“. You shave three cycles off the stress life of that beam.” Miroslava drags a finger; the line turns from amber to red. “And alien substrate below goes… twitchy.” The word is an ugly understatement. People remember the quakes.
Slowly, the diagrams become the Assembly’s first common tongue that is not just curses and hunger.
They start demanding visuals before votes. A warren matriarch refuses to back a new drilling pattern until Miroslava adds overlay for rad seep into nearby habs; when the sickly green wash spreads across her block, she nods once and says, “Then we move kitchens, not children.” A young pilot from Natalya’s crews sits in the back, mirroring the lines on her own pad until she can stand up and correct Miroslava’s estimate on dock cycle overlap.
By the fifth session, the shouting still comes, but now it bends around shapes on glass: red swells where life‑support sags, thin blue filaments where water can be safely diverted, blacked‑out zones where alien stone has already warned them once. People argue not only because their bellies ache or their dead weigh heavy, but because the lines tell them what the Ring will or will not survive.
“Is not about fair,” an old grav‑tech mutters, running a calloused thumb along a projected stress crack. “Is about possible.”
For the first time, when the Assembly chooses who gets light, who gets spin, who waits one more cycle in the dark, they do it staring at the same harsh map. The decisions do not hurt less, but they are no longer hidden behind someone else’s password.
The Substrate Circle takes shape less as a formal committee and more as a rotating shift of whoever can read both alien glyphs and human faces. Titles don’t matter; stubbornness does. A retired grav‑tech from K‑7 whose knees are shot but whose memory for old fault lines is perfect, a refugee kid from M‑13 who can spot pattern glitches in telemetry like other children spot card tricks, one of Natalya’s quieter pilots who listens more than she talks. They hunch over scavenged consoles and flickering projection slabs, feeding alien response logs through hacked diagnostic tools not meant for anything this old or this strange. Glyph cascades, thermal ripples, stress harmonics that don’t match any corporate schema: all of it gets argued over in low voices, filtered through curses and half‑jokes until it turns into something like language.
They translate ominous anomalies into rules the Assembly can understand: how many docks can cycle at once without waking that low‑frequency tremor along the inner spine; how far they can push life‑support redundancy before something in the black stone pushes back with a gravity twitch or a sensor blackout; which sections of the alien skin sulk for days if power is rerouted too abruptly.
They write these as blunt directives, three‑line warnings and color‑coded bands, stripping away the parts that would only scare people without giving them choices. The Circle’s notes go up on the same boards as ore tallies and scrubber stats, stamped not with corporate logos but with a rough stencil of nested rings.
Miroslava keeps a second ledger inside her head and a third buried behind encryption she does not share. In it, she marks behaviors she can’t yet explain: response delays that feel like hesitation, synchronized flickers in distant sectors with no shared cabling, phantom pathways that light only when her own improvised access keys ping the substrate.
Some patterns she flags in faint gray, ready to bring to the Circle once she has three, four repetitions; others she quarantine‑marks in her private files, red‑on‑black, the kind you do not test by accident. She chooses carefully which uncertainties to expose and which to hold until she understands the risks, balancing one more unknown against a Ring already stretched thin between hunger, hope, and the quiet pulses of the alien night under their feet.
Natalya’s people rewire the docking arrays with a smuggler’s paranoia and a unionist’s idealism, hanging new bundles of color‑coded fiber like veins along the bulkheads. Every hull that claws its way in from the red dwarf’s glare now throws its manifest, registry hash, and airlock delta‑P onto a public board in the former tram dispatch bay, mirrored line‑for‑line in Irina’s patient intake queues. The shift hits like cold air. Smugglers curse at seeing their tonnage blinking beside ration ledgers and quarantine flags, captains flinch when crew names scroll past memorial notices, and some miners resent that med‑evac priority can stall ore offload when triage bands flash hard red. But when a damaged hauler limps in, half its crew coughing blood and frosting their own visors, and the traffic backlog is cleared in minutes because everyone can see the stakes, bodies move without orders. Grav cranes idle, loaders peel away from ore pallets, Natalya’s shuttle slots in hot on auxiliary clamps, and Irina’s team is already scrubbed in. The value of this clumsy, brutally honest transparency becomes hard to deny, even to those who miss the comfort of shadows.
