Han crouches beside the bulkhead, scanner held steady against the metal. The clicking accelerates. 3.[^4] millisieverts now. She shifts position, traces the seam with methodical precision. The radiation signature bleeds through from the other side. Not transient. Not passing cargo. Something stored there, close to the wall, radiating steadily into the corridor where crew members walk every shift.
Her scarred hand moves to her tablet. She photographs the reading, the angle, the exact position. Her fingers know this routine. Document everything. Build the case before someone can dismiss it. The pale patches on her skin catch the corridor’s amber light: her own body a permanent record of what happens when protocols fail.
The numbers should be declining this far from the bay’s core operations. Instead they climb. She maps the hot spot, cross-references it with her previous surveys. The pattern emerges: consistent elevation over three weeks, centered on this junction. Whatever Xiao-wen has stored in there isn’t moving through. It’s sitting. Accumulating exposure time.
Han stands, knees protesting. The chronic ache in her scarred tissue flares. It always does when she’s tense. She breathes through it, forces her shoulders down. The reading blinks on her scanner’s screen: 3.[^2] millisieverts. Still technically within safety margins. Still legal. Still something she can’t order removed without evidence of immediate danger.
But she knows how this starts. Acceptable readings that trend upward. Assurances that everything meets standards. Then someone’s lymph nodes swell. Someone’s hair falls out in the shower. Someone burns from the inside while management reviews liability clauses.
She marks the location on her schematic with a red flag. Adds it to her growing file. Three weeks of increasing readings. Three weeks closer to the threshold where “acceptable” becomes “catastrophic.”
Her tablet chimes, Li-na-wei, asking about lunch. Han glances once more at the bulkhead, then moves on.
Han stops them with a raised hand. “Chen. A moment.”
The younger worker turns, resignation in his posture. His partner continues toward the crew quarters without looking back.
“The cough,” Han says. “Still present?”
“It’s nothing. Dust in the recyclers.”
She studies his face. The shadows under his eyes have deepened since last month. His skin has that particular pallor. Not quite jaundiced, not quite gray. “When did you last work a shift in the bay?”
“Yesterday. Double shift. We’re behind on processing.”
Behind because Xiao-wen pushes quotas. Behind because corporate won’t authorize additional workers. Behind because speed matters more than safety margins.
“Come to medical tomorrow. 0800. Blood panel.”
“I’m scheduled for.”Non-negotiable.”
Chen’s jaw tightens, but he nods. He knows what she’s checking for. They all know. The radiation exposure protocols are posted in every section, translated into four languages, ignored by management when convenient.
She watches him walk away, counting the days since his last examination. Thirty-two days. Long enough for cellular damage to manifest. Long enough for early intervention to matter.
Her scanner clicks its steady rhythm. Still baseline here. Still safe.
For now.
The civilian ring smells of ginger and garlic. Someone cooking congee despite the energy rationing. Han’s scanner maintains its steady rhythm. Baseline. Baseline. Safe.
A child’s drawing decorates one door: the station floating among stars, rendered in bright marker strokes. Optimistic. Innocent.
Han’s scarred hand tightens on the scanner. Ming’s words from last month surface unbidden: forty-three people short of full evacuation capacity. She’d checked the numbers herself afterward. Verified them. The child who drew those stars might not have a pod assigned.
The scanner clicks. Still baseline.
She continues toward medical, her jaw set. Some numbers matter more than acceptable parameters. Some margins are too thin.
Han’s fingers pause over the keyboard. The radiation pattern matches nothing in her experience: not solar activity, not normal decay curves. This is accumulation. Deliberate exposure from repeated operations.
Filing the report means corporate review. Investigations. Xiao-wen’s operations suspended, maybe. Or more likely: her concerns dismissed, her credibility questioned. Again.
The data doesn’t care about politics. The numbers are what they are.
She opens the incident report form.
The screen’s glow catches the mottled scarring on her left hand. She knows Li-na-wei will read her tension immediately: the set of her shoulders, the way she holds herself too still. No hiding it. But she can give her partner a few more minutes before the weight of this settles between them. Before the numbers become a problem they’ll have to solve together.
Han’s fingers hesitated over the tablet, the cursor blinking at the end of the data string. Section E-7: 2.[^8] millisieverts per hour. Last week it had been 2.[^3]. The week before, 1.[^9]. A clean progression, mathematical and inexorable. She pulled up the overlay map, watching the color gradient bloom outward from the salvage processing bay. Yellow bleeding into green, the safe zones shrinking incrementally with each survey cycle.
Her left hand cramped, the scarred tissue protesting. She flexed it carefully, feeling the familiar pull of damaged nerves and contracted skin. The mottled patches caught the screen’s blue glow, pale against tan, a permanent record of what 47 millisieverts over six hours could do to human tissue. That had been acute exposure, a containment failure, alarms screaming. This was different. Slower. The kind of exposure that accumulated in bone marrow and thyroid tissue while people went about their routines, unaware.
She cross-referenced the salvage manifests Ming had mentioned: just administrative curiosities, nothing urgent. But Han had learned to read between the lines of bureaucratic language. Irregularities meant something wasn’t matching up. Manifests described what materials came aboard. Her radiation surveys described what those materials were actually doing to the station’s environment.
The numbers didn’t lie. Someone was processing hot salvage, and either they didn’t know it or didn’t care. Given Tiangong Reclamation’s reputation for efficiency over safety, Han suspected the latter. She’d seen this pattern before, on the mining station where she’d earned her scars. Corporate operators pushing quotas, radiation safety becoming a checkbox exercise, workers absorbing doses that wouldn’t show symptoms for months or years.
Her jaw tightened. Not here. Not on her watch. Not to her people.
But first, she needed more data. Evidence that would stand up to corporate lawyers and plausible deniability.
Han saved the file and set the tablet face-down, accepting the meal packet with both hands. The warmth seeped into her palms, easing the cramping in her scarred left hand. Li-na-wei had chosen the chicken congee. The thought mattered more than the contents.
“You’re doing the face,” Li-na-wei said, unwrapping her own packet.
“What face?”
“The one where you’ve found something wrong and you’re already three steps into fixing it.” Li-na-wei’s knee pressed more firmly against Han’s arm, a deliberate anchor. “The readings?”
Han nodded, peeling back the packet seal. Steam rose, carrying the scent of ginger and sesame oil. Real ginger, somehow. Li-na-wei must have traded favors with the galley staff again.
“E-7’s climbing. Consistent pattern over four weeks.”
Li-na-wei was quiet for a moment, spooning congee into her mouth. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its lightness. “Xiao-wen’s been running double shifts. Brought in something big last week. Said it was a navigation array from a decommissioned cargo hauler.”
Han’s hand tightened on the packet. Navigation arrays used cesium clocks. Cesium-137. Half-life of thirty years.
Han set the congee aside and pulled up the radiation map on her tablet, the scarred skin of her left hand catching the blue glow. Li-na-wei shifted closer, her thigh warm against Han’s shoulder now, reading the display without needing explanation. Four weeks of data points, the gradient spreading from E-7 like blood in water.
“How bad?” Li-na-wei asked quietly.
“Not critical. Not yet.” Han zoomed in on the processing bay readings. “But it’s moving. Through the ventilation system, probably. Maybe the water recycling.”
Li-na-wei’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “Your territory.”
“My territory,” Han confirmed. The words carried weight they both understood: the promise she’d made after the incident, after the radiation had eaten through her skin and nearly killed three others. Never again.
Han’s fingers paused over the tablet. Li-na-wei’s thumb traced the edge of her collar, finding the border where scarred skin met unmarked. The touch was deliberate, familiar. A reminder that Han’s body was more than damage and vigilance. She turned her head slightly, let her cheek rest against Li-na-wei’s wrist for three heartbeats. Outside, the station hummed its endless mechanical song.
Li-na-wei’s fingers worked the packet open with practiced efficiency. The mango pieces were leathery, amber-colored. She placed three in Han’s palm, kept two for herself. Han bit into one. Sweetness flooded her mouth. Real fruit sugar, not synthesized. She closed her eyes. Li-na-wei’s quiet laugh was worth more than the mango. Han set the tablet face-down. The radiation data could wait ten minutes.
Han watched Ming’s fingers move across the tablet surface. Too fast. The administrator’s usual methodical pace, three seconds per screen, eyes tracking left to right before advancing, was gone. Ming was hunting, not reviewing.
“The quarterly schedule looks manageable,” Ming said, stylus hovering over names. “Unless you’re still short on supplies?”
“I can work with what I have.” Han kept her voice neutral. Ming knew the inventory situation. They’d discussed it last month.
Ming nodded, still scrolling. Then stopped. The tablet angled slightly away, but Han caught the header: SALVAGE OPERATIONS MANIFEST LOG.
“There’s something odd in the docking records.” Ming’s tone shifted: still soft, but with an edge Han recognized from their years working together. The voice Ming used when they’d found a problem but weren’t ready to name it yet. “Xiao-wen’s crew brought in that satellite debris three weeks ago. Manifest listed it as eighteen tons of aluminum composite and steel. Clean materials.”
Han’s attention sharpened. “But?”
“Docking log recorded twenty-two tons on arrival.” Ming looked up, meeting her eyes. “And the radiation scanners logged elevated readings during processing. Nothing alarming. Well within acceptable parameters for space debris.”
The mango sweetness turned metallic in Han’s mouth. She reached for her own tablet, pulling up her radiation survey logs. The elevated readings near the salvage bay. Manageable, she’d noted. Background variation.
“Four tons is significant,” Han said carefully.
“Could be measurement error. Different systems, different calibrations.” Ming’s words offered the easy explanation, but their expression didn’t match. “Xiao-wen’s team probably just estimated wrong on the initial assessment.”
Han studied the numbers on her screen. The readings had been higher this week than last. Gradual increase. The kind of pattern that looked like normal fluctuation unless you were watching for it.
“Probably,” she said.
Han set down her own tablet. The movement was deliberate, creating space between her hands and the data. “Show me the material classifications.”
Ming hesitated. Their fingers tightened on the stylus, then relaxed. The tablet turned toward Han, screen displaying a manifest entry with highlighted discrepancies.
“Aluminum composite, steel framing, standard debris.” Ming’s voice stayed level. “But the secondary scan flagged trace elements. Beryllium. Lithium compounds. Things you’d find in. Han’s throat constricted. The words came out flat.
“Old generation. Decommissioned decades ago.” Ming pulled the tablet back, scrolling through additional entries. “Could be legitimate salvage. Those old satellites had all kinds of components.”
The scarred tissue along Han’s neck tightened, phantom heat spreading across her jaw. She knew the progression of reactor material degradation. Knew how shielding broke down, how particles migrated through composite layers, how exposure accumulated in tissue.
“How many loads?” Han asked.
Ming’s pause lasted three seconds too long. “Seven. Over the past two months.”
Seven loads. Gradual increase. The pattern crystallized.
Han’s fingers traced the edge of her tablet. The question formed itself. “What kinds of materials are misclassified?”
Ming’s hand stopped mid-gesture above their screen. The pause stretched. When they spoke, each word carried careful weight. “Composite shielding. Reactor components. Things that should have specific handling protocols.”
The scarred tissue along Han’s jaw flared hot. Not pain exactly. Memory written in nerve endings. She’d seen those manifests before, years ago, before the incident. Before her skin had learned what unshielded exposure felt like.
“Reactor components,” Han repeated. Her voice stayed steady through practiced control.
Ming nodded once, sharp and certain. Their eyes met hers with something like apology.
Han’s throat tightened. “Just sloppy paperwork.”
Not a question. Ming heard the difference.
“I can’t say definitively.” Ming’s fingers moved across their tablet, not looking at it. “But the discrepancies follow a pattern. Heavier materials logged as lighter composites. Shielded waste reclassified as standard salvage.” Their voice dropped. “Consistently in Xiao-wen’s operations.”
The medical bay’s air filtration hummed. Han’s scarred skin remembered heat.
“You’re documenting this.”
“Everything,” Ming confirmed quietly.
The medical bay’s quiet pressed against her ears. Ming’s tablet reflected in the dark window behind them, numbers, weights, classifications. All the careful documentation of something wrong.
Han’s hand moved to her neck, fingertips finding the ridge where smooth skin became textured scar. The gesture was unconscious now, a tell Li-na-wei recognized but never mentioned.
Ming waited. Not pushing. Just present with their dangerous gift of information.
