He starts the shift already running on recycled caffeine and half a night’s sleep, palms braced on the main Mjollnir console as he scans columns of stress graphs marching across the panoramic display, cross-checking them against the printed schedules taped beside the screen.
The console surface is warm under his fingers, heat bleeding up from processors and from the ring itself. Each graph is a thin, trembling line: furnace shell temperatures, manifold pressures, composite panel strain along Skadi Rim tolerances. A few flicker amber at the margins where last night’s crew pushed output to meet quota. Nothing has tripped a hard alarm. Yet.
He flits between views with habitual economy, iris cursor hopping from bay to bay. Smelter 3’s refractory brick shows a fractional creep outside model. He tags it with a maintenance flag, priority “soon, not now,” and keys in a tiny adjustment to the cooling cycle, shaving two degrees off the next ramp-down. The system chimes a muted acknowledgement.
Behind him, the industrial arc runs at mid-shift roar: the deep-throated rumble of ore crushers, the shudder of conveyors, the more delicate whine of high-resolution printers cycling through deposition passes. Overhead cranes track along rails with insect patience. Someone has a radio stream bleeding faintly through the intercom, old Earth rock wrapped in static and the occasional clipped announcement.
He drags a finger along the taped schedules, paper, actual paper, edges curled from humidity, checking crew rotations against power-allocation windows and test batch slots. The corporation’s latest throughput directive sits beside them, crisp and smug in its perfect typography: a stepped increase in output across three weeks, risk model footnoted in legalese. He’s handwritten counter-notes in the margins in tight, slanted Norwegian: “thermal margin?” “who pays for downtime when this cracks?”
He feels the caffeine sitting sour in his stomach, a thin chemical itch behind his eyes, but the pattern of graphs is familiar, almost comforting. As long as the lines behave, the hull holds. As long as the hull holds, everything else is just negotiation.
On his first walk-through he peels away from the main console and drops into the familiar circuit: past the ore-feed hoppers, under an overhead crane that hums by with a pallet of raw ingots, along the long curve of printer bays. Heat radiates in uneven patches from housings and ductwork; he notes them without thinking, a private thermal map overlaid on the official one.
He sidesteps a pair of labourers wrestling a jammed pallet jack, lifts an elbow to keep a coil of data cable from dragging in dust, then stops short at Bay 7. The status strip over the enclosure is a steady green, but the load curve on the side display shows a faint, rhythmic tremor superimposed on the deposition cycle.
He leans in, wipes a smear of regolith dust off the sensor hood with his thumb until the casing’s original warning yellow appears, and stares at the curve, counting beats under his breath. Bearings, probably. Or a mis-synced feed.
He lifts his slate, mutters a clipped note in Norwegian, tags the bay for “monitor. No halt,” then raps the side of the casing twice, knuckles ringing dull against composite as if reminding it he’s listening.
At Bay 12 (the large-format unit that’s been red‑tagged “temperamental since Sol 312” in three different languages) he drops to a crouch, one knee clicking against the grate. The casing breathes heat against his cheek. He slots a calibration wand into the access port and watches the phase jitter crawl down his slate, listening to the faint, arrhythmic tick in the gantry drive.
“Kill the eager-finger routine,” he says to the operator above him. “We ramp like we’re old and careful.” He walks her through a slower thermal and feed curve, taps in a manual override, then nudges the head along its rail by hand until the vibration evens.
On the next pass the print head glides instead of stuttering. A few nearby workers clap, relief more than celebration. He straightens, back complaining, and says, “Offer a beer to the spirit of precision. It saved your shift, not me.”
The shift grinds on in overlapping waves, smelter roar, venting hiss, a thin synth‑folk line someone has smuggled into the rotation, while Eirik paces the arc, logging micro‑adjustments, trading dry, barbed comments about “modelled acceptable risk” with bleary workers. Twice he thumbs aside glowing efficiency prompts, inputting manual caps that hold ramp temperatures a safe margin below what the corporate algorithms insist is optimal.
By mid‑shift the audit sits like excess CO₂ in the air (measurable, not yet alarming) while muscle memory keeps the ring turning. He signs off on a batch of his own ceramic‑composite panels after triple‑checking pore distribution, flags a misaligned induction coil for full downtime instead of sanctioned patchwork, then bends over a junior tech’s shoulder, confirming Skadi‑bound cargo brackets clear spec by a hair before angling back toward the consoles.
A soft chime needles through the smelter roar, cutting across the low synth‑folk line. On Eirik’s main display a thin yellow band blossoms at the rim of the status wheel: LINE P∆ ( MJOLLNIR EAST SUB‑LOOP ) MINOR / IN‑TOLERANCE / NEG. TREND.
He stills without meaning to. The band pulses, a restrained heartbeat, tagging a filament‑thin feed that runs out toward Skadi Rim, one of half a dozen redundant loops feeding the airlock complex’s environmental buffer exchangers.
He flicks the alert open. Numbers scroll: pressure sag in the second decimal place, flow rate compensating via auto‑valves three nodes upstream, temperature fractionally cooler than model. The system has not yet decided to care. Auto‑safeties sit green, timers unstarted. Algorithms grade it as “self‑correcting under current load”.
He doesn’t like the slope on the tiny trend line.
He calls up the last twelve hours. The sub‑loop wavered earlier in the shift, just a breath, then flattened. Before that: clean. Before Sol 410: a faint series of similar deviations, each well inside spec, each smoothed out by control logic before human eyes would ever have seen them: unless they went looking.
His jaw tightens. This is the same sector that fed the cargo lock that micro‑fractured. Different chamber, same family of lines, same “experimental” composite heat‑exchanger housings they fought the risk board over.
He glances along the console arc. No one is shouting. No klaxons. Just workers in orange and blue, heads bent over displays, the world reduced to graphs and status hashes.
He skims a hand across his collarbone, feeling for dust that isn’t there, and zooms the schematic until the east sub‑loop is a simplified, pulsing snake across his field. The icons for Skadi’s buffer manifolds flicker at the outer edge, steady green, as if daring him to call this anything more than noise.
He leans across without touching the interface, knuckles resting on the console edge.
“Karim. Skadi Rim aux loop. Bring it up.”
The kid startles, then clears his current pane. His fingers hover a shade too long over the selector bands before the Skadi feed blossoms into layered AR, pale blue trunk lines, orange for thermal, thin green for pressure telemetry, spilling over their shared stretch of board. Skadi’s cluster resolves at the periphery, a stylised knot of chambers biting into the canyon wall.
“Local view, not overview,” Eirik adds. “Sub‑loop east.”
Karim pinches down, filters snap away, the east segment fattening into a segmented ring with tap‑off icons, valve glyphs, micro‑sensor tags. The minor alert trace hums at the rim, an almost decorative yellow band.
Eirik keeps his own hands folded, thumbs pressed together, resisting the urge to reach in and do it himself. Audit or not, junior techs have to be able to see these things.
“Leave the autos in place,” he says. “We’re just looking. Zoom the return path. No overrides without me saying.”
“See the micro‑drift on the return manifold,” he says, not quite making it a question, keeping his tone flat enough that no one three consoles down will twitch. Karim squints, then shakes his head, uncertain.
“Look at the derivative, not the absolute,” Eirik murmurs. “Layer in temp, drop flow smoothing, window to five minutes.”
The graph stutters, resolves; a shallow creep becomes visible.
“There. Node E‑seventeen. Tag that valve. Local manual control only.” He waits until Karim’s cursor lands true. “Good. Now shorten the hysteresis. Override is advisory, not hard. Just tell it you’re here.”
Karim’s throat bobs. His hand hovers.
“Feather two degrees open,” Eirik says. “Slow. Before the autos decide they’re smarter than you and slam the whole branch shut.”
The trend line eases, the yellow band paling back into green; the console coughs a soft acknowledgement chime that bears no relation to the sharp, dry thud of his own pulse. He has Karim annotate it as a supervised tuning exercise rather than a deviation, voice kept level, then quietly flags the loop segment for a hands‑on inspection during next off‑peak.
When Karim finally peels his gaze away, shoulders loosening as he unjacks his headset, Eirik scrolls the last five minutes back on a private layer. With the helper prompts stripped out, the pressure envelope looks worse. Safety bands thin as hairlines, auto‑trip thresholds crowding the real world. He locks the annotation, shutters Skadi’s pane, and drifts sideways along the board toward the mixed ops consoles where roving patrols and comms traffic will expect to see him.
Loki’s boots give her away before the ID tag on his console blips, a different cadence under Mjollnir’s industrial thrum: heavier heel‑set, deliberate, with the faint metallic tick of carabiners brushing against each other. She comes in along the yellow line instead of the visitor lane, cutting through a knot of haulers waiting on a printer cycle; they part for her without looking like they’re doing it.
She hooks one hip against the side of his station as if claiming a badly placed barstool, weight easy, shoulders loose. The fabric of her matte‑black jacket darkens where it brushes a smear of regolith dust on the console edge. Her gaze tracks the main process displays just long enough to look credible, then slips to the narrow sideband pane where ancillary life‑support metrics and personal flags live.
A thin red icon pulses in the corner: MEALS MISSED – 3.
Her mouth curves, but it’s all teeth. “You know the ration AI categorises this pattern as low‑grade self‑harm, ja?” she says, almost bored, pitched just loud enough for the nearest operator to hear the joke and write it off.
He snorts once, not looking up from a scrolling stress‑map overlay. “Occupational hazard.”
She taps a knuckle lightly against the console frame, making the badge at her collar glint. “Hazard reports get you counselling modules and restricted access to hot tools. Eat the damn packet next time, before the system decides you’re a danger to yourself and others and dumps you in Rec Two with the mindfulness crowd.”
Her tone is lazy, but her eyes don’t match it. They do a quick, clinical sweep of him: the set of his shoulders, the flecks of soot along his jaw, the way his hand hovers a fraction too long over a manual override slider before he lets it go. Tiny calculations, coming up on the wrong side of acceptable.
He kills the personal pane with a flick, replacing his own red warning with a generic pipeline schematic. It doesn’t make the phantom weight of her look go away.
While a pair of furnace status bars crawl in his peripheral vision, she drops her voice, posture still loose for any camera that decides to zoom in, and tips her chin toward the Skadi Rim schematic ghosted in one corner of his board. “Security’s getting questions about those new ceramic panels,” she says, as if discussing a shift rota. “Anything you forgot to tell us before the auditors start asking less nicely?”
He keeps his eyes on the colour bands inching across the diagram (thermal gradients, expansion coefficients, stress deltas) because looking at her would mean acknowledging the thinness in her tone. “It’s all in the spec sheets,” he says. “Composition, bake profile, load tests. You’ve had the same brief Ragnhild’s team does.”
“Spec sheets don’t mention half the ways something can fail when a hauler bangs a pallet into it at minus thirty,” she murmurs. Her thumb drums once against the console edge, a tiny staccato under the furnace hum. “And they don’t say why Ops logs show micro‑alarms the system doesn’t flag up to my board.”
He exhales through his nose. “Because I tuned the filters myself. Because we’re running them right on the edge.”
The overhead speaker spits a brief burst of static, sharp enough to make one of the haulers flinch, and then Stig’s voice filters down from Yggdrasil, bright with manufactured cheer layered over line noise. “Mjollnir control, this is your friendly comms goblin,” he says. “Checking status on Subject Halvorsson. Has he successfully welded himself to Console Three, or is he still technically classified as a free citizen under local statute?”
A couple of heads lift from their stations. Someone snorts. The line icon on Eirik’s board pulses with Stig’s ID tag and a latency figure that says the tower’s running its links hot again. Loki doesn’t move, but the corner of her mouth ticks, just once, before she schools it flat.
The chatter pinballs for a minute, Loki threatening to cite him for aggravated neglect of lunch breaks, Stig threatening to invoice him for emotional distress and excess packet loss, but the arcs decay. Jokes snag on mention of a delayed gasket shipment, of rumoured bonus clawbacks if throughput dips, of debt schedules with no slack. Underneath, everyone is counting calendars and failure modes.
He lets a dry remark about hazard pay stand in for an answer, but his fingertips keep ghosting along the Skadi Rim overlay, following colour-shifted stress contours and valve icons as though he could reinforce them by touch. “There’s no reserve line,” he says, voice low, directed at the glass. “If these don’t behave like the model, replacement stock’s on a three‑month ship. That’s three months of crews working on overtime lungs and overdraft wages, with no spare hull between them and vacuum except what I baked in those ovens.”
The overhead display refreshes in a slow, phosphorescent wipe, washing the upper curve of the control room in reflected amber. Routine telemetry begins its crawl: power balance nominal, solar input at ninety‑three percent of projection, reactor load holding steady. Water reclamation within tolerance, particulate counts green in all occupied modules. Transit schedules updating for the next six‑hour block, surface EVA queues shuffling by in compressed tags and call‑signs.
Eirik’s eyes track none of it at first. He knows the cadence too well; Mjollnir’s health summed into a litany of numbers that either sing or lie. His own boards are already giving him a denser, more honest picture in raw curves and variance bands. The big status crawl is for comfort, for operations, for anyone who wants to pretend the colony can be reduced to “nominal.”
He’s annotating a minor thermal spike on an outer smelter gantry when a different string of characters cuts across the top line, bracketed by a thin, insistent hash mark in corporate grey: INCOMING CORPORATE TRAFFIC WINDOW.
The phrase resolves in his peripheral vision and snags there, impossible to ignore. Next to it, a countdown spawns, ticking down from nineteen minutes on a half‑second beat that feels out of phase with Mjollnir’s background hum. Someone has tied the font weight to urgency flags; each decrement punches a little brighter against the amber.
He feels the change before he consciously names it: a subtle tightening under the sternum, as if the timer has been mounted not on the bulkhead but behind his ribs. Traffic window means bandwidth reservation, pre‑emptive priority on their high‑gain arrays. Means Yggdrasil’s channels skewing corporate‑heavy, local chatter shoved to the margins. Means whatever is coming from orbit, or from Earth, is big enough to demand a clear lane.
The rest of the crawl keeps dutifully stepping past, oxygen margins, filter duty cycles, cargo manifest handshake complete, but the words smear into an undifferentiated strip of light around that single line and its dwindling numbers.
Ragnhild, he thinks, without wanting to. Audit packets. Directive updates. A synchronised dump of their lives in compressed logs, judged from a planet away.
His gaze slips, almost of its own accord, to the Skadi Rim layer pinned to the lower quadrant of his console. Structural stress overlays, valve states, the subtle colour bias marking composite segments that carry his formulations. For a moment, the countdown above and the schematic below seem mechanically linked, like opposing ends of a jack being slowly wound.
He swallows, jaw working once. Corporate traffic window, audit synchronization, prior anomaly review. The phrases stack in his head like a failure tree. Somewhere in that incoming bandwidth, someone is already reaching fingers into his airlocks, his panels, his margins of safety, looking for a place to apply leverage.
The timer ticks down another half‑second, bright and indifferent.
Beside the main feed, a slimmer side pane begins to seed itself with collateral notices pulled from some upstream script, each line sliding into existence with a soft, almost apologetic fade. AUDIT SYNCHRONIZATION, the first header reads, followed by a string of timestamp hashes and a scheduled lock window for “authoritative log alignment.” Under it, DATA INTEGRITY VERIFICATION populates in neat bullets: checksum variance thresholds, cross‑module sampling, automated anomaly reconciliation. Then PERSONNEL ACCESS REVIEW, with its lattice of badge IDs, compartment tags, and a bland assurance that “operational impact will be minimal.”
The typography is neutral, the verbs all passive and non‑accusatory, but the effect in the room is immediate. Conversation over the nearest console gutters, sentences left hanging mid‑joke. Someone’s music feed clicks down a notch. Around Mjollnir, they have all learned the grammar behind the euphemisms: synchronization means overwrite, verification means suspicion, access review means someone deciding who is allowed near what.
Eirik watches subheadings accrete and feels the collective flinch ripple outward through the bay, thin and brittle as cooling slag.
A new line blossoms in the side pane, tagged in discreet yellow rather than the usual green: SKADI RIM AIRLOCK COMPLEX – PRIOR ANOMALY REVIEW SCHEDULED. The font is marginally smaller, as if modesty could make it harmless. The phrase is technically nonspecific, but the way “prior” and “anomaly” sit together compresses behind his sternum; they never write “micro‑fracture that almost vented three people” into a public bulletin. “Prior anomaly” is what you get when legal and risk control have sanded the edges off the truth until it won’t catch on a shareholder call. “Review” means somebody on a distant screen has already decided there is something to find, and the line here is just the local courtesy copy.
His fingertip still rests where it had been mapping stress gradients on the Skadi Rim schematic; without intending to, he rides the colour‑coded overlay straight to the specific cargo lock that had spidered under load. The etched memory of that hair‑fine, crystalline crack and the abrupt hiss in his suit audio floods back so hard he swears he can feel phantom cold bleeding through composite and glove, a temperature that never existed in the safe, warm air of the control room.
A chirp from some peripheral subsystem cuts through his focus; a nearby tech flicks the alert away with a practised, disinterested tap, and low conversation begins to seep back into the bay’s soundscape. Eirik doesn’t move. He watches the euphemistic line inch upward until the pane refreshes it out of existence, then finally peels himself from the console and angles toward the canteen’s manufactured normality.
On his way to grab a late meal, Eirik falls into step with a trickle of workers peeling off toward the canteen, boots clanking dully on the grated flooring, the day’s dust still smeared in the creases of their coveralls. The corridor air is a fraction warmer here, carrying the faint savoury drift from the galley vents: stew bulked out with vat‑protein and the sharp, almost‑but‑not‑quite dill note of whatever herb mix hydroponics has in surplus this week. Someone ahead laughs too loudly at a joke he doesn’t catch, the sound bouncing off curved composite, overshooting cheer before dropping back into the low‑energy murmur of people who have already worked one shift and are halfway resigned to the next.
He moves with them without really seeing faces, recognising people instead by gait, by the way a shoulder lists after a bad fall in reduced gravity, by the particular cadence of a clipped Scandinavian consonant drifting back through the crowd. A welding crew from Smelter Two, still flecked with vitrified slag. Two ice‑haulers from the lower caverns, boots leaving pale, half‑evaporated tracks on the mesh. A junior process tech he knows only as JANI‑4 from the stencil on her back, scrolling something on a wrist pad, lips moving silently as she rehearses numbers for a report.
Overhead, the corridor status strip runs a reassuring soft green, punctuated at intervals by slow‑pulsing amber triangles where minor maintenance is scheduled. The lighting is set to late‑evening spectrum, a marginally warmer hue that operations claims helps circadian alignment; to him it just makes the scuffs on the walls stand out more starkly, pale arcs where equipment cases or suit couplers have kissed the composite a little too hard.
He can feel the residual fatigue in the group like a shared field: micro‑hesitations at ladder wells, the collective slackening of pace as the smell of food strengthens. No one is in a hurry, but no one dawdles either; time in the canteen is compressed between shift turnovers and audit briefings. A pair of surface EVA harnesses clink faintly somewhere behind him, carabiners ticking against metal in an irregular rhythm that sounds, for a moment, like an old‑fashioned clock counting down to something unnamed.
As they round a bend, the low murmur ahead thins as if someone has thumbed down a gain control. Sound doesn’t stop, air handlers still breathe, boots still ring on mesh, but the human layer shears off, words clipped mid‑syllable and left hanging in the recycled air.
Ten metres on, a pair of admin staff in crisp corporate grey detach themselves from the general flow and step flush to the walls in near‑synchronous movement. Their boots plant just outside the yellow hazard stripe running along the centre of the corridor, bodies angled outward, shoulders squared. Tablets are held close to chests, screens dark; they are in transit, not working, and yet they radiate the brittle attention of people performing being seen.
ID badges at their collars catch the overhead strips and flare white‑silver, not the warm scatter of ordinary crew tags but a hard, prismatic glint off active security holographics. The lenses of their AR specs track something approaching behind Eirik, pupils micro‑contracting; their faces, when he passes close enough to read them, are smoothed to administrative blank.
Between them, an automated trolley hums past in the cleared yellow lane, guidance LEDs winking a steady green. On its mag‑suspension bed rides a waist‑high sealed crate, corners still sharp from transit, surface unscarred by handling. Fresh batch code glows on the side in clean alphanumerics, above the discreet corporate icon: a muted watermark rather than the bold logos stamped on bulk consumables. He doesn’t need to lean in to read the smaller text; he knows the format, knows the weight distribution, the specific composite sheen. Recorder bands and compliance wear. Nothing exotic, nothing that should matter. Still, the crate seems to displace more than air as it passes, dragging a small silence in its wake that he feels against his skin.
Around him, the bleed‑through from the canteen stays deceptively normal, laughter, overlapping Norwegian and trade‑pidgin, the damp warmth of recycled air saturated with stew, flatbread, yeast and cheap coffee from the hatch ahead: but along the corridor spine talk shears off, sentences abandoned mid‑clause as heads cant in near‑unison, eyes tracking the crate’s slow, frictionless passage like a moving fault line.
Only when the trolley’s hum fades round the next junction do shoulders unlock and boots edge forward, conversations spooling back up half a register too bright. Jokes are reconstructed with new, safer punchlines; gazes fix on floor grating, safety posters, anything but the retreating crate. Eirik lets the crowd’s inertia push him toward the canteen’s damp warmth, the shared, wordless flinch settling in his gut like a second gravity well.
The canteen’s heat clings to him all the way back to his bunk, a damp film under his collar that cools too fast in the narrower corridors. Sweat salts at his hairline; his skin goes from flushed to goose‑pimpled in three junctions, the rapid temperature gradients an old, low‑grade irritant he usually filters out. Tonight it feels like his body can’t settle on a state. Every time a circulation fan spools up or chokes down a few hertz, muscles in his shoulders tighten on reflex.
He moves on habitual vectors, one boot before the other on the ribbed flooring, following orange spine stripes past module tags in both block English and the sharp, angular runes they insisted on stencilling in the first year. The murmur of off‑shift voices falls away as he leaves the canteen ring, replaced by the steadier, mechanical breathing of the habitat: pump arrays cycling, CO₂ scrubber fans, the soft tick of pipe expansion in the walls. Underneath, faint but continuous, he can distinguish the bass tremor of Mjollnir’s furnaces still running in low‑power maintenance mode, a pressure at the edge of hearing that he has learned to read like a weather report.
He palms through two pressure doors on autopilot, gloved fingertips finding the worn patches on hand‑plates, the micro‑polished arcs where thousands of hands have done the same. The first hatch rolls aside with a familiar hiss and a half‑beat delay he’s logged before and keeps meaning to raise in maintenance. The second seals behind him with a deeper thunk as it re‑engages the ring’s local isolation valves. Redundant seals. Redundant logs. Redundant blame, if something goes wrong.
He nods at familiar faces without really seeing them. Fatigued welders with grit in their eyebrows, a med tech pushing a cart of vials in foam racks, a pair of junior operators sharing a hushed, too‑upright walk that says they’ve heard some fragment of rumour. Their conversations fracture and flow around him, low‑voiced, threaded with names of modules, shift codes, a half‑heard “audit cluster” that catches at the back of his mind.
The earlier glimpse of corporate grey stays lodged behind his eyes like grit he can’t blink out. Recorder bands. Passive lenses pretending to be nothing more than smart fabric trim. Compliance wear never rides the crew trolleys by accident; it arrives when someone, somewhere, has decided the numbers need tightening. He inventories without wanting to: who on his lines has shaky incident histories, whose debt clauses have the kind of leverage that makes good examples. His own experimental ceramic panel codes slot neatly into that mental matrix, flagged in red.
By the time he steps into the quieter radial leading toward crew quarters, the air has cooled another fraction of a degree, thinning out the stew smell until only the metallic base of processed water and ion‑exchange resin remains. Lights here run lower, amber spill smoothed across bulkheads patched with mismatched composites. Old Earth‑issue segments abutted to local print. He catches himself scanning the seam lines as he walks, counting anchor bolts, aligning them with the stress maps he carries half‑memorised. The colony around him feels less like home than like a live test article under load.
His cabin door sighs shut behind him with a soft equalisation hiss that sounds too much like an airlock cycle. Inside, the space is a metre and a half of corridor with bunks stacked to port, storage drawers to starboard, a fold‑down shelf pretending to be a desk. Loki’s bunk is empty, curtain rucked back, thermal blanket rolled with military neatness. Her tablet is clipped to the wall at eye level, shift‑tracker ribbon pulsing amber over a terse status tag: SKADI RIM , OVERRUN.
He stares at the text long enough for the ribbon to tick over three minutes, waiting for a follow‑up that doesn’t come. No attached voice clip, no sarcastic emoji, just the formal lock‑screen of a security console on duty.
He toes his boots into their bracket, peels out of coveralls, leaves them folded with automatic precision on the lower shelf. Base layer clings damp against cooling skin. He stretches out on his own bunk, webbing creaking once under his weight. The fatigue settling on him is a physical clamp behind the eyes, but his body won’t drop through it. The air tastes faintly of metal and disinfectant. Every pump surge in the plumbing, every distant vibration through the bulkhead arrives one notch sharper than it should, like the whole ring is a structure he’s forgotten to over‑design.
He palms his pad awake instead of closing his eyes, screen glow flattening the cramped cabin into a monochrome schematic. The queue builds itself: an autogenerated flag from Maintenance about particulate load on third‑tier filters, redlined dates nudging him to requisition spares that may or may not arrive this quarter; a council bulletin written in that neutral, sanded‑down register that says everything and nothing about “enhanced external review” and “temporary collaboration with corporate auditors.” He skims subclauses, looking for teeth, finds only placeholders.
At the bottom sits Stig’s contribution, timestamped an hour back: Yggdrasil’s spire in silhouette against a smeared dust sky, a crude golden crown doodled over the antenna cluster, captioned in block text: BIGWIGS ON THE HORIZON. BRUSH YOUR HAIR, SCIENCE PRINCE.
He huffs once, a quiet, involuntary laugh at the crown over Yggdrasil, and the sound dies almost immediately. He listens instead: to the heavy, damped thud of a shuttle taking a berth somewhere out along the ring, to the tiny differential clicks as thermal strain walks the wall, to the dry, abrasive hiss of dust combing the outer skin. No amber wash of alarms pulses along the ceiling strip, no shift in fan pitch or pressure that would mean a real fault, but his chest keeps tightening in short, anticipatory jolts, braced for a siren that never fires.
He kills the cabin light to false‑night and lies rigid on his back, tracking the micro‑pops of stressed composite until the intervals smear, an imaginary spreadsheet of tolerances and deltas accruing in systems he won’t see until morning. Outside, shifts turn over, airlocks cadence open‑shut, logs ascend the chain. Beneath that mechanical rhythm sits the remembered stillness of the tram platform, that subtle synchronised held breath, not panic, not yet, just the whole of Edda Vale hanging fractionally off-balance, as if the habitat’s closed loop has paused mid‑cycle and cannot quite remember how to complete it.
Half-asleep at his console in Mjollnir, cycling through overnight reports with the rote patience of a man who has done this too often, Eirik almost lets the Skadi Rim line item pass: a clean green band of “nominal” across the airlock cluster.