In Section M‑13, the legalization of what once kept them alive in secret comes with its own unease. Official crews in marked coveralls snake bright, insulated conduit along walls where residents once hid stripped cable behind children’s drawings and saint icons. Miroslava insists on redundancy loops and manual cutoffs within reach of kitchen doors, muttering about fault isolation and firebreaks while grandmothers argue with inspectors over where cooking stoves can sit, how far from bunks, how close to shrine shelves. Children trail after the crews, solemn, carrying labeled breakers like relics. The first time a power surge hits and the new breakers trip exactly as designed, lights dimming but not failing, scrubbers shuddering but holding, the warrens erupt in relieved, slightly disbelieving laughter that tastes of released breath and old fear. That night, the old illegal tap junction is ceremonially sealed, its access hatch painted over with a mural of interlocking hands clutching a thick, glowing line that runs outward toward other sectors, a promise in pigment that sanctioned lifelines can still be theirs.
As physical spaces shift, the story the Ring tells about itself shifts too. The new icons the children paint spread from M‑13 to mess halls and tram hubs: the Ring as a many‑handed figure, not towering over terrified silhouettes but cupping habitats, tramlines, even alien conduits in its palms like fragile toys. In Assembly debates, people start pointing to those images when arguing for or against risky expansions, “Is this another hand, or are we prying one finger open too far?” Old shift captains who once cursed at art now jab calloused fingers at painted wrists to argue load distribution. Miroslava tries to ignore how some of the eyes resemble the sensor flares she sees in the substrate, but she quietly shifts maintenance cycles so no single sector carries peak strain two rotations in a row. Governance stays improvised and fraught, but in the rough symmetry between diagrams, conduits, and murals, a cautious sense emerges that the Ring is no longer just something they endure; it is something they are, together, trying to build before it decides for them what it wants to be.
Over time, Miroslava’s consultations with the Ring harden into an unofficial rite, something halfway between engineering review and confession. No matter how heated an Assembly session becomes (voices stacked over each other in three dialects, fists drumming on tables) the room quiets when she lifts a hand and says, in that flat, carrying tone, “We walk the load paths.”
They kill the main holos and follow her down: two or three delegates at a time, never more. A miner matriarch in oil‑stained sleeves, a refugee quarter rep with ink still wet on his first ration ledger, sometimes even a grim security liaison sent to “observe.” In the narrow, sweating service corridors outside the chamber, rank and rhetoric strip away. The only decorations here are numbered brackets, rust blooms, and the faint, pulsing threads of alien conduit under human plating.
Miroslava jacks her beat‑up tablet into a junction and throws stress maps across the bulkheads in wavering color bands. Reds crawl along ceiling ribs, pale blues spider down through the deck, pulsing in time with distant pumps. Hum from grav‑plates rattles teeth; condensation runs through projected fault lines like they’re already leaking.
“In Assembly you speak about principles,” she says, knuckles rapping a panel until it rings thin. “Down here, is kilograms, is kilopascals, is which grandmother loses air first.”
Arguments that filled a hall now have to fit inside a two‑meter span of pipe. She makes them stand shoulder to shoulder, rival factions brushing sleeves as she traces an invisible fracture with a burn‑scarred fingertip.
“You want more draw for your smelters?” she asks one delegation, pointing to a junction glowing orange. “Then here we cut power to scrubbers, and this stack (” she flicks the projection so a block of family cells flares) “breathes dust until lungs fail. Say it plain. Say whose children cough.”
Sometimes they mumble, sometimes they hold her gaze and name a sector aloud. She does not let them look away when she overlays population density on thermal load, or when a proposed expansion turns half a memorial wall’s names into a predicted casualty cluster. In those cramped spaces, slogans die quickly; there is only this conduit, that grav‑plate, these faces inside the blast radius outlined in ghostly numbers.
The habit changes the tempo of governance. Debates acquire a pulse: surge in the hall, then drop into the quiet thrum of pumps and fans while an exhausted engineer and a handful of representatives listen to the Ring’s complaints in creaks and power spikes. Decisions return upstairs slower, stripped of applause lines, stamped instead with Miroslava’s gravelled “Here, no further,” or, more rarely, a grudging “Maybe, if we brace and you accept the risk.”