Han’s fingers hover over the request form for Xiao-wen’s processing records, the cursor blinking in the authorization field. She types her medical officer credentials, then deletes them. Types them again.
The regulations are clear. Documented evidence of health risk before accessing corporate operational data. But the regulations were written by people who’ve never watched radiation sickness hollow out a crew member from the inside. Never had to tell someone their bone marrow is dying.
She thinks of Chen. The way his gums bled in the third week. How his hair came out in clumps on the pillow. The desperate hope in his eyes when she’d checked his counts each morning, watching the numbers fall like a countdown she couldn’t stop.
Her left hand finds her neck again. The scar tissue pulls when she swallows.
The trend line on her secondary monitor shows the salvage bay readings climbing. Not dramatic. Just persistent. The kind of increase that means something is leaking, accumulating, spreading through the recycled air they all breathe.
She could wait. Gather more data. Follow proper channels. File a request through Ming’s office, let it work through the bureaucratic machinery until someone with the right authority notices. By then the readings might be high enough to justify intervention.
By then someone might be showing symptoms.
Her finger moves to the authorization field. The cursor blinks. Waiting.
Corporate operations are outside her jurisdiction. Xiao-wen has legal protections, lawyers, the weight of Tiangong Reclamation behind him. She has her medical license and a service record marked by one catastrophic failure to prevent disaster.
She types her credentials. The system accepts them, processing her request.
The screen flashes: AUTHORIZATION INSUFFICIENT. CORPORATE OPERATIONS REQUIRE COMMAND-LEVEL APPROVAL OR DOCUMENTED MEDICAL EMERGENCY.
Han stares at the denial. Her jaw tightens.
Not yet an emergency. Not officially.
She saves the request as a draft.
Li-na-wei’s hand settles warm on Han’s shoulder, and Han can feel the calluses through her uniform, the familiar weight of concern. The touch grounds her, pulls her back from the spiral of worst-case projections.
“You’re doing that thing where you forget to breathe,” Li-na-wei says softly.
Han forces herself to inhale, to meet those warm brown eyes. Her chest expands against the tightness that’s been building there. “Just reviewing protocols,” she says. The words taste like evasion.
Li-na-wei’s thumb traces a small circle on Han’s shoulder. Her expression says she knows there’s more, can read the tension in Han’s jaw, the way her left hand has found her scar again. But she doesn’t push. One of the things Han loves about her, this understanding of when to offer space instead of questions.
“Double shift tonight,” Li-na-wei says finally. “Life support calibration in Section F. I’ll be late.”
Han nods. Catches Li-na-wei’s hand before she can pull away, squeezes once. A promise she can’t quite articulate: I’m here. I’m careful. I won’t disappear into this.
Li-na-wei squeezes back. Then she’s gone.
Han’s fingers hesitate over the keyboard. The medical bay’s silence presses against her ears, broken only by the ventilation system’s steady rhythm. She pulls up the archive interface, its familiar blue glow washing over her scarred hands.
Salvage operations: forty percent increase over twelve months. The graph climbs steadily, corporate efficiency translated into numbers.
Section E medical complaints: headaches, fatigue, nausea. Thirty-two percent increase. The symptoms cluster around workers assigned to processing duty.
Correlation isn’t causation. The instructor’s voice from medical school, dry and certain.
But her skin knows better. The mottled tissue along her jaw tightens, phantom pain blooming where radiation once burned through protective gear that wasn’t quite protective enough. Her body remembers what statistics can’t prove yet.
Her stylus moves across the tablet with surgical precision. Each entry carries weight she learned from failure: the crew members whose symptoms she dismissed as fatigue until their bone marrow collapsed. Document everything. Trust the pattern.
The words accumulate like evidence at a trial that hasn’t started yet. She writes without emotion, but her scarred hand trembles slightly. Professional distance protecting what lies beneath: the certainty that she’s watching another disaster unfold in slow motion.
Her fingers hover over the send button. The message sits in draft, each word calibrated for diplomatic neutrality. Coordination. Health and safety protocols. Personnel. Nothing accusatory. Nothing that crosses jurisdictional lines.
She doesn’t send it.
Instead she opens a new file, labels it “Salvage Bay Health Assessment. Evidence that can’t be dismissed as paranoia.
The file displays isotope signatures she could recite from memory: Cesium-137, Strontium-90, traces of Plutonium-239. She’d studied radiation medicine before the incident; afterward, she’d become obsessive. Every paper, every case study, every protocol update. She knows the progression of acute radiation syndrome by heart: the prodromal phase, the latent period, the manifest illness. She knows which tissues fail first, which deaths come quick and which stretch across weeks of cellular collapse.
Her left hand moves unconsciously to her neck again. The scarring extends down past her collarbone, hidden beneath her uniform during duty hours. Li-na-wei traces those boundaries sometimes, gentle fingers mapping damage in the dark. You’re beautiful, she says, and Han wants to believe her but mostly feels grateful that someone can touch the ruined tissue without flinching.
She closes the old file and opens today’s radiation survey data. The numbers hover just below alarm thresholds. Nothing that would trigger automatic protocols, nothing that would force Xiao-wen to halt operations. But the trend line climbs. Slowly. Steadily. The isotope profile doesn’t match the reactor breach signature, which should be reassuring. Different source, different risk profile. Except her training screams that any upward trend demands investigation, and her scars remember what happens when people ignore early warnings because they’re not convenient.
The salvage bay readings show the highest concentrations. She cross-references with Ming’s manifest irregularities: shipments logged as “mixed metals” and “structural components” without detailed composition analysis. Corporate shortcuts. Acceptable risk, they’d call it. Industry standard.
She’d heard those phrases before. Right up until the alarms started screaming.
Han opens a new document and begins typing. Not accusations. Just observations. Dates, readings, locations. Evidence that exists independent of her hypervigilance, her paranoia, her damaged tissue’s phantom warnings. Evidence that might save someone before the screaming starts.
The medical bay’s silence presses against her eardrums. Han stares at the dual spectral analyses, her training warring with her scars. The isotope profiles are objectively different. Reactor breach versus salvage contamination. The current levels fall within industrial tolerance ranges. Any other medical officer would file the report and move on.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard. She could close both windows. Trust the protocols designed by people who’ve never felt their skin slough away in sheets, never watched cellular collapse happen in real-time behind someone’s eyes. The numbers say acceptable risk. The regulations say no immediate action required.
But regulations have tolerances built in. Margins that assume perfect compliance, accurate reporting, honest manifests. Her scars itch: phantom sensation, psychosomatic, she knows this. Knows her hypervigilance colors every assessment. Knows she sees catastrophe in every elevated reading because she’s lived through one.
She opens a third window anyway. Begins cross-referencing Ming’s manifest irregularities with the spatial distribution of today’s readings. Just data. Just documentation. Just preparation for a disaster that probably won’t come.
Probably.
The isotope signatures from that day glow on her screen. Cesium-137, cobalt-60, the distinctive fingerprint of reactor materials. She opens today’s survey data in a second window. The spectral analysis spreads across her display in colored peaks and valleys. Different isotopes: americium-241, strontium-90, traces of plutonium. Salvage materials, not reactor breach. Different sources entirely.
The levels are elevated but within acceptable limits for industrial operations. Green indicators across the board. She should close the files, trust the numbers, let it go.
Her scarred hand reaches instead for the archive function. She pulls six months of salvage bay readings, watches the trend line climb. Each data point higher than the last. Still within guidelines. Still technically safe. But trending wrong.
Her fingers trace the upward slope on the display. Six months of incremental increases, each individually defensible. Together they form a pattern she’s seen before: not in data, but in flesh. The way radiation damage accumulates. How exposure compounds. She pulls Li-na-wei’s maintenance logs, cross-references timestamps with salvage operations. Her partner’s name appears seventeen times in contaminated zones. Seventeen exposures. All within limits. All adding up.
The medical bay’s silence presses against her eardrums. She runs her thumb across the scar tissue at her collarbone. The nerve damage makes the sensation distant, like touching someone else’s skin. The jade plant needs water. She doesn’t move. Outside, the station hums its endless mechanical song. Somewhere in that sound, hidden in the rhythm of recycled air and spinning gyroscopes, there’s an answer. She just has to listen long enough to hear it.
Han sets the sample aside and pulls a fresh one from the junction corridor’s opposite wall. The counter clicks through its analysis cycle: thirty seconds that stretch like held breath. Point-two-eight microsieverts. She cross-references the location in her station map, tracing the proximity to the salvage bay’s storage depot.
The pattern emerges in her mind like a medical scan revealing hidden trauma. Not random fluctuation. Not equipment drift. Migration.
She pulls up the salvage bay’s operational logs on her tablet, scrolling through Xiao-wen’s processing schedules. Three major hauls in the past ten days. Decommissioned satellite components. Reactor shielding from a scrapped transport. All logged as “decontaminated and cleared for storage” with radiation signatures marked below threshold.
Her scarred fingers move across the screen, pulling up Ming’s manifest notes. The administrative curiosities. Discrepancies in material weights between initial scans and final processing reports. Nothing dramatic: a few percentage points here and there. The kind of variance that could be measurement error or equipment calibration differences.
Or material that went somewhere other than the official manifests indicated.
Han stands, her shoulder protesting the movement. She walks to the medical bay’s small viewport, looking down the corridor toward the industrial section. The salvage bay’s status lights glow steady green. Normal operations. Nothing to see.
She thinks about the incident that scarred her. How it started with small anomalies. Readings that were elevated but within margins. Everyone saying it was probably nothing. Probably equipment error. Probably just normal variation.
Until it wasn’t.
Her hand finds her tablet again. She begins composing a message to Ming, then deletes it. Too early. Not enough data. She needs more samples, more locations, a clear pattern that can’t be dismissed as paranoia from someone who sees radiation ghosts in every shadow.
But her instincts, trained through survival and loss, are already screaming warnings she can’t yet prove.
Han’s jaw tightens as she logs the reading. Point-three microsieverts. The number sits on her screen like an accusation she can’t yet voice.
She recalibrates the counter, checking the cesium standard source. The equipment responds perfectly, calibrated within point-zero-two percent. No drift. No malfunction. The elevation is real.
Her fingers trace the scarred tissue along her neck. An unconscious habit when the old fear surfaces. She forces her hand down, pulls up the station schematic instead. The junction corridor sits forty meters from the salvage bay’s primary storage depot, separated by two bulkheads and a maintenance crawlspace.
The readings shouldn’t be migrating. Not through that much shielding. Not unless something with significant contamination is being stored improperly, or the shielding itself has been compromised.
She thinks about Li-na-wei mentioning structural stress near the salvage operations. About Ming’s manifest discrepancies. About Xiao-wen’s easy smile when she’d asked about his decontamination protocols last month.
Separate concerns, or pieces of something larger?
Han pulls a fresh sample bag from her kit. She needs more data points. The maintenance crawlspace between here and the depot: that’s where the truth will show itself.
Han saves the requisition and pulls up the radiation log history. Three months of data, color-coded by zone. The salvage bay readings have crept upward: not dramatically, but consistently. Point-zero-five microsieverts every two weeks. The kind of gradient that disappears in daily noise but becomes undeniable when mapped over time.
She exports the data to an isolated tablet, disconnected from the station network. If she’s wrong, there’s no need to create panic. If she’s right, she’ll need evidence that can’t be remotely altered or deleted.
The Prussian blue capsules rattle softly as she inventories them again. Forty doses. She does the math reflexively: enough for twenty people for two days, assuming acute exposure. Not enough for chronic contamination across multiple sections.
Not nearly enough.
Han touches the uniform sleeve, then pulls her hand back. The fabric holds Li-na-wei’s warmth like evidence of something fragile. She’d meant to say something last night but Li-na-wei had been exhausted, her fingers trembling from another sixteen-hour shift. Some burdens you carry alone until you’re certain they’re real. Han closes the locker and seals it.
Through the viewport, the salvage bay’s docking sequence plays out in silent mechanical choreography. Thrusters firing in brief bursts, magnetic clamps extending, cargo bay doors cycling open. A manipulator arm swings hull plating toward processing, its surface pitted and discolored.
Han’s trained eye catches something. The discoloration pattern. Wrong.
She’s moving toward her radiation scanner when the stumbling footsteps sound in the corridor outside.