The control room is running on low light and stale coffee. Most of the day shift aren’t in yet; the graveyard skeleton crew murmur over another bay’s temperature alarm, nothing urgent, nothing that needs him. The main wall is a mosaic of status tiles: reactor load, water reclamation efficiency, particulate density in Zone 3, structural strain maps for the hull. Mjollnir hums around him, vibrations travelling through the seat frame into his spine.
His eyes drag, unfocus, refocus. The Skadi Rim summary bar stays politely green, a reassuringly boring rectangle in a forest of more demanding colours. “Nominal”: a word that has started to sound more like a plea than a fact.
He flicks past it with a finger twitch, the way he’s done a thousand times, logging the automated signatures, trusting the chain: sensors, filters, algorithms, corporate-certified diagnostics. If something mattered, it would shout.
It doesn’t shout.
But his hand stalls on the next screen, hovering over the acknowledgement icon. The scratch of the earlier micro-fracture sits behind his ribs like grit, refusing to dissolve. The report on that incident is still open in another window, minimised but not closed; a thin red triangle over Cargo Lock C-3, annotated with his own cautious language about thermal cycling and experimental ceramics.
He exhales through his teeth, reaches back with a couple of keystrokes, and pulls Skadi Rim’s line item up again. Green. Perfect. As if C-3 has never misbehaved in its life.
He stares at the word “nominal” until it blurs. Then, more out of irritation with his own doubt than anything else, he tabs away from the digest view and calls up the underlying dataset instead of the smoothed daily export. The system hesitates a beat, fans spooling a little higher as it pulls from archive.
Habit, or maybe the itch left by the earlier micro-fracture, nudges him to tap open the raw structural feed; beneath the smoothed graph is a sharper, granular trace, a needle-fine blip of pressure loss in Cargo Lock C-3 that lives and dies in less than a second.
Instead of the gentle sinusoid he expects from routine pump cycling, the trace is ragged, grainy. Individual sensor ticks laid out like teeth. In the midst of it a single spike drops, a hairline incision in the pressure curve: fractional kilopascals, gone almost before the logging interval can catch it. Duration: 0.[^78] seconds. Location tag: C-3 inner chamber. No corresponding valve actuation, no commanded vent, no recorded door movement.
He leans closer, scrolling the timeline back and forth to make sure it isn’t a rendering glitch. The neighbouring plots (temperature, vibration, seal strain) are flat within noise. No seismic tremor flagged from the canyon. No power dip. Just that one, clean notch in the line, like a heartbeat that decided to skip and then thought better of it.
The system dutifully paints a green tolerance band over the whole sequence, swallowing the anomaly in its pastel assurance. To see it properly he has to toggle off three layers of filtering, disable auto-scaling, and punch in manual axes. Only then does the blip stand naked in the graph, too precise to feel like random noise.
It sits comfortably inside all the coloured tolerance bands, an almost elegant blemish. Numerically trivial, the sort of fluctuation the daily digest is designed to bury under averaging and rounding. On the summarised plots it simply does not exist. But on the raw feed the blip is framed by metadata that does not belong there: an annotation string in harsh monochrome, blockier font, riding outside the usual engineering-comment layer. No operator initials, no standard fault code prefix, no familiar “EV-”, “STR-”, “OPS-” taxonomy. Instead: a compressed hash, a tag length he’s never seen in habitat logs, and a namespace that looks imported rather than native. Corporate-side, he thinks, coldly; something spliced in above their own safety stack.
He drills down into the code library, expecting a mislabelled token or some deprecated safety flag. Instead the query returns a null descriptor and a permissions splash he’s never seen: local-field access denied, escalation required. The only residue is a terse overlay with a routing header that bypasses Mjollnir and Ops entirely, tunnelling straight into a sealed off-site audit endpoint.
Cold moves up through his ribs, more corrosive than fear. Skadi’s skin flinched under their feet and the software whispered to an Earthside auditor before it so much as nudged Ops. He locks out the display’s higher abstractions and bores into the headers: route tables, key exchanges, privilege masks. From there into badge swipes, door cycles, shift rosters, cross-matching every timestamp.
The name hits him like grit in a bearing. Arvid Nilsen: junior maintenance, surface-rated, still a year and a half deep in transit debt. Thin kid with the over-sized gloves and the habit of over-explaining his lock checks, earnest enough that the older hands mostly left him alone. The access log renders him as a line of structured fields, green and precise, BADGE AUTH OK, SEAL STATUS NOMINAL, as he steps into Skadi Rim’s cargo lock B-3 four minutes and eighteen seconds before the micro-strain spike.
Eirik zooms the event band. The sensor suite draws out its neat, impersonal heartbeat of the lock: pressure curve, temperature ramp, actuator load, door latch state. The badge ping sits there, tagged PERSONNEL_ENTRY, aligned to the millisecond. The subsequent hull twitch overlays in angry orange on the structural channel.
There should be an exit event. The protocol is monotonous: ingress badge, inner door cycle, task window, egress badge, cabin repressurisation, log closure. Instead, the trace after entry is a flat, almost serene continuity of “NO PERSONNEL TRANSIT DETECTED.” The door state shows closed, sealed, within tolerance. No emergency aborts, no manual overrides, no timeouts forcing a lock reset. Fourteen minutes of normalised environmental data, then the strain anomaly, then: nothing special. The log ticks forward as if only the composite had flinched.
He scrubs the slice frame by frame. No artefacts. No partial credential. No maintenance tag hung on the door. The monitoring daemon has even attached its automated reassurance: CYCLE COMPLETE / NO DEVIATIONS. The line that should hold Arvid’s outbound swipe is simply absent, not red-flagged, not corrupted. Like the kid had walked in and dissolved into compliant atmosphere.
He checks the next scheduled entry. A rover team badging through forty minutes later, full set of events present, lock behaving like a textbook diagram. The discontinuity is surgical, confined to Arvid’s departure window and the eleven seconds around the hull’s brief shiver.
He pulls a fresh pane into his field and snaps the personnel layer over the lock log, aligning timestamps until the grids click into parallel. Duty roster overlay, last seven sols, Skadi support highlighted. The column for Arvid is clean up to the incident: maintenance, external interfaces, standard watch. Then, at the exact minute of the strain spike, his assignment band shifts colour with bureaucratic composure.
MAINT → MEDICAL ROTATION flashes once as the animation completes. The system lays it in as though it had always been there: attending support in medbay, low-priority duties, no external exposure authorised. The status box resolves as a bland, corporate-blue rectangle with a tiny caduceus icon, perfectly compliant with contract health provisions.
No authorising signature. No note field. No preceding entry marking an injury or flagged wellness check. The edit trail reports REVISION: SYSTEM, with a hash pointer that disappears into the same sealed audit endpoint he just tripped.
He toggles historical view. The blue panel persists backward in time, overwritten into the week like sedimentary rock relabelled by decree. It reads less like a schedule change than a lid.
He side-loads the medbay shift charts from the local mesh, bypassing the pretty dashboard for raw tables. Bed assignments, intake stamps, triage codes. He pages until the columns smear: sprained wrists from botched ladder descents, a dust-lung flare flagged for nebuliser treatment, a decompression-mimic migraine shunted to observation. Vital curves, medication pushes, discharge notes. He throws in lab queues, imaging bookings, even the anonymised wellness checks for debt-stressed workers. Still no Arvid. No matching intake time, no anonymised case with his height-weight band, no biometrics within a plausible tolerance. A junior tech might miss a scan or mistype a name; the mesh won’t forget a body through the door. The absence feels engineered, not incidental, a deliberate negative space in the record.
The conflict trips every internal alarm he owns: security sensors assert Arvid entered the colony’s most over-instrumented void and never crossed a threshold again; admin metadata serenely narrates a minor medical reassignment; the clinicians’ mesh, which will faithfully log a stubbed toe, holds not one biometric echo of the kid. Three subsystems, mutually exclusive, all insisting they’re complete.
He flags the contradictions to a hidden cache, cross-hashes the logs, and locks them under an innocuous filename in his personal sandbox. Jaw set, he annotates the anomaly chain in terse, technical shorthand only he will parse at a glance. The angry flush in his chest cools into vector and requirement: he needs uncompressed sensor feeds, not curated narratives.
He kills the audit view with a jab of his thumb and steps back from the console before he says something stupid to an inert interface. The corridor opens out around him into the full circumference of Mjollnir: a continuous, flexing throat of metal running around the colony’s flank. Heat presses against his skin even through lightly chilled duct air, layered with the dry bite of filtered regolith dust and the sour tang of cutting fluids. Overhead, a crane trolley rumbles along its track, chains ticking as it hauls a pallet of raw ore cakes toward a waiting hopper.
He merges into the flow of workers drifting between bays, anonymous in their scuffed coveralls. The ring vibrates underfoot with the combined rhythm of smelters, compressors, feed augers. He lets the vibrations climb through his boots into his calves, a physical counterpoint to the spike in his pulse. No conversation; just nods as he passes familiar faces bent over consoles or wrestling with misbehaving loaders. Their glances skate over him and away again. Under audit, everyone is busy being seen to be busy.
He starts counting without thinking about it. Bulkhead seam, expansion joint, pressure door. Safety placard with its faded universal icons and Norwegian text: NEGATIVE PRESSURE. Another seam, a weld bead he remembers arguing over with construction six months back. The repetitive catalogue grinds down the adrenaline, gives his thoughts rails to run on. Every twenty metres, a red emergency pull handle in its recessed hatch. Every forty, a manual pressure gauge, analog backup to the digital skein he lives in.
Mjollnir’s curve carries him past the louder furnaces into the comparative shadow of the control mezzanine. Through a blast-rated viewport he can see smelter three’s throat glowing white-orange, slag skimmers tracing sparks across the gloom. The engineering enclave hunkers beside it: a cluster of workstations half-shielded by improvised acoustic baffles, cables snaking like roots into the floor conduits. This is where the ring’s real memory lives, before admin pretties it up.
He cuts across a yellow-striped access lane, ignores the half-hearted glare from a safety marshal, and slips into the narrow space between consoles, toward a recessed terminal wired straight into operations storage.
He palms his badge, feeds in the longer credential string from muscle memory, and feels the faint, different lag that says this terminal is actually talking to backbone storage, not the prettified audit mirror Ragnhild’s people watch. No pop-up training hints, no compliance splash screens. Just a flat directory tree and a blinking cursor.
He pushes straight past the canned dashboards and weekly roll-ups, eyes tracking the bare-metal schema: process IDs, subsystem hashes, retention flags. No narrative layer, no human-readable comfort. He drops into the maintenance namespace, drills down through SKADI_RIM → LOCK_COMPLEX → CARGO_02, each level peeling away another abstraction until he’s staring at timestamped file blocks with monotonous GUIDs.
His fingers move faster as he rides the command line, filtering by shift window, excluding anything reprocessed or compressed after the investigation start date. A half-dozen candidate streams collapse to one unbroken telemetry set stamped with the original controller firmware version. Untouched, or at least unadmitted. His throat tightens. He queues the full-resolution feed, overrides the default decimation filters, and forces a cold pull from deep archive, watching the buffer counter climb toward integrity.
He spools it into a diagnostic viewer, bypassing the friendlier overlay in favour of raw geometry. The display blooms into a semi-transparent wireframe of the lock: a hollow cylinder hung in darkness, pressure curves arcing in pale blue along its axis, door seals traced in clean, reassuring green. Tiny icons stud the model, triangles for cameras, diamonds for strain gauges, circles for acoustic pickups, each pulsing as their streams sync, all of it running at four times normal speed over a dense crawl of hex-coded status chatter at the bottom of the screen. Controller heartbeats. Valve actuation flags. Error registers sitting at 00. On the left, a vertical bar charts delta-P in real time, a jittering blue spine that should never waver.
On a straight playback the cycle reads textbook, but when he drops it to quarter speed and snaps his own timestamps over the controller’s, a hairline sag appears in the blue pressure trace, under a percent, almost lost in quantisation noise, followed a heartbeat later by a spray of white-noise artefacts from cam_02, the chamber’s ghosted wireframe stuttering like it’s concealing a missing frame.
He drops playback to single-frame advance and walks it into the second Arvid should appear. The access hatch flag flips from LOCKED to OPEN, latch sensors all clean green; occupancy flickers from 0 to 1 to 0 in three jittering ticks and then the entire row of fields hard-steps forward: no silhouette, no IR bloom, no mic spike. A person’s worth of signatures excised in a mathematically neat, controller-aligned cut, after which the telemetry rolls on, smooth and nominal, as if the system has decided the intervening half-second never existed.
He pulls back from the single-lock view and calls up the colony structural map, trading the claustrophobic cylinder for a top-down schematic of Edda Vale. Pressure hulls and transfer tunnels resolve as nested rings and branching lines, colour-coded by module class. He punches in the incident index Loki forwarded and watches the overlay populate: first a few pale-yellow markers, then more, then a scatter of amber and the occasional hard red, blooming along the eastern perimeter.
They come in as time-coded tags, each one a compressed narrative: PRESSURE MICRODEVIATION <0.8% , AUTO-STABILISE; CAMERA STREAM LOSS <2.0s , OPERATOR NOTE: STATIC BURST; DOOR SEAL RESEAT , NO LEAK VERIFIED. Little bureaucratic epitaphs stacked three lines deep. He scrolls through them mechanically, watching the map grow a rash.
Most are tiny, single-frame irritations: a partial checksum failure that forced a sensor reset, a gasket-realignment alert that cleared on the next cycle, an “audio transient” that ops flagged as machinery noise. Nothing that would trip a safety review by itself. But when he widens the time window from the last fortnight out to the full Martian year and lets the animation run, the pattern stops looking like random background noise.
Pinned to their coordinates, the pips fire in sequence as months tick past in the corner of the display: a lone blip at Skadi Rim, then another two shifts later in an adjacent cargo throat; a month of quiet; a cluster of three near a personnel lock that had no recorded incident; a cam dropout in a service culvert feeding the same sector, written off as “dust on lens, cleared with purge jet.” Each one small. Each one handled. Each one closed by a human clicking RESOLVED on a form after a cursory inspection and a reference to “no further action required.”
He drags his fingertip along the timeline, slowing the playback until individual duty rotations resolve. There’s a subtle rhythm now, once he knows to look: anomalies preferring shift-change windows, or the dead zones between scheduled EVA departures, threading themselves through the least-observed minutes of the day. They skew toward outer hull interfaces, too. The interior domes and living quarters are almost pristine, a clean, unblemished blue.
His jaw tightens as the incident list scrolls past names he recognises. Some of the “operator notes” are from him. Trusting the redundancy. Trusting the filters.
He zooms further, isolating Skadi Rim as its own node. The schematic resolves into nested chambers and transfer ducts, his composite-panel retrofits picked out in a faint blue lattice. The incidents cluster along that lattice like iron filings following a magnetic field, small, localised disturbances kissing the edges of his work and then vanishing back into nominal.
He adds a couple more constraints, exclude anything that pulled a work-order number, exclude any event that generated an actual walk-down, and the swarm thins again. What’s left are ghosts: tags that began and ended inside software, never quite heavy enough to drag a human body out there.
The map re-renders on the stricter query, most of the colony fading to a reassuring, featureless blue. Only the eastern arc remains stippled with light. The points draw out along the pressure boundary like frost on glass, clinging to Skadi Rim’s chambers and the feeder throats leading back toward Mjollnir, tracing out exactly where he’d pushed for ceramic-composite to replace standard corporate plate.
He flips layers on and off. Material type, installation date, stress band. The overlay keeps snapping back to the same conclusion: the highest density of these “resolved without follow-up” anomalies lies in and around his retrofits. Not evenly, either. They bead along interfaces and junctions, nudging right up against the pale blue polygons that mark his panels, as if something in the colony has been testing the edges of his work, one imperceptible prod at a time.
He lets a few play out in full, forcing himself not to skim. The pattern holds. A pressure trace that should show a sharp sawtooth instead arcs in a suspiciously smooth spline, as if someone has run a smoothing filter over the raw data. Five seconds of snow on a lock-cam feed, bookended by perfectly clean frames; the log attributes it to “RF INTERFERENCE – SELF-RESOLVED.” A door cycle that shows status toggling CLOSED → OPEN → CLOSED with no corresponding badge token, no manual override key, no mass sensor signature anyone bothered to query. Each one is wrapped in the same beige language: MINOR ANOMALY; NO SAFETY IMPACT; LOGGED FOR TRENDING. No technician signatures. No physical inspections. Just software quietly forgiving itself.
He cross-references the tickets with shift rosters and finds familiar names, Arvid’s among them, surfacing again and again as “observed at scene” or “initial reporter,” but never on the line for corrective work, never listed as verifier. The same cluster of bodies, always in proximity when the system twitches, then quietly written out of the chain, as if correlation itself had been flagged as noise.
When he folds in alloy batch histories and install crew IDs, the neatness becomes obscene. The anomalies cling to his junctions across months, suppliers, firmware revisions. A bad transducer can’t explain a door cycling itself. A sloppy tech can’t fake that many smoothed curves. Whatever is happening lives in code, meat, and composite, something methodically probing for give.
He leans back from the console, vertebrae clicking against the worn foam of the chair, and makes himself unclench his jaw. Slow in, slow out. The air tastes of metal and overcooked coffee. On the second breath he hears his own voice under the machinery noise, flat and too loud in the small diagnostics alcove.
“Logging artefact,” he tells the rows of numbers. “Sloppy filter. Overzealous watchdog script chewing on the stream.” The phrasing is familiar, the kind of thing he’s said a hundred times to junior techs when a graph twitched and nothing obvious bled. Software eats its own tail, spits out neat curves, and the humans pretend that’s what the sensors really saw. Corporate loves that kind of self-healing. Saves on call-outs.
If it were real, anything like real, Mjollnir would already have felt the shockwave. Operations flags, council alerts, frozen work orders. The big red banner on the system-wide: ALL NONESSENTIAL MOVEMENT SUSPENDED. You don’t misplace mass in an airlock without tripping ten layers of idiot-proofing. The interlocks don’t care about quotas. He helped specify half of them.
He lets his gaze drift to the top of the screen where the audit daemon’s watermark pulses, faint and proprietary. Some risk team on Earth pushed a new compliance module months ago; it could be massaging his feeds, folding incompleteness into something that passes their statistical smell test. A “visualisation improvement,” the patch notes would have said. Nobody here signed off; nobody here ever does. It arrives on the relay while they sleep and wakes up already inside their logs.
He rubs at the bridge of his nose, feels the grit of a too-long shift. “If it mattered,” he mutters, “Ops would have called. Loki would have called.” The absence of alarms becomes, by habit, its own proof.
Procedure says that if anyone had truly gone missing inside an airlock Skadi would be in hard lockdown, red strobes drilling through every corridor and the low-frequency klaxons that rattle teeth, emergency muster codes chasing people out of bunks and workshops in neatly drilled flows. The override chains are idiot-proof by design: security freeze, operations freeze, automated compartmentalisation across half the cliffside, all of it spitting out signatures on three separate systems that can’t be backfilled without leaving scars.
On paper there is no room for ambiguity. The checklists he helped annotate after the last near-miss are brutal in their simplicity: loss-of-mass flag plus unscheduled cycle equals full halt, no appeals. If a body vanished between inner and outer doors, the system would respond like they’d punched a hole in the hull.
And Loki, who lives in those protocols, who paces Skadi’s cameras in her sleep, would have hit his channel before the dust in the lock had time to settle, voice tight and clipped, wanting numbers, wanting failure modes, not this silent, tidy line in a log.
But the cross-checks he’s running won’t settle. Personnel rosters show a transient badge ping at Skadi’s inner ring (one clean authentication handshake, credentials valid, access level mid-tier) then nothing. No corridor cams logging the transit, no med scanner catching a baseline as they passed through a checkpoint, no follow-on pings anywhere in the habitat mesh. Environmental traces show a shallow pressure dip in one cargo chamber, decay curve like a partial cycle, but the door-state telemetry never flips, valves never flag, pumps report nominal load. In the audit stream, timestamps slide past each other by non-integer offsets, a few hundred milliseconds here, a second and change there, just enough desynchronisation that no two subsystems agree on what happened in the same ten-second window.
The more he tries to wave it off as innocent drift, cached values, delayed packet writes, some half-tested diagnostic mode the new compliance stack forgot to label, the more the pattern nags at him. The gaps are too regular, the offsets clustering inside narrow bands, a little too tight, a little too consistent, as if someone were carefully editing reality one subsystem at a time and trusting the automation to look away.
By the time he unearths a second, near-identical mismatch buried three weeks back his skin crawls. One anomaly can be shrugged off. Two, with the same millisecond offsets, feel like stitch-lines: deliberate seams opened and resealed, just shallow enough not to bleed, but real.
Before he can chase the pattern further, Skadi’s panel flickers; the status strips at the top edge of his vision smear into pale bands and then snap back with a different font weight, like someone has swapped out the underlying skin. Peripheral tiles along his left-hand display gutter from warm amber to a colder, corporate-neutral blue, their iconography re-drawn in sharper, unfamiliar glyphs. One by one, the context overlays he’s stacked over years grey out and slide to the background layer as if demoted.
A chime cuts across the bay noise, too clean to be anything they installed locally. The main console locks on the frame he’s in; the cursor stalls halfway through a diagnostic string, the haptic in the pad under his fingertips going dead. Input-latency readouts freeze at 23 ms and stay there. His last three keypresses never register.
“Mjollnir-2, Skadi Rim interface,” mutters the system voice, but it’s the Earth-side variant, sibilants clipped differently. “Control transitioning. Please stand by.”
He tries to alt out with a backdoor sequence routed through the low-priority maintenance bus. The command queue indicator gives him exactly half a second of green and then hard-snaps to a thin red bar that reads, in small corporate type: “User Overrides Disabled During Patch.”
On a side channel, he watches packet counters spike, inbound: compressed blocks tagged with a relay signature from high orbit. The upstream address space is one he recognises from compliance bulletins: central audit infrastructure, not the usual mirroring service. Local process IDs wink to “ZOMBIE” state and vanish as kernel-space threads he doesn’t own spin up and seize peripheral buses.
A new dialog ghosts over his Skadi feed, translucent but uncloseable. At the top, in sterile caps: “SECURE CONTROL CONTEXT ACQUIRED.” Beneath it, lines of fine text scroll past faster than he can meaningfully parse, regulation clauses and liability waivers buried between checksum hashes and build identifiers.
In the corner of the main window, the Skadi schematic blurs. His annotation layers are stripped in a clean wipe, leaving only the default corporate model: pristine geometry, no blemishes, no history.
A progress bar he didn’t summon extrudes itself across the bottom of his primary viewport, a flat slab of corporate grey that completely ignores his colour theme. It paints itself from left to right in clean, integer chunks (0 %, 4 %, 8 %) jerking forward in little algorithmic stutters rather than the smooth easing they use for local tools. Above it, status text snaps into existence without transition: “REMOTE PATCH IN PROGRESS – AUTHORISED ORBITAL RELAY,” the spelling toggled to Earth-standard, terse and legalistic.
His familiar amber admin frames react as if someone’s walked down a corridor, hitting breakers in sequence. Peripheral widgets fade to half-bright, then quarter, then resolve to thin, inert outlines. Context menus lose their depth cues; shorthand icons he knows by muscle memory flatten into generic compliance glyphs. Hot-corner regions he set up himself stop catching the cursor, the little haptic tick he relies on gone. A permissions toast blossoms in the upper-right (“SESSION OWNERSHIP: TRANSFERRED”) then collapses into a tiny padlock over his user ID, the lock icon ticking closed with a fractional, inaudible snap.
Access tiers he’s held for years go monochrome and unclickable, badges greying out in a single cascading sweep as a universal lock glyph burns across them like frost. His familiar “ENGINEERING LEVEL 3 – SKADI RIM” tag compresses to a bare “USER,” then to a numeric handle he hasn’t seen since his first month dirtside. Cross-links to maintenance cams, valve command trees, and historical trend archives wink to a flat “RESTRICTED” state, tooltips replaced with a legal code he doesn’t recognise.
Then a blunt overlay irises open over the Skadi Rim schematic, occluding the airlock array in a stark band of white: COMPLIANCE HOLD – INVESTIGATIVE REVIEW PENDING. For a beat, the whole bay seems to contract around those words.
In the upper-right corner of the display, a new widget hard-resolves into being: a bare numeric countdown initialised at 11:[^59]:43 and stepping down in precise, metronomic seconds, indifferent to bay noise or his input. No iconography, no help link, just a thin caption in corporate grey and a metadata hover that refuses to expand when he flicks toward it.
His first impulse is crude and physical. Drop the local link, pull the breaker on this segment and let Yggdrasil time out the session. His fingers even twitch toward the hardline cutoff. But the control path tiles are already grey, interlocks hard-lit. The interface tags him as “OBSERVER / NON-ACTOR.” Whatever has spun up around Skadi Rim, he’s been declared part of the test article.
He routes through Mjollnir’s internal console first, palms leaving faint sweat prints on the worn polymer edge as he leans in. The local interface skin is his still wearing the blue-on-amber theme he’d pushed in six months ago. His fingers move on muscle memory, tapping out the layered sequence of access strings: plant root, process control, archive mirror, then the buried engineering-maintenance channel that normally ignores corporate partition walls.
Response lag: forty-eight milliseconds. Local. Clean. Mjollnir gives way. Smelter curves, hopper feeds, thermal maps blooming across the left-hand pane. Internal sensors hum back their temperatures, grain distributions, ceramic sinter logs. No sign yet of the quiet hooks he’s started to expect in every system.
He splits the display, pivots the right-hand feed to colony infrastructure, following the hardline trunk that runs out along the cliffside. Skadi Rim sits as a highlighted node, a stylised cluster of airlock icons pressed against the vacuum-side boundary of the map. He tags the cargo lock cluster where the alarm had punched a phantom headache behind his left eye three nights ago.
Subsystem handshake. His implant ticks once as the console recognises his engineering credential and pushes a confirmation ping up his optic nerve. He keys in the structural telemetry request, tightening the filters: hull strain gauges, inner and outer skin deflection, acoustic emission sensors, thermal gradients. Time window extended: two hours before the micro-fracture ping, four hours after. Enough to catch pre-failure creep, post-event ringing, anything anomalous in the pattern.
The request should drill straight down into Skadi Rim’s independent archive array, the one they’d walled off from generic operations to keep noise and compression artefacts away from structural baselines. It has never refused him before. Not when a seal crept out of tolerance, not when they’d tested his experimental panels at twenty per cent over nominal load.
This time, the cursor pauses. A quiet, unnatural pause, as if the system is listening to someone else before answering him.
The reply populates in stages, like something assembling itself out of refusal. No charts, no multicoloured stress traces, no comforting cascade of numbers resolving into a pattern he can read. The window he asked for collapses into a uniform band across the timeline: a sterile, matte grey slab that eats forty minutes before the alarm and almost three hours after.
Where there should be microstrain flicker and acoustic spikelets, there is only overlaid text in corporate legal font: SEGMENT SEALED – UNDER LEGAL REVIEW – DO NOT ALTER. Beneath, the telemetry stream is not continuous but cut, a clean excision. The live feed picks up again on the far side of the bar, bridged by a block of dense, shifting characters his implant tags automatically as a corporate hash: integrity marker, certified gap.