Some start calling these excursions “penance walks,” others, half‑joking, “going to hear mass.” The joke sticks because the pattern does. Even Zoran, when he deigns to attend in person, finds himself ducking through low hatches behind her, neural feed dimmed so the raw noise of the systems doesn’t drown out her muttered counts. Irina’s liaisons bring casualty charts that Miroslava pins beside stress overlays, until metal fatigue and blood oxygen saturation share the same wall.
No edict passes that touches the alien substrate or the main trunks without a walk logged and signed. Over months, the ritual teaches the Ring’s new rulers to measure their ambitions not in abstract percentages but in bending beams and failing seals. Power, now, has to squeeze itself down to corridor scale, where the air smells of ozone and old sweat and there is nowhere for a lie to echo without hitting metal.
Distributed apprenticeship spreads uneven, like heat through bad ductwork. Recognizing that her solitary judgment is becoming too central, Miroslava starts dragging others into the work whether they volunteer or not. She pulls sharp-eyed teenagers from M‑13 who grew up counting the stutter in failing fans, and burned‑out line techs from the mines whose hands still twitch to panel rhythms. They shadow her rounds, boots slipping on condensation, as she shoves battered tablets into their grip and makes them annotate anomalies by hand, not trusting auto‑filters.
“Don’t just write ‘fault,’” she snaps. “Write why. Write who paid for it last time.”
She walks them past plates still warped from old collapses, points to a weld scar and names the shift that died there, the quiet sabotage that saved three others. Schematics become palimpsests of rebellion and error. Irina, seeing the pattern, sends a few carefully chosen med orderlies to join these walks, folding pulse-ox graphs and lung-scar maps into the same overlays of strain and resource flow.
“If this all hangs on me, it breaks,” Miroslava says flatly one shift, shoving a tablet at a protesting apprentice. “So you learn. You argue with me when I’m wrong. Ring doesn’t need saint. Needs many bastards who know where it creaks.”
Friction with power-holders The more the “walks” become custom, the more certain people start checking how far they can lean on, or around, Miroslava. Zoran chafes first and loudest. In the Systems Gallery, under the cold wash of ring schematics, he stands with implant halo flickering and asks (too smooth) “We run one test pulse. Narrow band. Contained.” She traces the projected surge, sees it knifing past already hairline-stressed ribs, and says, “No. You want experiment, you build new brace first.”
“Your caution is becoming a bottleneck,” he snaps once, cutting his neural feed so hard his pupils blow wide. “Bottlenecks keep hull intact,” she answers, already unplugging her tablet.
Assembly traditionalists gripe in side corridors that she is “just tech, not tribune,” demanding formal override procedures. Natalya’s people, remembering airlocks that opened when corporate code twitched, mutter that staking so much on one woman’s word smells too much like the old hierarchies with a different logo.
Miroslava listens when complaints reach her, fingers resting on the nearest bulkhead as if taking its pulse. She does not argue philosophy. “You think I like this?” she says once, weary. “Good. Then we agree on something.” Then she goes back to counting bolts and fault lines, because steel and alien glass do not care who feels slighted; they only care when someone stops paying attention.
Under the constant pressure of being the decisive voice between “hold” and “push,” Miroslava’s already frayed nerves thin to wire. Sleep comes in broken increments between alarm calls and mediation sessions; radiation headaches smear into the static that rides the edge of her perception whenever she brushes too close to deeper channels. Some nights she wakes mid‑sentence, throat raw, realizing she has been arguing load paths in her dreams with a structure that never answers. In mess halls, people lower their voices when she passes, not out of reverence but because they do not want to add one more plea to the pile they know she carries. On rare, solitary walks through neglected service tunnels, she finds herself talking aloud to the walls in a hoarse whisper just to hear a human sound answer the endless hum, to prove she has not yet slid entirely into the substrate’s private language.
Quiet safeguards Feeling the weight of everyone’s reliance on her, Miroslava begins to weave her own thin insurance into the fabric of the Ring. She documents her methods in plain, unembellished language on unsecured terminals where anyone with patience can read them, annotating with failure cases and names of those lost when similar shortcuts went wrong. She insists that critical override codes require multiple signatures, embedding threshold checks that will trip if any one faction tries to centralize access again, flags that dump alerts to Irina’s med nets and even M‑13 status boards instead of just corporate logs. In the alien substrate itself, she leaves subtle branching logic. Alternate paths that can be activated by simple, well‑publicized physical actions rather than by a single hidden key: a purge valve cycled three times, a certain tram halted at a certain junction. She tells no one the full extent of these measures, only that “nobody should be able to lock this place down alone,” and returns to work, knowing that even these protections may someday be twisted but unwilling to leave the Ring without at least a chance to resist.