Han’s fingers move across Chen’s wrist, counting his pulse. One-twenty, thready and weak. The diagnostic scanner beeps its preliminary assessment, and she doesn’t need to look at the screen to know what it will say. She’s felt this before, in her own body, in the bodies she couldn’t save.
The numbers confirm it. 800 rads. Maybe more.
She pulls the radiation badge from Chen’s suit collar. It should be red, screaming danger. Instead it shows pale yellow: barely above background levels. Someone tampered with it, or replaced it with a dummy. Her jaw tightens.
“Chen.” She leans close, speaking directly into his ear. “I need you to focus. What were you processing?”
His lips move soundlessly. She waits, watching the tremor spread from his hands up his arms. The scanner’s secondary readings populate: white blood cell count already dropping, electrolyte imbalance, early signs of intestinal damage. She’s seen this progression. She knows where it leads.
“Reactor… housing,” he finally manages. “Military grade. Xiao-wen said… clean extraction… just surface dust…”
Surface dust. Han’s left hand unconsciously moves to her neck, fingers tracing the mottled scarring that extends beneath her collar. Surface dust had been the explanation then too, before the readings came back, before three crew members died in quarantine while corporate lawyers argued about liability.
She keys the intercom. “Ming, I need you in medical. Now.” Then she pulls up Chen’s work schedule, cross-referencing it with salvage bay logs. Six other workers on that shift. All of them exposed.
The anti-nausea medication goes into Chen’s IV line. It will help with the symptoms, buy him comfort. But she knows the truth her training taught her, the truth written in her own scars: there is no treatment for exposure this severe. Only time, and pain, and the question of how much of either remains.
“When?” Her voice stays level, clinical, though the scarred tissue along her neck begins its familiar ache: phantom pain that flares whenever she encounters these isotopes.
Chen’s eyes roll toward her, pupils dilated and unfocused. “Yesterday… morning shift…” His words slur together. “Xiao-wen said… the readings were safe…”
Twenty-four hours. The timeline slots into place with terrible precision. Acute onset, rapid progression. The exposure was massive, unshielded. Her training catalogs the damage already cascading through his cells: bone marrow dying, intestinal lining beginning to slough away, DNA shredding faster than his body can repair.
Another wave of nausea convulses through him. He dry-heaves, his stomach long since emptied. Han positions him on his side with practiced efficiency, one hand supporting his shoulder while the other reaches for the anti-nausea medication. The ampule feels too small, too inadequate. She knows what it will do: ease his suffering for a few hours, maybe a day.
She knows what it won’t do.
Her fingers are steady as she loads the injector, but inside, the old rage builds.
The scanner’s chime cuts through the medical bay. Han’s gaze drops to the display. The isotope signature resolves into familiar patterns: Cesium-137, Strontium-90, traces of Plutonium-239.
Her vision tunnels. Three years collapse into nothing. She’s back in the old medical bay, that first burning moment when she didn’t understand why her skin felt hot, why her instruments were screaming warnings she’d been trained to ignore during routine operations. The invisible fire that ate through her flesh while she evacuated six other crew members.
Military reactor components. The same signature.
Her left hand rises without conscious thought, fingers pressing against the mottled scarring along her neck. The tissue feels hot, though she knows it’s only memory speaking through damaged nerves.
She moves closer, her scarred hand steady on his shoulder. “Chen. Focus.” Her voice cuts through his delirium. “The debris: describe it. How many hours exposure?”
His lips crack as they move. Blood flecks his teeth. “Reactor housing. Military grade.” He swallows, wincing. “Xiao-wen… shut down the alarms. Corporate deadline.” His eyes find hers, desperate. “Don’t report this. My family. They need the income.”
The radiation signature blooms across her diagnostic screen in patterns she knows too intimately. Cesium-137, strontium-90, the same isotopes that melted through her own flesh. Her scarred tissue burns with phantom heat as she catalogs the damage: bone marrow suppression beginning, gastrointestinal syndrome advancing. Three years ago she couldn’t save Zhao and Martinez. The numbers then looked exactly like this.
Han’s hands move through the chelation protocol with the precision of muscle memory, but her mind calculates darker mathematics. The injection site on Chen’s arm shows the mottled bruising of platelet failure already beginning. Eight point seven sieverts. The number burns behind her eyes like afterimage.
She’s done this before. The motions are identical. Zhao had vomited for six hours straight before the seizures started. Martinez lasted longer, conscious enough to ask if she’d make it, and Han had lied because sometimes lies are the only mercy left.
Chen retches again, his body trying to expel radiation it has already absorbed into bone and tissue. She holds the basin steady, her scarred hand against his shoulder blade, feeling the heat of his skin through the thin medical gown. His temperature is climbing, 102.[^3] now, the beginning of the inflammatory cascade that will consume him from within.
“How long?” Chen’s voice is raw, stripped of pretense.
The question she cannot answer honestly. Not yet. Not while variables remain. She swabs his arm for the second injection, watching how the antiseptic pools in the depression where muscle has already begun to waste. His body is cannibalizing itself, cellular repair mechanisms overwhelmed by the cascade of broken DNA.
“We’re starting aggressive treatment,” she says instead. “The chelation therapy will bind the radioactive particles.” True, but incomplete. It will bind some particles. It will buy time. Whether it will buy enough time depends on factors she cannot control: supply deliveries that may not come, equipment that may fail, and the question of whether Xiao-wen has contaminated anyone else.
Her fingers find Chen’s pulse point, rapid, thready, the heart already struggling against the systemic damage. She marks the time on her tablet: 14:[^47]. Hour zero of the countdown.
The Prussian blue container feels light in her palm. She counts without opening it. Eighteen capsules by weight and rattle, muscle memory from too many inventory checks. Protocol demands forty over seven days. The mathematics are unforgiving.
She unlocks the cabinet. Three vials of DTPA nestle in their foam slots, the clear liquid catching the overhead lights. Five days of therapy if she stretches the doses. Chen needs ten. Minimum.
Her hands don’t shake as she draws the first vial. The scarred tissue on her left hand pulls tight, phantom sensation of heat that isn’t there. She’d had enough chelation therapy for herself, three years ago. Barely enough. The supply officer had apologized, explained the shipping delays, the budget constraints, the corporate restructuring that left medical supplies on Earth while she burned from the inside.
Chen’s vein collapses under the first needle stick. She finds another, deeper, feeling for the thread of pulse beneath skin already bruising purple. The IV catheter slides home. She tapes it carefully, knowing his platelets will fail soon, knowing every puncture site will become a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
The monitor updates again. 3,[^600]. She watches the number flicker, imagines the stem cells dying in waves, radiation-shattered DNA triggering apoptosis cascades. His marrow is liquidating itself.
She keys in the antibiotic protocol. Broad-spectrum, maximum dose. His kidneys can handle it now. In forty-eight hours they won’t be able to. The medication dispenser clicks and whirs, counting out pills into a small cup. She crushes them, mixes them with water for the nasogastric tube. He’s too disoriented to swallow reliably.
Seventy-two hours. The number sits in her mind like a countdown timer. Less if his kidneys fail early. Less if sepsis takes hold. Less if internal bleeding starts before she can get platelets shipped up from Earth.
She doesn’t have seventy-two hours of treatment.
She maps the treatment timeline on her tablet. Blue marks for chelation: three days of supplies, maybe four if she dilutes the doses. Red for transfusions. She’ll need platelets by day two, whole blood by day four. Green for supportive care.
The gaps stare back. No bone marrow stimulants. No isolation ward. No hematology specialist within eight million kilometers.
Each gap is a door closing.
The scar tissue pulls tight across her jaw: phantom heat blooming where radiation once cooked her flesh. She remembers the taste: copper and ash. The weeks watching her skin slough away in sheets.
Chen’s readings match her own from three years ago. Exactly.
Same isotope signature. Same criminal negligence.
Her stylus hovers over the report field. One word will trigger station-wide protocols. Corporate lockdown. Investigation.
Xiao-wen’s operation exposed.
The chelation agent flows clear through the IV line, and Han watches it disappear into Chen’s vein knowing it’s probably futile. Six days. The cesium is already integrated into his soft tissues, the strontium mimicking calcium as it embeds itself in his bones. She’s seen this progression before and the clinical part of her brain is already calculating: fifty-fifty chance he makes it past the latent phase, maybe thirty percent he survives the acute syndrome if it hits hard.
Her fingers key in the isolation protocol codes while her other hand steadies the IV. The medical bay’s decontamination systems activate with a low hum. Yellow warning lights begin their slow rotation.
Chen vomits again, the basin catching mostly bile now. His stomach lining is already compromised. She administers another antiemetic, adjusts the fluid replacement rate. Her movements are precise, economical, the product of a thousand emergency drills and one catastrophic real-world lesson.
The spectrometer reading glows on her secondary screen: 847 millisieverts cumulative exposure, possibly higher depending on how close he was working to the source. Her own exposure three years ago was 920 millisieverts. She survived, but she lost two colleagues who’d absorbed less. Radiation is cruelly arbitrary in how it kills.
She pulls up the station’s salvage operation logs on her tablet, cross-referencing dates. Six days ago, Xiao-wen’s crew logged “routine debris processing” in Bay E-7. No mention of reactor components. No radiation warnings filed. No decontamination procedures initiated.
The lies are right there in the official record, neat and bureaucratic.
Her scarred jaw aches. The phantom heat spreads down her neck, following the old burn patterns. Psychosomatic, she knows, but her body remembers what her mind tries to compartmentalize: the terror of watching your own flesh betray you, cell by cell.
Chen’s breathing steadies slightly. The antiemetic is working, buying him temporary relief from symptoms that will return, worse, in the days ahead.
Han extracts her wrist from Chen’s grip carefully, noting the heat radiating from his damaged palm. Second-degree burns, the skin already showing the mottled discoloration she knows too well. She reaches for her tablet with her free hand, pulling up the exposure protocol questionnaire even as her scarred tissue throbs in sympathetic recognition.
“The bonus,” she says, keeping her voice level. “How much?”
“Twenty percent.” Chen’s eyes are glassy. “For finishing ahead of schedule.”
Twenty percent. She calculates rapidly: maybe eight hundred yuan for a laborer like Chen. The price of his bone marrow, his intestinal lining, possibly his life. Her friends died for similar arithmetic: corporate risk assessment that valued speed over survival.
She swipes through the questionnaire screens, each answer worse than the last. The dosimeters weren’t malfunctioning. Xiao-wen’s crew had been instructed to remove the batteries, to eliminate the “distraction” of constant alarms. The decommissioned reactor still held fuel rods. The drainage certification was fabricated.
Her jaw aches. Her teeth grind. The lies are identical, word for word, to the reassurances that burned her face off three years ago.
Her fingers tighten on the tablet. Twelve workers. Six days. The math is brutal and immediate.
“The cutting pattern,” she says. “Show me where.”
Chen’s trembling hand traces coordinates on her screen. Reactor compartment seven, the primary containment vessel. Blue-green flames mean active fission products vaporizing under plasma heat. Her medical training catalogs the damage: lungs coated with radioactive particulates, bone marrow already dying, cellular destruction cascading through lymph nodes and intestinal walls.
“The debris,” she says. “You tracked it where?”
“Everywhere.” Chen’s voice breaks. “Corridors. Mess hall. The showers.”
The showers. Where people wash. Where water recycles through the entire station. Her scarred hand moves to her comm unit.
The numbers crystallize into certainty. Cesium in bone-seeking concentrations. Strontium already migrating to marrow. Chen has days, maybe weeks. The others: she pulls up station schematics, traces ventilation patterns with her scarred finger. Habitation modules. The nursery where Li-na-wei’s friend keeps her daughter. Every breath cycling contaminated air through healthy lungs. The station isn’t just compromised. It’s dying.
Han’s finger hovers over the comm button. Protocol demands she report to station command first. But command answers to corporate, and corporate owns Xiao-wen’s operation. Her scarred hand clenches. Three years ago she followed protocol. Three years ago she trusted the system to protect people. She still carries those corpses in her nightmares. Not again. She keys Li-na-wei’s personal channel instead.
Han’s fingers freeze over the data. The numbers arrange themselves into a pattern she’s seen before. The same ascending curve of exposure levels, the same distribution across a work crew, the same corporate footprints covering the trail.
She overlays the radiation signatures. Cesium-137 half-life: thirty years. Strontium-90: twenty-nine years. These isotopes don’t fade quickly. They accumulate. They migrate through bone and tissue. They kill slowly enough that liability becomes diffuse, blame becomes impossible to assign.