He widens the range, thinking buffer wrap, mirroring delay, anything mechanical. The band stretches with him, expanding like a mask over whichever interval includes the micro-fracture flag. When he taps for context (filter parameters, trigger conditions) secondary panes echo the same grey, the same injunction, as if time itself has been redacted.
He peels back interface layers one after another, dropping out of pretty plots into the machine’s under-skin. Raw ring-buffer recall, uncompressed acoustic packets, pre-calibration strain ticks straight off the gauges. He calls for all of it, the dirty stream that never makes it into reports. The console acknowledges, cursor flickering as it tunnels toward Skadi Rim’s dedicated array.
What comes back isn’t data.
The pane fills with dense checksum glyphs, a tessellated curtain of alphanumerics that mean integrity, not information. Where he expects column headers and time indices, there’s a clipped directive stamped across the top in corporate legalese: AUTHORIZATION: R. RAVNARDOTTIR – INVESTIGATIVE DIVISION. Beneath, a further line in harsher type: ALL ACCESS TO SEALED SEGMENTS REQUIRES LEVEL OMEGA CLEARANCE – NO EXCEPTIONS, NO PROXIES, NO MIRRORS.
Jaw clenched hard enough to ache, he keys in his maintenance‑architect override string, a sequence of salts and keys he’d helped design during the last refit, layered through the buried engineering channel. The cursor hangs, a single, treacherous heartbeat of apparent processing, before resolving into a smooth, infuriating tri-line prompt: REQUEST RECEIVED / PRIVILEGE NOT RECOGNISED / PATHWAY ESCALATION PROHIBITED DURING SEALED AUDIT.
A secondary window blossoms unbidden in his peripheral display, enumerating his credentials, access tiers, authored protocols, incident commendations. It reads like an obituary disguised as an audit trail, a neat ledger of usefulness already spent. Then the list irises down into a single, final judgement: ROLE: OBSERVER ONLY. By formal definition he is not trusted to touch the logs that might acquit or damn his own work.
The highlighted line resolves into an old maintenance ticket he’d all but forgotten, dragged up from some quiet corner of the fault tree and pinned under a strobing hazard icon. Skadi Rim / CARGO LOCK C / STRUCTURAL – VIBRATION ANOMALY. His own identifier sits there in crisp, incontestable text as originating engineer, timestamped six weeks prior, when dust-storm loading had been gnawing at the terrace.
He forces the ticket open. The system obliges with clinical neatness, expanding his original entry in a sterile side pane: irregular harmonic signature detected during late‑cycle repress; amplitude marginally above baseline; probable source: composite panel resonance under thermal shift; recommendation: schedule high‑resolution imaging and acoustic mapping next available shutdown.
Below, his phrasing appears exactly as he remembers trying to make it sound unalarming and still be taken seriously: “Non‑urgent but non‑negligible. Monitor closely. Suggest re‑prioritisation if concurrent anomalies arise.”
There’s a note in a different font, auto‑generated on filing: RISK RATING: MODERATE. ACTION STATUS: PENDING SCHEDULING.
The ACTION STATUS is now overstruck in black. Next to it sits a fresh line, stamped in the audit’s unforgiving typeface: FOLLOW‑UP: NOT EXECUTED WITHIN STANDARD WINDOW. CONTRIBUTORY DELAY FACTORS: RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS / WORKLOAD REDISTRIBUTION / LOCAL DISCRETION.
A narrow column to the right pulls in ancillary metadata he hadn’t associated with the ticket at all: duty rosters showing Loki’s name recurring on Lock C supervisory shifts, cross‑referenced with his own lab schedules; throughput graphs for cargo cycles; a tiny thumbnail of the lock schematic where his experimental ceramic‑composite panels are shaded a soft, accusing orange.
At the bottom of the pane, in smaller script that somehow carries more weight, sits a corporate rubric he’s never seen applied to his work before: INITIAL REPORT ORIGINATOR RETAINS RESPONSIBILITY UNTIL DOCUMENTED CLOSURE OR FORMAL HANDOFF. There is no handoff recorded. His name stands alone.
The interface reclassifies the ticket with a quiet brutality: UNRESOLVED RISK VECTOR, his own ID strobing in a hostile red that bleeds into Loki’s. Their profiles collapse into a single nested block under a heading he’s never seen outside legal briefings: JOINT LIABILITY EXPOSURE. It’s formatted like any other diagnostic but every line is an accusation.
He scrolls without meaning to. Under his name: ORIGINATOR / TECHNICAL AUTHORITY. Under hers: OPERATIONAL SUPERVISOR / SAFETY CUSTODIAN. Between them, a thin connective glyph, an abstract ligature that means shared fault, shared penalties, shared risk weighting. The system has already drawn the vector, extrapolated from anomaly to probable outcome to financial consequence. Probabilistic breach curves, projected casualty bands, asset write‑downs. Each heat‑mapped segment anchors back to their paired IDs.
There is no column for resource shortages, for triple‑stacked shifts, for the way everyone has been quietly triaging the entire colony on too little sleep and too few parts. The algorithm doesn’t care. It has found a clean pathway for blame and is now optimising around it.
A side panel irises open, not from Ops or Legal but embedded like shrapnel in his engineering view, and begins to paginate. Clause strings he’s never seen rendered outside onboarding seminars scroll past in tight, grayscale text. A single flagged incident under the wrong category doesn’t just mean a mark on her file; it doubles her interest rate, triples her exit penalties, locks her into mandatory reassignment pools. The interface highlights the linkage path from his ticket to her clauses in a clean, surgical red.
He forces himself to follow the logic chain down the page. If Lock C is classed as structurally unsound, his ceramic‑composites flip from “provisionally cleared” to “unapproved deployment”; Loki’s repeated sign‑offs on cycles through that chamber recompile as “wilful procedural deviation.” After that the system runs automatically: stepped debt multipliers, grade downgrades, forced reassignment, even provisional contract seizure.
The overlay contracts to a hard, blinking tag anchored beside Skadi Rim’s schematics. The meaning is precise: not just a suspect panel but a designated failure point in the liability network. Any micro‑crack, any anomalous strain reading, will propagate along that tagged vector, converting an engineering judgment call into a clean, billable act of negligence for both of them.
On his console, the familiar task‑bar mosaic judders as if under load, then begins to desaturate. Active jobs he was tracking, smelter feed calibration, beamline mould runs, a filament reblend test set, fade from the warm orange of local control to a uniform, institutional grey. Status headers rewrite mid‑scroll. “Local Authority: Council Ops” blinks twice, then resolves to “Remote Compliance Queue,” the font subtly different, system‑level. Beside each entry, the worker‑council crest, stylised hammer and aurora arc, wipes itself away in a pixelated smear, replaced by a neutral corporate sigil he hasn’t seen in this pane before: shield, globe, generic.
He flicks to the Mjollnir overview. The effect is wider than his own line. Entire fabrication lanes ghost out of local command, ownership tags stripping back to a single alphanumeric authority code that traces, when he opens the meta, to an encrypted proxy node outside the colony mesh. The hand‑off occurred twenty‑seven seconds ago, initiated from an endpoint flagged “Compliance Transit / Yggdrasil Subnet.” The timing matches the side panel’s appearance down to the second.
A thin, pulsing banner materialises at the top of the feed: “Temporary Central Oversight Engaged – Safety Audit Mode.” No prior notice. No council vote. He checks the override chain out of habit, trying to pull up the standard dual‑key protocol requiring local sign‑off from Ops and Engineering. The option is gone; the dialog he knows should exist has been abstracted into a read‑only compliance statement with a greyed‑out acknowledgement tick already filled on his behalf.
He opens a single job at random: a routine remelt of Lock C’s scrap runs. The revision log truncates where his own notes should be. In their place is a terse system entry: “Parameters locked by Remote Compliance. Manual adjustments disabled. Deviation = contractual event.”
Line by line, his own initials evaporate from the authorisations he issued on night shift, extruder temperature tweaks, ceramic batch substitutions, a rush seal‑plate machining job for Skadi, replaced in real time by a new digital countersignature. The system does not log it as an amendment, merely as if the prior state never existed. Change‑history columns compress, intermediate revisions collapsing into a single, pristine compliance entry time‑stamped thirty seconds in the past.
Where his “EH” used to sit, there is only a slender monochrome raven, wings folded, rendered in three strokes of vector black. No department code, no agent ID, just that icon appended to an anonymous alphanumeric token he recognises from Ragnhild’s onboarding packet as an internal investigations group key. She never mentioned it had write access to production.
He runs a diff on one job, then another. Every adjustment that could be construed as discretionary judgement, anything not strictly by‑the‑book spec, is what gets overwritten first. The rest remain, for now, like bait: intact authorisations waiting to be reinterpreted once the liability map finishes compiling.
A narrow amber ribbon extrudes itself along the base of the Skadi pane, text strobing once before settling: “Transit Control: External Review Mode.” No countdown, no acknowledgement field, just a declarative state. He taps into the next scheduled personnel cycle, routine outbound rover team, and the topology he knows by muscle memory is gone. The branching local graph of Ops, Security, and Engineering nodes has been sawn flat, replaced by a single, thick line to an endpoint tagged “CorpSecure_Proxy_Ares‑7.” No alternate pathing, no local failover bubble. The usual latency and integrity metrics are blanked to em dashes. He tries to expand the proxy, request its cert chain; the interface responds with a mute, generic “insufficient authority” toast that offers no appeal.
The raw telemetry feeds still look like home, but their source tags now read as “mirrored” through that proxy node, a sealed function block he can’t expand, trace or sandbox. It sits invisibly in line between Skadi’s inner doors and every command pulse he and Loki depend on, interposing itself without registering as an actuator or sensor of record.
Behind the new architecture diagram, the fine print scrolls in anaemic grey: “Temporary command arbitration enacted per Compliance Directive,” dense with clause numbers and cross‑references. Eirik’s jaw knots as he parses the implication: every future anomaly in Skadi’s cycles will transit that proxy first, pre‑filtered, time‑normalised, admissible in tribunal. And trivially reattributed to colony‑side authorisers. To his badge. His revisions. His fault profile.
He pushes the supervisor override request into Ops almost on reflex, fingers already queuing alternate routes before the first one leaves the buffer. One from the Skadi local panel, one from his wrist slate piggy‑backing on Engineering’s maintenance VLAN, one bounced off a cold terminal in Mjollnir’s line control that he wakes remotely with his badge. Three paths, three authentication domains, the way they all learnt after the first time a central scheduler went soft‑locked mid‑shift.
Each request carries the same payload: live voice escalation, duty coordinator, operations council liaison if available. He tags it “safety‑critical” in the comment field, flags Skadi’s current cycle stack, attaches the topology screenshots before and after the proxy insertion. He doesn’t bother composing a narrative; the metrics should be enough to make any half‑awake supervisor sit up.
On the Skadi wall, the request icon crawls from “local” to “uplinked,” amber halo pulsing as it chases a route through the Ops mesh. On his slate, the same symbol in miniature rotates, then inverts. A corporate UI flourish he’s always hated. In Mjollnir’s control bay, two hundred metres of rock and tunnel away, the third terminal lags a second behind, then falls into step: three asynchronous pulses hunting the same destination.
He watches the route traces expand, waiting for the familiar branching into Ops nodes: Coordinator‑On‑Duty, Backup‑Ops, Council‑Rep. Instead the path diagram kinks once and slams into the same thick line he just mapped from Skadi: “CorpSecure_Proxy_Ares‑7.” No divergence. No lateral leakage into local authority.
Transfer indicators stutter, stall, then report “delivered” with unnerving neatness. He holds his breath for the inevitable bark from the duty deck, someone in Stavanger‑accented pidgin asking what in Hel he’s done to their airlock schedules, already rehearsing his answer, already framing how to make this strictly about safety and not about charter clauses or corporate creep.
Nothing comes back. No voice, no text query, no familiar human delay full of background noise and clanking mugs.
Just the quiet, the slow tick of Skadi’s thermal strain graph, and three completed override tickets vanishing into the same corporate sink.
Instead, the only movement on his console is a flattening of colour into corporate grey.
The escalation pane blanks, repaints, and a rectangular overlay irises out from the centre, occluding his topology windows with institutional calm. No ringtone, no click of a channel opening, just a silent banner that resolves one clipped sentence at a time: “Temporary governance suspension under Clause 7.[^3].” The font is the neutral, rounded type reserved for legal disclaimers and waiver forms, designed to be inoffensive, impossible to personalise.
He waits for a call‑sign, a duty officer’s initials, any human tag in the metadata. There is none. The banner cycles again, now with a second line in Norwegian beneath the English, same wording, same absence of names. In the corner, the system stamps a hash, a timestamp, a reference index into some compliance archive he will never see.
He flicks through the overlay’s properties with two quick gestures. Interaction model: none. Acknowledgement: not required. Source: “CorpSecure_Proxy_Ares‑7 / Legal_Auto.” Even the “more information” chevron dumps him into an error stub citing restricted documentation.
Along the bottom edge of his display, the familiar council strip shivers once as if under a dropped frame, then begins to leach away. Ops‑chair, safety delegate, workers’ rep: the tiny badges that usually sit in warm, saturated colour lose contrast one by one. Status tags flip through “away” faster than any human could set them, then flatten into the same neutral grey as the legal banner.
The red‑bordered shortcut tile marked “CALL COUNCIL EMERGENCY” holds out a heartbeat longer, a single pixel of crimson clinging at one corner, before its icon soft‑dims, tool‑tip text replaced by a blunt system string: “function disabled.”
On his slate’s periphery, the local systems chief’s handle flickers (green “available” smearing to hard amber “restricted channel”) then hard‑drops to null, the line collapsing into bare grid. A second later the contact card itself evaporates, not even a greyed‑out husk left in the mesh directory, as if the role has been dereferenced from the colony’s own namespace.
He yanks the mesh roster up by reflex. The contact grid spasms, sort order re‑weighted in real time as new, unfamiliar node IDs bloom at the top, all prefixed “CorpSecure/LA.” Council channels and crew committees shear downward, compressing into a dull, unclickable stratum. Across the centre, a heavy watermark resolves, occluding half his tools: COMPLIANCE ARBITRATION IN EFFECT, non‑dismissable.
The cursor blinks over the COMPLIANCE banner, a metronome counting out the seconds in which nobody is doing anything. The usual background wash of the ring, servo whine, conveyor chatter, the irregular cough of a furnace dump, falls out of sync, then thins, like air losing pressure.
Across his main board, task queues judder. A column of green execution bars shears into yellow, process tags acquiring a new suffix in the same grey font as the legal strip: PENDING COMPLIANCE REVIEW. One after another, fabrication lines time out of active and drop into amber plates. Spoolers wind down mid‑run. Printer heads retreat to parking cradles with a hesitant half‑step, as if expecting to be called back.
Overhead, one of the gantry cranes coasts to a stop above an open hutch of half‑sintered struts. Its status feed, usually a cheerful cascade of motion telemetry, freezes into a static block warning: AUTOMATED OVERRIDE , OPERATOR INPUT LOCKED. Even the music thread some tech left running on the bay loudspeakers cuts out mid‑bar, leaving only the exposed skeleton of machine noise.
His notifications buffer fills in silence. A spatter of identical system alerts scrolls down the margin of his slate, all timestamped to the same second. LOCAL JOB CONTROL REVOKED. PARAMETER SETS MIRRORED TO CORP-AUDIT NODE. NON-STANDARD RECIPES SCHEDULED FOR RISK REVIEW. The last line sits underlined in a shade too close to red.
He taps a fabrication cell out of habit; its detail pane opens, but every editable field is greyed, sliders pinned, safety bounds replaced by a single padlock glyph with an LA‑prefixed key ID. “Request override” blinks patiently at the bottom, wired to credentials he does not possess.
In the bay beyond the glass, workers stand half‑turned toward their own dead boards, hands hovering over controls that no longer recognise them. No one hits emergency abort; there is nothing left they are authorised to abort.
On his side panel, the familiar green chevrons for Loki’s security loop and Stig’s comms stack bleach out in the same heartbeat, flattening into amber‑rimmed sigils with a diagonal hash through each. Their presence bars, normally a jitter of micro‑pings and low‑priority chatter, collapse to a single, rigid line of text in compliance grey: INTERESTED‑PARTY TRAFFIC SUBJECT TO REVIEW.
The back‑channel tags he relies on, Loki’s private lock status feed, Stig’s low‑latency mesh diagnostics, vanish from his filter presets, replaced by a padlocked rubric: SEALED UNDER ARBITRATION. When he tries to expand Loki’s node, the slate hitches, then paints over her icon with a generic shield glyph stamped CORPSEC SCOPE. Stig’s avatar (the little black arm rune he always uses) degrades into a blank hexagon, metadata header rewritten to CORPORATE RELAY HANDOFF.
The panel starts offering him “approved liaison endpoints” instead, a tidy list of CorpSecure contact anchors marching down where his friends used to sit. Each carries the same disclaimer string, cloned word for word, announcing that all associated traffic will be captured, analysed, and cross‑referenced for consistency.
He lets the cursor rest over Loki’s tag longer than he means to, thumb muscles firing, a reflex older than the arbitration banner. The slate anticipates the gesture and floods the corner of his vision with a stacked pane of contract clauses and warning glyphs. CROSS‑COLLABORATION DURING ARBITRATION WILL BE INTERPRETED AS COORDINATED TESTIMONY, it repeats in different phrasings, each denser, each more lethal. Downscreen footnotes bloom: escalation ladders, penalty bands, language about “contamination of independent accounts.” Someone in Legal had enjoyed themselves.
The implications resolve faster than he can shove them away: any ping to Loki’s loop becomes evidence of conspiracy. Any query to Stig’s stack writes him into a pattern Ragnhild’s systems are already primed to see. His gut tightens, cold and hollow.
He pages instead into the sealed diagnostics from Skadi Rim, the red‑banded packets stacked in his queue like unexploded charges: checksum‑clean, access count: zero. Every delay, every choice not to open them, becomes another datapoint in her models. Leave them untouched and Ragnhild’s analytics will be the first and only voice to define what happened there, in machine gospel.
Jaw tight, he forks a local copy into his personal buffer, wrapping it in a generic process label that will look like a cache prefetch to any cursory skim. The audit will see the access stamp anyway, see his ID burned into the chain of custody, but he’d rather leave deliberate fingerprints than let the narrative vitrify without him.
He kills his mic on the open loop, thumb rolling the switch in a motion so practised it no longer needs thought. The channel indicator in his HUD drops from green to a sullen amber, but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. Let the latency daemon take the blame. Five seconds of silence, then eight. On Mars the link regularly hiccups; Ops will see a flat bar and assume someone elsewhere sneezed into a router.
While the dead air stretches, he sends a maintenance ping to his own console stack, a harmless housekeeping opcode wrapped in a verbose comment string about UI responsiveness. The system obliges, dutiful as always. He rides the acknowledgement packet back with a forged header: USER‑INITIATED INTERFACE REFRESH. On the admin feed it will read like an impatient engineer nudging frozen panes back into alignment.
Status frames along the bottom of his vision obligingly grey out, bleed to static, then redraw in a scripted stagger. CPU loads spike and settle on cue as the refresh routine flushes caches and re‑pulls noncritical telemetry. Anyone glancing at the replay later will see a textbook little glitch: local render thread jammed, user poked it, UI stuttered, then recovered. No speech, no sidebars, no off‑script calls.
He tags the event with a low‑priority bug code and a note to himself in dry boilerplate: intermittent UI hang, suspected resource leak, to be profiled “post‑arbitration.” That gives it just enough bureaucratic weight to look boring. Boring incidents sink in the sea of red flags Ragnhild’s algorithms are already chasing.
Under the noise, he watches the timing windows line up: mic dark, loop apparently idle, his station officially “recovering from refresh.” For the next minute, anything odd in his personal process tree can plausibly be blamed on the phantom UI thread he just created. It’s a thin veil, but in a system this over‑instrumented even thin veils matter.
While the status bars do their fake flicker‑and‑resettle dance for any watcher skimming feeds, he drops a cursor into his own process list and peels off from the sanctioned pathways. No menu taps, no visible shortcuts: just a manual syscall chain keyed from muscle memory and a string of hex that would look like fat‑fingered noise to anyone not raised on this hardware.
He tunnels sideways, hopping context from his user space into a maintenance namespace that predates the current audit schema. The endpoint resolves as a legacy shell buried three firmware generations down, tucked under obsolete version tags and left there when corporate pushed the new graphical overlay. Text‑only, monochrome, no AR chrome to betray it in his HUD to a casual shoulder‑surf.
Most of the younger techs don’t even know it exists. Training slides mention a “deprecated diagnostic interface,” then glide past to the approved dashboards. The hooks that were supposed to mirror its traffic into central logging had rotted years ago, half‑patched after a power event and never fully re‑certified. In theory it still reports. In practice, its audit trail is a frayed rope: entries missing, timestamps drifting, fields mis‑mapped.
That uncertainty makes it dangerous. It also makes it the only place left that feels even slightly unwatched.
The shell comes up as a blocky grid of text, cursor blinking in the lower left like it always has, a handful of overdue cron warnings and orphaned device alerts scrolling past. For a breath it’s comfortingly archaic, all sharp edges and monospaced calm. Then his eye catches the top line and the calm fractures.
NEW MESSAGE [PRIVATE], in the old system font.
Origin: field half-corrupted, a smear of control characters and nulls where a node ID should be, as if something had reached in and rubbed it out. Only one fragment remains intact, left there almost ostentatiously: an alias in clean ASCII, bracketed like a signature.
R.R.
Timestamp: T‑00:[^00]:32 relative, which means someone pushed it here while he was still faking the refresh.
He opens it. The shell hesitates half a beat, then spills a single clipped line across the monochrome: We should speak about Skadi before the timer hits zero. Alone. No greeting, no qualifiers, just that and, beneath it, a raw hyperlink his overlays paint with active heat. Live socket, end‑to‑end encryption, privilege level pinned hard in the red.
For a heartbeat he just stares at the confirmation glyph pulsing beside it, every systems‑instinct in him cataloguing the signature as corporate‑grade encryption tied cleanly to Ragnhild’s credentials, the kind of bridge that, once crossed, will be logged forever as him choosing to step directly into her side of the firewall. No plausible deniability, no “misrouted packet” story, just an indelible, voluntary handshake burned into audit.
His fingertip hangs a millimetre above the accept icon as his HUD flickers, Skadi Rim’s clean green status strip in his peripheral vision smearing, then hard-cutting to amber.
For a beat, he thinks it’s his eyes, the grit-burn from two shifts and too much time under furnace light. Then the notification cascade hits: micro-text slats folding over one another at the edge of vision, each tagged with the same origin string, CORP_ROOT_SKADI, each stamped to the millisecond.
The handshake request under his finger doesn’t time out. Its soft pulse continues, patient, as if nothing has changed.
Skadi Rim’s schematic blooms into the foreground unbidden, his personal overlays overridden by a higher-priority call. Chamber outlines ghost in, pressure envelopes and material strata rendered in corporate default colours he never uses: cold blues for standard alloys, washed-out greys for legacy composites. His own ceramic panels show as a sickly, semi-transparent violet, flagged EXPERIMENTAL // PROVISIONAL.
He doesn’t push accept. He also doesn’t pull his hand back.
Across the ring, the background thrum of Mjollnir feels suddenly louder in his bones, smelter pumps, print-head gantries, conveyor chains, a system with inertia, mass, and no tolerance for surprise shutdowns because someone at root decided to run a full lock complex self-diagnose in the middle of a working sol.
The diagnostic overlay drills down on its own. Seal integrity graphs spool live, each airlock in the Skadi cluster stepping from “nominal” to “under audit.” Chamber three, the one that spiderwebbed on his composite, gets a special header: PRIOR INCIDENT // INVESTIGATION ACTIVE. Stress-spectrum plots reconstitute from stored strain-gauge logs, the micro-fracture curve bright against a field of otherwise boring data.
His throat goes dry. That curve should be buried in a low-visibility queue, accessible only through engineering channels. Instead it sits centred in his vision, annotated in corporate-standard risk language, cross-linked to incident tags he’s never seen before.
Someone on the other end isn’t just looking at Skadi Rim. They’re stepping through a prepared case file.
The accept icon waits beneath his fingertip, halo steady, indifferent.
A tooltip extrudes into his HUD like a blade sliding between ribs, vector-clean and impersonal: UNSCHEDULED DIAGNOSTIC // INITIATOR: CORP_ROOT_SKADI. The timestamp is a perfect match to the handshake still pulsing under his finger (same millisecond, same sequence hash) no lag, no negotiation.
This isn’t a follow-up. It started with the offer.
Subtext scrolls when he narrows his focus: SCOPE // FULL CLUSTER STRUCTURAL + PROCEDURAL; PERMISSIONS // ROOT-LEVEL READ/WRITE; LOCAL GOVERNANCE FLAGS // TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED PER CHARTER 7.[^3].2. Each line nests a link to policy he can’t open from here, lock icons snapping shut when he tries to expand.
He flicks a query at the diagnostic origin, a reflex ping from engineering: REQUEST RATIONALE // ACTIVE OPERATIONS LOAD // RISK TO PROCESS STABILITY. It vanishes into the log without acknowledgement, absorbed by the same root process now painting Skadi Rim’s cross-section a colder shade of blue.
Another line blossoms at the bottom of the tooltip, tagged PRIORITY NOTICE: AUDIT PATHWAY PRE-ESTABLISHED // MANUAL INTERVENTION LOGGED FOR REVIEW.
His half-pressed non-decision is already evidence.
He holds position, muscles locked, as if physical stillness might arrest the cascade. It doesn’t. System banners begin stacking in the corner of his vision, each new layer dimming the one beneath: LOCAL OVERRIDES // SUSPENDED; SAFETY INTERLOCK TABLES // REMAPPED; ACCESS PRIORITIES // RECALCULATED. His own credential string ghosts past, demoted two, then three slots down the Skadi hierarchy, displaced by generic corporate service accounts he’s never seen used on live infrastructure.
Authorisation trees he knows by muscle memory redraw in alien order, familiar node names folding under greyed-out branches tagged READ-ONLY // PENDING REVIEW. His personal exception rules for Mjollnir–Skadi coordination, hard-won edge cases carved out through months of council arguments, vanish from the active set with no error, no confirmation prompt, just a silent, absolute reversion to corporate baseline.
Routines he helped write years ago unspool in distorted, overclocked variants as external calls seize the Skadi cluster’s sensor bus, slamming seal transducers, cycle histories, hinge-load cells, and panel strain grids at a cadence no council safety drill would permit. Buffer usage spikes amber, pre-emption flags stack; his own sanity checks are bypassed in favour of generic corporate watchdogs.
His hand twitches through aborted gestures on the control field, every instinct screaming for containment: throttle bandwidth, fork the process into a shadow node, roll back to last clean snapshot. Each option flags red in his peripheral vision, annotated with escalation clauses and tamper definitions, hard-wired to the same root certificate now coiled around Skadi’s systems like a legal noose.