In early sessions of the new Assembly, Miroslava perches on a rear conduit box, boots braced against a humming riser, half-listening as delegates argue over air tax brackets and shaft access schedules. Condensate drips slow from a coolant line overhead, ticking time against the metal near her shoulder while voices rise and knot in the chamber.
On the floor, a delegate from the tram crews, broad hands, dispatcher’s badge polished bright, leans toward a cluster of worn-faced family reps from the lower habitats. His tone stays soft, almost apologetic.
“Listen, babushki, we do this clean. I put your three complaints, filter replacement, bunk reallocation, the boy’s shift suspension, inside one motion. Easier to pass, da? We tie it to revised gravity cycle for Junction Six. Less strain on old bones. You back my schedule proposal, I carry your paper through.”
Miroslava watches the quiet exchange of nods. No one writes anything down. A niece pulls a scarf tighter around her hair and murmurs, “For community,” as if rebranding the bargain in real time.
On the main display, colored blocks reshuffle: tram capacity, shaft windows, ration-linked air draws. Someone quotes the charter about participatory oversight; someone else mutters about “responsible delegation.” In the glass reflection, she sees only the old pattern: leverage bundled, favors layered, debts accruing at compound interest.
Later, when the vote comes, the motion is framed as optimization. “We align gravity cycles with peak rest hours to reduce strain injuries,” the tram man says into the record, voice smoothing the edges. “In return, we address several long-standing grievances from under-served sectors.” Applause, thin but present, circles the hall. On the status board, M‑13’s gravity slot ticks up by a fraction; three petitions vanish into “resolved” without detail.
Miroslava’s fingers rest on the conduit behind her, feeling the faint shiver of shifted load. Representation, she thinks, has simply learned new words. Where corporate once said “efficiency” and “throughput,” the Assembly now says “solidarity” and “communal duty,” but the grammar underneath is the same: those who control the routes, of trams, of air, of votes, decide which voices move and which stay stuck in place.
She slides off the conduit box before adjournment, leaving the argument about “temporary oversight committees” to loop without her. In the service corridor beyond, with only pipe-song and distant tram thunder for company, she keys a note into an unsecured terminal: a dry line in plain language.
Bundling grievances into single motions concentrates negotiation power. Monitor who offers the bundle, not just what gets “won.”
No commentary, no denunciation. Just another small annotation in a growing ledger of how systems, left to themselves, curl back toward familiar shapes.
When a cargo bottleneck in the outer shafts sparks panic about food shortages, the Assembly chamber fills with the sharp, metallic edge of fear. Word ripples in from the rim: sealed pallets, stalled trams, families counting meal packs in half-days instead of weeks.
An old smuggler from M‑13, beard gone almost white but eyes still quick, taps his knuckles on a rail until people look his way. “We got routes for this,” he says. “Legacy priority. From first crisis times. You make exception, let old paths run hot, food moves. No one starves while you argue commas.”
On the projected schematics, Miroslava watches the proposal unfold: a thin braid of side tunnels and bypasses, flagged amber and green, labeled now as emergency redistribution channels. She knows those paths. They once carried contraband meds and stolen ration bricks under corporate scans. Now they are rebranded as secure, exempt from routine tracking “for security reasons.”
The vote is near-unanimous, grateful. Within a shift, the priority lanes hum. Almost at once, new fights start over who gets their names on manifests no one outside a tight logistics circle is allowed to see.
Zoran, stripped of corporate insignia but still wired into the Ring’s nerves, discovers that in this new order, hard numbers carry more weight than stamped directives. He leans into it. In council, he throws stress maps and fault overlays onto the air in stark reds and blacks, pairing speculative failure trees with phrases like “irreversible loss corridor” and “cascading suffocation risk across three generations.” When delegates balk at a shutdown he wants, he nudges baseline wear upward, tightens tolerance bands, lets projected casualty counts climb. “You call this compromise,” he says mildly, “but physics calls it slow asphyxiation.” No one in the chamber wants to be the one on record arguing with the math, and his resolutions pass “for the safety of all.”