The manifests show processing dates. Her medical logs show symptom onset. Forty-eight hours. Consistent. Damning.
She pulls the derelict vessel’s registration from the salvage database. Military designation: Zheng He-class deep space patrol craft, decommissioned fifteen years ago after reactor malfunction. Flagged for specialized disposal. Somehow it ended up in Xiao-wen’s processing queue instead, listed as “miscellaneous structural salvage.”
Her left hand moves to her neck, fingers tracing the mottled scarring without conscious thought. The tissue aches. Phantom pain, her therapist called it, psychosomatic response to stress. But Han knows better. Her body remembers. Her cells remember. Radiation leaves signatures in flesh the way it leaves signatures in data.
She cross-references the worker locations. Salvage Processing Bay, Section E-7. Maintenance tunnels adjacent to the bay. Crew quarters in Section D. The contamination pattern spreads like ink in water, following air circulation, tracking through the station’s infrastructure wherever those seventeen workers moved.
Li-na-wei works those tunnels. Sleeps in Section D.
Han’s breath catches. She pulls Li-na-wei’s maintenance logs. Three repair calls in the salvage bay last week. Direct exposure. Close quarters with contaminated equipment.
Her hand moves to the comm button again, but this time there’s no hesitation. Li-na-wei’s channel opens with a soft chime.
“It’s me,” Han says. “Don’t go near Section E-7. I need you in Medical. Now.”
Han’s terminal fills with overlapping windows. Exposure timelines, symptom progressions, cellular damage projections. Her training takes over, clinical distance settling like armor. She catalogs the damage with surgical precision.
Zhang Wei’s headaches: intracranial pressure from vascular inflammation. Radiation attacks blood vessel walls first, makes them permeable, leaky. His brain is swelling inside his skull.
Okonkwo’s nosebleeds: thrombocytopenia, platelet destruction. The body can’t clot anymore when radiation shreds the bone marrow’s production capacity.
Patel’s rashes: not dermatitis. Radiation burns, low-grade but progressing. The skin cells dying faster than they can regenerate.
She pulls metabolic data, cross-references body mass and estimated exposure duration. The math is brutal. Chen got the worst of it: direct handling, longest shifts. But the others are burning too, just slower.
Forty-eight hours between exposure and symptoms means the damage is already done before anyone knows to run. By the time they feel sick, their cells are already dying, their DNA already shattered into fragments that can’t repair themselves.
She needs baseline radiation readings on all seventeen. Needs to know who can still be saved.
The scanner’s final analysis scrolls across her screen. Chen’s bone marrow: catastrophic failure, stem cells destroyed, production capacity at eighteen percent and dropping. White blood cell count halving every six hours. His body can’t fight infection anymore, can’t heal, can’t rebuild what radiation has unmade.
She pulls the comparative data. Seventeen workers, seventeen exposure profiles. Some worked closer to the reactor cores, some handled materials longer, some have faster metabolisms that concentrate the isotopes differently. But they’re all burning. Chen is just furthest along the curve.
Days for the next three. Weeks for the others. Maybe months for the lucky ones who stayed peripheral.
All of them following Chen down into cellular collapse unless she acts now.
The emergency panel glows red beneath her scarred hand. One touch broadcasts to every terminal, every screen, locks down the salvage bay, grounds all operations. Corporate protocol requires her signature, her medical authority, her career staked against their quarterly profits.
Last time took everything. Six months of depositions. Investigators who measured her scars like evidence of instability. The license review board’s clinical questions about trauma and judgment.
She’d been right then too. Saved forty-three lives. They still called it overreaction.
Her fingers move across the terminal with surgical precision. Each image captured at optimal resolution. Spectral analysis logged with timestamp verification. She cross-references seventeen patient files, highlighting symptom clusters that match radiation exposure protocols. The correlation matrix builds itself. Salvage schedules aligned perfectly with sickness reports. She encrypts everything, backs it up to three separate servers, sends copies to Ming’s administrative files. This time the evidence will be irrefutable.
Han’s hands don’t shake as she administers the anti-nausea compound. The needle finds the vein on first insertion. Chen’s arm is hot under her fingers, fever already spiking as his immune system begins its futile war against cellular destruction. She watches the medication enter his bloodstream, counts three seconds, sees his retching subside to shallow gasps.
The diagnostic scanner hums against his chest. She moves it in precise grids, mapping the isotope distribution like charting a minefield. The display builds its three-dimensional model of contamination. Bone marrow. Lymph nodes. Intestinal lining. Every place fast-dividing cells cluster and die.
Cesium-137. The readout confirms it first. Then Strontium-90.
Her left shoulder blade spasms. Phantom pain in tissue that remembers these exact isotopes eating through dermis and muscle. She knows their half-lives. Their decay chains. The way they migrate through the body seeking calcium deposits. Three years ago she watched these same numbers climb on her own diagnostic screen while her skin blistered and her hair came out in clumps.
Chen is twenty-four. She read his personnel file when he came aboard six months ago. Graduate degree in materials engineering. Sends half his pay to his parents in Chengdu. Plays chess in the rec room on Sundays.
His bone marrow is cooking from the inside out.
She pulls up the exposure timeline, cross-referencing his work schedule. Two weeks of salvage processing. Twelve-hour shifts in Xiao-wen’s bay. The corporate manifests list “low-grade structural components” and “non-hazardous material recovery.” Nothing about reactor shielding. Nothing about military-grade fission products.
The fluid replacement bag empties into his veins. She hangs a second one. It won’t save him. It will buy time while his body destroys itself trying to replace cells that can no longer divide cleanly.
She knows exactly how this ends.
Li-na-wei’s boots hit the deck plating at a run. Four minutes from the maintenance tunnel to medical bay. She’s still in her coveralls, grease dark under her fingernails, tool belt jangling against her hip.
She stops in the doorway.
Chen’s skin has the mottled appearance of thermal burns, but Han knows better. Radiation doesn’t burn from outside in. It destroys from the cellular level up, killing the basal cells that would regenerate healthy tissue. The diagnostic display hovers above the bed, its three-dimensional model rotating slowly, red zones spreading through bone and organ systems like spilled ink.
“No.” Li-na-wei’s hand finds the doorframe. Her knuckles go white. “Han. Not again.”
Her voice cracks on the last word.
Han feels it build behind her sternum. The old pressure. The rage that has nowhere to go in the careful protocols of military medicine. Her scarred tissue pulls tight across her shoulder, phantom pain echoing real memory.
She crosses to Li-na-wei. Takes her hand. Squeezes once.
“Call Ming,” Han says. “Tell them to pull every salvage manifest from the last month.”
Han stares at the comm panel. Five to seven business days.
Chen has forty-eight hours before the bone marrow damage becomes irreversible. Maybe less.
“Lieutenant.” She keeps her voice surgical. “I’m invoking Article Twelve of the Station Medical Emergency Protocol. I’m declaring a potential mass exposure event. That supersedes corporate jurisdiction.”
Silence on the line. Then Okafor’s voice returns, stripped of its sympathy. “Medical Officer, Commander Zhang will need to authorize that declaration. He’s currently off-duty. I can schedule a briefing for oh-six-hundred.”
Six hours from now.
Li-na-wei’s fingers dig into Han’s shoulder. Not restraint. Solidarity.
“Log my formal request,” Han says. “And Lieutenant? When people start dying, remember this conversation.”
She cuts the connection.
Han’s jaw sets. The diagnostic screen behind her flickers, Chen’s white blood cell count dropping in real time.
“I need containment protocols now, Lieutenant. Not next week.” Her voice carries the weight of three years’ worth of radiation burns. “People are being exposed while we wait for corporate approval.”
But Okafor’s already reciting policy. Five to seven business days. Internal review first.
The words taste like ash.
Li-na-wei’s arms tighten around her shoulders, solid and warm against the medical bay’s sterile chill. Han allows herself three seconds of contact before pulling back. Her partner’s eyes are wet.
“We’ll find another way,” Li-na-wei says, but her voice cracks on the lie.
Five to seven days. Chen’s lymphocytes are already crashing. By then, bone marrow failure. Hemorrhaging. The same cascade that killed Tanaka and Rodriguez.
Corporate lawyers don’t bleed out. Workers do.
Han’s fingers move across the medical tablet, each gesture precise despite the tremor in her scarred hand. She photographs Chen’s radiation burns from six angles, anterior torso, posterior, bilateral arms, the mottled erythema already progressing to vesiculation. The camera captures what words cannot: tissue damage measured in grays, cellular death written on skin.
Vital signs every fifteen minutes. Heart rate elevated. Blood pressure dropping. Temperature climbing toward the fever that precedes the latent phase. She knows this progression intimately. Lived it. The diagnostic sequencer hums as it analyzes tissue samples, counting the lymphocytes that are already dying, measuring the isotopes that will keep killing long after Chen stops breathing.
Each file gets a timestamp. Cross-referenced with station safety protocols: the ones Xiao-wen ignored. She creates redundant backups, layering documentation like radiation shielding. Official medical database. Station command server. Her personal encrypted drive hidden in three separate partitions.
Three years ago, evidence disappeared. Radiation readings revised downward. Exposure logs corrupted. Corporate investigators concluded equipment malfunction, operator error, acceptable risk. Tanaka and Rodriguez died anyway. The settlement barely covered funeral costs.
Not this time.
Her scarred hand hovers over the isotope analysis. Cesium-137. Strontium-90. The same signatures burned into her own tissue, archived in her medical file like a fingerprint. She tags each sample with comparison data, building a chain of evidence that connects Chen’s dying cells to her own scars to the unshielded reactor cores sitting in Xiao-wen’s processing bay.
The phantom pain flares. Nerve damage that never quite healed, tissue that remembers what radiation feels like. She ignores it. Documents it. Adds her own elevated readings to the file. The medical bay’s sensors show contamination levels rising. Particulates in the air filtration system. Isotopes that travel through ventilation, through corridors, through bodies.
The evidence is irrefutable now. Whether anyone will act on it is another question entirely.
Han looks up from Chen’s monitors. Li-na-wei stands in the doorway, thermal container in one hand, work tablet in the other. Her expression tells the story before words do.
“Ming found the manifests.” Li-na-wei’s voice is flat, controlled. She crosses to the desk, sets down the congee Han won’t eat. Her fingers move across the tablet, pulling up documentation. “Xiao-wen logged those reactor components as low-grade structural materials. Falsified every radiation reading.”
The schematics bloom on screen. Salvage bay layout. Ventilation pathways highlighted in red, branching through the station like arterial flow. Li-na-wei traces the connections with a grease-stained fingernail.
“Maintenance tunnels. Where my crew works.” Her jaw tightens. “We’ve been breathing it for weeks.”
The weight settles across Han’s shoulders, familiar as her scars. Not one victim. Dozens. The mathematics expand exponentially: exposure duration, ventilation rates, cumulative dosage. Her mind catalogs the maintenance crews, the salvage workers, everyone who passed through those contaminated corridors.
She reaches for Li-na-wei’s hand. Squeezes once. Then returns to her tablet, adding new categories to the exposure database.
Han watches Chen’s vitals stabilize into the deceptive calm that precedes cascade failure. His whispered names echo: Yuki, Dmitri, Kwan. She adds them to the exposure database, fingers moving with practiced efficiency across the tablet. Proximity to the reactor components, duration of exposure, body mass. The variables compile into grim probabilities.
The medical summons go out through official channels. Three urgent pings into the station’s communication network. She knows the mathematics of fear: some won’t respond. Work permits depend on health clearances. Families planetside depend on remittances. Corporate policy makes seeking treatment an admission of liability.
Her scarred tissue aches as she opens the triage protocols. Available chelation agents: insufficient. Evacuation capacity: zero without authorization she doesn’t have. The categories form themselves: salvageable, critical, terminal.
She begins with salvageable.
Ming’s data chip feels heavy in Han’s pocket, dense with evidence that transforms negligence into documented crime. She knows what it cost them. The careful neutrality that protected their position, the bureaucratic invisibility that let them help people quietly. Now they’ve chosen a side, made themselves visible. The chip contains timestamps, authorization codes, budget transfers showing exactly when corporate accountants decided shielding equipment was an acceptable cost to eliminate. Three separate systems, Ming said. Redundant backups. As if documentation could stop radiation, as if evidence could chelate isotopes from blood and bone.