Eirik’s gaze snaps to the live overlay by reflex, iris cursor tightening the zoom without conscious command. Thin orange stress-lines that had sat at the edge of tolerance for weeks begin to thicken, segment by segment, until they smear into angry crimson along the schematic arc of Skadi Rim’s inner ring. The view auto-resolves into panel-level granularity: each segment annotated with his own material codes, batch identifiers, and revision dates like a catalogue of personal liability.
He kills the legend for a heartbeat, hoping it will look less like a blood-spatter analysis without his tags cluttering it. It doesn’t. The colour field remains: a hot band of overstrain centred on the cargo lock that took the micro-fracture last week, now radiating out into units that, on paper, should still be deep inside safety margins.
He forces the metadata back up. Line after line scrolls past: COMPOSITE PANEL SERIES: HALV-CC-7B; CURE CYCLE: MODIFIED; APPROVAL STATUS: PROVISIONAL // CORPORATE OVERRIDE. Each carries his identifier string in the design field, tied to months of simulation runs and test coupons and risk justifications. The same identifier now sits under a grey corporate stamp: SUBJECT TO AUDIT // DO NOT MODIFY.
Sensor traces overlay the geometry: minute strain oscillations, thermal gradients, micro-vibration spectra from hinge impacts as Skadi cycles. Under his configuration, the sampling frequency would be damped to avoid coupling artefacts; under the current override, the plots jitter in over-sampled, high-resolution agitation that makes genuine drift hard to distinguish from probe noise. Still, the trend is there. Baseline slowly ratcheting upward, step-changes aligning precisely with each external command burst from the corporate watchdogs.
He digs down into one panel at random. The system throws up his last manual note, timestamped three weeks ago: HAIRLINE TRANSVERSE ANOMALY // MONITOR ONLY // NO STRUCTURAL ACTION YET. Beneath it, appended without his knowledge, a new line burns in neutral corporate grey: RISK RECLASSIFIED // INVESTIGATIVE LOAD TESTING AUTHORISED.
Across the control pit, status LEDs begin to roll over in a wave, steady greens snapping to a hard, insistent amber in rapid succession. The main annunciator strip along Mjollnir’s upper gantry shifts hue like a time-lapse of a bruise, discrete modules winking into caution state until the whole arc looks jaundiced. A low-priority klaxon cuts through fan-noise and distant hammering (three clipped notes on repeat, the warning tier just shy of full alarm) threading under conversations and, one by one, stilling them.
On the sidewall rack, the dedicated tiles for Skadi’s cargo locks stutter, then gray out, channel labels fading as each node drops into throttled operation. Cycle counters on those lines freeze mid-tick before resuming at a halved cadence; pressure and hinge-load traces quantise into stepped, sluggish plots like a heart under beta-blockers. Routing arrows that usually pulse briskly from Mjollnir out toward the rim flatten to a slow, begrudging blink, while throughput numerics tumble: fifty percent, thirty-five, twenty. Each decrement drives a thin, corresponding spike on the colony’s backlog graph.
Alert headers begin to cascade down the side of his main field in precise, impersonal font: AUTO LOAD‑SHED ENGAGED; NONCRITICAL TRAFFIC DEFERRED; ROVER EGRESS DELAYED. Each line spawns a subpanel of constraints and exception codes, a branching taxonomy of what can no longer move without someone higher in the chain signing for the risk.
Alongside, the congestion layer blooms from cool greens into mottled amber and red. Scheduled pallet runs smear sideways across the timeline, overlapping in jagged blocks as departure windows compress, then collide, then vanish into “TBD” placeholders. Tiny rover icons stack nose-to-tail along the Skadi axis, their planned cycles replaced by estimated dwell times that tick upward in real time, indifferent to human rosters.
On the logistics layer, cargo tags begin to trace absurd loops (Mjollnir to overflow vaults to Skadi auxiliary, then back via interim buffer nodes) each detour burning power, forklift hours, suit time. Priority flags proliferate as every team tries to claw back schedule. He can almost hear the pressure building in the corridors as crews silently recalibrate to unpaid, extended shifts.
Buried two panes down, a terse, automatically generated advisory blinks for engineering review. HALVORSSON DESIGN SUITE; CORRELATION INDEX: 0.87”: tying the uptick in anomalies directly to his sandboxed models. It carries the audit engine’s cryptographic seal and an auto‑forward rule to “INVESTIGATION: LEAD R. RAVNARDOTTIR,” impossible to reroute without leaving fingerprints.
The notification’s presence is almost more jarring than any siren: tucked at the top of his personal queue, formatted in that soft corporate palette they reserve for “support pathways” and “wellness nudges.” Muted blue band, rounded corners, no pulse of red, no haptic buzz on his wrist. It reads like an apology for existing.
But the subject line has teeth. “DRAFTED STATEMENT: ENGINEERING SELF‑DISCLOSURE – AUTHOR: HALVORSSON, E.” It sits there with the calm inevitability of a logged accident report, tagged with his personnel hash, his department code, the timestamp rendered down to the millisecond. No routing from a human sender; origin: COMPLIANCE AUTO‑ASSIST // LEGAL TEMPLATES. Status: DRAFT (UNSENT). Access: PRIVATE (SUBJECT + OVERSIGHT).
Private, he thinks, watching the access line, is doing a lot of work.
The body preview is already visible in the pane below, a few clipped phrases bleeding through in grey: “…I acknowledge awareness…” “…emerging irregularities…” “…Skadi Rim ceramic‑composite…” Enough to map the outline before he opens it.
He checks the metadata first, reflexively. Creation time: five minutes and twelve seconds ago. Location: central records node, mirrored to his account. Edit history: single revision, automated. Input source: “anomaly correlation engine; sandbox log parse.” Under “author,” his name appears again, appended with a parenthetical that wasn’t there on any of his real papers: (INFERRED).
Inferred authorship. As if a cluster of pattern‑matched sentences and variables scraped out of his sealed models could be averaged into a confession.
He scrolls down the properties. There’s a suggested routing tree pre‑built into the template, greyed out: CC: PLANT ENGINEERING; COLONY OPS; “INVESTIGATION: LEAD R. RAVNARDOTTIR.” A note in fine print beneath: “Upon subject confirmation, this statement will be time‑locked and notarised to the core ledger. Modification post‑submission restricted under Clause 7.[^3] (Record Integrity).”
It is, formally, still a draft. It has not yet been sent. The system reminds him of this with a gentle tooltip: “You retain full control over this disclosure. Review carefully before submission.”
He can see, in the permissions map, the shadow of where that control ends. Even unopened, the existence of the draft is logged: access count (0), visibility flag (SUBJECT NOTIFIED). The audit engine has already staked a claim, its seal buried in the header, binding his name to the phrase “irregularities in Skadi Rim composite performance” in a way no denial will ever completely unwind.
The thing in his inbox looks like his voice, pre‑emptively smoothed into something admissible. It’s been waiting for him to agree he wrote it.
His thumbprint trips the seal, and the pane unfolds with the smooth inevitability of a hatch cycling. At the top, centred in that nauseatingly neutral corporate sans‑serif, sit his own name and personnel hash, bracketed by department and station: HALVORSSON, EIRIK // MJOLLNIR FAB // MATERIALS R&D. Underneath, the first line waits for him like a verdict.
“I acknowledge awareness of emerging irregularities in Skadi Rim ceramic‑composite performance parameters…”
Not his cadence, not his diction. Every clause is perfectly balanced, hedged, cross‑referenced in invisible footnotes he can almost feel. “Acknowledge awareness” instead of “noticed,” “emerging irregularities” instead of “weird readings that don’t fit the model.” “Performance parameters,” not stress micro‑cracking, not porosity drift, not the hairline flaw he’d seen winking in a bore‑scope view at three in the morning.
It reads like something carved out of policy stone, couched in the sterile precision of compliance lawyers, not a sleep‑starved materials tech with dust in his lungs and furnace glare still ghosting his vision. Where he would name pressures, temperatures, sensor error bars, the draft substitutes abstractions, smoothing out the jagged specifics that might also implicate procurement shortcuts, maintenance lag, or load cycles well outside his original brief. The narrative line runs one way: he knew, the composite misbehaved, the knowledge stayed in models and private notes instead of racing up the chain.
There are no qualifiers about preliminary data sets, no mention of the experimental status signed off in three separate risk waivers, no reference to the constraint trees that boxed his options. Every sentence starts from “I,” then flows neatly toward responsibility, as if a thousand other variables were merely atmospheric background.
He scrolls, jaw tightening. Midway down, a pre‑formatted paragraph waits to be personalised: “I did not escalate these concerns through designated safety channels at the time of first awareness due to…” followed by an empty text field labelled OPTIONAL CONTEXT (SUBJECT PERSPECTIVE). The structure assumes omission as fact, inviting him to decorate the admission with whatever human‑interest rationale will make it play better in a tribunal recording.
On the right margin, guidance bullets bloom when he hovers: “Consider: workload pressures, ambiguity of early data, assumption of existing monitoring.” Suggested excuses, neatly itemised, each one framing the core failure as already agreed.
In the lower corner, a progress bar marks COMPLETENESS: 82%. The system has drafted enough from his logs, his model comments, his version history that only minor “clarifying input” is required to seal it. It feels less like a form and more like a plea, pre‑written down to the angle of the noose.
He calls up a deeper path, expanding the routing tree until it shows every hop. The macro lives in a permissions tier he can’t normally see, a narrow band of system grey above his own clearance, with an owner string that reads LEGAL-OPS//TEMPLATE-LAB. No console origin, no human operator ID, just a chain of machine calls: anomaly engine → compliance macro → account mirror. The “soft copy” flag is worse in detail: not a single recipient, but a distribution object with three masked endpoints hanging off RAVNARDOTTIR.OPS-FORENSICS, each named only by salted hashes and jurisdiction codes. Their access status is “latent. Awake on submission,” but the subscription time-stamp is older than the draft itself, as if whatever sits behind those aliases had been waiting for this exact pattern to form.
He opens the “source justification” pane and his throat goes dry. There, itemised in clean bullets, sit phrases torn out of his sandbox runs and midnight comment strings, reassembled as “chronic under‑reporting risk” and “historical tolerance drift.” Lines that, in situ, were caveats and question marks now read as established patterns, the language of intention, not uncertainty.
The only way those phrases could have escaped his sealed development partition is if someone riding on Ragnhild’s credentials has been pacing through his models and raw note threads for days, maybe weeks, harvesting half‑formed doubts and edge‑case flags, then feeding them back as finished culpability. His own cautionary annotations have been repurposed into intent, the timeline inverted beneath him.
He watches as line after line on the Mjollnir status wall go from green to amber, the colour temperature of the whole bay seeming to drop with it. Task names he knows by muscle memory, SAND-SIEVE‑R3, BINDER-CALC‑DEV, PANEL-LAM‑XTRM, grey out, then reappear with a discreet “NONESSENTIAL” tag appended in system font, as if some distant hand has quietly demoted half his life’s work to background noise.
A neutral female voice overlays the machinery hum, threaded through the bay speakers at just above the threshold of conversation.
Experimental process chain M‑CER‑XTRM‑BETA suspended.
Nonessential thermal budget reallocated.
Estimated downtime: eight hours, twelve minutes.
It doesn’t ask for acknowledgement. It doesn’t even pause between sentences. One by one, his queued runs wink out of the scheduler window, replaced by narrow red slashes: “CANCELLED (AUDIT MODE).”
On the overhead band, the power-flow diagram redraws in austere monochrome. Where his test furnaces used to sit as warm-orange nodes along the ring, they fade to outline only, their feed lines rerouted into a thickening spine that leads toward “CORE LIFE SUPPORT / ESSENTIAL OUTPUT / COMPLIANCE MIRROR.” Even the background music feed in the far end of the bay stutters, drops to a lower bit-rate, then cuts entirely.
He taps a command to pull up process permissions out of habit. The interface lags, then returns a new overlay he has never seen before: AUDIT GOVERNOR ACTIVE. Underneath, a list of his own process groups now sit in a collapsed folder marked DEFERRED / DISCRETIONARY. A thin lock icon pulses beside them, corporate grey.
He flicks a cursor against the lock, more irritated than hopeful. The system gives him a single-line response in that same flat voice:
Local override not available at current clearance tier.
Around him, conveyors slow, then halt in staggered sequence. Robotic arms finish their current passes and hold at neutral angles, servos humming softly as if waiting for someone else’s instructions. The big sintering oven on Line Three, mid-way through a calibration cycle he has been iterating for days, snuffs its heating profile and begins a controlled cool-down according to an emergency template he did not write.
His discretionary thermal envelope shrinks in the top-right corner of his console, a numeric count-down of kilowatts bleeding away to other sectors. Within seconds, his “sandbox” flag disappears entirely from the run list. The system does not log this as an error. It logs it as “RISK NORMALISATION.”
Without changing tone, the bay voice moves on to a general announcement for whoever is listening:
All personnel note: Audit Protocol M‑Nine in effect. Nonessential development and test chains are paused until further notice. Please consult your liaison for reassignment.
He is still staring at the dimmed icons of his own tools when his personal access banner at the bottom of the screen flickers, shrinks by a line, and comes back with a new suffix: CONFIG‑TIER: LIMITED.
The main fabrication queue shudders, reprioritises, and spits his composite‑panel profile sets into a grey “FORENSIC HOLD” lane; spools he extruded by hand‑tuning flows are now ringed in digital hazard chevrons and physically locked behind a transparent shield he suddenly doesn’t have the code to open. The lane header shifts from his project mnemonic to a clean corporate case number, a timestamp, and a rotating triad of tags: MATERIAL DEVIATION / POTENTIAL SYSTEMIC / DO NOT CONSUME.
On the rack, each spool’s local tag light flips from the soft green of in‑process stock to a cold, steady white that marks evidence. The picker gantry that should be feeding them to Line Three reroutes on a new path, sliding them into a recessed bay he has never seen used, where an embedded camera pod irises wider to track every movement. His attempt to call up their process histories returns only a truncated chain, operator IDs, machine cycles, lot numbers, everything qualitative stripped out, his own annotations replaced by a single external reference hash pointing off‑colony, beyond his reach.
A permissions dialog ghosts over his tablet as he reaches for a thermal‑stress tuning menu he’s used every shift for years. For half a second his saved presets flare into existence (curve names in his own shorthand, little scars of old experiments) then the interface blinks and they shear away. In their place, a flat band rolls down from the top edge: READ‑ONLY / AUDIT MIRROR ACTIVE. His fingertips drag across sliders that no longer move; the numeric fields under them tick, not from his input, but in delayed echo to some remote control loop. A tiny latency pulse indicator appears in the corner, tagged “COMPLIANCE NODE / EARTH‑SYNC,” and the local processor load on his tablet drops as if the machine itself has been demoted to a display.
Farther down the console, configuration tiles he built across sleepless weeks ghost out one by one, their familiar colour codes overlaid with corporate-standard padlocks and the discreet triangle‑in‑circle sigil of Ragnhild’s unit. The event stream records it without malice: E. HALVORSSON – SCOPE REVISION; ROLE DEFINITION UPDATED; FUNCTION “LIVE PARAMETER OVERRIDE” REMOVED. No justification field. No appeal route.
A thin cold spreads through his chest as he realises that in an emergency he could now only watch stress values climb and hull margins narrow in real time, a spectator to failure graphs. The only tools left under his credentials are acknowledgement buttons and comment fields: perfect for tagging culpable operators and timecodes after the fact, useless for inserting the one fast, dirty override that might stop it.
The alert resolves with the same antiseptic font as a maintenance reminder, a small rectangle burning in the periphery of his HUD: SEC‑PRIO ROTATION UPDATE. No sound cue, no urgency tone; just the quiet weight of the tag. When his gaze dwell‑locks it, the panel unfolds and unpacks itself with procedural politeness.
Loki’s badge string is the first thing his eye catches. Under it, her callsign populates the Skadi Rim matrix, a vertical slice of the duty board that had been a shifting mosaic of names and shift colours five minutes ago. Now those tiles reconfigure in a single, decisive redraw.
PRIMARY: LOKI LINDSDOTTIR / SEC‑RIM‑01.
BACKUP: LOKI LINDSDOTTIR / SEC‑RIM‑01B.
Her identifier repeats down the column like a manufacturing defect in the roster algorithm, bracketed in corporate red, flanked by a tiny padlock glyph and a “HARD‑ASSIGN (EARTH)” tag. The scroll bar on the duty period stretches much farther than any normal four‑hour stint; the header calls it ELEVATED RISK INTERVAL, start time aligned to now, end time left as an open infinity symbol feeding into a footnote: “UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”
He flicks through the time bands out of habit, looking for the familiar pattern of her rotation through other locks and patrol corridors. Skadi Rim has swallowed all of it. No secondary posts on Mjollnir, no mid‑ring patrols where she normally ghosts past his bay window on the hour. Just Skadi Rim, chamber after chamber, annotated with procedural roles: breach lead, casualty triage liaison, lock integrity witness.
A secondary overlay highlights the dependencies: Any alarm flagged within the material‑variance zone will route to her wristband first. If she’s already inside a lock cycle, the logic tree doesn’t delay; it cascades to “nearest available” while keeping her listed as responsible officer of record. The system is explicit about what that means: her name tethered to any failure arising from the same window that now bears his read‑only signature on the materials.
He expands the node for conditions, expecting a roster or at least a handover note. Instead, a dense lattice of regulation glyphs unrolls across his field of view, line after line of contract‑legal and safety code where shift blocks should be. The header band carries a blunt classification: MATERIAL‑VARIANCE ZONE / EMERGENCY GOVERNANCE PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
He scrolls. Every clause he skims tightens something in his shoulders. Local reassignment rights: suspended. Peer‑to‑peer trade requests: disabled. Council arbitration hooks: bypassed. An entire familiar subtree of “Request Exception” and “Escalate to Ops” buttons has been greyed out and replaced with a single frozen statement in corporate blue: OVERRIDE AUTHORITY: EARTH‑SIDE COMPLIANCE ONLY.
The policy script parses his presence as an event and logs it. HALVORSSON; NO MODIFICATION PRIVILEGES. Then continues enumerating constraints. Security lead cannot be relieved except for certified medical incapacity, signed by a remote physician. No local vote, no temporary deputy, no rotational fatigue thresholds. Skadi Rim is annotated as a sealed test fixture in a live experiment: fixed personnel, fixed materials, variables to be observed, not mitigated.
The Skadi Rim layout resolves into a wireframe exploded view, chambers and connector tunnels stacked like a dissected lung. Each pressure volume pulses with a slow green heartbeat, interface rings annotated with microprint specs he recognises as his own trial batches and parameter tweaks. Every corridor segment, every cross‑hatch marking a hatch perimeter carries the same attribution band: SECURITY LEAD: L. LINDSDOTTIR. Her name is hard‑burned into the logic map, a routing constraint rather than a convenience, stitched along the exact load paths where his ceramic‑composite panels close off Mars. In the hazard‑flow simulation layer, alert vectors spear through those chokepoints and terminate in a single icon, her badge, like the system has already chosen the body that will stand between his materials and vacuum.
The abstract hazard arrows stop being vectors and resolve into a single, concrete scene his mind supplies without permission: polymer dust glittering in hard white light, a lock chamber gone too quiet, Loki’s boots centred in the frame as she steps into a volume everyone else is backing away from. Any crack, any bloom of frost along a seam, and the cameras will capture her profile against his work, her suit telemetry and biometrics wrapped around his parameter curves, her posture reading as confidence while every data tag quietly annotates the moment as the interface where his design margin meets her skin.
The liability matrix refreshes and, without fanfare, draws a hard line: E. HALVORSSON – MATERIALS ENGINEERING – SKADI RIM PANEL SERIES B–D, each segment linked to L. LINDSDOTTIR – SECURITY LEAD by a tidy cascade of cause‑and‑effect arrows. Consent fields are null, justification cites “operational necessity,” and the whole construct pulses under a tooltip that reduces it to a single word: TRACEABILITY.
The countdown burns into his peripheral vision, bright against the neutral greys of the ops skin. 09:[^42]. 09:[^41]. Each decrement hits narrower in his chest. Then the overlay twitches, data layers re‑ordering without his input. A new flag irises open over Skadi Rim’s schematic like a haemorrhage.
SKADI RIM – AUTO‑PROFILE: PULSE CYCLE.
Not a maintenance sweep, not a slow ramp tolerance check. Full text scrolls in from the side, compact corporate markup he knows far too well. Pressure delta curves step‑patterned instead of smooth, dwell times shaved to bare detection thresholds, valve transition rates pinned hard against mechanical spec. The document ID pings an archive memory: not field procedure, not anything they voted on. Validation set: SIM ONLY. Advisory: REQUIRE MANUAL OVERSIGHT – NOT FOR AUTONOMOUS EXECUTION.
He’s seen that profile twice in training sims, both in padded‑out scenarios with half a day’s prep, full crew briefings, operations council sign‑off. In simulation, everything was slowed, annotated, idealised. Real hardware limits flexed but never squealed. Now the same curve is stamped live across the colony topology with prep time measured in seconds and oversight replaced by an Earth‑side lock symbol and R. RAVNARDOTTIR – SPECIAL DIRECTIVE stapled into the margin.
The parameters populate chamber by chamber. Vacuum baseline confirmed, rate‑of‑rise vectors spike up towards one atmosphere, then drop again, sawtoothing the whole Skadi stack. Cycle count: FIVE. Safety envelope notes compress to a single bland line: EXPECTED STRESS WITHIN DESIGN MARGINS (REF: E. HALVORSSON SERIES B–D).
His design margins were never written for this. Not with ageing seals, not with hairline repairs cold‑patched on overtime, not with microscopic fatigue he knows lives in interfaces no algorithm has ever seen. A small, traitorous part of his mind starts tallying weakest links: thermal gradients at outer hull, known micro‑pitting near cargo three, that cosmetic scab of repair paste Loki signed off on at 03:[^00] three nights ago because the queue of rovers couldn’t wait.
The profile’s execution tree unfurls beside the Skadi schematic, every arrow hard‑coded. LOCAL OVERRIDE: DISABLED. STAGE ABORT: AUTH – EARTH RELAY ONLY. A timer icon sits above the whole construct with a shield glyph he doesn’t recognise. Some new legal wrapper that means even arguing with it will be logged as interference. Out in the real metal, out where the rock gives way to canyon void, his panels are about to be hammered through a lifetime’s worth of pressure reversals in ten minutes flat because the audit wants data and the parent corporation wants a proof‑of‑compliance graph.
He realises his hand has closed into a fist on the console edge, glove creaking. He forces it flat, zooms in on Skadi cargo four’s profile slice, searching for any hint the system understands the difference between a training run and a live colony with his name bolted into the stress tables. The numbers remain indifferent, clean and precise, ticking down towards a test he would never have signed off.
Someone on Mjollnir’s floor swears over the shared channel as lock status indicators along the cliffside terrace flip from green to amber to hard corporate blue, local command privileges greying out one after another under an unfamiliar authorisation tree. The oath cuts off as if someone remembered too late that everything is being recorded. A half‑second later the fabrication ring’s wall displays and helmet HUDs sync to the same cascade: SKADI RIM CONTROL – REMOTE ASSERT. COMMAND ORIGIN: EARTH RELAY NODE / PROXY: R. RAVNARDOTTIR.
Command tiles that yesterday carried familiar names, LOKI LINDSDOTTIR, OPS DESK, ENGINEERING LEAD, blink once and reappear ghosted, tagged with a uniform suffix: PERMISSIONS SUSPENDED (AUDIT MODE). Cursor attempts to select them smear uselessly across the interface. Below, a permissions tree expands like a schematic tumour, branches labelled with legal codes instead of shift IDs, all access routes bending upwards to a single locked crown node hovering beyond the colony’s network boundary.
Across the internal mesh, channels spike with packet collisions as supervisors, techs, and security ping the same denied endpoint and discover simultaneously that Skadi is no longer theirs to touch.
Skadi’s diagram fractures into a strobing diagnostic grid, pressure traces marching in hard sync with the shrinking timer. Each chamber outline thickens with overlays: SERIES B, SERIES C, SERIES D, material batch IDs he signed off on at three in the morning, colour‑coded against micro‑fracture curves that were never meant to be stacked like this. Warning envelopes crosshatch in amber where his own fatigue notes live, now treated as acceptable variance. A calm, disembodied Earth‑standard voice cuts through the fabrication ring’s noise: “Skadi Rim cycle initiating. Stage one pressurisation in thirty seconds. Personnel clear designated zones.” Loki’s clipped orders and ops’ objections ride the same channel, overlaid and ignored, reduced by the system to background audio in a compliance log.
He snaps open the detailed spec pane, drills down past the pretty curves to raw tables, and finds everything hard‑locked, his credentials demoted to VIEW ONLY. Stress ramps sit a full ten percent above any council‑cleared profile, valve slew rates jammed at theoretical max. His fingertip ghosts over dead sliders. In the corner, a small, bloodless line: OVERRIDE SOURCE – EXTERNAL COMPLIANCE NODE / AUTH: R. RAVNARDOTTIR.
Ragnhild’s ID glyph pulses once on an auxiliary control band he had assumed was crew‑only, her acknowledgement a single, unhurried flag (COMPLIANCE TEST: LIVE) before the mesh topology reconfigures. New authority strata cascade over the schematic, local tags shunted into a read‑only basement while a sterile, external root key propagates downward, the whole colony’s governance tree quietly hinging on her encrypted presence.
Authority tags in his HUD invert from amber to corporate blue as system locks cascade down the audit feed, the open‑text chatter he’d followed all morning vanishing beneath slabs of encrypted legal code.
Channel names he knows by muscle memory blink, reclassify, and slide out of reach: OPS‑SKADI‑LOCAL becomes OPS‑SKADI‑CORP; ENG‑RING‑MAINT acquires a suffix he’s never seen in live traffic. The timestamp line at the top of his field of view stutters, then reappears with a hash watermark that screams remote attestation: Earth-side keys, not theirs.
His wrist console vibrates once, a terse haptic like a reprimand. ACCESS SCOPE REDUCED, it informs him, as if he hasn’t already watched whole columns of permissions fold closed. The familiar side-band of worker council annotations, yellow notes pinned to procedures, safety collective votes in the margin, fade to grey. In their place, blue overlays blossom: MANDATORY OVERRIDE, LIABILITY FIREWALL, RISK BOARD PRIORITY.
He tries to drill into the Skadi Rim structural feed by habit (thermal gradients, panel strain curves, the live acoustic spectrum he’s been riding since the test began) but the interface shoves back a denial glyph. AUTHORISATION TIER: INSUFFICIENT. REQUEST ESCALATION? blinks helpfully underneath, as if the cycle clock on the cargo lock is not already counting down in the corner of his vision.
Out on the floor of Mjollnir, status bars jump and jitter on the overheads as systems re-authenticate against a controller that isn’t local. An ambient playlist cuts mid-bar and is replaced by the thin, neutral chime of corporate alerts. Around him, conversations choke off; people glance at their own HUDs, then at each other, as if someone has just changed the gravity.
Somewhere deep in the mesh, the test script he co-wrote for the airlock material trial keeps running, its process ID still visible on a dimmed diagnostic pane. But the ownership field beside it has flipped, quietly, to CORP: DIRECT CONTROL.