Sergei returns first as a witness, then as a consultant. Miners who remember his old betrayals still seek him out in side corridors because he knows where the junction boxes actually are, which valves stick, how ration counters can be temporarily fooled without tripping alarms, whose signatures still unlock legacy safeties. Before long, Assembly committees invite him to “informal briefings” on infrastructure realities, coffee cups and printed charts as props. Miroslava listens from a gantry as he explains that some data “must be filtered before the public panics,” that not every ledger can be open. His tone reasonable, regretful, almost exactly the one he once used to justify corporate quotas and “temporary hardship measures” for the greater good.
In response, Miroslava retreats deeper into the infrastructural backroads she trusts: crawlspaces above council chambers, maintenance ledges overlooking repurposed loading bays, tight service tubes where alien inlays still ghost through human plating. There, slate jacked into junctions no committee has yet bothered to catalog, she layers in quiet contingencies. Shadow audit logs that mirror Assembly overrides, alternate routing tables that can quietly re-balance power or air without touching a single voting console. She tags them with anonymous, plain-language notes buried in diagnostic chatter, “If console say no other choice, run trace here first”, tiny, stubborn reminders that the Ring must never again hang its breath on one office, one gallery, one chamber, no matter whose name blinks on the door.
She watches the waveform crawl, teeth worrying at the inside of her cheek. The line is thin, almost shy at first, then builds itself into angles and hesitations that refuse every category her training reaches for. She flicks through filters with a twitch of her thumb, thermal, EM bleed, gravitic jitter, implant backscatter, each overlay washing pointless color across the same bare-boned curve.
Not thermal bleed. Not line noise. Not the lazy sawtooth of a mining tram spool-up, not the corporate “heartbeat” ping that used to pulse out from Zajcev’s gallery on every cycle tick. No checksum header like human code, no decay tail like automated diagnostics. Just… insistence. Modulated, returning, adjusting to each lens she forces over it.
It hooks at an old, half-buried thing in her. Childhood nights in distant shafts, mother’s voice going hoarse on tenth verse of the same shift song while knuckles tapped on bulkhead in a pattern that was never quite the same twice. A way of telling the metal, We are still here. A way of telling each other, I hear you.
Her thumb settles over the slate’s “suppress” command. Corporate manual ghosts rise up neat in her mind, every chapter heading in cold block font: ISOLATE ANOMALIES. MAINTAIN BASELINE. REPORT UP-CHAIN. She has filed those reports, redacted those logs, watched as anything that did not fit a cost model vanished into encrypted vaults where only people like Zoran and the boardroom ghosts could see.
“Da, sure,” she mutters under her breath, voice flat in the cramped cavity. “Again we pretend system is little box, hm?”
The glyphs beneath her boots give a faint, sympathetic shimmer, as if some distant relay shifts tension across the hull. She feels suddenly, acutely, how much of the Ring is not on any human schematic at all.
Suppressing the signal would be the easiest thing in the world: one press, a note in her private audit that she will probably never share, a line of anomaly flags quietly zeroed out. Safe. Contained. Owned.
She exhales instead, air hissing loud in her own ears, and taps past the command into the slate’s raw routing pane. The familiar human network map blooms in front of her, overlaid in pale green against the dark. Not the old corporate star topology anymore, with everything feeding up to one hungry, central throat, but a messy, branching mesh the Assembly fought over for weeks. Medical relays braided into miner com-lines, M-13’s once-ghost wires now marked as “provisional civic channel,” council routers tagged with too many author names to fit in a single field.
Her fingertips hover, tracing possible paths in the air without committing. She watches latency estimates flutter, choke points identified in red where old corporate firewalls still sit like scar tissue. Here, Irina’s archive: high bandwidth, high scrutiny. There, Zoran’s throttled gallery hooks, still armoured but no longer sacrosanct. Along the lower arc, squat and stubborn, the warrens of M-13, their lines thin but persistent, power-borrowed and half-legal.
This is what they argued for in that overheated hall, weeks of shouted numbers and sworn insults: that no signal vital to survival should ever again run through a single hand.
Her thumb slides, gentle as cracking a valve, and she begins laying a path.