Han moves through Section D’s crew quarters, scanner raised. The device clicks steadily, measuring invisible contamination. She finds Zhao first. A welder, already showing early symptoms he’s dismissed as station flu. The scanner’s reading makes her jaw tighten. Then Kumar, asleep in his bunk, skin temperature elevated. She doesn’t wake him. Let him rest while he still can. The scanner’s memory fills with damning numbers, each reading another name added to her mental triage list, another calculation of suffering she cannot prevent, only document.
Han’s fingers moved across the medical scanner, watching the numbers climb. Twenty-eight percent. She’d seen worse during the incident that scarred her, but those had been emergency responders who knew the risks. Dmitri was a maintenance tech. He fixed air filters and patched hull seals.
“Show me your hands,” she said.
He extended them, palms up. The tremor was fine but persistent, the kind that came from nerve damage at the cellular level. She noted it on her tablet.
“You’re off duty as of now. Report to medical bay at 0800 for chelation treatment.”
“I can’t. We’re short-staffed already,”
“You’re contaminated.” She kept her voice level, clinical. “You continue working, you spread it. You touch a control panel, the next person gets dosed. You understand?”
Dmitri’s face went through several expressions. Confusion. Denial. Then fear, settling in like cold water. “How bad?”
“Treatable. If we start now.” She pulled up the certification image he’d mentioned. The tag looked legitimate: holographic seal, proper formatting, Tiangong Reclamation’s corporate stamp. She’d seen similar tags on materials that had killed three people. “I need the container numbers. Everything you handled in the last month.”
He rattled them off while she recorded. His voice stayed steady but his hands shook harder. Combat training, she recognized. He was holding it together through discipline.
“The others on your crew,”
“Five of us on rotation. Park, Chen, Okoye, Ramirez.”
Chen was already in medical bay. Park was next on her list. Three more potentially exposed. She thought about the air circulation patterns, the shared equipment, the cafeteria where they all ate. Contamination spread through communities like rumors, invisible and persistent.
“Go to your quarters. Shower thoroughly. Bag your clothes in the sealed container I’m sending. Touch as little as possible.”
Dmitri nodded and left, moving carefully, as if he might break.
Han found Park’s quarters on D-deck, crew section. The door chimed twice, no answer. She checked Ming’s records again. Three days absent, medical leave requested but never processed.
“Medical override,” she said to the door panel. “Authorization Han-seven-seven-delta.”
The lock clicked.
The smell hit first. Vomit and sweat and the sharp metallic tang of radiation sickness. Park lay curled in her bunk, a plastic bag clutched in both hands. Her skin had the waxy pallor Han knew too well.
The scanner reading made her breath catch. Forty-seven percent.
“Park. Can you hear me?”
The woman’s eyes opened, unfocused. “Hurts.”
Han pulled the emergency kit from her belt, loading the chelation injector. “When did symptoms start?”
“Tuesday. Thought it was… stomach thing…”
Four days. Han pressed the injector to Park’s neck, felt the hiss of delivery. “What did you handle? Specifically.”
“Seventeen containers. Big ones.” Park’s voice was thread-thin. “Xiao-wen said… speed bonus. Badges never changed color. He said they… sometimes stick.”
Han keyed her comm. “Medical bay. I need a stretcher to D-47. Priority one.”
Han took Jensen’s tablet, scrolling through the files. Timestamps matched her own medical records. Exposure incidents correlating with specific salvage operations. Manifest discrepancies showing materials logged as “low-grade ferrous” that required specialized handling protocols. Safety complaints filed with corporate oversight, each one acknowledged and closed without action.
“You’ve been documenting for how long?”
“Eight months.” Jensen’s jaw was tight. “Since they started pushing the quotas harder. Since badges started ‘malfunctioning’ more often.”
Han copied the files to her secure drive. The evidence was better than she’d hoped, detailed, dated, corroborated by multiple sources. But she’d seen strong cases collapse before under corporate legal pressure.
“This helps,” she said carefully. “But documentation doesn’t stop radiation sickness.”
“No.” Jensen met her eyes. “But it might stop the next person.”
Han felt the weight of the tablet in her hand. Eight months of evidence. Eight months of Jensen watching, recording, knowing something was wrong while corporate machinery ground forward. She thought of her own scarring, the investigation that had cleared everyone of liability, the careful legal language that had made catastrophe into acceptable risk.
“It might,” she said. “If we’re fast enough.”
Han creates four treatment stations, adapting equipment designed for single patients. Her hands move through familiar protocols (chelation therapy, anti-nausea medication, hydration monitoring) while her mind catalogs evidence. Each radiation reading becomes a data point. Each symptom timeline maps to salvage schedules Ming provided. She photographs badge readings, logs timestamps, cross-references shift rotations against exposure curves. The medical bay transforms into both clinic and crime scene, her documentation as precise as her suturing.
Han’s fingers stilled on the tablet as Li-na-wei stepped through the medical bay door. Wrong. Everything about her partner’s posture was wrong: shoulders rigid instead of loose, hands balled into fists instead of dancing across tools or reaching for Han’s arm. The maintenance reports hit the desk with more force than necessary, printouts because Li-na-wei didn’t trust the digital trail.
“Look at the dates,” Li-na-wei said.
Han scanned the first page. Power conduit degradation in Section E-6, adjacent to salvage operations. Ventilation filters in E-7 showing metallic particulate contamination. Micro-fractures in structural supports, stress patterns consistent with improperly secured loads swinging against bulkheads during docking maneuvers.
The station was sick. Han saw it with the same clarity she’d seen Chen’s radiation burns: symptoms of systemic poisoning, infrastructure failing the way organs failed when toxins accumulated beyond the body’s capacity to filter them. Each denied repair request was like ignoring elevated white blood cell counts. Each delayed inspection was like dismissing a patient’s complaint of chest pain.
“The timeline,” Han said, pulling the reports closer. “These failures accelerated three months ago.”
“When corporate raised the salvage quotas forty percent.” Li-na-wei’s voice was flat. “Xiao-wen’s been cutting corners to meet targets. Faster processing, less securing, no decontamination protocols between loads.”
Han overlaid the maintenance timeline against her radiation exposure data. Perfect correlation. Workers near the salvage bay showed elevated readings on days when Li-na-wei’s crew reported power surges and ventilation failures. Moments when contaminated air cycled through adjacent sections, when shielding degraded enough to let radiation leak through compromised bulkheads.
“These requests,” Han said. “You filed them properly?”
“Every one. Technical specifications, safety justifications, cost projections.” Li-na-wei’s jaw tightened. “All denied pending budget review.”
Han pulled up the secondary screen, fingers moving with surgical precision across the interface. “Show me everything you filed.”
Li-na-wei’s maintenance requests populated the display in chronological order. Each one professionally formatted, technical specifications exact, safety justifications irrefutable. Denied. Denied. Pending review: which meant denied. Budget reallocated to operational priorities. Salvage revenue.
The pattern was diagnostic. Three months of systematic neglect, each denial corresponding to increased quotas from Tiangong Reclamation. Corporate profit metrics overriding infrastructure integrity.
“Last week,” Li-na-wei said, voice tight. “Two of my crew refused the E-7 assignment. Too close to the bay, radiation alarms going off every shift. Management threatened contract violations.”
The burn started in Han’s chest, familiar as her own scarring. Workers punished for self-preservation. The same institutional calculus that had left her standing in a contaminated compartment while corporate lawyers rewrote liability clauses.
She activated her personal device: not station-issued, not networked, not accessible to administrative oversight. Photographed each denial, each reallocation, each ignored warning. The evidence file grew. Chen’s exposure. The maintenance failures. The threatened workers.
Documentation was ammunition. She was building an arsenal.
Han’s hand stilled on the interface. Li-na-wei’s touch traced the boundary between scarred and healthy tissue, a topography they both knew intimately. The gentleness was deliberate: her partner understood that the nerve damage made some touches painful, others numbingly absent.
“Cascade failure.” Han’s voice came flat, clinical. She was already calculating: breach in habitation modules, exposure radius, evacuation time versus personnel capacity. The numbers didn’t balance. Never enough escape pods. Never enough shielded compartments.
She saw it clearly: families in civilian quarters, children in the education module, Ming at their desk two sections over. All of them trusting that someone was maintaining the margins between operational and catastrophic.
That margin was gone. Xiao-wen had already spent it for quarterly profits.
Han pulled Li-na-wei close, feeling her partner’s heartbeat against her scarred cheek, the solid warmth that meant alive, safe, here. She held on three seconds (counted them) then stepped back.
“Document everything.” Her voice steadied. “Every workaround, every denied repair request. Timestamps. Send copies to Ming’s secure server.”
Li-na-wei’s jaw set, worry transforming into the stubborn competence Han loved.
“Infrastructure projections might penetrate where medical evidence hasn’t.” Han touched her radiation badge. “And if not: we’ll need documentation for after.”
Han’s fingers moved across the tablet, logging each worker’s symptoms: nausea onset times, white blood cell trends, tissue inflammation markers. The pattern clarified: exposure concentrations aligned with Li-na-wei’s structural damage reports, radiation seeping through compromised seals where salvage operations had stressed bulkheads. She added maintenance timestamps, power fluctuation logs, ventilation failure incidents. The evidence file grew dense, irrefutable. Her jade plant’s leaves caught the overhead light, green and improbable. Han activated her recording device, felt its weight against her ribs. She composed the message to Xiao-wen, attached three damning correlations, and pressed send.
Han’s scanner swept methodically through the processing bay’s atmosphere, the device’s soft chirp marking each data point. From his control booth above, Xiao-wen watched, his posture relaxed against the console but his eyes tracking her movements. The readings accumulated: elevated particle counts near the cutting stations. Not emergency levels (nothing that would trigger automatic alarms) but consistently higher than the values in his logged data. She photographed each discrepancy, the scanner’s screen reflecting in her eyes.
She moved to the equipment stations, examining the radiation badges clipped to support struts and tool racks. Each one positioned in low-exposure zones, meters away from where workers actually operated the cutting torches and manipulator arms. Han touched one badge, felt its cool plastic surface, noted its pristine condition. “Your monitoring positions don’t match actual work locations,” she said, her voice carrying the professional neutrality of a formal inspection.
Xiao-wen descended from the booth, his boots magnetic-locking to the deck plating with rhythmic clicks. He carried two cups of tea, steam curling in the recycled air. “Lieutenant Han, I appreciate your thoroughness.” He offered her a cup, his smile warm. “The badges are positioned per corporate protocol, approved by certified safety engineers. Their credentials far exceed station requirements. Doctoral-level radiation physics, decades of industrial experience.” He gestured toward a framed certification on the booth wall. “Tiangong Reclamation’s safety standards are actually more stringent than military protocols. We have to be. Liability costs would destroy our profit margins otherwise.”
He sipped his own tea, waiting. The processing bay hummed around them, equipment dormant but ready. Through the observation port, debris floated in neat magnetic clusters, waiting to be transformed into revenue.
Han held the tea cup without raising it. She set it on the nearest console, then pulled her tablet from her belt. Chen’s exposure timeline appeared on the screen. She overlaid Xiao-wen’s processing logs, the data sets misaligning like broken bones.
“Chen was on shift here Tuesday,” she said. “Your manifests show inert metals only. Steel plating. Aluminum frames. Nothing radioactive.”
She turned the tablet. Xiao-wen leaned forward, his expression shifting to professional interest. His fingers moved across his own console with the efficiency of someone who’d answered these questions before.
“The reclassification,” he said, pulling up a corporate memo. “New categorization standards from headquarters. Materials we logged as low-level radioactive last quarter are now ‘trace contamination: industrial grade.’ Different handling protocols. Less documentation required.”
He gestured at the screen. “The components didn’t change, Lieutenant. The regulatory framework did. Tiangong Reclamation worked with three different safety agencies to establish these standards. All perfectly legal.”
Han’s hand tightened on her scanner. Legal. Not safe. Legal.
Han’s jaw tightened. Corporate lawyers redefining danger to improve profit margins. She’d seen this before: different station, same arithmetic of acceptable casualties.
She photographed his screen, then moved deeper into the bay. Her scanner extended toward salvaged components floating in magnetic nets. The readings spiked. She marked the location, moved methodically through the workspace. Xiao-wen followed at a careful distance.