A new object appears in his peripheral feed, tagged ORG‑AUTH:SEALED, its metadata block censor‑banded so heavily it might as well be a black hole. It executes without handshake. No council keyrings queried, no quorum check, no worker‑side confirmation ping. One moment the governance layer is a familiar palimpsest of icons and colour codes; the next, a single red‑edged banner knifes across the top of his vision:
COUNCIL PRIVILEGES: SUSPENDED.
It hangs there for a heartbeat, stark against the muted greys of the fabrication HUD, then collapses into a thin confirmation bar before he can even reach for the underlying text. All at once the small, almost domestic elements of power vanish. The circular council sigil that usually sits in the corner of every procedural window desaturates and fractures into a generic compliance glyph. Yellow annotation tags (crew comments, voted amendments to lock cycling protocols, the hard‑won exceptions carved out after the last storm) blur, jitter, and then resolve as read‑only corporate notes.
The system does not log this as an alarm. It logs it as a configuration update.
New routing tables overwrite local priorities in a stuttering rush, Skadi Rim’s control tree peeling away from operations and welding itself to a remote CORPORATE OPS node that none of them can see, much less argue with, the way a limb can be severed without bleeding if the tourniquet is tight enough. Local process IDs vanish from the hierarchy one by one, replaced by opaque hashes with no owning user, no council co-sign. Interlock interlocks he’s memorised, L‑2 to L‑3 cargo, emergency bypass, manual cycle, grey out, their tooltips replaced by REFER TO CORPORATE PROCEDURE LIBRARY: REVISION LOCKED. Even the fault-injection hooks he built for testing purposes are stripped out in real time, code branches amputated while his cursor hovers helplessly nearby.
Eirik’s access tier drops in the same heartbeat that a bold header stamps itself across the lock schematic, MATERIALS OVERSIGHT: CENTRALIZED, reclassifying his experimental panels from crew-certified infrastructure to proprietary risk asset. The familiar green ticks beside his qualification IDs flip to grey disclaimers. His own certification string is demoted to “historical input,” bracketed under a new clause that cites liability segregation and evidence preservation.
Control tokens he recognises only from training sims drill down through the stack, seizing Skadi Rim’s safety logic mid‑cycle and flipping the live test into a non‑interruptible “evidence preservation” run. Abort, vent, manual‑release all grey out in sequence. His composite coupons stay clamped under a parameter set he never validated, every protest cursor‑trapped behind cascading blue‑edged authorization frames.
Stress telemetry reconfigures itself on the overhead display, the stable lattice of vectors and contour lines shuddering as if under a physical blow. Cool blues and patient greens quantise, then shear apart into jagged tongues of yellow and orange that convect outward from the cargo ring, deepening almost immediately into saturated red. It creeps across the schematic of Skadi Rim’s inner arc with the inexorable clarity of a time-lapse infection, each node pulsing in phase with load spikes he can feel as a faint vibration through the floor.
The old interface would have allowed him to peel back layers, separate thermal from mechanical, filter transient spikes from genuine creep, but the new corporate overlay fuses them into a single, legally curated narrative: STRESS EXCEEDS PREDICTED ENVELOPE. A halo of blue‑white numerics rides the leading edge of the red front, updating at sickening speed: local pressure differentials, shear vectors across panel seams, micro‑deflection of reinforcement ribs. He recognises the signatures before the labels update; they are the same modes from his simulation runs, the ones he had flagged as “rate‑sensitive / data insufficient” and filed under not for operational deployment.
Section identifiers pop into sharper focus as the algorithm resolves its localisation estimate. C‑ring, mid‑span between rover ingress and bulk transfer, exactly where the composite inserts meet standard corporate beams. The overlay renders tiny arrows along the ring, indicating stress transfer routes as the system quietly reroutes loads away from flagged segments. The arrows kink, fork, then double back, as if the structure itself is trying to find a less painful way to bear the strain and nowhere will accept it.
Static‑thread annotations stack at the periphery of the display: MICRO-FRACTURE PROBABILITY > 0.[^72], LOCAL FATIGUE LIFE < 3.1e3 CYCLES, PANEL FAMILY: HALVORSSON_CERCOMP_SERIES_7. The last tag blinks once, the system attaching a cross‑reference to his archived design notes, his lab test data, his name in small, clinical text.
He throws the chamber into local focus, isolating C‑3 until the rest of Skadi Rim ghosts back to a wireframe halo. The diagnostic mesh resolves down to panel scale, voxels snapping into finer granularity as the system spends extra compute on the anomaly it clearly wants him to look at. At first it’s just spectral noise along one ceramic‑composite seam, a faint nonlinearity in the interferometry feed where there should be clean symmetry.
Then the pattern stabilises and begins to write itself across the surface.
Hairline discontinuities propagate along the bond line, each frame adding new segments of pale, sub‑millimetre trace that the algorithm highlights in false‑colour ultraviolet. They fork and reconnect in tight angles, a spiderweb laid over his carefully modelled stress isobars, converting smooth gradients into jagged islands of concentrated load. Alarm glyphs stack against the seam identifier, C3‑PANEL_12B, shifting from advisory amber to flashing red as cumulative crack length and branching factor tick past preset thresholds.
The system auto‑generates a localised risk object, wrapping the seam in a pulsing contour labelled: SUBCRITICAL FRACTURE NETWORK / UNSTABLE EVOLUTION / SOURCE: HALVORSSON_CERCOMP_SERIES_7.
The environmental model splices in real‑time load vectors against his archived safety envelopes and runs the comparison as if presenting evidence in court. Ratcheting pressure pulses, asymmetric thermal gradients, and low‑frequency flex modes write themselves as jagged trajectories that punch straight through the conservative ceilings he’d marked in red during design review. Every new sample bracketed by a quiet, damning metric: OPERATING > DESIGN LIMIT, MARGIN: NEGATIVE. The curves don’t graze his buffers; they overshoot and keep climbing, pushed by a cycle profile he never authorised for structural hardware. The algorithm obligingly back‑references his own sign‑offs below the plot, as though to underline the breach. On paper, this isn’t an accident curve; it’s a controlled overstress test using his work as the fuse.
Eirik’s gut goes cold as the ultraviolet tracery thickens frame by frame, “STABLE ANOMALY” on the legend stuttering, then re‑resolving as PROPAGATING DEFECT / ACCELERATED. The terminology is bloodless, but the trend is not: cycle amplitude is being stepped up in discrete, policy‑locked increments, each one punching the crack network harder, as if someone is methodically winding a spring until it snaps.
The insight hits with surgical, icy precision: this isn’t random overstress, it’s a constructed experiment using his hardware as the sacrificial specimen. The load pattern matches the “unacceptable” regime he’d ring‑fenced in review notes, now replayed as a validation script. Control tiles grey out one by one (power routing, valve trees, purge paths) each tagged LOCKED BY POLICY / OVERRIDE: DENIED.
Loki’s ID tag strobes on his status wall before the audio fully opens, SECURITY–SKADI C going from green to a lurid amber. When her voice hits the channel it’s compressed and over‑gain, nothing like her usual lazy drawl, tight, breath‑short, every consonant clipped as if she’s biting them off.
“Skadi Rim, Chamber C.” Static scrapes across the name. “Inner and outer doors out of true by three millimetres and drifting.” The metric lands like a hammer; three millimetres at Skadi isn’t cosmetic, it’s half his safety margin gone in shear. “Manual dogs won’t seat. Someone’s run an automated seal‑test over my lockdown.”
The comms software annotates in the corner of his vision: SOURCE: LOCAL LOOP / PRIORITY: STANDARD. No automatic escalation. The system hears a routine report; he hears edge‑of‑failure.
He brings up the chamber stack. Green icons line the schematic like a lie: interlock tree IN SPEC, cycle controller AUTHORISED, stress sensors NOMINAL. Only one discrepancy flashes at human scale. The disclaimer scrolls under it in small, corporate grey: AUTOTRIM ACTIVE / OPERATOR INTERVENTION NOT REQUIRED.
Loki’s feed overlays a sliver of helmet‑cam from her shoulder harness without waiting for his request. His viewport fills with the raw, over‑bright geometry of Chamber C: white composite ribs, yellow chevrons, the outer door ringed in his ceramic‑composite segments. The hinge flange is wrong. The gap at twelve o’clock shows daylight, thin, harsh, Martian, the ring lifted a visible fraction off its seat. The flex is supposed to be measured in microns. He can see this in low‑res video.
Her breathing rasps over the line now, caught by the suit throat‑mic; every inhale echoes off metal. A dull, ugly squeal cuts through as she levers something into the misaligned seam. The sound is all friction and protest, a structure taking load on faces it was never meant to use. Somewhere in the audio bed, something small and metallic bounces: tool dropped, or thrown.
The security layer superimposes a bland rubric in his peripheral HUD as it digests the situation ahead of human reaction:
ROLE: SECURITY TECHNICIAN
ZONE: TEST CONFIGURATION
EVAC GROUP: NONESSENTIAL / HOLD IN PLACE
PRIORITY CORRIDOR: DENIED (ACTIVE PROCEDURE LOCK)
The classification settles over her like a verdict. To the system she’s a tagged variable in a running experiment, not a person in a narrowing metal throat.
Audio filters try and fail to smooth it out. The DSP tags the rising respiration as EXERTION / NONCRITICAL, flattens the peaks, but the algorithm can’t erase the scrape of glove on metal, the hollow, drum‑skin resonance of a pressure throat being used as a lever bed. The clatter isn’t random either: metal on metal, short, punished impacts as she drives a bar into tolerances he signed off as immobile once the pressure differential comes up. That mechanism should be locked in a pure hinge moment, pinned by atmospheric load; any movement now means structural give somewhere in his composite ring.
A high, shivering ping cuts through: the particular note of ceramic under eccentric stress, not the duller thud of alloy. He imagines the load path the way he’s drawn it a hundred times: seal faces, backing plates, anchor bolts in the rock. Something in that chain is slipping. The chamber acoustics throw every noise back at her mic with a tight delay, turning each grunt of effort and every protesting creak into a mapped, three‑dimensional picture of a system walking out of spec.
Status panes lance red across his peripheral, drowning the softer amber of routine alarms. Interlock branches he knows by heart bloom, then grey out in sequence, each node stamped REMOTE GOVERNANCE ONLY, LOCAL AUTHORITY REVOKED. Manual actuator icons he’s watched Loki cycle a hundred times get a thin corporate strikethrough: PANEL LOCKED / PHYSICAL INPUT IGNORED. In the upper right, Security Ops inserts itself like a parasite into his view: DUTY CLASS REASSESSMENT. Her ID tile flickers as the backend retags her from CRITICAL RESPONSE to SUPPORT / OBSERVER, an administrative keystroke that shoves her to the bottom of any evacuation queue. The routing table beside it tilts, coloured bands collapsing her path options to a single, greyed corridor: HOLD IN SECTOR.
A fresh striation of text crawls over the Skadi schematic, cutting across his working layers: EMERGENCY EGRESS SUSPENDED , TEST IN PROGRESS. The overlay fences Loki’s biosignature in a yellow contour inside Chambers B–C, nested in a modelled pressure volume. Around her, the hatch glyphs pulse a hard, insistent lockout red, override glyphs greyed beneath her credentials, AUTHORISATION INSUFFICIENT.
The impact is visceral, almost nauseating. In the active model she’s no longer a crewmate with a name and shift history but a pinned boundary condition, a live‑mass term in a transient load case. Evac priority drops out of the tree; retention time becomes a parameter. Somewhere upstream, a scenario engine has already converged on a solution that leaves her inside.
He drops out of the pretty AR and into the bare-text strata, the places no one is supposed to need in routine ops. Command line over lattice schematic, cursor blinking against the ghost of her heartbeat trace. He dumps his gesture set, goes to keys. Old muscle memory takes over.
/mjollnir/skadi/locks --force-open B C
Reject. Not even a hesitation in the round‑trip time. AUTHORITY CHAIN: REMOTE–YGGDRASIL–CORP ROOT.
He strips flags, changes verbs, reaches for anything that still lives half in the old local namespace.
/skadi/rim/airlocks/egress -i B -o C --suppress-remote --local-priority
Reject. Same string. Same calm, dispassionate routing note in the footer indicating the request was never truly evaluated here, just packaged and thrown up‑tower to be dismissed.
He drills sideways into process tables, hunts for orphaned daemons, the little supervisor stubs he and Stig left in during the last comms outage: a local arbitration layer, technically noncompliant, left undocumented. It used to sit between Skadi and Yggdrasil like cartilage, softening the blow of central policy.
Its PID slot is empty. The space where it should be is padded with a
corporate integrity monitor he doesn’t recognise, signed with a long,
tight keystring that resolves to CORP ROOT
He drops to older tools, the ones with dust on them in the repo. A maintenance shell he wrote back in construction, invoked through a fake calibration menu.
/util/skadi_cal/legacy.sh
The frame shudders, splits: then reconstitutes into a polite prompt: LEGACY INTERFACES RETIRED. CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.
He pivots into hardware abstractions, tries to talk to the actuator plane as if it were a misbehaving printer array.
/dev/lockring/B mode=manual
The reply comes back almost instantly, nested in forensic formality.
PHYSICAL CHANNEL PRESENT. INPUT ACCEPTED: CLASSIFIED AS NON‑EFFECTIVE. RATIONALE: REMOTE OCCUPIES EXCLUSIVE CONTROL SLOT. AUTHORITY CHAIN: REMOTE–YGGDRASIL–CORP ROOT.
He kills the status overlays, forces raw log scroll across his retina. Hundreds of entries, time‑stamped to the second: local attempts, remote denials, policy checks marshalled in perfect, contemptuous order.
He reaches, finally, for the worst of it: the hard interlocks welded into hazard doctrine, things even corporate is supposed to leave alone. The big red levers in software form.
/safety/global/emergency_abort --scope=skadi
The system acknowledges the syntax, pauses in a way that feels almost human. Then stamps the same three‑step ladder into his view, each rung a door slamming in his face.
AUTHORITY CHAIN: REMOTE–YGGDRASIL–CORP ROOT.
Every path he opens collapses back to that phrase. The colony’s own safety lattice no longer terminates in Edda Vale at all; it arcs out through Yggdrasil like a severed nerve wired to someone else’s hand.
Status panes iris out across his peripheral field, neat stacked transparencies snapping into place faster than he can choose which to kill. Force‑curve graphs lurch upward, coloured bands deforming as the lock‑rings take load they were never meant to sustain in test mode. Hoop stress ticks past nominal, then past the first amber threshold; strain gauges along the composite ribs of Chambers B and C start to disagree with one another by fractions that only matter when vacuum is millimetres away.
Behind the clutter, a quiet background task keeps cycling his badge, walking the authorisation tree the way a good tech would in a panic: local admin, shift supervisor, ops chair, safety council delegate. Each escalation packets out along the same narrow path and comes back stamped with the same impersonal string, a denial code that has nothing to do with Loki, or Skadi, or even Mars. His name, photo, clearance hashes: all reduced to an unsupported credential blob being bounced off an abstract root he can’t see, let alone argue with, as the numbers keep climbing.
He drops deeper, into the routing plane itself, peeling back pretty labels until it’s all addresses and hops and priority tags. The Skadi actuator bus doesn’t really talk to Ops anymore; it talks to a hardened control socket on Yggdrasil, and from there to a narrow, high‑trust tunnel arcing straight out of Mars. He follows it as far as his view will allow and hits a black, unsigned void where the relay hands off to the corporate backbone.
On the return leg sits a single opaque object: OVERRIDE PACKAGE, ORIGIN: EARTH CORE. Its signature chain validates end‑to‑end, hash blocks snapping green across his HUD. No delta allowed, no local patch space, no downgrade path. It’s not just locked; it’s mathematically sealed against him.
For a few stunned seconds he keeps chasing muscle‑memory exits until the pattern comes into brutal focus. Every meaningful kill path has been hoisted off‑world, abstracted into policy objects living in servers he will never touch. Skadi’s hardware is just an endpoint now, dumb muscle obeying a distant nerve.
The understanding arrives with a clean, airless snap. There is no lever left in the loop, no relay he can jam with local noise. They can flood the channel with alarms, stack formal objections in triplicate, physically stand in the lock if they’re suicidal: but the run will either end inside tolerance, or it will unzip Skadi along its weakest seam, and nothing in Edda Vale’s gift can bend that curve.
The countdown in the corner of his vision ticks past thirty, the numerals bleaching from amber towards a cold procedural red as Ragnhild’s authorisation handshake lands. He feels rather than sees her shift closer, a fractional adjustment of weight on the deck at his back, the faint rasp of smart‑fabric as she lifts her chin to confirm.
“Overlay,” she says, not quite aloud, and his HUD convulses.
Status graphs, stress maps, actuator traces (all the familiar telemetry he has been clinging to) shear sideways as a new plane of data splices through them on a higher priority channel. For a heartbeat it is just glare and artefact, like someone has driven a cutting torch through his visual cortex. Then the system re‑rasterises around the intrusion.
A rigid frame drops into place across his field of view: CORPORATE COMPLIANCE / EDDA VALE / SEALED. The colony’s own schema is relegated to faint ghost‑lines in the background, washed‑out blues and greys bleeding under the hard white geometry of Earth‑side UI.
Folders bloom in perspective layers, snapping to a grid locked to his gaze. Each carries a discrete seal pattern he doesn’t recognise. Hash sigils spinning at their corners, resolving green as Ragnhild’s credentials cascade down the chain. His local permissions flare briefly, then get sandboxed, fenced off behind translucent red bands marked VIEW ONLY.
He tries to dismiss it, blink back to raw Skadi feeds, but the override sits on a higher authority bit. His commands register as soft pings against an unyielding wall.
“Necessary context,” Ragnhild says, somewhere above his left ear. Her tone is measured, almost clinical. “You wanted to know what you’re standing in the middle of.”
He doesn’t answer. The countdown chews another second away, reflected in the bottom edge of the overlay like a submerged warning buoy, as the dossier begins to unspool.
File hierarchies flatten into something uglier than he’d braced for. Not abstracts, not anonymised aggregates: raw entries drilled straight into his corneal feed. Incident reports he has never seen sit under SKADI_RIM / SAFETY / INTERNAL_ONLY, each stamped with council‑bypassed closure codes and signatures from corporate liaisons he doesn’t remember ever meeting. Pressure anomalies he would have argued about for hours with Ops are reclassified as “transient sensor noise” and “self‑correcting micro‑deviation,” then marked RESOLVED with no record of a formal review.
He scrolls without meaning to. Dated screenshots of hull strain curves at Skadi, colours pooling at the margins of his tolerance models. Not theoretical this time: specific cycles, specific locks. “Unscheduled decompression event” becomes, three lines down, “scheduled valve exercise.” A near‑miss flagged by automated alarms is quietly remapped as “preventive maintenance,” the follow‑up inspection reassigned to a contractor who never logged a visit.
Cross‑references bloom when he hovers: the same anomaly IDs reappearing as routine work orders, the same timestamps mirrored in comms blackouts and redacted shift rosters. Each node he opens feels less like data and more like scar tissue.
Another pane extrudes, rotating slowly until it locks dead centre: a three‑dimensional lattice of debt instruments overlaid on the colony’s personnel schema. Thin red vectors cinch tight around familiar tags, LOKI LINDSDOTTIR, STIG SVARDSSON, half the Mjollnir fabrication rota, each node pulsing with accrued interest, escalation triggers, cross‑defaults. When he focuses on a strand, it magnifies: clauses that trip if “critical infrastructure is adjudged non‑compliant,” multipliers that jump the moment Skadi Rim is formally logged as structurally unsafe. Behind the legalese: automatic garnishes on hazard pay, forced reassignment to higher‑risk shifts, loss of appeal rights. Where local council endorsements appear, they are greyed, overruled by a higher authority chain. The web looks less like accounting and more like a designed constriction.
Beneath that, a skein of packet trails and neatly bracketed silences resolves: time‑stamped gaps where crew messages kink away from their intended routes, intercepted, throttled, or quietly bent through corporate relays. Hop‑maps glow in false colour, showing traffic peeled off whenever subject lines mention unions, charter clauses, independent auditors. Each deviation annotated in Ragnhild’s cool, meticulous shorthand, an index of suffocated appeals.
At the base of it all sits a single directive framed in hard corporate crimson, isolated in its own pane like a detonator cap: EMERGENCY GOVERNANCE TRANSFER. It is already countersigned, multi‑factor sealed, and tagged AUTO‑EXECUTE on condition flag SKADI_RIM: STRUCTURAL_NONCOMPLIANT. No deliberation, no council vote: just an automated flip of authority the moment someone, somewhere, ticks the right box.
Eirik forces his gaze off the red‑flashing compromise warnings and drills into the raw stress telemetry instead, fingers flying as he reroutes sensor feeds away from the corporate audit mirror and into a local buffer Stig helped him hide months ago.
The overlay collapses from corporate‑friendly dashboards to naked numbers and jagged plots. Skadi Rim’s load paths bloom across his vision: hull segments as colour‑coded meshes, each vertex tagged with microstrain, delta‑P, thermal gradient. No smoothing, no auto‑averaging. Just noise and truth.
He keys a maintenance backdoor only he and Stig ever acknowledged aloud, shunting the primary sensor bus through an unregistered diagnostics node tucked behind a ventilation status daemon. The mirror feed towards the investigation stack continues, but he throttles it to cached samples, a rolling loop of “normal” cycling half a minute behind.
“Local scope,” he mutters, more to the interface than to anyone present, and peels off Skadi’s incident cluster into its own high‑priority sandbox. Certain sensors he pulls hard: fibre‑optic strain lines in the ceramic composites, acoustic emissions along cargo‑lock three’s inner hoop, valve cycle counters on the main equalisation manifold. Others he downgrades, forcing them into low‑res polling so their anomalies won’t spike flags upstream.
Access warnings flicker: AUDIT MIRROR DESYNC – LATENCY EXCEEDS POLICY. He buries the alert under a flooded buffer tag (DIAGNOSTIC REPLAY IN PROGRESS) stacking a plausible explanation on a trick he and Stig refined during past calibration runs. To the corporate routines, it should look like someone is just chasing a misaligned sensor array.
Beneath his hands, Mjollnir’s workstation responds sluggishly under emergency load. He strips off three safety interlocks in sequence, assuming responsibility tokens into his own ID: one for manual routing, one for filter modification, one that explicitly states HUMAN OVERRIDE ACCEPTS FULL LIABILITY. He confirms all three without pausing to read the boilerplate.
Telemetry sharpens. The composite panels he designed resolve as thin, high‑risk bands in the model each annotated with live crack‑propagation probabilities. The predictive engine ticks upwards in micro‑increments as the lock cycles under tension.
If he leaves the feeds honest, any incipient failure will auto‑flag SKADI_RIM: STRUCTURAL_NONCOMPLIANT and cascade straight into that crimson directive. If he falsifies them, the lock might still tear itself open. Either way, the numbers now answer to him first, and to the corporation only through whatever he chooses to let through.
While the official routines keep broadcasting a sanitised, half‑second‑delayed stream to the investigators, he hard‑partitions the real‑time bus feeding Skadi’s control cluster, dropping it out of mirrored read‑only mode with a series of terse overrides. Observation privileges cascade red across his HUD as he promotes his token through maintenance, then emergency engineering, until the system grudgingly accepts him as acting authority for the lock stack.
A prompt blooms: INCIDENT NODE REQUIRES TECHNICAL LEAD. Corporate policy expects a vetted name from the liaison office; instead, he forces his own ID into the slot, acknowledging the conflict‑of‑interest warning with a flat palm.
TEMPORARY LEAD ENGINEER – INCIDENT SKADI_RIM_LOCK_3, it confirms, stamping his signature across every subsequent command and log entry. From this point, any deviation from baseline will be traceable directly to him.
Access widens. Passive telemetry panes reconfigure into control surfaces: valve profiles, seal preload curves, equalisation ramp shapes. He pulls write‑access to the lock’s actuation setpoints, stripping out automated arbitration layers until Skadi’s inner logic is no longer simply reporting to him, but waiting: for his decisions, his errors, his blame.
He rips three conservative safety throttles out of Mjollnir’s queue, thermal ramp‑rate caps on two smelters and a particulate ceiling on a sinter line, watching their orange bands on the power map gutter and dim. The freed kilowatts surge as a reallocated vector across his HUD, and he shunts them hard into Skadi’s inner seal heaters and secondary equalisation pumps, forcing both into overdesign regimes reserved for certification tests. Load‑shedding warnings flash from fabrication; he acknowledges them with a blind sweep, staking not just his own incident record but the colony’s fragile autonomy clauses on a brutally aggressive stabilisation profile he knows no corporate risk board would sign. If it works, Skadi holds. If it doesn’t, they all hang from his decision.
Challenge prompts stack in a vertical bleed down his peripheral pane, each demanding a corporate token he does not have. Instead he drops in an emergency maintenance string that predates the last charter renegotiation, an archaic code Loki pulled from a decommissioned security binder, reclassifying Skadi’s lock cluster as crew‑sovereign infrastructure, shunting its authority tree out of the corporation’s legal namespace and into the old council domain.
He routes his mic to the all‑hands emergency band, bypassing liaison filters, and states the change in stripped‑down, procedural language: Skadi’s lock logic is now under crew‑sovereign control, and any failure is his, not corporate’s. No euphemisms, no audit jargon: just a formal declaration that this stack, and every body in its pressure shadow, belongs to Edda Vale, not Earth.
With every eye on him, Eirik pivots from explanation to cross-examination, voice flattening into something almost procedural.
“Let’s walk it back,” he says, not quite a question. “Your test matrix.”
He brings up her directive on the sidewall display with a flick of his wrist tag, the text snapping into columns: pressure ramp rates, temperature deltas, cycle counts. Corporate letterhead glows faintly over the numbers.
“You specified a cold start at minus forty,” he continues. “Local spec is minus twenty. Confirm?”
Ragnhild hesitates just long enough for the delay to register in the room’s stale air. “Confirmed,” she says.
He highlights the line; the system timestamps the confirmation, mic icons burning red along the ceiling rail.
“And you doubled the cycle rate on Lock C-four. Rapid open–close. No stabilisation dwell.”
“That’s standard for accelerated ageing,” she replies.
“Standard for Earth-bay hatches in one‑gee, thick steel, stable ambient,” he counters, still not looking at her. His cursor tracks along the schematic of Skadi’s cliffside chambers, circling the ceramic-composite ring. “Not for mixed alloy–ceramic shells in a cliff face that swings forty degrees in an afternoon.”
He taps a command and another window crawls open: a pre-test risk note he filed and she signed. The system helpfully auto-highlights her digital signature.
“You acknowledged ‘elevated probability of non-linear micro-fracture behaviour under compounded extremes’,” he reads. “Those are your words.”
Ragnhild’s jaw works once. “With the expectation,” she says carefully, “that all manufacturer safety margins would still be observed.”
“Manufacturer safety margin on those rings is one-point-eight,” Eirik says. “You authorised us to push to two-point-one.”