She pulls up the transmit pane and widens the mask, fingers moving faster now that the choice is made. No narrow channel, no private backdoor; she drags the alien pulse across the whole messy mesh, plotting it through Irina’s clean, redundant medical relays and the scabbed-on council routers the miners insisted on owning. Old corporate choke points glow amber at the edges of her vision and she ghosts around them by instinct, slipping the signal through spare diagnostic lanes and archival health feeds no one ever bothered to lock down.
Packet header field blinks, waits. Line by line, she edits it down: not her registry tag, not “Chief Tech,” not “Wanted Asset.” Just: SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE QUERY. In the free-text annotation she types in flat station pidgin, no jargon to hide behind: “Unknown pattern. Looks back. All see.”
Her slate gives a single, almost polite chime as the route compiles and latency estimates settle. She watches the confirmation cursor pulse under her thumb, feels her own heartbeat double it, then authorizes full-mesh visibility.
Far above, Irina’s ward boards will flag a synchronized advisory; in the Gallery, whatever shackled fragment of Zoran’s interface remains will log a “non-standard external event” at priority gray. In M-13’s crooked corridors, some cracked tablet balanced on an oil drum will blink awake, backlight flickering, and show the same thin, defiant curve now threading across Miroslava’s wrist.
The response, if that is what it is, unfolds slowly enough that people have time to notice and argue about it in real time. Assembly delegates trail off mid-argument as status bars around their chamber displays slide into an unscheduled “observation” mode, agenda queues graying out one by one. Dock controllers and hauler pilots glance at their panels as a low-priority alert overlays their traffic maps with the drifting, alien waveform, jittering just enough to tug at peripheral vision. In the warrens, a handful of children interrupt their game to crowd around a patched-together screen, arguing in rapid-fire slang over whether the shifting line looks more like a snake, a river, or some old folk-dragon no one’s actually seen. Feedback windows bloom across Miroslava’s slate: curious pings from rebel relays, a terse “Under review, do not panic” tag pushed by Irina’s ID, a throttled, half-blocked query from Zoran’s constrained node asking for the original capture feed, and, sliding in late from Sokolov’s hall, a nervous, anonymized text-only: “This from you? Should we kill power?”
Then the Ring moves. Power draw curves flatten of their own accord as lights along one corridor dim, then another, then a dozen in succession, the effect rippling outward like a pressure wave with no source. In the maintenance cavity, Miroslava feels the faintest change in skin pressure as micro-fans behind her cycle down, then up, in perfect sync with the waveform’s slow rise and fall, like some buried lung testing capacity. Gravity in one of M-13’s uneven pockets steadies for a few breaths, letting a loose toy and a drifting screw hang perfectly between floor and ceiling before the fluctuation resumes and they tumble away. In the infirmary, Irina sees monitors briefly smooth into ideal baselines (perfect saturations, textbook cardiac rhythms) then drift back to messy human variance, as if a hand had brushed every graph flat and then withdrawn. No alarms trigger; no safeties trip; Zoran’s constrained hooks log only clean, within-tolerance deviations. The Ring inhales, exhales, and every watching console, from Sokolov’s rattling terminals to Natalya’s cockpit repeater, records the same impossible note: “No operator input detected.”
Silence settles into the gap that follows: not the dead hush of failed pumps, but a shared, held breath with the taste of ozone on it. Across the mesh, low-band chatter spills in fits and starts: miners forwarding shaky cam captures of the dimming wave, a rebel tech annotating overlays with guessed stress correlations, an anonymous M-13 handle simply writing, “It felt…gentle. Like it check we still here.” In the council feed, someone jokes about filing a grievance with the substrate; three more reply with serious proposals for “negotiation protocols.”
Miroslava detaches her slate, thumb lingering over the interface until the glyphs under her gloves fade back to their usual slow shimmer. The alien pattern waits: no push, no pull, just a steady, patient presence in the logs. She does not try to speak into it again; for once, she leaves a message unanswered: “Unknown event distributed to all nodes. Interpret as needed.” Let them argue, mythologize, model. Let Irina’s people call it a systemic artifact, Zoran label it “non-operational anomaly,” Natalya whisper “first contact” over encrypted bands.
Outside the thin metal skin around her, the Kovalev Ring creaks, adjusts, and continues its work, ore carts grinding, air scrubbers sighing, children in M-13 shouting over the tail end of the light-wave game. Every corridor hums just a fraction louder with rumor, every console bearer slightly more aware that something vast beneath their boots has noticed their existence.