“You’re welcome to inspect everything,” he said. Apparent openness. “But Tiangong Reclamation carries full liability insurance. Any claims would need to prove negligence, not just presence of radioactive materials in salvage operations.”
He smiled. “That’s a high legal bar, Lieutenant.”
The message clear: corporate legal resources would crush any challenge.
Han’s scanner showed contamination seventeen percent above safe exposure limits in three separate material clusters. She photographed each reading, documented the positions. Her movements stayed precise, methodical: building an evidence trail that corporate lawyers couldn’t dismiss as hysteria.
“Routine work,” she said, voice flat. “With radiation signatures matching Chen’s exposure profile exactly.”
She watched his expression calculate new angles, new defenses. The smile returned, but colder now.
Han’s scanner remained steady in her grip, its readings still visible. The numbers didn’t change because someone showed her profit margins.
“Chen’s in medical quarantine,” she said. “Zhao will want to see my contamination readings.” She paused, watching his calculation shift again. “Unless you’d prefer explaining to families why their oxygen contracts matter more than radiation protocols.”
The control booth suddenly felt smaller. More exposed.
Han didn’t move. The scanner stayed in her hand, its weight familiar. She’d held diagnostic equipment through worse conversations than this.
“Chen’s symptoms match acute exposure,” she said. “Nausea, disorientation, elevated white cell count. The pattern’s consistent.” She kept her voice level, medical. Facts without accusation. “Your badges read safe. Your manifests show compliance. But something in that bay made a healthy worker sick within a four-hour shift.”
Xiao-wen’s fingers drummed once against his desk. “Correlation isn’t causation. Chen could have picked up a virus, eaten something off, had a stress reaction. You’re assuming. Han pulled her own tablet from her belt, called up the readings she’d taken.”Air samples from three locations in the processing bay. Particulate analysis pending, but preliminary scans show isotope signatures inconsistent with your manifests.” She turned the screen toward him. “These readings suggest materials with higher decay rates than what you’ve logged.”
The numbers hung between them. Not proof. Not yet. But enough to make his jaw tighten.
“Equipment malfunction,” he said. “Your scanner’s probably miscalibrated. Happens all the time with sensitive instruments in this environment.”
“I calibrate every morning.” Han’s scarred hand stayed steady on the tablet. “Station protocol. I can show you the logs.”
“Then the samples are contaminated. Cross-contamination from other sources, background radiation, solar activity,” He was talking faster now, building explanations. “You can’t just wave a scanner around and shut down critical operations based on preliminary readings that could mean anything.”
Han met his eyes. “I can quarantine sections showing contamination risk. Medical authority supersedes operational concerns during health emergencies.” She paused. “Or we can wait for proper analysis. Three days for full spectroscopy. Bay stays sealed until then.”
His expression shifted. Calculation replacing defensiveness.
Xiao-wen stood. The movement was controlled, deliberate. His height advantage in the small booth suddenly tactical.
“You’re describing standard industry practice,” he said. “Badge rotation prevents false positives. Material classification follows established guidelines. Guidelines written by people with more expertise than either of us.” He gestured at the bay beyond the booth’s window, where workers maneuvered debris in practiced choreography. “Those people have jobs because I run efficient operations. Their families eat because I meet quotas.”
Han didn’t step back. The scarred tissue on her neck pulled tight.
“Chen’s white cell count is three times normal,” she said. “That’s not standard industry practice. That’s radiation damage.”
“That’s one data point.” Xiao-wen’s voice dropped lower, almost gentle. “You’re a good medical officer, Han. Everyone knows that. But you see radiation exposure everywhere since your incident. It’s understandable. Trauma does that.” He paused. “Maybe you should consider whether your judgment is… compromised.”
The word hung between them like a blade.
Han’s fingers tightened on the tablet. The photographs stared back: evidence that would mean nothing to corporate lawyers, everything to someone who’d watched radiation sickness progress through human tissue.
“Compromised,” she said. The word tasted like metal. Like the air in the reactor room seven years ago.
She moved closer. The booth’s confined space made the distance between them tactical, measured in centimeters. Her scarred hand placed the tablet on his desk with careful precision.
“These workers show early-stage symptoms. Subclinical presentation, yes. But consistent with chronic low-level exposure.” She tapped the first image. “Conjunctival pallor. Persistent fatigue. Decreased lymphocyte counts in routine bloodwork.” Another tap. “Your monitoring system is designed to miss exactly this pattern.”
Xiao-wen leaned back. His chair creaked in the recycled air. “Dr. Han. Let’s be practical.” His voice carried the smoothness of rehearsed arguments. “Even accepting your hypothesis (which requires significant assumptions) what do you propose? Immediate shutdown creates immediate consequences. Lost wages. Reduced station funding. For symptoms that could indicate stress, sleep deprivation, nutritional deficits.”
His hands opened, palms up. Reasonable. Concerned.
“Enhanced monitoring. Additional safety protocols that preserve operations. But quarantine?” He shook his head. “Commander Zhao won’t authorize economic collapse based on preliminary data. You know this.”
Han watched his reasonable mask. She’d worn one herself once. Before the incident taught her what corporate concern was worth.
“Seventy-two hours,” she said. “Complete material manifests. Unedited radiation logs. Worker exposure histories.”
She stood. Her scarred tissue pulled tight.
“If corporate blocks me, I invoke medical emergency protocols. Take evidence to Earth oversight directly.”
At the door she stopped. “I document everything now, Xiao-wen. Every conversation. Every obstruction. Every convenient delay.”
Her hand found the bulkhead. Steadied herself.
“Won’t be silenced with spreadsheets again.”
Han pulled the spectrometer results closer. The blue glow of the display painted her scarred tissue in shifting shadows.
Cesium-137. Cobalt-60. Trace amounts of strontium-90.
Her fingers moved across the tablet, photographing each reading from three angles. Chain of custody mattered. Corporate lawyers would attack methodology before they’d address the contamination itself.
She labeled the first sample container: “Corridor E-6, 1407 hours, 15cm from salvage bay pressure door.” Her handwriting stayed level despite the tremor in her damaged hand. The chronic pain always worsened when she was tired. She’d been tired for three years.
The spectrometer hummed through its analysis cycle. Thirty seconds per sample. She had seventeen containers.
While the machine worked, Han pulled up the station’s automated environmental monitoring logs. Clean readings across the board for the past six months. Either the sensors were positioned to miss the contamination or someone had edited the data. She screenshot the logs, noted the discrepancies in her investigation file.
Her personal radiation detector sat on the desk. The one she’d bought with her own money after the incident. Station-issued equipment could be calibrated to corporate specifications. This one answered only to physics.
She held it near the sample containers. The click-click-click accelerated. Not dangerous for brief exposure. But the salvage workers spent eight-hour shifts in those corridors. Breathed that air. Ate lunch with contaminated dust on their hands.
Li-na-wei worked maintenance in that section twice a week.
Han’s jaw tightened. She forced her breathing to slow, counted to four on the inhale. The meditation techniques her therapist taught her. Stay clinical. Emotion compromised evidence.
The spectrometer beeped completion. She documented the reading, moved to the next sample.
Methodical. Irrefutable. Exactly what she’d needed three years ago when corporate investigators had called her concerns “premature” and her warnings “alarmist.”
This time she’d have proof before anyone died.
Han opened the medical database at 1432 hours. Six months of records. Two hundred forty-seven crew members.
She created a new spreadsheet. Columns for name, assignment, symptoms, dates. Rows for salvage bay personnel highlighted in red.
Chen: persistent headaches, three months ago. Attributed to stress. She pulled his work schedule. Forty hours weekly in E-section corridors.
Rodriguez: unexplained bruising, six weeks back. Logged as minor trauma. Han zoomed in on the photographs. The bruising pattern matched compromised platelet function.
Okafor: recent bloodwork showed elevated lymphocytes. Marked “monitor and retest.” The elevation was slight. Individually meaningless. But Okafor supervised material sorting in the processing bay.
Twelve more cases. Each with plausible alternative explanations. Fatigue. Stress. Minor injuries. The kind of complaints that filled any station medical log.
Together they formed a constellation. Chronic low-level exposure. Textbook presentation.
Han screenshot each record. Added annotations in a separate document layer: exposure pathways, symptom timelines, statistical clustering. She saved everything to three encrypted drives. One for her personal files. One for Ming. One hidden in Li-na-wei’s tool locker with instructions she hoped would never be needed.
Han’s fingers moved across the tablet, capturing each image at 1515 hours. The detector readings first: baseline normal in the medical bay, the numbers clear and defensible. Then the samples arranged on her desk, labels facing forward. The documentation spread in careful sequence. Every photograph included the timestamp overlay.
She drafted the summary in clinical language. Exposure pathways identified through air sampling. Symptom progression documented across fourteen personnel. Regulatory thresholds exceeded in three corridor sections. No accusations. No emotional appeals. Just measurements and medical observations that couldn’t be dismissed as personal vendetta.
She encrypted the message to Ming. Subject line: “Routine Medical Quality Assurance Documentation. The bureaucratic phrasing would protect them both. For now.
Han’s eyes tracked down the protocol document, finding the bureaucratic gaps where medical authority dissolved into corporate discretion. “Reasonable suspicion” required quantifiable proof. “Immediate danger” meant bodies already failing. The language protected operations, not people.
She highlighted Section 7.[^3] anyway: the emergency override clause. Narrow as a blade, but sharp enough if she needed it. Her scarred hand steady on the screen.
Han sealed the medical bay door behind her. The corridor stretched empty. Her boots made no sound on the deck plating.
The radiation detector hung heavy in her pocket, already calibrated. Her tablet pressed against her ribs, evidence encrypted behind three passwords. The personal badge at her collar caught the overhead lighting, timestamp, baseline reading, proof she’d entered clean.
She walked toward the industrial section. Toward Xiao-wen. Toward answers he wouldn’t want to give.
The industrial section smelled different. Metal and ozone, sharp against the recycled air. Han’s detector registered the change. Background radiation climbing from 0.[^3] to 0.[^8] millisieverts as she crossed into E-section. Still safe. Still legal.
The observation port showed the processing floor in full operation. A cutting torch sparked white-hot against a cylindrical hull section, the faded logo of some defunct mining company barely visible through carbon scoring. Three workers in reinforced suits maneuvered the piece with magnetic grapples. The debris field beyond the airlock stretched into darkness, a constellation of salvage waiting to be processed.
Xiao-wen stood in the pressurized control booth, backlit by monitors displaying profit margins and material assessments. But he wasn’t watching the work. He was watching the corridor. Watching her approach.
Two figures flanked him. Corporate security uniforms, crisp and new against the worn industrial equipment. Not station personnel. Brought in specifically. Recently.
Han’s detector chirped softly, recording everything to her encrypted tablet. She kept walking. The observation port reflected her own face back at her. The mottled scarring pale against her skin, the set of her jaw, the lieutenant’s insignia catching light.
Xiao-wen held a tablet. Document already displayed, already queued. Ready.
He’d known she was coming. Known before she’d left Medical Bay, before she’d sealed the door, before she’d checked her detector’s calibration. Someone had warned him. Someone with access to her movements, her schedule, her intentions.
The airlock controls waited at the corridor’s end. Han’s hand moved to the panel. Her detector showed 0.[^9] millisieverts now. Elevated. Concerning. Not emergency-threshold.
Not enough.
The airlock light blinked green. She pressed the cycle button. The door hissed open, and she stepped through into Xiao-wen’s carefully prepared reception.
Han’s detector chirped. Point-nine-two millisieverts. She held it steady, letting the reading stabilize. Point-nine-three. The device recorded automatically, timestamped, encrypted.
“Background radiation is elevated,” she said. “Point-nine-three millisieverts in a pressurized workspace.”
“Within legal parameters.” Xiao-wen’s tone remained pleasant. “The threshold for emergency intervention is two millisieverts in occupied spaces. I’m sure you know the regulations, Lieutenant.”
She did. She’d memorized them after the incident. After watching Chen die over six days, his bone marrow destroyed by exposure that had registered just under emergency thresholds. After the corporate lawyers had argued “acceptable risk” and “industry standard” until the case disappeared into archived files.
“My workers wear dosimeters,” Xiao-wen continued. He tapped his own badge, clipped to his chest. “All within safe ranges. I can provide the data logs if you’d like to review them through proper channels.”