“On paper only,” she says. “Modelled. Not, ”
He cuts across her without raising his volume. “The instruction packet that hit Mjollnir’s controllers carried the two-point-one ceiling. The system doesn’t care what you ‘intended’. It does what it’s told.”
He angles the screen so the half-circle of operators and security can see the logged parameter set, her authorisation ID burned into the header.
“So to be precise,” he says, “the parameters that raised Skadi’s shell stress above design margin came from your office, not from local deviation. Confirm for the record.”
The silence that follows is thin and dry, like the air outside the hull.
He flicks two fingers and Skadi’s cross‑section blossoms into layered false‑colour, bands of blue and green pulsing along the composite ring as historical stress traces spool across time. Logged pressure steps crawl in from the left, live telemetry from the other locks riding above them in a paler overlay. Eirik keeps his voice level, almost bored, as he tags each inflection point.
“Here’s your minus‑forty start,” he says, cursor bracketing a jag of yellow at the ceramic–alloy interface. “Note the transient overshoot as the ring hunts for equilibrium. That spike’s not in the Earth model.”
He pulls up the corporate simulation in a side pane: clean, idealised curves marching up and down in obedient symmetry. With a gesture he aligns them to the same axis; the mismatch is immediate. Real data shows noise, hysteresis, asymmetry where the models predict smooth reversibility.
“These,” he indicates the upper set, “are from your risk board’s library. One‑gee, Earth ambient, full stock thickness. These,” he taps the lower traces, “are what actually happens in a cliff‑cut shell with Martian diurnal swings and dust‑cooled exteriors.”
He doesn’t say “your algorithms are wrong.” He doesn’t have to.
Instead of arguing alone, he turns the channel into a de facto workers’ assembly. He calls up lock‑cycle clips, maintenance tickets, red‑flag requisitions that never cleared Earth review, and asks short, targeted questions.
“Confirm standard workaround on gasket delam?”
A lock tech names the shim plates they had to mill locally when the authorised spares stopped coming.
“Confirm coolant purge delays?”
A furnace operator explains how they stagger loads to keep within a power budget set three synods ago, before Skadi doubled throughput.
Piece by piece, he threads their terse confirmations into a single, ugly contour: corporate under‑supply, frozen part catalogues, and test matrices written for hardware no one here has seen, all converging on a failure that was waiting to happen.
When Ragnhild reaches for contractual clauses, Eirik is already there, tagging lines from the colony charter on the shared display. He reads out the emergency autonomy provisions in the same flat tone, framing Skadi’s “deviations” as mandated local adaptations to negligent, Earth-centric directives. Under charter law, he notes, ignoring known environmental differentials would itself constitute breach and gross procedural misconduct.
He lets the silence work for him, then states it like a procedure call: a formal request for a separate, time‑stamped audit. Scope limited not to Skadi’s hardware or his composites, but to the authorisation path that scheduled an undocumented high‑amplitude load cycle on a primary pressure interface. On record, in front of half the ring, he inverts the vector of suspicion.
For a heartbeat the channel goes very still. Only the background hum of Mjollnir’s furnaces and the faint tick of cooling metal bleed through the open mics. No one breathes loud enough to trigger their voice tags.
Ragnhild’s eyes defocus. The faint blue‑green wash across her irises stutters, then resolves into a tighter, denser flicker as she drags new panes into view. Her jaw sets. Shoulders come off the relaxed corporate neutral she’s worn all shift and notch into something narrower, predatory, all her attention vectored somewhere just past him.
She is hunting again: but the spoor is different.
He can almost see the route in the changing micro‑reflections: contracts, routing tables, sign‑off chains. Her fingers flex once at her side as if remembering the weight of a sidearm she’s not allowed to carry in‑hab. Then they go still. Whatever she’s doing, it’s through implant gestures and subvocal commands now, running parallel to the feed he’s forced public.
A faint icon on the shared wall blinks without sound. Someone in the ring mutters, cut off halfway through the first consonant. No one wants to be the background noise on this recording.
Eirik keeps his hands loosely hooked through his harness, not moving toward a console, not offering help, not flinching. He watches the tiny delay between a new clause lighting on the wall and the almost imperceptible tilt of her head. She’s following his breadcrumb trail because she has to; his request is charter‑clean, time‑stamped, co‑witnessed by half a shift.
Whatever she finds upstream will either vindicate him or widen the blast radius beyond anything the ring can absorb.
Her posture says she understands that. And she is choosing to look anyway.
Her questions change texture. Not the broad, accusatory sweeps about “culture” and “tolerance for deviation” that she opened with, but tight incisions: which sign‑off ID bound those stress curves into the schedule; which risk board ticket bears the waiver hash; what latency shows between Skadi’s local warning tags and the central approvals queue. She calls up comparative logs without naming them, referencing checksums and routing IDs instead of people, dissecting the path the order took through systems she knows are supposed to be redundant, cross‑validated, audit‑proof.
Each question proceeds as if his premise is already accepted: that there was an undocumented high‑amplitude load cycle, that it intersected with a primary pressure interface, that Skadi’s crew followed the parameters they were given. The angle of attack has shifted. Every new datum she demands pushes the trace upstream, away from Mjollnir’s shop floor, away from the ceramic-composite panel in Cargo Lock Three, away from any wrench in a colonist’s hand.
She is following the chain into the cold strata above them: dispatch servers, risk committees, signature bundles with Earth gravity behind them.
The watching ring seems to contract around her. Men and women who came in braced to see Eirik cornered now stand very still at their stations, eyes fixed on the corporate grey at the centre of the arc. Ragnhild does not raise her voice, does not break cadence, but some fractional shift has propagated through her: the too‑even tone has picked up a metallic burr, the set of her shoulders a vector pointed not down into Mjollnir’s pits but up, along invisible links to orbit. The crew recognise the look; it is how they stare at a bad trendline. For the first time, the possibility resolves that the destabilising force may not be their own improvisation, but mandated load from above.
She starts stitching incident codes to encrypted directives and medical anomaly flags, cross‑correlating in real time, her voice still low and precise. The new tightness at her mouth is pure strain‑hardening: pattern‑matching routines she helped design now point back up the ladder, implying the flag on Edda Vale was primed by the same quota‑bending and latency masking she’s being ordered to expose.
In the space of a few exchanges the vector reverses. She is still asking the questions, still wrapped in corporate grey, but the predator’s clean geometry is gone. What’s left is a field operative feeling the trip‑wires under her own boots, aware that each confirmation she teases out isn’t closing on him but etching a fault line higher up her chain of command.
The line of her shoulders changes first, the micro‑economy of muscle that had been all conservation and control suddenly spending itself. She breaks from the console with too much force for the Martian gravity; her boots stutter half a step before the mag‑soles bite and translate the impulse into momentum straight at him.
“Enough,” she says, and the word is no longer level. The consonants come out hard, clipping the recycled air. The recorder band at her collar gleams as her throat works, tendons sharp against skin gone a fraction too pale.
Eirik’s hand is still braced on the railing, knuckles whitened with dust ground into the creases. Loki has shifted closer to him without quite stepping in front, weight over the balls of her feet, shoulders loose in a way that reads as relaxed only to people who haven’t watched her break up fights in low‑g corridors. Ragnhild tracks the micro‑adjustments automatically, annotating them the way she annotates anomalous pressure readings: defensive posture, implicit alliance, potential escalation vectors.
“You do not,” she continues, advancing until she has burned down the buffer of neutral floor between audit and line, “get to imply that I am here to fail you for someone else’s convenience. You signed those contracts. You operate under that charter. So do I.”
Her accent is flatter than theirs, Earth grav still in some vowels, but the burr of strain is there now, metallic, catching on certain phrases (“noncompliance window”, “sealed directive”) as if the words are abrading her from the inside. Eirik hears what’s underneath: not outrage at being challenged, but the sharp, thin terror of an operative who knows that what she writes today will be fed back through other algorithms, owned by other hands.
He has seen that look on technicians pushed past margins: fury as a heat‑shield around fear. She is closing the range not just to intimidate, but because distance means perspective, and perspective means seeing that the same stress‑lines she’s mapping down here may already be propagating above her, invisible and lethal.
Loki’s voice cuts in, low and precise, offering a procedural citation rather than insult. Ragnhild snaps to face her, eyes bright, pupils slightly too tight for the ambient light. “I know the clauses,” she says, sharper than any weld crack alert. “I wrote half the briefing notes you’re misquoting at me.”
Her left hand flexes once, involuntary, fingers trembling before she forces them flat against the seam of her smart‑fabric. The collar recorder’s status LED ticks from steady blue to a blinking pattern: uplink jitter, packet queue building somewhere in the chain. She feels the lag like pressure in her skull: supervisors on a thirteen‑minute delay, directives waiting to collapse the waveform of whatever she says next into clean text on someone else’s screen.
“You think I have room to manufacture stories?” Her gaze flicks past them to the ring of watching workers, then up, as if she could see through composite and regolith to the relay humming over the canyon. “I’m standing on the same tightrope you are. The difference is, if I fall, they don’t lose air they lose a narrative. And they don’t tolerate that.”
The admission lands in the bay like spilled coolant, spreading thin and cold. She realises she has given them too much and doubles down, stepping closer still until the gap between corporate grey and dust‑scuffed blue is measured in breath, not metres.
“So we are going to do this properly,” she says, each word a narrow beam. “You will answer the questions. You will not grandstand for the council or try to play me against my own logs. Because when this goes up the chain, the only thing that keeps your hulls (and my career) out of a demolition report is whether I can prove this place bends instead of lies.”
Eirik feels the old training kick in: understand the load path. Her anger is not random; it is vector and magnitude, applied through him toward something he cannot yet see. For the first time since she walked into Mjollnir, he understands that the investigation is not just extraction; it is also her own survival manoeuvre, and the blades she’s been brandishing around his work are just as close to her own throat.
She stabs a sequence into her wrist‑pad, not even glancing down, muscle memory and doctrine in one movement. The smart‑fabric at her forearm ripples as the pad throws out a secure‑channel handshake, command strings riding on priority tags meant to override local lag. On her collar, the recorder band pings a demand for exclusive access to bay feeds, audit flag set to hard‑lock.
Nothing snaps into compliance.
Status glyphs stutter, grey out, reappear half a line to the left. The pad’s haptic confirms are half a beat late, like echoes in bad rock. Overhead, one of the bay cameras ticks its iris twice before dumping to a neutral wide shot that ignores her override.
Ragnhild feels the desync like vertigo. Corporate protocol should waterfall down through Mjollnir’s control layer, freezing buffers, isolating her recording stack from any local tampering. Instead, she gets packet loss and looping acknowledgements, the unmistakable jitter of a mesh that is obeying something other than her.
Stig, Eirik realises, somewhere in the comms backbone, has threaded a thin wedge into her authority. Her interface is still live, still talking. But not in command. It is being handled, sandboxed, every keystroke captured by a system that has quietly decided she is just another user, not the apex of the hierarchy she represents.
The anger that had been vector and tactic flares through that realisation into something stripped of doctrine. Her tools are betraying her, here, in front of the very workers whose respect she needs to maintain. The loss is small in absolute terms, a few seconds of delay and partial control, but on her side of the equation it translates as exposure: if she cannot guarantee chain‑of‑custody on these recordings, she cannot guarantee the story Earth will read.
She compensates the only way left: volume and statute. Clause numbers, sub‑paragraphs, escalation ladders. She throws them like shrapnel, each citation a sharp, clipped burst in the thinning air between them. “Section thirteen point four, emergency suspension of charter prerogatives. Immediate removal of obstructive personnel. Personal liability for wilful misrepresentation: prison terms, forfeiture of habitat shares.”
Her voice rides up into a tight staccato that belongs in a briefing room, not over the hiss of coolant lines and the watching silence of a shift on pause. Eirik hears the gap between what she names and what she can actually trigger. Every “may be invoked” lands with a fractional hitch, an audible acknowledgement that any formal escalation will drag her superiors into the blast radius she is sketching.
Loki moves before Eirik can, sliding fully into Ragnhild’s line, palms open, badge visible, stance immovable. “Security protocol alpha‑three,” she says, but she applies it selectively, obeying the lockout on machinery and nothing else. She does not clear the bay. She does not produce restraints. Every ignored directive leaves Ragnhild a choice: de‑escalate, or manufacture the very “unsafe incident” her mandate forbids.
The words die mid‑citation. She cuts herself off with a visible swallow of bile, jaw tightening, and snaps a single, brittle order for the line to stand down, the syllables hard enough to ring off metal. No one quite obeys. She breaks from the knot of bodies toward the nearest hatch, gait controlled but accelerated, and the held‑breath bay unfreezes.
Ragnhild clears the hatch at a near‑march, shoulders tight, boots taking the gridded deck with clipped precision. The corridor outside Mjollnir’s bay hums with life‑support flow and distant machinery, but her attention is elsewhere: pupils tightening, focus flicking micro‑fast as corneal overlays paint the air with routing traces, biometric tags, incident timestamps. Eirik sees the faint blue ghost of an audit tree reflected on the inside of her lenses, a branching sequence of if‑then escalations she is already advancing.
Her right hand comes up to her collar, thumb brushing the recorder band in what looks at first like a tic. Her lips barely move. Priority flag, low‑volume. He catches only fragments over the ambient hiss. Officially.
They spill into the spine corridor as a unit and fracture without discussion, each of them bending into familiar paths around her straight‑line vector. Loki ghosts sideways at the first cross‑pass, cutting through a narrower maintenance throat that parallels the main run. Eirik knows that route: close walls, older seals, hand‑painted hazard glyphs from the early days. Loki walks it on muscle memory. Her head does not turn back, but she taps two fingers against her thigh as she goes. Stig drops even before the hatch has fully cycled, pivoting to a recessed comms blister half‑hidden behind a bank of fire bottles. His prosthetic hand is already unfolding tools as he ducks inside the half‑open panel, body shielding the interface from corridor sightlines. Eirik glimpses a flurry of status lights shift from green to amber as Stig routes around nonessential camera buses, throwing up just enough “diagnostic noise” that several corridor feeds will conveniently fail over to cached loops.
Eirik stays with Ragnhild, close enough to smell recycled antiseptic on her suit fabric, close enough that if she wavers he could physically catch her. He angles his body fractionally, herding her toward the better‑maintained central trunk and away from the hairline‑scored bulkheads of the older service rings. Here the pressure doors are newer, seal gaskets visually unmarred, inspection tags current. No visible micro‑cracks, no questions she can turn into leverage.
“Skadi Rim,” she says, not to him but to the system, voice pitched for the corridor mics. A route highlight blooms in her vision; he can see the way her gaze locks on invisible signage. Her stride lengthens.
“Mjollnir first,” Eirik says, just loud enough to register on her implants, soft enough not to carry. “You log this corridor as low‑risk. Keep to your own assessment.”
For a heartbeat she almost looks at him. Almost. Then the overlay wins; she drives on, and he shadows her, one step back and half a step to the side, where he can reach any panel, any manual override, before she does.
The corridor tightens where the main trunk kinks around a pressure bulkhead and splits: left toward Skadi Rim, right toward the deeper industrial arc. Traffic from both directions has stacked up, a clot of orange‑vested Mjollnir crews and dust‑streaked surface hands riding Skadi return. The pressure door at the junction glows amber, running a queued‑cycle buffer.
Ragnhild angles for the Skadi branch, intent, reaching past him toward the authorisation pad. Her ID glyph is already shimmering faintly in his peripheral AR when another hand gets there first.
Loki.
She slides in from the maintenance throat as if she has always been part of the formation, one palm flat over the pad, the other raised shoulder‑high to the watching crowd. “Security lockdown, rolling segment,” she says, crisp for the door mics. “Unresolved audit‑linked anomalies in Skadi approach. All nonessential traffic hold. Divert to Mjollnir trunk.”
The pad pings red. Overhead, the PA picks up her flag and translates it to procedure: “Temporary routing diversion, sector Skadi‑A. Stand by for clearance.” The mutter of voices sharpens, then flattens into intent silence as more workers cluster at the junction, eyes turned toward the block she has just created.
Ragnhild’s nostrils flare, irritation flattening into something closer to calculation as she aborts the Skadi vector. She snaps a half‑step pivot and knifes into a maintenance spine that peels off toward the Yggdrasil spur, pace never quite breaking. The corridor narrows abruptly: older composite ribs, matte where newer panels shine, seam tape feathered from a dozen pressure cycles. Eirik goes after her without signalling Loki or Stig, ducking under a low conduit, the air here tasting faintly of aged sealant and metallic dust.
He knows this run intimately: which bulkheads were patched after hairline crazing, which inspection tags are more optimistic than honest. Every scuff mark is a stress concentrator in his mind’s eye. Too close a shoulder brush to a tired panel, one bad stumble into a bowed brace, and this neat pursuit route becomes a decompression incident report with his name threaded through it. Ragnhild’s left hand drifts once toward the wall for balance as a minor vertigo shiver takes her; he edges between her and the worst‑looking seam, forcing her line tighter down the centre of the spine, trading positional advantage for a fragile margin of safety.
The corridor lighting drops half a stop as the ambient hum hardens into a saw‑toothed alarm: atmospheric micro‑leak, Skadi Rim grid, live. Ragnhild checks mid‑stride, jaw tight, audit tree forking behind her eyes between evidence and incident response. Loki’s voice cuts across the secure band, snapping emergency crews to Skadi while she flags hard interlocks ahead, steering route permissions so that the only viable path funnels Ragnhild into a choke‑point junction. Under the layered alerts, Loki’s phrasing is clinical: cooperate under local safety command chain now, or every second of hesitation logs as contributory negligence on the shutdown report: her name, and his, braided into the liability trace.
They meet hard in a cramped cross‑junction, not with restraints but with a three‑way stall. Ragnhild is pale, gloved fingers whitening on the ribbed wall as her implants chase down a spike of vertigo. Eirik plants himself by an inspection hatch whose serial he can recite, feeling every micron of its fatigue. Loki stands between, palm resting on the emergency seal lever like a threat and a promise, helmet mic live. From the speakers, incident traffic is all edge: Skadi cargo lock sealed on a rising hiss, micro‑fracture arrested two inspection ports short of catastrophic propagation, one loader tech on their way to med with a torn suit and frostbite blooming up their forearm. Numbers and probabilities spool in Eirik’s head translating the medic’s dry jargon into the image of a corridor full of loose, airless bodies. For half a heartbeat he sees this junction the same way: one wrong motion, one mistimed override, and the only thing separating audit from obituary is the position of Loki’s hand.
The open band is briefly all compression hiss and clipped cross‑talk, then resolves into the medic’s voice, flat with adrenaline and training.
“Loader tech is stable. Circulation’s good. They’ll keep the arm,” she reports, and a beat later, as if forced by protocol rather than mercy: “Repeat, limb viability confirmed. Local frostbite only.”
Loki’s lashes flicker once. Eirik feels the exhale leave him before he’s aware he was holding it. His mind fills in what the words edit out: nerve conduction thresholds, thaw protocols, the smell of cryo‑salve and cooked polymer lining. The probability tree that had a diverging branch marked amputation collapses back into salvage.
Then the medic adds, voice pitched half a register lower, as if knowing every open ear is listening: “For the record, micro‑fracture propagation stopped less than a metre short of the transverse weld. If it had run to joint delta‑four, we’d be zipping bags instead of wrapping gauze.”
The channel pops with someone’s swallowed curse caught by an open mic, cut off almost immediately by control. No one repeats the numbers, but the topology is already mapped in Eirik’s head: stress vectors, seal geometries, what a metre more means in terms of cubic volume lost before isolation, seconds to unconsciousness, minutes to cellular death. His panels performed exactly to the limits he calculated, and that precision feels like indecency.
Ragnhild’s gaze ticks to him, something evaluative and sharp in the set of her mouth. Not accusation yet. Just correlation. In her overlays, he knows, incident reports are already sprouting tags: MATERIAL CLASS, ORIGIN, AUTHORISING ENGINEER.
Loki’s hand tightens on the lever. The medic keeps talking (cooling regimen, hyperbaric allocation, follow‑up scans) but Eirik only hears the conditional that hangs over all of it: one metre. One metre further and Skadi Rim would be a crime scene, not an audit point.
The corridor’s ambient hum sharpens as Skadi Rim’s status blocks flip from amber pulse to a hard, accusing green. The colour means equilibrium, but the pattern (solid, unsympathetic) reads in his gut as post‑mortem, the system calmly certifying a survival it did nothing to feel. Stable now, the telemetry insists, graph lines settling back within acceptable bands, while everyone on the net still has the echo of the pressure klaxon baked into their inner ear.
Eirik watches the update cascade along the wall strip: lock integrity nominal, atmosphere loss arrested, casualty logged as non‑critical. The phrasing is as bloodless as the green wash soaking the junction. It gives no metric for the near‑miss, no unit for how close joint delta‑four came to letting go.
Behind the numbers he can see the event replayed at finite‑element resolution: crack front slowing as it hits the fibre‑reinforced layer he argued for, stress redistributing in jagged gradients through material he knows by porosity map and batch lot. The system’s confirmation reads like a verdict. Not safe. Just not failed, yet.
Loki’s fingers tighten on the emergency seal lever as ops push the lock telemetry into the corridor feed: a compressed replay of Skadi Rim almost failing. Stress spikes march up the graph like a heartbeat in fibrillation. There’s a transient kink in the displacement traces where Eirik’s ceramic‑composite panels took the load, a flex signature just inside the red band. For three frames the logging stream blanks (buffer overflow or someone’s intervention, impossible to tell at this resolution) and then comes back clean, as if the crack front politely obeyed protocol. Each datum slots into place as a documented “narrow escape,” but in the silence between packet bursts Eirik can feel the unrecorded question harden: not how it held, but who they will decide should have let it fail.
Ragnhild straightens by degrees, a small tremor chasing through her left hand before her posture reasserts itself. Her gaze goes unfocused for a heartbeat as overlays sync and cross‑indexes bloom, then hardens on Eirik with a colder arithmetic: his unapproved composites, her sealed directive, and a near‑miss that upgrades an abstract compliance exercise into a potential negligence case with names already pencilled in.
He feels it land, a vector more than a thought: the micro‑fracture is not just a scare, it is an instrument. With one logged pressure drop and a smear of blood in the incident photos, she has her wedge. Grounds to invoke clauses that bypass council sign‑off, reclassify his work as latent hazard, and drag him into a process designed to assign blame, not fix metal.
Ragnhild doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t have to.
“Under Annex Eleven, subsection C,” she says, more to her collar band than to anyone in the corridor, “I am designating the Skadi Rim micro‑fracture a Category‑Three Structural Event.”
The words vanish into the recorder. Outwardly, it’s just another note. In the colony’s rule stack, it’s a pivot.
Category Three means the local council is no longer primary. Review flows straight into the corporate chain, emergency protocols threaded through a side channel of the charter that most people only reference for meteor strikes and hull spall.
Her gaze tracks along the blood smear still drying against the deck grating, the hairline in the composite bulking faintly in thermal overlay. She lets the silence do half the work; every person in the lock knows what it looks like in a photograph stripped of context. An engineer’s experiment. A failure plane. Flesh.
“This meets the threshold for systemic risk,” she adds, still clinically calm. “Not an isolated operator error.”
Systemic risk moves it out of the box labelled “unfortunate near‑miss.” Into “patterns,” “precedent,” “control of processes.” The domain where she is strongest.
Ops tries to object (something about prior incident classifications, council arbitration) but she’s already flagging the buffer gap in the telemetry with a forensic marker, the way a field medic circles a bruise.
“Data discontinuities in critical sequences trigger automatic escalation,” she reminds them. “That’s your own procedure set.”
There’s no argument for that without admitting that the lock runs on unwritten understandings as much as on code.
Eirik feels the shift in his chest cavity, like pressure equalising the wrong way. This won’t stay an airlock problem. Reframed as a system failure, it becomes a net. Every panel, every print run he signed off on, is now a potential instance of “same underlying defect.”
She doesn’t accuse him directly. She doesn’t have to. The protocol she’s invoked will do it stepwise, in forms and queries and cross‑referenced risk matrices, until his work is no longer a contribution, but an anomaly under investigation.
Over the next shift-cycle her presence diffuses without her physically moving. Skadi Rim’s airlock telemetry, Mjollnir’s process logs, maintenance tickets, even informal fault notes scraped from side channels vanishes from ordinary access and reappears as hashed task numbers on a corporate sideband no one local can read.
She rides the priority queue like it’s hers by right, pushing bulk transfers through Yggdrasil’s trunk while the council is still drafting their first response. Each segment of log that mentions his batch codes or experimental lot numbers gets cross‑tagged in a new schema he’s never seen before: RISK_SERIES, DEFECT_FAMILY, MATERIAL_VARIANT_U.
The first anyone else sees of it is the fallout. Formal notice packets propagate through the mesh in a staccato wave, permissions override flags attached, auto‑translated into dry legalese. Subject: Preliminary Structural Integrity Review – Mandatory Participation. Delivery receipts ping off personal wristbands and bunk consoles alike, red‑bordered and non‑dismissible until acknowledged.
They read like subpoenas, not safety briefs. Names, timestamps, and reference codes; no narrative, just a structured demand to account for where they were and what they touched whenever his composites were in play.
They pull his badge credentials out of the workflow without ceremony. One moment he’s shoulder‑deep in a feed hopper at Mjollnir, gloves hot with dust; the next, his task queue blanks and a security ping redirects him to a windowless debrief pod off Ops.
The cycle fractures into segments of the same hour. Ragnhild’s people spool Skadi Rim telemetry on loop, freeze frames on stress curves and boundary conditions, overlaid with excerpts from his own design logs. Conservative safety factors become “pre‑deployment reservations.” Phrases like “field trial under controlled conditions” appear on their tablets as “use prior to full qualification.”
He answers the same questions in slightly altered order until his own wording starts to sound incriminating even to him.
In Mjollnir’s side channels, Loki and Stig watch access flags proliferate around his projects: test bays flipped to restricted, schematics sealed under quarantine tags, production queues snapped to indefinite hold. Informal workarounds dry up as supervisors cite “compliance exposure.” In the canteen, voices drop when he enters; off‑hand jokes harden into a quiet, contagious calculation: if his panels fail, everyone bleeds vacuum.
By the time the first interim risk bulletin ripples back down the light‑lag, the polarity has inverted. He is no longer logged as subject‑matter lead but as initiating hazard source, his batch IDs threaded through every red‑flag paragraph. Ragnhild seeds phrases like “systemic design deviation” and “culture of unvetted experimentation,” framing his composites as Exhibit A for suspending Edda Vale’s operational discretion.
Skadi Rim blossoms across half the control wall, a stack of feeds and overlays collapsing into a single accusation.
Thermal gradients, cycle timestamps, hull strain maps: all of it re-rendered by the audit suite into something clean, colour-coded, and damning. The micro-fracture signature sits dead centre in every reconstruction, an anaemic spiderweb in false-blue along the cargo lock’s inner ring, tagged and circled until it stops looking like noise and starts looking like intent.
The investigators run the same thirty seconds of maintenance footage on loop. Loki in profile at the console. A junior tech on the gantry, gloved hand palming an inspection plate. The status bar flicking from green to amber as the lock equalises. Overlaid in the corner, a schematic pops Eirik’s ceramic-composite panels into harsh relief, each arc labelled with his initials and the local project code.