The security personnel shifted slightly. Not threatening. Just present. Just blocking the path to the processing floor where the cutting torch still sparked, where the debris waited, where the real readings would be higher.
Han lowered the detector but kept recording. The numbers told one story. Her training told another.
“Section Seven medical authority supersedes jurisdictional frameworks in matters of crew health,” she said. Each word precise. “Station charter, Article Four, Subsection B.”
Xiao-wen’s smile thinned. “I’m familiar with the charter, Lieutenant. I’m also familiar with the injunction transmitted from Earth this morning.” He produced a tablet, held it where she could read the legal text. Corporate letterhead. Proper signatures. Seventy-two hours notice required for non-emergency inspections of commercial facilities.
“Unless,” he said gently, “you’re declaring a medical emergency? That would require documentation. Justification. Review.”
The detector chirped. Point-eight-seven millisieverts.
Not enough.
Han’s jaw tightened. The detector’s steady rhythm mocked her. Evidence that proved nothing. She swept it toward the processing floor again. Point-nine-two near the airlocks. Point-seven-eight by the control booth.
“Background radiation,” Xiao-wen repeated, his tone patient, almost sympathetic. “Salvaged materials. All documented.”
Behind him, workers moved through their routines, dosimetry badges clipped to their suits. Everything technically compliant. Everything legally defensible.
Everything wrong.
Han held his gaze. The detector continued its quiet documentation. Point-eight-five. Point-nine-one. Numbers that meant everything and proved nothing.
“I’ll be reviewing those records,” she said. “Monitoring crew health. Very closely.”
She moved toward the airlock. Stopped.
“Proper procedures work both ways, Xiao-wen. When they fail to protect people, I have other authorities.”
Not quite a threat. Not quite a retreat.
The airlock cycled. Through the porthole she watched him turn back to his operations, already dismissing her.
Han’s hands moved across the diagnostic tablet, fingers tracing the radiation signature patterns she knew too well. The spectrometer readings showed cesium-137 and strontium-90. Bone-seekers, the kind that lodged in marrow and stayed. She’d carried similar isotopes in her own tissue for years, felt them in the chronic ache along her jaw when atmospheric pressure shifted.
The younger worker vomited into the collection bag. Han steadied his shoulder with one hand while adjusting the IV drip with the other. His lymphocyte count had dropped thirty percent in six hours. Accelerated progression. Higher exposure than her instruments had initially calculated.
She pulled up the corridor E-6 maintenance schedule on her secondary screen. The ductwork installation had taken Chen and his partner into a crawlspace that shared a bulkhead with the salvage bay’s material storage area. According to the environmental logs, that section should have registered baseline radiation. Han accessed the salvage bay’s monitoring feed. The official readings showed green across all sensors. 0.[^09] microsieverts. 0.[^11]. 0.[^08]. Perfectly safe. Perfectly consistent.
She switched to the medical bay’s independent detector array. The backup system she’d installed herself after the incident, the one that wasn’t networked to station operations. The readings from corridor E-6 told a different story: 2.[^3] microsieverts. Sustained exposure over the eight-hour shift would exceed monthly safety limits.
Someone had scrubbed the data. Someone had sent these workers into a hot zone with falsified clearance.
Han photographed the comparison screens, her scarred hand steady despite the familiar cold rage building in her chest. She saved the files to her personal storage, encrypted them, then sent a copy to Li-na-wei’s private address with a single word: “Evidence.”
The second worker started bleeding from his gums.
Ming entered at 1742 hours carrying three data tablets against their chest like armor. Their expression held the careful neutrality of someone who’d discovered something they couldn’t unknow.
“I’ve been running comparisons,” Ming said. They set the tablets on Han’s desk, arranging them in precise alignment. “Salvage manifests against monitoring logs. Four months back.”
Han pulled up the first screen. Numbers in red. Discrepancies ranging from fifteen to twenty percent. Every adjustment lowered the radiation readings. Every change bore Xiao-wen’s authorization code.
“The materials are getting hotter.” Ming’s voice dropped to barely audible. “Reactor components. Hull plating from Chernobyl Station. Medical waste from oncology facilities.” They pulled up an email chain. “Corporate explicitly authorized ‘optimized safety thresholds’ to meet quarterly targets.”
Han felt the scar tissue along her neck tighten. She’d seen this before. Different station, different company, same language. Optimization. Acceptable parameters. Calculated risk.
Behind them, Chen coughed wetly into his oxygen mask.
“They knew,” Han said.
Ming nodded once. “They knew.”
Han typed the protocol with steady hands. Each word precise. Each requirement justified by regulation. She routed it through official channels at 1753 hours.
The response arrived at 1812. Station Commander Wei’s voice carried the flat tone of someone reading corporate counsel’s script. Tiangong Reclamation generated sixty-three percent of station revenue. Current readings fell within acceptable industrial parameters. Mandatory screening would constitute contractual interference.
Han’s fingers found the scar tissue at her neck. The words were different. The station was different. The excuse was identical.
“Voluntary screenings only,” Wei said. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
She ended the call. Pulled up the emergency protocol she’d written after the last incident. The one nobody had implemented.
This time would be different.
She set up the monitoring station at corridor junction C-7. Shift change. Maximum traffic.
Workers stopped. Word had spread. Forty-two screened by 1800 hours. Eleven showed elevated markers. Seventeen more carried trace contamination.
Corporate employees walked past. Eyes forward. Following supervisor guidance.
Han logged each reading. Built the medical record. Documented the expanding radiation map in real-time: the slow catastrophe she’d seen before, when she was too junior to act.
Not this time.
Han’s scarred hand completes the authorization sequence. The screen flashes red. Emergency medical authority activated. Station command will receive the alert in thirty seconds. Court-martial risk accepted. She keeps the comm open, listening to Li-na-wei’s breathing, that familiar rhythm she knows better than her own pulse. “I’m implementing full quarantine protocols now,” Han says. “Get your crew to decontamination. All of them.”
Han’s fingers hover motionless above the authorization panel. The comm crackles with Li-na-wei’s voice, stripped of its usual warmth, reduced to the flat precision of someone delivering a damage report. “Han, I need you to listen without interrupting.”
The atmospheric analyzer readings scroll across Han’s secondary screen as Li-na-wei transmits them. Cesium-137 at 0.[^8] microcuries per cubic meter. Strontium-90 at 0.[^3] microcuries. Both isotopes with half-lives measured in decades. The numbers overlay themselves in Han’s mind with the progression charts of the two workers in her bay. Their nausea and fatigue suddenly acquiring a terrible mathematical precision.
Her scarred tissue tightens. The sensation always comes when her body remembers before her mind catches up. She knows these isotopes. Knows their signatures. Knows what they do to bone marrow and intestinal lining and lung tissue over weeks and months and years.
“Location of highest concentration?” Han asks. Her voice comes out steady. Military training.
“Salvage bay ventilation feeds directly into the primary circulation trunk.” Li-na-wei’s words come faster now, technical details a barrier against panic. “From there it distributes through sectors C through G. Habitation modules. Cafeteria. Your medical bay is on the secondary circulation loop, but there’s crossover at junction points.”
Han pulls up the station schematic. The ventilation system spreads across her screen like a circulatory system, every module connected, every corridor sharing the same recycled air. No isolation capability. The designers had worried about biological contamination, about viruses and bacteria that could be filtered and sterilized. Not about particles that would pass through standard filters and embed themselves in human tissue.
“How long?” Han asks.
“Xiao-wen’s been processing hot salvage for three months. Maybe longer.” Li-na-wei’s breathing sounds wrong through the comm. Too shallow. “We’ve all been breathing this.”
Han pulls up Li-na-wei’s biometric data without asking permission. Heart rate elevated. Respiration shallow. Core temperature up point-three degrees. The numbers arrange themselves into a diagnosis Han doesn’t want to make.
“Stop talking,” Han says. “Listen to me. You need to exit that crawlspace now. Seal the access panel behind you. Go directly to Medical Bay. Don’t stop anywhere else.”
“I have six more filter assemblies in this section. The silence stretches. Han can hear the rasp of Li-na-wei’s breathing, the scrape of tools being gathered. Through the comm comes the metallic clang of a hatch closing.
“I’m coming,” Li-na-wei says finally.
Han’s hands move across her screens, pulling up exposure protocols, calculating accumulated doses based on Li-na-wei’s shift logs. The math is brutal. Double shifts in contaminated crawlspaces. Weeks of exposure before detection. The particulates would have settled in her lungs first, then migrated through lymphatic tissue.
Han tastes copper. She’s biting the inside of her cheek.
The scarred tissue pulls tight, nerve endings misfiring their familiar alarm. Han’s palm finds her neck automatically: the mottled skin, the permanent map of what radiation does to human tissue. She forces her hand down. Opens the atmospheric monitoring interface.
The contamination pattern spreads across her screen in red vectors. Salvage bay. Connecting corridor. Ventilation intake. Then branching, branching, branching through every duct and register. The cafeteria where morning shift ate congee three hours ago. Civilian quarters where the Zhao family’s twins sleep in their magnetic bunks. Her own quarters. The bed where Li-na-wei collapses after double shifts, breathing deeply in exhausted sleep.
Han’s fingers hover over the quarantine protocols. Already too late. The air has been circulating for weeks.
Han’s throat closes. The question forms itself: exposure duration, particle density, accumulated dose. The mathematics of cellular damage. Li-na-wei’s voice fractures through the comm, metal shrieking as another filter tears free. “Primary circulation, four hours. Secondary systems, eight. But Han,” The pause stretches. “Everyone breathing station air these past weeks.”
The two workers behind her. The reflection in her monitor: scarred skin, a map of radiation’s patience. Some futures can’t be prevented. Only endured.
Han’s hands move without conscious thought, pulling up the crew roster. Three hundred forty-seven names. Sixty-two children in the civilian section. Her eyes find Li-na-wei’s entry: maintenance crew, double shifts, maximum time in contaminated crawlspaces. The numbers translate automatically into cellular damage, mutation probability, years subtracted. Her finger trembles over the emergency protocol key. Through the comm, Li-na-wei’s voice steadies. “Transmitting my analyzer readings now. You’ll need baseline data.”
Han’s training takes over. She doesn’t look at Ming. Can’t afford the distraction of their fear. The tablet’s surface is warm under her palm. Smart. The station’s surveillance systems are corporate-owned.
She opens the first file. Salvage manifest 2247-A. Reactor shielding from a decommissioned military vessel. The radiation signature shows cesium-137, strontium-90. Her jaw tightens. The logged reading: 0.[^3] millisieverts. Acceptable for processing.
She pulls the raw sensor data from station environmental monitoring. The same timestamp. Actual reading: 4.[^7] millisieverts. Twenty minutes of exposure at that level equals her daily safety limit.
“How many?” Her voice sounds distant to her own ears.
“Forty-three manifests.” Ming’s hands clasp behind their back. Military posture borrowed from watching her. “The pattern starts small. January. Minor adjustments, maybe ten percent. By March, he’s cutting readings in half. Last month’s shipment,” They pause. “He reported one-fifth the actual contamination.”
Han scrolls faster. Her medical training translates the numbers into flesh. Into cellular breakdown. The workers in the processing bay wore standard suits, not radiation gear. Exposure time logged in the duty rosters. She can calculate their accumulated doses. Already is calculating, can’t stop the automatic assessment.
“The ventilation contamination Li-na-wei found.” Not a question.
“Particulates from cutting operations. The materials were so hot they should have triggered automatic containment. But the sensors were reading Xiao-wen’s adjusted numbers.” Ming’s voice drops further. “The system thought everything was safe.”
Han finds Li-na-wei’s shift logs. Maintenance crawlspaces. Ductwork repairs. Seventeen hours last week in contaminated zones, breathing recycled air thick with radioactive dust. Her hand moves to her own scarred neck. She remembers the taste of radiation sickness. The cellular fire.
“Corporate authorization codes.” She’s already seeing them in the file headers.
“Every fraudulent report.” Ming’s glasses reflect the screen’s glow. “They knew.”
Han’s fingers freeze on the tablet. Manifest 2289-C. The isotope profile makes her stomach drop. Cobalt-60. Half-life five years. The kind of contamination that doesn’t wash away.
The logged reading: 0.[^8] millisieverts. Acceptable threshold.
She pulls the raw environmental data. Her scarred hand clenches. Actual reading: 6.[^2] millisieverts.