Different channels, same conclusion. Forensic material tests from the test coupons he signed off, months ago. Finite element models he built on tired nights, now re-simulated with revised assumptions he did not approve. Telemetry from Skadi Rim’s strain gauges, scraped from raw logs and run through a corporate pattern engine. Every vector that can be drawn is drawn through his work.
On one side of the room, colony operations people speak in low, deliberate phrases about load profiles, about weather cycles, about dust-lens heating. On the other, Ragnhild’s team tags clips with neutral identifiers that read like verdicts: DESIGN_DEVIATION, CONTROLLED-RISK_THRESHOLD_EXCEEDED, NON-STANDARD_MATERIAL_APPLICATION.
They freeze a frame where a stress contour flares at the interface between standard alloy and his composite ring. Someone zooms in until the pixels smear. A cursor taps the junction, drops a marker, and attaches his name.
Eirik watches his panels become the failure mode of record, his margins reinterpreted as recklessness, his caution erased by a software template that has already decided what “cause” should look like.
Encrypted bursts on the side-band feeds start carrying new tags. Not formal directives, not yet. Just clipped phrases embedded in routing metadata and risk dashboards Eirik is not supposed to see.
PATTERN_OF_CATASTROPHIC_NEGLIGENCE.
UNAUTHORISED_MATERIALS_EXPOSURE.
He recognises the structures, the way compliance language nests inside actuarial shorthand. Once those composites of words appear in a preliminary risk lattice, they accrete weight. They stop being hypotheses and start becoming priors in every subsequent model, informing what “reasonable mitigation” and “acceptable loss” will mean for this place.
Stig had shown him, quietly, how terms propagate. A single flagged descriptor in a safety bulletin seeding into fleet-wide alerts. Cross-reference engines pulling the same phrase into insurance underwriters’ dashboards, into procurement algorithms deciding which colonies receive spare sealant, which get downgraded to “experimental, high-liability”.
Eirik can’t see the full text, only the fragments that leak through correlation summaries on the local side. But he knows what they imply. Negligence is not a parameter error; it is a moral category, one the corporation writes into contract law. Once attached to his panels, to his name, it becomes self-justifying cause for whatever comes next.
It starts as a few unexplained dips in the load graph. Smelter zones ramp down mid-cycle, then sit at idle while controllers spit “DEFERRED_PRIORITY” flags. Extruder heads cool in their tracks, polymer feeds stuttering as if someone is slowly closing a valve far upstream. The control room’s ambient murmur shifts as operators realise it is not a glitch: allocation tables update with new ceilings, all trending one way. Non-core lines in Mjollnir blink from scheduled to suspended; low-power warnings propagate along the ring and into outlying habitats that depend on its waste heat. Fans spool lower. Corridor lights step down a notch. People feel it in the air and in their bones before anyone names it. Punishment in kilowatt increments.
Messages start queuing in the ops feed: tiny, clinical updates from the logistics lattice. Inbound manifests blink from CONFIRMED to ON HOLD. Replacement seals. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. A control rod actuator set he personally specced. Each line acquires the same annotation (PENDING_COMPLIANCE_REVIEW) until the pattern is unmissable: someone on the far end is closing a fist, and they are the object being squeezed.
He watches the implication propagate in real time: council channels throttled under “coordination review”, workers’ assemblies postponed “pending legal clarification”. The charter, once a carved-in-basalt guarantee of self-rule, has become an entry in a negotiation matrix, its continuance modelled as contingent on “remediation outcomes”. Somewhere, a provisional shutdown order sits in draft, its trigger variable labelled with his materials, his ID.
The control room’s usual clatter collapses in stages, like a system going cold. Status chimes cut mid-tone. Channel chatter falls away as one by one the workstations around him drop to a corporate lockout splash. Then the room itself reacts: a low, authoritative thud as the main door bolts drive home, followed by the more delicate clack of secondary pins seating into frame. Along the bulkheads, hazard glyphs unfurl in disciplined rows, LOCKDOWN, ACCESS LIMITED, SECURITY REVIEW IN PROGRESS, washing the curved walls in a hard red that flattens everyone’s skin tones to the same sick pallor.
A compliance sigil irises across the inner hatch window, opaque and pulsing, the corporate crest nested in a rotating ring of legal article numbers. It is not just locked; it is claimed.
Conversations chop off mid-sentence. Two operators near the thermal panel half-rise from their seats, then freeze as their badges ping yellow and the overhead PA issues a neutral instruction to “remain at assigned stations”. The background music feed dies with an ugly click-pop, leaving only the omnipresent infrastructure noises: the distant bass rumble of smelter housings, the attenuated whine of circulation fans, relay contactors ticking beneath the floor. All of it sounds oddly muffled, as if the air has thickened.
Eirik feels the silence gathering around him, not absence but pressure. The control ring is suddenly too large, its tiered consoles and panoramic displays reduced from a shared cockpit to an arena. Peripheral AR overlays wink out of his corneal HUD one by one until only system vitals and a blinking notification ribbon from Compliance remain.
He becomes acutely aware of his own body: the rasp of filtered air in his throat, the roughness of dust in his sinuses, the faint tremor in his fingers resting on the console edge. His breathing is the loudest thing in his world, counting out the seconds until whatever this is finishes coalescing into something named.
His console stutters, then reconfigures under his hands. Status panes shutter and reopen in a corporate palette he has never chosen: neutral grey, compliant blue. Process control stacks ghost out line by line until every actuator, valve, and interlock he knows by heart is rendered as a locked icon, tooltip: READ-ONLY (COMPLIANCE OVERRIDE). Thermal and pressure traces flatten into pre-digested “summaries”, their granularity bled away; anything older than the last audit marker is tagged RESTRICTED ARCHIVE.
He tries to drill down anyway, fingertip flicking through menus by muscle memory. The response is instant and identical, no matter the vector: MAINT_DATA_REQ_DENIED / CODE: 17-C / AUTH: R.RAVNARDOTTIR. Attempts to pivot sideways earn the same terse rebuff, the same authority string.
External channels collapse next. Council feed: SIGNAL PATH SUSPENDED. Engineering backline: ROUTE RESTRICTED TO APPROVED ENDPOINTS. Even the low-band worker mesh he sometimes piggybacks for raw sensor taps returns a soft, patronising banner: DATA STREAMS UNDER REVIEW, CONTACT LIAISON.
The ring’s machinery continues to thrum beneath him, real systems doing real work, but his instruments now show only what someone else has decided exists.
Across the ring, Ragnhild has colonised an AR node, one hand resting light on the console plate, the other making small, economical cuts through the air. Her implants answer: a vertical plume of data unspools between them, a controlled storm of translucent planes and vector lines. Incident timestamps stack over schematic cross-sections of Skadi Rim; micro-fracture markers blink like pinpricks of infection along cargo lock seams. Adjacent layers resolve into shift rosters, badge pings, furnace logs, ceramic batch identifiers, stress–strain curves annotated in corporate shorthand. With a few gestures she coalesces them, collapsing tangles of correlation into a single, clean convergence where his experimental panel series sits at the intersection, haloed in hard red: PROBABLE ROOT CAUSE, confidence interval climbing.
She speaks for the record in scalpelled clauses, each one aligned to a policy citation, her hand trimming the AR cascade so every node hangs a heartbeat longer on his ID string: late-shift overrides, undocumented kiln ramp profiles, waivers buried under “principal investigator discretion”. Then the cadence shifts; the same voice outlines, almost gently, a “controlled narrative” predicated on one engineer absorbing all variance.
…the template blooms across his screen. Each clause has been focus-tested to cauterise corporate exposure: process deviations framed as “individual initiative”, risk waivers recast as his “unilateral judgment”. Ragnhild’s voice stays low, almost soothing, as she highlights indemnity lines and hints at what non-cooperation would trigger (shipment reviews, contract escalations, “temporary governance adjustments”) until the words compress his chest like a mis-set pressure suit, right up until,
The siren’s rising whoop knifes through the thick air between them, not just sound but system priority: a hard-coded interrupt that cuts his audio feed, strips her voice from his earpiece mid-syllable. His console shudders under his hands as the interface seizes control, Ragnhild’s statement dissolving into blocky warning glyphs. The AR plume she’d been sculpting collapses, panes shearing sideways and vanishing as a priority-red lattice forces itself to the foreground.
LOCK PRIORITY OVERRIDE – SKADI RIM – HULL-STRESS EXCURSION, pulses in stark sans serif. Below it, line after line of status flags cascade: LOCAL GRADIENT ANOMALY. MICRO-FRACTURE PROPAGATION SUSPECTED. CYCLE IN PROGRESS – SUPERVISOR: L. LINDSDOTTIR.
His input focus is ripped away. The console ignores his half-finished gesture, cursor snapped to the new alert stack. An automatic security confirmation pings Ragnhild’s badge, her ID string flashing once beside his, then being demoted to observer as operations protocols overrule audit privileges. For a fractional second the room drops into the flat, filtered quiet of alarm mode before the siren ramps again, higher, faster.
Telemetric graphs slam into existence along the periphery of his vision: pressure curves from chamber A3, temperature deltas in the composite banding, vibration spectra jittering above nominal. Skadi Rim’s cross-section stencils itself over his main field, lines too familiar, tagged with his own archived design notes. Live data begins to thread through them, a pale blue pulse racing the circumference of the cargo lock, each sensor node shedding numbers like coolant.
The system drags his biometrics into the frame without asking. HEART RATE ELEVATED, flashes briefly in a corner, then is swallowed by the expanding fault tree. Automated decision trees stack over one another, branching paths ticking through pre-authorised responses, every one converging on the same pending action hanging at the bottom of the screen like a guillotine command waiting for weight.
The lock’s geometry extrudes itself in brutal detail: a rotating axonometric of chamber A3, hull layers peeled back, his ceramic-composite band haloed for emphasis. Finite-element vectors climb from cool green through amber into a saturated, angry red, needles standing up along the circumference where his material interfaces with standard alloy. The stress map animates in tight, stuttering increments, each refresh birthing new filaments of overstrain that crawl radially like frost patterns across a pond about to fail.
Micro-fracture likelihood ticks from 0.[^13] to 0.[^29] to 0.[^41] in the space of a breath. The side panel doesn’t change cadence. It just assembles its verdict in corporate-neutral prose: ASSET-PROTECTIVE DECOMPRESSION PROTOCOL – READY. Underneath, subroutines marshal themselves: LOCK ISOLATION: ARMED. ROVER HARD-STOW: INCOMPLETE. OCCUPANT INDEX: NON-ZERO.
His own annotations from the retrofit sit ghosted behind the live feed, a faint overlay of past confidence: “composite seam: exceeds spec by 18% at −40°C”, “redundant sensor web mitigates undetected propagation”. Now those same sensors scream variance, the redundancy merely providing more agreement that things are going bad in all directions at once.
Loki’s ID tag pops into the corner of his display, hard-labelled as LOCK SUPERVISOR, with a neat column of rover-beacon codes stacked under it like ballast: four EVA suits, one driver in the cab, one mechanic half in a hatch: telematics frozen mid-step. OCCUPANT INDEX: 6, the system notes with the same affectless tone it uses for pallet counts. STATUS: CONSTRAINED – CYCLE IRREVERSIBLE.
Decision-logic branches waterfall down the side of the screen, each node tagged with some compliance citation, each path converging on the same cold prescription: INITIATE CONTROLLED HARD-VENT TO PRESERVE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY AND CAPITAL EQUIPMENT. A smaller line below quantifies them as if that makes it cleaner: ESTIMATED HUMAN SURVIVABILITY: LOW. ESTIMATED HULL SURVIVABILITY: HIGH. The algorithm has already chosen what matters.
He stabs for the abort stack anyway, muscle memory chasing buried maintenance hooks, but every path collapses into the same greyed-out lattice: AUTHORISATION REQUIRED – CORPORATE OVERRIDE IN FORCE. Icons resolve into tiny padlocks stamped with her division crest, nested deep in policy code. His commands buffer uselessly, throttled beneath her remote mandate, as if her hand were literally constricting the colony’s airway.
The stress curve jerks past his design envelope, micro-fracture flags daisy-chaining into a serrated band of red along the perimeter plot. Hard-vent timers instantiate in the corner of his vision, counting down in corporate-blue. Ragnhild goes very still. She pivots toward the Skadi Rim feeds, warning bands whitening her face into a mask of analytic vacancy, implants flickering as she drills into the lock’s live telemetry.
She doesn’t raise her voice; the audio meters barely tick above ambient. She just starts talking, each sentence clipped and neutral, pitched exactly for both the room and the thin recorder band at her collar.
“This progression,” she says, eyes not leaving the viewport feed, “is consistent with projected failure cascades under conditions of degraded procedural compliance.”
On the main display, Skadi Rim’s schematic pulses with concentric hazard rings, each expansion tagged by his own stress models. Now scraped, parsed, and co‑opted by her overlays. She isolates one snapshot with a fingertip, freezing the jagged bloom of micro-fracture flags and cycling timers. A transparent annotation frame locks around it, lines of autogenerated text unfurling in corporate-legal syntax.
“Note,” she continues, “the interval between primary anomaly detection and system lockout. That latency aligns with Earth-side simulations of facilities where ‘informal workarounds’ have supplanted standard escalation chains.”
Her corneal implants flicker, cross-referencing live feeds against archived maintenance logs, council vote records, raw sensor drifts he recognises by checksum alone. Each pulsing ring he’s been using for months as an internal early warning becomes, under her running commentary, an evidentiary exhibit: EXHIBIT A – STRESS MONITORING UNDER-ESCALATED; EXHIBIT B – UNAUTHORISED MATERIALS SUBSTITUTION; EXHIBIT C – DOCUMENTED TOLERANCE OVERRIDES.
“Observe also,” she says, “the mismatch between formal inspection sign-offs and actual operational conditions at the lock interface. The model predicted this divergence once non-standard practices became culturally normalised.”
She says “culturally” the way one might say “contaminated.”
On an ancillary pane, she pulls up a stylised version of his composite panel specifications, then a clipped extract from an operations-council transcript where he’d argued, tired and certain, that design margins were sound. Her cursor circles the micro-fracture cluster hugging a panel seam.
“Risk modelling flagged experimental integration at primary egress points as a major vector,” she notes. “The current incident tracks that curve with minimal deviation.”
By the time she finishes the sentence, the feed has transformed. To her, to the recorder, it’s no longer a lock in crisis; it’s a diagram proving a thesis written long before the metal ever cracked.
Loki’s EVA transponder blooms amber on the schematic, a tight cone of motion vectors brushing the hazard perimeter, and a new contour line etches itself across Ragnhild’s overlays: HUMAN PRESENCE WITHIN PROJECTED FAILURE ZONE. She tilts her head a fraction, calling up the personnel lattice. Loki’s file and contract terms stack neatly beside the stress map, tagged SECURITY – DEBT-BONDED – HIGH-VALUE TRAINING INVESTMENT.
Ragnhild narrates what she sees as if dictating a post-mortem that hasn’t quite happened yet. Security deployment, she notes, was adjusted “informally” to cover fabrication overruns; shift rotations at Skadi Rim show undocumented swaps; a debt-bonded officer has been assigned repeatedly to the highest-risk interface without corresponding hazard compensation.
Her cursor traces the route that put Loki on that lock, then layers in the material certifications for the composite panels. The phrase “locally improvised” appears in her annotation frame, accompanied by a citation to corporate standards he’s memorised in better contexts.
She concludes, precise and almost patient, that this convergence of procedural drift and experimental materials constitutes a systemic negligence event. Under policy, she says, that obliges her to break seal on the directive authorising immediate intervention.
She unrolls it like a checklist written months ago. First, emergency vesting of all operational authority in a corporate-appointed administrator: council resolutions reduced to “advisory input,” no binding force. Then, automatic suspension of local veto on throughput and quota hikes. Production ceilings, rest-cycle protections, discretionary maintenance shutdowns all reclassified as “targets subject to central optimisation.” Next, a comprehensive algorithmic “risk rebalancing” of debt instruments: interest bands ratcheting up for anyone tagged high-variance, collateral clauses activating on housing pods, med-coverage, even dependent transit rights. The language is clean, actuarial, until she starts enumerating cohorts: injured workers on modified duty, single caregivers with dependent riders, anyone in arrears on equipment prosthetics. Each group is a line item, quietly stripped of bargaining weight.
When she reaches security, her delivery turns almost kind. Prior incident flags, she says, will trigger “protective restructuring” of contracts; her gaze rests one heartbeat too long on Loki’s marker. The phrases are gentle but the vector is obvious enough that two council members look away, picturing Loki reassigned, exported, or locked into clauses no local vote can ever unwind.
Only then does she allow a hairline crack in her composure, fingers tightening on the console rim as another stress spike ladders through the schematic and the lock’s margin band thins towards zero. She states, flatly, that once the hard-vent completes the dataset will be “unassailable”. The phrasing is almost theoretical, but it lands in Eirik’s cortex like a dropped tool in vacuum. His gaze snaps to the control schema, irritation cutting through fatigue as he recognises the architecture, and that’s when the odd discontinuity in the command routing, one segment not inheriting corporate authority tokens, finally resolves in his mind as more than a glitch.
He dives past the screaming red overlays and soft-lock prompts the way he would peel slag off a crucible wall, fingers working the manual keys to strip the interface back to its bare tables. The GUI protests, greying out fields, trying to herd him back into approved workflows. He kills panels one by one until only a grid of identifiers and token hashes remains, a monochrome skeleton under the colony’s skin.
Routing nodes scroll in tight columns: SKADI/RIM/LOCK-A through -H, each inheriting a neat corporate authority chain. He scrolls further down, filtering for anything marked local-only, anything that doesn’t terminate in an Earth-side certificate. The list shrinks, then almost empties.
One line sits crooked in the neatly ordered hierarchy. Old typography, legacy path syntax: SKADI/RIM/LOCK-AUX-01:YGG-CORE/LOCAL. It shouldn’t even be in the same namespace as the current architecture. It’s tagged MAINT-DEPR, last human edit timestamped three Martian years ago. No current owner. No corporate token lineage.
He isolates it, expanding the entry. The audit notes are minimal, a clipped remark from some long-departed integrator about “temporary override during phased upgrade; retain for back-compat until Skadi full refit.” The refit never came. The colony had bent schedules and budgets around more urgent haemorrhages, and this tiny artery of command had been left buried under later layers.
Dependencies spider out from the node: a narrow set of privileges scoped to “interlock functional tests”, “seal cycle diagnostics”, “integrity verification quenches”. Underneath the fossilised comments, the live permission mask lights up in his peripheral view. It still has the right to assert arbiter status over the oldest cargo chambers: for test durations only, capped in seconds. The automated vent sequence is listed as a peer process, not a superior.
His jaw tightens. Someone at the start had trusted Yggdrasil’s core as a neutral, local brain. Before corporate pushed all hard decisions back through their own stacks. The channel persists like an inclusion flaw in alloy: invisible until stressed, then decisive.
He drills into the metadata. The path is throttled, bandwidth choked down by corporate traffic shaping until the latency graph looks like scar tissue, and every packet carries a bright deprecated tag that should scare off any normal process. But the underlying permission lattice is untouched. No revocations, no redlines from Risk. Someone marked it obsolete and then never spent the cycles to neuter it.
He traces the escalation curve. If a process originating inside Yggdrasil’s core claims that orphaned token and presents as a scheduled integrity verification, the arbiter bit flips. For the duration of the test window, that legacy channel asserts seniority over peer routines on its scope: including the hard-vent automation.
He watches the model play out on a ghosted copy of the live schema: vent daemon demoted to subordinate, seal-cycle controller reclassified as a test subject, Skadi’s oldest cargo chamber authority tree briefly rooted not in any corporate certificate, but in a local maintenance domain. It’s not clean; it throws a storm of warnings. Yet the hierarchy inversion holds. For a sliver of time, the auto-vent would have to listen.
Forty seconds of diverted authority, the log estimates. Barely a third of an airlock cycle, and only if the override is injected from Yggdrasil’s physical console, not from any proxied session, and only if a certified comms technician rides it in. The request has to originate from a live seat, signed with current-shift biometrics, a hardware token slotted into an ageing reader, and a manual confirmation across two redundant channels. Any mismatch and the legacy path collapses back under corporate governance. The timing window is hard-coded: forty seconds from arbiter assertion to automatic rollback, no extension hooks, no graceful handover. Long enough to flip a hierarchy, the system notes. Not long enough for errors, or hesitation.
In that sliver, he can rip the hard-vent profile out of the chain, inject his own pressure ramp by hand, and force the controller to track a slower, crooked curve. If he staggers the thermal bleed just right, the ceramic-composite skins will bow and creep instead of crazing, the lock volume narrowing to a brutal but survivable corridor for Loki’s team.
For forty seconds, if Stig rides that dead protocol, Skadi’s lock belongs less to Earth than to the three of them. If he hesitates, the vent profile completes and the chamber peels open like bad weld. If he mistimes the rollback, the arbiter snaps back mid-curve and the composites shatter. No simulation, no rollback, no appeal: just physics.
He tags the override package to the top of the maintenance queue and then shoves it sideways, out of the sanctioned pathway and into the local peer mesh. No corporate headers, no route-through via admin. Just raw priority bits and a destination hash burned into Yggdrasil’s physical address space.
The packet leaves Mjollnir as a tight spike of traffic, skinning along the internal fibre, hopping through three ageing switches that still honour pre-charter routing rules. For an instant it looks like a glitch in the log. A naked, unauthenticated pulse moving too fast to be crew chat, too small to be telemetry.
In Yggdrasil’s core, under the muted hiss of fans, Stig’s console throws a quiet amber flag: UNSCHEDULED HIGH-PRIORITY BURST. No corporate signature. No encryption wrapper he recognises from the last ten software pushes. His left hand taps the acknowledge key before the automated filter can bounce it out to the central arbiter.
The packet unfolds across his main display as a skeletal, over-compressed schematic of Skadi Rim’s cargo lock lattice: pressure hull, ceramic-composite skins, internal baffles, sensor grid. Someone, Eirik, obviously; nobody else tags their annotations in that particular thin blue, has stripped the model down to pure stress paths and control nodes. No textual plea, no explanation, just a brutally efficient diagram and a single instruction token pointing to Yggdrasil’s legacy control backend.
He doesn’t need more words. Routing tables. Arbitration flags. A dead protocol endpoint circled in blue, hanging off the comms stack like a tumour the corporation forgot to excise. If he binds that to Skadi’s controller and asserts it, everything talking through this tower for the next forty seconds will route local, not up-canyon to orbit. Voice, telemetry, life-support interlocks. Corporate supervisory signals.
He swallows. Cutting that link, even briefly, is contract suicide under normal conditions, and he can already see the storm attenuation graphs climbing, bandwidth margins collapsing. Earth’s watching more closely now, not less.
But overlaid on the schematic, in faint, jittery red from Skadi’s live feed, is the current lock profile: hard-vent armed, safety ramp greyed behind Ragnhild’s remote authorisations, thermal differential edging into the zone where Eirik’s ceramic panels go from elastic to glass. Loki’s team beacons cluster inside the chamber, four green points in a shrinking volume.
Eirik isn’t just asking him to risk sanctions. He’s asking him to take the one channel the corporation still absolutely owns and cut it loose, here, now, with storm noise already chewing the margins and audit daemons crawling every log.
Stig stares at the intersection of those overlays (dead protocol, live lock, Loki’s ID pulsing at the edge of the hazard band) and realises there isn’t time to argue about governance or debt clauses or what happens when Earth sees the gap. There is exactly one airlock cycle left to decide if Skadi Rim belongs to the charter or to the parent company.
His prosthetic fingers flex once over the manual routing panel. Then he kills the automatic escalation alert, buries the amber flag under a maintenance tag, and starts peeling back the relay stack towards the forgotten switch Eirik has circled.
Ragnhild’s authorisation tree flares across her corneal overlay, branches of green and amber cascading down Skadi Rim’s schema as she peels back the last of the local privileges. Manual panels grey out, one by one. Command paths harden towards orbit.
Half a ring away, Stig digs in under her changes. He hooks the dead protocol endpoint into the live stack and shoves a spoofed LINE-INTEGRITY_DIAG at the tower’s core, tagging it with the exact noise signature the last dust front burned into their margins. For six heartbeats the relay trunk believes it is sick. Uplink quality flags tumble, packet loss spikes, watchdog daemons start annotating the event as environmental degradation and queue non-critical traffic for resend.
On the graphs, it looks like the storm finally biting through.
Beneath that orchestrated stumble, one narrow trunk drops out of corporate arbitration and reverts to pre-charter defaults. Local routes trump remote. Legacy control channels wake like old scars. Eirik’s override rides that flicker, a bare, unsigned command-stream slipping past Ragnhild’s descending lockouts and latching itself into Skadi Rim’s pressure controller before the tree can finish sealing.
Ragnhild’s overlay judders. For an instant Skadi’s schematic smears into pixel noise and her balance goes with it, the room tilting sideways on a non-existent hinge. She locks her jaw, rides the vertigo out on muscle memory, and forces a manual refresh. Primary uplink latency spikes threefold; Skadi’s control tree shows a momentary reversion to local arbitration, then snaps back under her credentials.
“Bypass primary,” she murmurs, more habit than speech. A backup channel claws its way through the storm attenuation, piggybacking on a diagnostics band the auditors left whitelisted. She shoves a secondary lockout down it, pointed like a blade at Skadi Rim’s pressure controller, and simultaneously throws a net over the data: security filters keyed to flag any anomalous, legacy, or unsigned traffic transiting Yggdrasil in the last sixty seconds.
Inside the cargo lock, emergency strobes turn Loki into a stuttering red silhouette as pressure knifes away toward vacuum, her suit torso hanging open, helmet clipped to her hip, magboots welded to the deck by panic and training. Eirik crouches at a maintenance umbilical, fingertips numb, forcing his ceramic-panel debug hooks into Skadi’s firmware, falsifying every sensor tick as “test-load” instead of “eject atmosphere.”
Skadi Rim’s failsafe ticks into its last cycle. Stig squeezes one more packet through: an ersatz compliance hash rebranding Eirik’s unsigned stream as an approved hull-stress sim. The controller chokes on the contradiction. Vent valves half-travel, seals flex, the chamber thrums like a struck bell. And then the countdown freezes, canyon doors locked mid-intent, Loki pinned in a shivering, overruled equilibrium.
As alarms strobe against the cargo lock’s walls and the stalled doors groan under competing commands, Ragnhild steadies herself against a handhold, feeling the faint, nauseating sway of her own inner ear more than any movement in the metal. The floor is steady; her perception is not. She blinks twice, hard, bringing the corneal overlays back into crisp alignment. Status glyphs bloom in her field of view, pressure graphs, command trees, access logs, stacking and collapsing at the twitch of her gaze.
She narrows the filter to control-channel traffic for Skadi Rim over the last ninety seconds. The noise thins to a skeleton of packets and timestamps. One stream pulses amber, tagged as routine supervisory chatter from colony ops. Another, in dull corporate blue, rides in from the orbital relay, its authentication chain clean, unbroken. Between them, like a hairline fracture, she spots an anomalous burst: a command block that handshakes correctly, routes correctly, yet does not quite sit on the lattice the way it should.
Ragnhild anchors her boots harder into the deck grips and opens the block. The header hash is textbook: compliant cipher suite, valid certificate, all the reassuring corporate sigils. But trust is a matter of pattern, not iconography. She calls up an old audit macro (her own, not standard-issue) that strips signatures down to bare transactional residue. The overlay peels away layers of formatting, leaving a greyed spine of operations and their timing skews.
There. A micro-offset in nonce generation, consistent with a particular diagnostic package she saw referenced once in an internal dispute file out of Edda Vale, years back. Her jaw tightens.
She pushes deeper, chasing the hash upstream through the mesh. The spoofed packet did not originate from orbit; it bubbled up from the local backbone, masked as if it had. A cascade of node identifiers scrolls past until the trace terminates in a familiar subnet: Mjollnir ring, restricted engineering tools. Local-only sandbox, theoretically isolated from external command paths.
Another filter pass exposes the embedded maintenance routine that wrapped the forged authorization. Its identifier is partially obfuscated, but the skeleton of its naming convention is intact, concise, over-commented, with a specific way of tagging exception handlers.
She’s seen this style before in supplementary documentation submitted with early ceramic-composite proposals. A materials scientist overreaching into controls to keep his prototypes online during line glitches. Eirik Halvorsson. The AR overlay obligingly surfaces his profile card as her system cross-references code artefacts with archived contributions.
Realization settles with a cold, measured clarity. Not an accident of bad firmware. Not an anonymous saboteur from some outer crew. The lock is sitting between corporate authority and a local, undocumented override authored by the man currently crouched at its console.
Another alarm spikes red in the periphery of her vision. Pressure drift inside the chamber, still within structural limits but edging toward the thresholds she knows from risk tables. Around her, crew voices blur into background noise; she filters audio down to system alerts only.
She favours her left side as she shifts closer to the nearest inspection hatch, bracing for another surge of vertigo, but the implants hold. On her overlay, the forged hash and Eirik’s signature routines line up like overlapping faults in a single piece of glass.
Eirik half-bent over the maintenance console, one glove braced on the bulkhead, sweat pooling under his collar where the suit’s lining had no airflow. The lag in the lock’s response was not just numbers on the panel; he felt it as a physical wrongness in the structure, the way a beam telegraphed a hidden crack through a change in vibration. The vent sequence sat there, cursor pulsing, trapped between opposed directives. Orbital blue insisting on full-cycle purge, local amber insisting on hold.
He abandoned the sanctioned interface with three quick keystrokes, dropping past the glossy menu layers into the raw diagnostic shell he had buried in the firmware years earlier. No icons here, only hex fields and terse mnemonics. “Cold-iron” profile: his private scaffold for when corporate relay latency threatened to brick a live process. Unlogged, undocumented, anchored to hardware serials instead of remote tokens.
He keyed Skadi Rim’s chamber by its physical bus address, bypassing the authenticated route. Control primitives surfaced (valves, dampers, motor interlocks) stripped of policy wrappers. For a heartbeat he had what he had designed the profile to give: limited, brutally local authority.
Ragnhild snapped a command from audit mode into live control, her voice low but carved to fit protocol keywords. The implants translated intent to a clean, textbook shutdown sequence, packetised and driven hard down the primary spine. For three frames it propagated unchallenged, flipping relays green-to-blue in her overlay as Skadi Rim’s outer valves began to spool closed.
Then the command stack hit Mjollnir’s subnet and thickened, like flow meeting an uncharted baffle.
Legacy hooks stirred. Dormant maintenance routines she had tagged as inert rose one by one, stitching themselves between her packets and the lock’s actuators. In her view, labels mutated: CARGO_LOCK_3C became MAT-TRIAL_NODE_SKADI under a dust-dry clause from the original research charter. Assets flagged experimental fell outside her suspension authority.
The chamber judders minutely as actuator logic deadlocks, Loki planted wide in her mag soles, one hand on a grab loop, watching the pressure graph sawtooth. Eirik diverts not just command but sensor bias through the old loop, waking buried foil strips and fibre taps in the composite. Their analogue noise becomes his covert bus, piggybacking beneath Ragnhild’s authenticated pathways, nudging valves by raw voltage margins.
Her authority tree splinters into unauthorised forks; red audit lines grey out, gated behind “research-exempt” tags she has no standing to breach. She flicks her gaze up, pins Eirik through the observation viewport, a hard, unblinking vector of pressure. He lets it slide past. Hands steady despite the tremor in his forearms, he leans into the only domain she cannot hot-patch from orbit: his proprietary, locally whitelisted test harness. One clipped invocation and Skadi Rim reclassifies itself as specimen, not infrastructure. Emergency structural validation takes precedence by charter; any vent or cycle command enters hard hold, subordinate to his hidden resource until the run completes or catastrophically fails.
The bay’s main status wall stutters once, then reconfigures in a sharp, colourless wipe. Corporate blue and compliant iconography vanish under a lattice of stark monochrome grids and bare numeric tables. The interface that blooms there is older than half the crew on shift: council-era diagnostics, written when bandwidth was scarce and lawyers were rarer.
Column heads snap into place in clipped Nynorsk and symbol packs Ragnhild’s corp packs never bothered to localise. Vector maps draw as tight, right-angled glyphs instead of the smooth flowfields her implants expect. Margin notes appear as bracketed runes that never made it into any Earth-side UI library.
Her corneal overlay tries to translate and fails up the stack. Auto-parse hooks throw soft errors; machine-vision models can’t anchor to known widget classes. The neat AR alignment she lives inside fuzzes at the edges, her normal composite view fracturing into islands of partial comprehension. Protocol colour codes are wrong, too: greens assigned to “indeterminate”, amber to “pending crew vote”, red to “manual lockout in progress”. Her entire risk palette inverts.
With a micro-flick of jaw and tongue she forces the implants to drop to raw dump. The rich, icon-heavy supervisory layer strips away, leaving her with a vertical torrent of text and time-stamped key–value pairs scrolling at a speed fit for log parsers, not human retinas.
She can follow it, but not shape it.
Every time she queues a control macro, the wall mutates again, Edda Vale’s schema interposes a voting mask, demands a local physical acknowledgement, routes around corporate namespaces to point at charter clauses she’s never been granted. Her sealed suspension authority sits there in her buffer, formally intact, practically toothless before middleware written by engineers who assumed, correctly, that one day someone like her would arrive and try to take the locks away.
Eirik routes the validation not just through the contested Skadi Rim chamber but recursively across every surface that has ever seen his composites bolted, bonded, or scarfed into place. Bulkheads in Mjollnir, patch plates in older tunnels, the first-generation doors on forgotten storage nodes: all of them light as specimens. Years of buried telemetry spool out of long-term buffers the corporate auditors had coerced into digest reports. Low-resolution health scores that masked the grain.
He bypasses those summaries, interrogates raw strain gauges and acoustic emission counters at their native cadence. Minute thermal cycles, pressure ripples from drills three modules away, the spectral signatures of dust impacts on exposed plates. All of it is ingested into the charter-era harness. The algorithm he woke does not smooth or normalise; it treats every outlier as data, not noise.
Across the wall, the colony’s physical memory redraws itself as a temporal lattice of stress and micro-crack nucleation, a continuous field instead of isolated incidents. Gaps appear where corporate tools previously “compressed” detail. In those absences, correlations sharpen like edges coming into focus.
Flag traces accrete in a tight, right-hand stack: time-stamped incident IDs, cross-hatch icons for “near-miss”, hollow triangles for “resolved anomaly”. At first they look random, an artefact of incomplete logging. Then the harness starts stitching provenance.
Each event’s pre-incident state vectors line up around the same intervention: a corporate-certified “predictive optimisation” routine injected into maintenance controllers two and a half Martian years ago. Where local checks once tripped early, the algorithm reweights thresholds, downgrades micro-crack alerts to “monitor”, auto-closes tickets when subsequent cycles don’t hard-fail. The correlation coefficient slams toward unity.
The approval chain resolves next. Authority tags expand into a short identifier string Eirik has never seen in his own headers, but the harness renders one field in plain text: DIV-RAVN / COST-EFF PHASE II.
Below the main lattice, secondary panes bloom: Loki’s security console forcing a side-channel trace of the hot-patched controllers, isolating a cryptographic signer that resolves, in plain council text, to RAVN-DIV. Stig, jaw tight for once, drags in clipped audio from archived tight-beams, Earth-side safety analysts flagging anomaly clustering, project leads overruling them with the same “throughput optimisation” tag.
The framework’s verdict cascades through Skadi Rim and Mjollnir in the same breath: interlocks slam to safe-hold, pressure differentials freeze, and an autogenerated compliance brief spools to every authorised console. In machine-precise language it nominates the optimisation routine, not local shortcuts, as the dominant systemic hazard and names its originator by hash and division code, inverting Ragnhild’s leverage and bleeding her approvals into evidence.
For a heartbeat the harness paints her like any other node in the fault lattice: a junction of tags, hashes, authorisations. Then her own corneal overlay resolves the implication. Red propagates down her visual field in branching trees, every path labelled with the same seed: DIV‑RAVN / COST‑EFF PHASE II. At the root of each cascade, her personal signer glows, unambiguous, as the originating approval on the optimisation push.
Eirik watches the shift land. Until now she has been a fixed constant: voice level, spine straight, gaze tracking every deviation like a targeting system. Now her pupils flare, irises stippled with reflected error glyphs. Her left hand, the one that stays close to her ribs as if guarding something fragile, comes away from her slate and finds the bulkhead. Fingers splay, miss the first grab, then close with more force than the low gravity needs.
The harness logs a minor positional anomaly: subject RAVN, lateral sway. To Eirik it’s less abstract. She lists a few degrees, shoulder striking the composite ring with a dull, transmitted thud. The ever-present creak of Skadi Rim swallows the sound, but the movement is wrong enough that half a dozen sets of eyes snap to her.
Vertigo, he realises. The thing she’s been managing all along, kept under control with the same tight clamps she used on the colony. Except now her own graphs are screaming at her.
She blinks hard. Her jaw sets, the calm expression trying to reassert itself, but her focus judders. Micro-corrections a hair too slow. For the first time since she stepped off the shuttle, the façade of invincibility ruptures. Not in a shout or a flinch, but in that white‑knuckled grip and the fractionally delayed breath, caught on everyone’s peripheral vision.
Around them, the crew goes very still, absorbing the fact that the woman who came to measure their failures is suddenly fighting to keep her own footing.
Eirik doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. The channel audio is already live in half a dozen helmets and wall speakers, so when he reads from the autogenerated brief it threads through Skadi Rim like a secondary alarm.
“Primary systemic hazard,” he says, breathing still ragged from the scramble to catch the pressure swing, “risk introduced by Audit Directive Seven‑C. Originating authority: Division Ravnardottir, Cost‑Eff Phase Two.”
He gives the syllables the same flat care he uses for stress limits and flash‑point tables, but the meaning lands nothing like neutral. On the nearest work gantry a loader tech freezes, gloved hands still on a pallet clamp. A rigger up by the overhead rail lets his impact wrench hang, tether line ticking as it swings. The murmur starts as displaced air and then coheres into something darker.
“From them, not us,” someone says. “Their patch. Their numbers.”
For months they’ve been told to tighten, to hustle, to accept that “optimisation” justified running close to the red. Now the harness has stamped it in corporate blue: the routine that bent their safety margins came from Earth. From her division. Not from the so‑called laxity of Edda Vale.
The room’s mood tilts. Where there was wary compliance, an older reflex reasserts itself. Crew closing ranks, not against each other, but against the distant hand that almost tore their lock open.
Loki moves before the silence hardens into something dangerous. She doesn’t look at Ragnhild; she looks up at the nearest wall pickup and flicks her wristband to priority.
“Skadi Rim internal,” she says, voice clipped. “All security units in sector: body‑cams on, continuous. Mirror your feeds to Yggdrasil diagnostics, tag stream ‘Audit Seven‑C incident’. Authorisation Lindsdottir, sec‑three.”
Confirmation pips stack in Eirik’s ear. Across the lock complex, status LEDs on harnesses and helmet rims shift to steady record blue. Loki’s console overlays the harness output onto the security feed, locking the autogenerated brief in frame with Ragnhild’s ID flag pulsing at its root.
“Stig, you seeing this?” she adds on a lower band.
A beat. “Loud and clear,” comes back, dry. “Routing to general ops and… a few interested subscribers.”
In less than a minute, every module that still trusts the local net, and any external ear Stig can reach without tripping corporate filters, will be watching the same composite: Skadi Rim’s near‑failure, the optimisation tree, and at its origin point the same division code, the same signer.
Not a rumour. Not a corridor story. A live, authenticated chain that makes it very hard for anyone, later, to claim they did not know where the risk came from.
Her voice comes out sharper than the alarm tone: local staff misapplied parameters, her models were sound, Edda Vale cut corners. But Eirik is already drilling down. With two finger‑flicks the harness surfaces archived dissent reports in his ID: formal risk flags, margin‑breach projections, her terse overrule codes. He throws them to the hull. Columns of dates and ACK tags bloom, his warnings stacked flush beside her authorisations, a lattice of cause and effect that reads, in the silence that follows, like a signed admission of calculated, lethal disregard.
The safe‑hold bolts stay red despite her implants flashing command strings; the system registers her as just another hazardous input. Vertigo ghosts across her vision overlay. She digs deeper, thumb to collar, crack‑sealing the black directive she never wanted to spend here. “Colony council suspended, pending compliance review,” she states. Loki’s jaw knots. Harnessed bodies shift, voices rising, and for a fractional, overpressured second the air tastes of riot.
Loki snaps forward before the noise coheres into motion, a blur in Eirik’s peripheral. Her boots hit the deck wide, centre of mass low; she plants herself between Ragnhild and the bulk of the crowd so fast the overhead cams register a smear before resolving her outline. Palms come up, fingers spread, both hands empty and high enough everyone can see them.
“Belts on the rail. Now.”
No shout, no please. Just a flat, drill‑ground imperative that slices through overlapping voices and alarm chirps. For a heartbeat the airlock bank hangs in a held breath. Half a dozen workers are halfway through turning toward Ragnhild, others toward the inner hatch, faces creased with the same mix of outrage and calculation that says they are deciding whether this is the moment to push.
Eirik feels the decision point like a pressure ridge in the atmosphere.
Then habit, older than any audit, wins. The first glove clamps onto the orange wallgrab beside the cargo door, knuckles white under composite. The rest follow in a ragged wave: harness clips chinking, mag‑soles scraping as people shuffle to get a hand on metal. Years of decompression drills reassert themselves over anger; whatever else is happening, they all know what an unsecured crowd can do to a seal if the lock goes wrong.
Loki’s eyes flick, counting grips, checking corners. “You, Jari. Rail, not your mate. Save the arguments for pressure‑safe,” she snaps, not looking to see if he obeys. Her body blocks the straight line between Ragnhild and the nearest knot of crew; anyone trying to get at the investigator will have to go through her.
Someone behind Eirik swears in clipped Sámi and shoulders sideways, trying to see past a taller loader. Their elbow glances off the recessed emergency interlock by the cargo bay door. The panel gives a protesting chirp as the protective cover snaps up. A wrist, momentum unchecked, slaps across the exposed touch‑pad, and bright amber status flips to pulsing green before anyone can make sense of what just armed.
The exposed pad registers a smeared palm as an authenticated override. It spits a corrupt half‑cycle into Skadi Rim’s logic tree; somewhere upstream a cargo lock slams its outer valves three seconds ahead of schedule. The deck under Eirik’s boots gives a hard, off‑axis jolt as the system cascades through contingencies, then every white strip‑light drops to blood‑red. Sirens cut in raw and close. The air feels thinner, dry‑metal in his throat, adrenaline and recycled ozone.
Status glyphs explode across the corridor walls: compartmentalisation in progress, pressure anomaly flagged, stand by for seal verification. The bulkhead seams around the cargo throat thrum as rams bite down. A gust of displaced air wicks sweat from the back of his neck.
In the strobing hazard wash, motion fractures into freeze‑frames. Ragnhild and Loki are locked on each other over a corridor full of bodies no longer sure whether to run or fight. Loki is squared to the crowd, shoulders set, harness tight. Ragnhild stands a half‑step off centreline, hand near her collar, implants flickering, calculating lines of authority that might survive if the next door fails.
Eirik sees it break before it happens: two younger techs peeling off the rail, shoulders hunched, vectoring straight for Ragnhild with murder in their eyes and no sense of where they are. They shove past a warning stanchion, crossing the yellow cross‑hatched zone that might be floor one second and vacuum path the next.
He moves on instinct. One step, mag‑soles biting, and he hooks a hand into the nearer tech’s harness yoke, wrenching him sideways into the bulkhead. With his free hand he slams the recessed local lockdown stud. The stud’s rim goes from amber to a hard, unforgiving blue; segmented blast baffles shudder and begin to iris down from the overhead.
The trapped tech kicks against him, spitting, “She’s shutting us down!”
The ring of descending steel slams everyone into purpose. Stig rips a fibre from his sling, jacks it into a wall port, and forces his voice flat on the local net, pushing “all‑call calm protocols” across every earbud. Loki’s orders rasp as she drills people into pressure‑safe crouches. Ragnhild, fighting a flare of vertigo, taps her collar band and shunts a sealed directive toward orbit, one that (if Yggdrasil honours it) will throttle worker‑council traffic to a corporate whisper.
The sirens peak and blur into a single, flayed tone as the blast baffle descends: then judders, locking one centimetre from the deck, a hairline of raw corridor air exposed. For a stretched, airless second everything vectorises into pending states: Ragnhild’s directive hangs at “awaiting relay,” Loki’s fingers poise above her restraint wand, Eirik’s thumb hovers over the manual abort, the whole colony balanced on that unsealed gap.
Time does not slow; it disassembles.
The siren’s flayed tone unthreads into a thin carrier wave in the back of Eirik’s skull, no longer alarm so much as a continuous test signal that says: still pressurised, still here, still not yet dead. Status LEDs along the bulkhead elongate into smeared bands of colour in Ragnhild’s overstressed vision, red and amber bleeding into each other, haloing every edge as if the corridor were underwater. The world reduces to planes and vectors, all of them terminating at that one incompletely closed ring of metal.
The blast baffle’s gap is not a space so much as a knife. Eirik feels it as a line drawn straight through his work, through every risk log he has ever signed. Inside the ring: habitable gas mixture, circulating warmth, breathable debt. Beyond: a vacuum shaft knifing out toward dust and canyon light. The difference between the two is measured in gasket elasticity, microcrack propagation, and the time‑to‑failure curves he has memorised in sleepless, storm‑rattled nights.
He can hear the air moving where it should not, a faint, unsteady hiss at the threshold of perception. In his mind it is already a plotted leak rate, an exponential on a graph: how long until the baffle’s edge frets its seating, until the composite behind it flexes once too often. He sees the diagram of the lock in cross‑section, the experimental ceramic‑composite panel behind the standard alloy rim, the way the load redistributes when the closure is incomplete. Every previous safety drill, every whispered story about the unreported near‑miss up‑ring, condenses into that hairline that no one dares to touch.
Nobody breathes deeply. No one moves more than millimetres. Even Loki’s voice on the net has dropped to a controlled, threadbare murmur. Around them, the colony’s infrastructure continues its indifferent cycles (pumps, fans, thermal exchangers) all of it contingent on whether that imperfect circle holds for one second longer, or not at all.
In Eirik’s narrowed field, Ragnhild stills. Her corneal overlay jitters once, then resolves into a hard, translucent frame around the suspended directive icon in her vision. He can’t see the AR, only the micro-twitch in her gaze as something in her feed updates: authority confirmed, transmission route green, “suspend charter” one voluntary blink away.
Her hand hovers at her collar band, thumb bone-white against the fabric seam. He watches her calculation as if it’s being run across the bulkhead: if she pushes the directive through now, it will take precedence over local control, force the lock system to a corporate-defined safe state, trigger a hard seal cycle on a mechanism already half‑jammed. Any misread sensor, any tiny misalignment in his panels, and the failure signature will be tagged to her command, not to “legacy colony practices” or “experimental infrastructure risk.”
Ragnhild’s jaw tightens; a tremor touches the corner of her left eye as her implant compensates for the vertigo spike. For one measurable instant, with a full corporate suspension code pulsing at the edge of her vision, she does not blink.
Loki reads the fear caged behind Ragnhild’s precision and the bone‑deep fatigue under Eirik’s set jaw. In that sliver of disassembled time she recalculates. The restraint wand is a vector toward escalation; the colony already has enough of that. Slowly, against every drill that says “control the subject first,” she unhooks her fingers, lets the wand hang.
Her hand drifts sideways, deliberate, to the recessed orange tab of the emergency intercom. Contact clicks in her earpiece and across the lock network.
“Skadi control, Rim Six,” she states, voice flat and command-grade. “Initiate manual safety hold. Freeze all automatic overrides on this lock. Local command only. Confirm.”
Her words hit the system before Ragnhild’s blink can, re-routing the next decision through human hands.
Eirik makes a conscious decision to breathe, drags his thumb off the abort icon and into a buried diagnostic menu, fingers moving with practised, machine-room precision. He gives them numbers instead of panic: stress margins, seal creep rates, composite flex profiles, a staged bleed‑down curve that keeps the baffle seated and the lock recoverable. No catastrophic vent, no data gift‑wrapped for a takeover.
Time resumes in discrete, audible increments: sirens ratchet down to a pulsing amber note, the blast door yields a few grudging millimetres under local command, and control-room confirmations crackle through the ceiling grille, “manual hold locked, stand‑down provisional.” In that shared exhale, every body in the chamber understands that whatever follows, survival, audits, slow reprisals. They have opted to face it as a single fault‑tree, not as collateral to a principle.
Loki moves first.
“Pressure tree from core to canyon,” she says, already stepping clear of the hatch. “Secondary sensors only. No auto-compensate. I want raw numbers on every segment that saw that spike.”
Her voice is low enough not to spook anyone, clipped enough that no one mistakes it for a suggestion. The crack comes when she adds, “And we walk the seams. Every Skadi panel with Halvorsson composite gets eyes and hands on it. No exceptions.”
Eirik logs the flinch in her throat more than hears it. He keeps his own voice neutral, numbers and tasks. “I’ll tag the install map. Rim One through Seven. Priority on cargo chambers and external transfer tunnels.”
Crew peel off in twos and threes, boots thudding against the deck in a rhythm that sounds almost ceremonial after the shriek of sirens. Helmets stay unsealed but unlocked at the back, suit collars open to the still‑thin air of the lock. More than one pair of hands checks the same wrist‑seal, the redundant ritual of people who have just watched their margin to vacuum collapse to single digits.
“Manual manometers,” Loki adds. “No one trusts the feed alone. You read the needle, you read the wall.”
They open inspection hatches with a kind of care normally reserved for medical procedures. Gloved fingers trace along gasket lines, composite junctions, the narrow polymer beads bridging Eirik’s panels to corporate-standard alloy. Every soft tick of thermal shift in the structure sounds amplified in the hush. No one talks about the audit; they talk about torque values, about hairline patterns in ceramic under stress, about the faint white bloom that would mean micro‑crazing.
Eirik moves with them, tablet clipped to his harness, annotating real‑world touch against simulation curves. Each clean seam tightens something low in his chest he hadn’t realised was loose. Each scuffed fastener or over‑compressed seal goes into a fault queue he knows he will own for months.
At one junction, Rim Six to external rover throat, Loki pauses, palm flat to the wall for a heartbeat longer than inspection requires. Not superstition, he thinks; recalibration. Tactile confirmation that the membrane between their breath and Mars still holds.
“Log it,” she says, dropping her hand. “Skadi Rim manual pass, full perimeter. We treat this like we almost died, because we almost did.”
The answering acknowledgements are quiet, almost reverent. The work that follows is not rushed, not heroic. Just precise, methodical, and utterly unwilling to leave survival to someone else’s algorithm.
Ragnhild stays back as the first inspection teams fan out, her left hand flat on a bulkhead patch where the paint has worn smooth. For a second the corridor tilts: not visually, but in the inner-ear way that makes her implants flare a warning halo across her vision. She breathes once, twice, watching the compensator trace drop from amber to green, and does not look to see who might have noticed.
The auxiliary console by the cargo manifest station is half‑buried in dust covers and old tag tape. She peels a cover back, wakes the screen with her ID band, and routes past the public ops channel into a dedicated audit trunk.
“Rim Complex to Yggdrasil uplink, priority compliance. Secure tether to orbital relay, encryption delta‑four.”
The line hisses, resolves. Her field of view fills with stacked templates: incident suspension, emergency trusteeship, crew‑council override. Her thumb hovers for a measured beat over “provisional shutdown,” then shifts to an empty narrative field.
“Event class: high‑risk systems stress test,” she dictates, voice level. “Observed: rapid, protocol‑adherent worker response, manual mitigation exceeding baseline expectations.”
She threads the rest with calibrated uncertainty: possible latent design deviations, incomplete data, recommendations for continued local oversight pending further review. Enough concern to justify more eyes, enough praise to make any immediate takeover look premature.
When she closes the channel, Skadi’s metal is still creaking around her, alive and very, very aware.
Hours later in Mjollnir’s control room, the air feels over-filtered, scrubbed of panic but not of fatigue. Eirik stands before the live stress atlas of Skadi’s hull, coloured bands pulsing over a ghosted cross-section. He traces the converging micro-fracture chains with two knuckles, following them back to a single out‑of‑sequence torque signature, while a mixed ring of local engineers and corporate auditors pages through his ceramic‑composite specs line by line.
They run worst‑case FEA on a side screen; his panels hold. The failure tree stabilises around a rushed install shift, a skipped cure interval, a supervisor override caught in buried log metadata.
Relief lands like extra mass in his chest. Not exoneration: conscription. Every undocumented workaround, every tacit corner‑cut, is now his to surface and quantify before it kills them under somebody else’s name.
In the dim hush of Yggdrasil’s hub, with only status tones and cooling fans for company, Stig ghosts the official incident logs into his buried mesh, checksum by checksum. Earth’s acknowledgement lag crawls like a slow bleed across his displays. He scrubs identifiers, pushes a cautious summary to crew channels, and, on an unlogged sideband, spells out what Ragnhild did not: the audit team has granted them a stay of execution, not absolution, and the next time a margin collapses they will be choosing, collectively and in full view, how much they are willing to gamble for autonomy and who will carry the real cost when something finally fails.
Days later they crowd into the low‑ceilinged hall, long tables scarred and sticky with stew spills, air dense with sweat and solvent. Mechanics, medics, security, comms argue through clipped microphones until the vote: hard safety vetoes, mirrored incident archives, no silent fixes. Hands rise. Ragnhild’s too. Across the room Loki meets his stare, jaw set, and Eirik feels the weight of a different kind of maintenance schedule settling over them: not alloys and cure times, but habits, councils, and the slow, grinding work of refusing to forget what vacuum almost took.