She knows this signature. Knows it in her bones, in the mottled tissue of her neck. Medical reactor shielding. The same source type that burned her three years ago on the Zheng He. The same corporate cost-cutting that left inadequate protection around a failing containment system.
“These materials,” Her voice sounds strange. Hollow. “: these should never have been processed here.”
The words feel insufficient. Criminal understatement. She scrolls to the handling protocols. Standard cutting procedures. No additional shielding. Workers in regular suits breathing recycled air while Xiao-wen’s torches vaporized radioactive alloys into fine particulate.
“They require specialized containment facilities.” She looks up at Ming. “Deep space processing or lunar sites. Nowhere near a habitation station.”
Ming nods once. They already know. Have known since they started compiling the evidence.
Ming swipes through the folder. Their hands shake. The monitor’s glow makes their face corpse-pale.
“Five months ago.” Ming’s voice barely carries. “Regional management. They acknowledge the ‘elevated risk profile.’”
Han leans closer. The language is surgical. Clean. Cost-benefit analysis indicates acceptable parameters for continued operations. Liability payouts calculated against profit margins. Every phrase constructed for legal protection.
The signature sits at the bottom. Xiao-wen’s supervisor. Xiao-wen cc’d.
He read this. Knew the numbers. Knew what “acceptable parameters” meant in flesh.
Han’s throat tightens. The scarred tissue pulls. She remembers her own incident report. The same careful language. No negligence identified. The settlement check. The agreement she signed.
They always know. They always calculate. Someone always pays.
Ming’s finger hovers over another file. “The ventilation contamination: it didn’t spread naturally. He vented the processing bay during a pressure equalization cycle. Faster than running proper decontamination.”
Han’s vision narrows. Li-na-wei works those systems. Breathes that air. Every shift, every repair, particles settling into lung tissue.
“When?” Her voice sounds distant.
“Three weeks ago. The day before Li-na-wei reported the readings.”
Han’s fingers move across the interface, copying files to her secured medical partition. The backup drives click into her palm. Small cylinders she’s carried since the incident, insurance against convenient data loss.
“Enough to shut him down. Force a full investigation.”
Ming’s expression doesn’t shift. “Command gets quarterly bonuses. Salvage revenue.” A pause. “The deputy director’s son. Expensive.”
The files feel heavier than their physical weight.
Han’s scarred fingers hesitate over the ventilation override panel. The sequence is burned into muscle memory: three authentication codes, two biometric confirmations, the final manual key turn that her therapist once suggested might be ritualistic avoidance rather than necessary protocol.
She enters the first code.
The system responds with amber warnings cascading across the display. Atmospheric pressure differential alerts. Circulation disruption projections. Temperature regulation compromise estimates spreading through connected modules like infection vectors on a diagnostic chart.
Second code. Her left hand, the scarred one, moves slower. Chronic pain flaring in the cold recycled air.
“Han.” Li-na-wei’s voice from the doorway, gentle but present.
“I know.” She doesn’t look away from the screen.
The biometric scanner reads her palm. Accepts. The system asks for confirmation. This action will affect life support for one hundred forty-seven personnel across four residential sections.
She confirms.
The klaxons begin as she turns the manual key. Not the sharp emergency evacuation tone, but the lower, sustained warning that means environmental systems are operating outside normal parameters. People will notice. People will ask questions.
The potassium iodide tablets are arranged on the medical bay counter in precise rows. Forty-three doses remaining after the first distribution. She’d requisitioned two hundred last quarter. Command approved sixty. Corporate logistics delivered forty-three.
“Twelve workers first,” she says, counting tablets into individual packets. “Highest exposure readings.”
Li-na-wei is already moving, pulling maintenance equipment from storage. Emergency shower components. Decontamination protocols adapted from industrial cleaning procedures because the station has no dedicated facilities. Her hands work with practiced efficiency, connecting hoses, testing pressure, adjusting spray patterns.
“This won’t be enough,” Li-na-wei says quietly.
Han seals another packet. “No.”
But it’s what they have. The decontamination station takes shape outside the medical bay.
Han’s jaw tightens as she pulls up the ventilation contamination map, the spreading red zones illuminating her scarred face. “Cumulative risk becomes acute when it crosses exposure thresholds. We’re approaching that now.”
“Approaching.” Xiao-wen speaks for the first time, his voice carrying practiced reasonableness. “Not there yet.”
She turns to face him directly. “Three workers are vomiting. Two have lymphocyte depression. Early indicators,”
“Could be anything,” Xiao-wen interrupts smoothly. “Flu. Stress. The medical literature acknowledges diagnostic ambiguity at low-level exposure.”
He’s done his research. Prepared for this.
Deputy Director Chen shifts uncomfortably, glancing between them. “Lieutenant Han, your concern is noted and appreciated. But we need definitive evidence before we can justify the economic impact. Continue your monitoring protocols. If the situation deteriorates to acute emergency status,”
“It will be too late.” Her voice stays level through discipline alone.
Chen’s expression shows genuine regret. “That’s not the standard we’re working with. I’m sorry.”
He leaves. Xiao-wen lingers a moment longer, meeting her eyes. Then he follows, his footsteps unhurried.
The cutting torches resume within the hour.
Han spreads the contamination maps across the medical bay’s display, each red zone a documented failure. “The particles are in the ventilation system. Spreading.” She pulls up the workers’ blood panels, the declining lymphocyte counts undeniable. “These aren’t projections. This is happening now.”
Chen studies the data with furrowed concentration, his finger tracing the contamination pathways. When he speaks, his tone carries reluctant precision. “Immediate means acute exposure, Lieutenant. What you’re describing is cumulative risk. The regulations were written by corporate lawyers for exactly this evasion.
“Continue monitoring,” Chen says. “Document everything. Prepare recommendations for gradual operational modifications.”
Bureaucratic language meaning nothing changes.
Xiao-wen doesn’t acknowledge Han. He stops at the decontamination station, studying the water recyclers and filtration setup with a salvage operator’s eye: calculating costs, inefficiencies, lost productivity. Chen remains after, voice dropping: “My hands are tied. We need that income. But keep documenting.” An admission of complicity dressed as future accountability. Han watches them leave. Her screens already show new contamination alerts spreading through the ventilation map like a slow hemorrhage.
Li-na-wei arrives at 2230 hours, still in her work coveralls, grease under her fingernails from the ventilation repair Han had ordered. She doesn’t ask why Han called her in after shift. Just sits on the examination bed, rolling up her sleeve, exposing the strong forearm that has held Han through nightmares about radiation burns. Han preps the scanner with hands that have sutured arteries without trembling. Now they shake.
Han’s fingers found the scanner’s activation stud. The device hummed against Li-na-wei’s skin, a sound that had become routine over fifteen years of medical practice. Not routine now. The tablet screen filled with data streams. Cellular counts cascading down in neat columns, each number a small verdict.
Lymphocytes: 3,[^200] per microliter. Han’s jaw tightened. Three weeks ago, 7,[^000]. Normal range, 4,[^000] to 11,[^000]. The decline traced a curve she recognized from her own medical files, from the incident that had melted the left side of her face.
She adjusted the scanner’s resolution, focusing on the blood smear analysis. Micronuclei appeared as bright spots against the darker cellular background. Chromosomal fragments that had broken loose during cell division, DNA shattered by ionizing radiation. They shouldn’t exist in healthy tissue. They existed here.
The spectral analysis loaded next. Cesium-137 signature, matching the contaminated ventilation system exactly. Particles small enough to bypass standard filters, lodged deep in alveolar tissue where Li-na-wei had been breathing them for weeks. Every maintenance shift in those tunnels, every breath of recycled air, adding to the cumulative dose.
Han moved the scanner to Li-na-wei’s chest, mapping the concentration gradient. Highest in the lungs, spreading to lymph nodes, beginning to accumulate in bone marrow where new blood cells formed. The pattern was textbook: she’d written papers on this progression, treated dozens of exposure cases. Never someone she loved.
Li-na-wei sat motionless on their bunk, her calloused hands resting on her knees. She wasn’t watching the tablet. She was watching Han’s face, reading the micro-expressions that Han couldn’t control: the tightening around her eyes, the way her scarred tissue pulled when her jaw clenched, the slight tremor in her hands as she saved the scan results.
The silence stretched between them, filled with everything the numbers meant.
“Show me,” Li-na-wei said.
Han turned the tablet. The cellular damage mapped in false color. Blue for healthy tissue fading through yellow to angry red concentrations. Lungs. Bone marrow. The contamination’s path rendered visible.
Li-na-wei traced the pattern with one grease-stained finger, following the radiation through her own body with a mechanic’s analytical eye. Reading the damage like a schematic. “Same as yours was.”
Not a question. Han nodded, her throat tight.
“Early stage. The progression is. Couldn’t finish the clinical description. Saw instead her own months of treatment. The burning pain that woke her at night. The tissue death spreading across her face and neck. The smell of her own flesh breaking down. The certainty that she was dying, cell by cell.
Li-na-wei’s hand moved from the tablet to Han’s face. Fingertips gentle against the mottled scarring. Tracing the boundary between damaged and healthy skin with familiar tenderness.
“How bad?”
The question steady. Practical. The same tone she used diagnosing a failing pump or cracked seal.
Han couldn’t speak past the medical truth lodging in her chest like shrapnel. The words came anyway, clinical and precise because that was all she had left. “Treatable now. Chelation therapy, stem cell support, aggressive monitoring.” Each treatment protocol a lifeline she was offering with shaking hands. “But only if the exposure stops immediately.”
Li-na-wei’s eyes held hers. Waiting for the rest. The impossible part.
“No more maintenance work in the affected sections.” Han’s voice steadied through force of will. “No more double shifts. You need to minimize time in any area connected to the salvage bay ventilation.”
She watched Li-na-wei absorb it. Watched her partner calculate what survival would cost.
Li-na-wei’s fingers traced the station schematic on Han’s tablet. Her jaw tightened as she mapped ventilation zones, calculated shift rotations, measured the impossible distance between survival and duty.
“Two-thirds of the station.” Her voice flattened. “Someone has to maintain life support. We’re already running skeleton crews.”
Her hand fell away from Han’s scarred cheek. “And it won’t stop the spread. I’m breathing contaminated air right now. Our quarters are three corridors from the processing bay.”
The resignation cut deeper than rage. “How long before everyone shows symptoms?”
Han’s tablet displayed the curves: red lines climbing exponentially across projected weeks. Her finger traced the inflection point where individual cases became epidemic.
“Forty-seven people symptomatic by week six.” The clinical precision steadied her voice. “Acute cases by week ten. Children first. Their cells divide faster.”
Li-na-wei’s breathing changed. Not fear anymore. Something colder.
“The education pod shares ventilation with habitation ring C.”
Han nodded once. Twelve children. Five families. The contamination wouldn’t discriminate.
Han’s scarred hand rested on the transmission key. The encryption algorithm cycled through its final verification: sixteen-digit authentication, triple-redundant routing, civilian emergency override protocols that would flag the message as critical across three regulatory agencies.
“They’ll subpoena our personal communications,” Ming said. Their voice carried no inflection. Statement of fact. “Every message, every relationship, every financial transaction. Looking for leverage.”
Han had seen the playbook before. Corporate investigations didn’t seek truth. They constructed narratives. Two disgruntled employees. History of insubordination. Personal relationship clouding judgment. The radiation readings? Equipment malfunction. Independent verification? Contaminated samples. The sick workers? Seasonal illness, stress-related symptoms, pre-existing conditions.
Her left hand moved to her neck, fingers finding the boundary between scarred and healthy tissue. The keloid ridges felt thick under her touch, desensitized nerves reporting pressure without pain. Seven years ago she’d believed documentation would matter. Believed that bodies dissolving from radiation exposure would constitute evidence no lawyer could dismiss.
She’d been wrong about what evidence meant to people who calculated human life in quarterly profit margins.
“The children in education pod,” Han said. “Their cellular regeneration rates make them particularly vulnerable to. Ming’s interruption was gentle.”I’ve read your projections three times.”
The progress bar reached ninety-four percent. Han thought about career trajectories, about the decade she’d spent rebuilding her medical credentials after the incident, about the careful political navigation required to earn this posting. Station command trusted her. Crew members brought her their private fears. She’d built something here.
Ninety-seven percent.
Li-na-wei’s contamination readings pulsed on the adjacent monitor. Early stage. Reversible. The word felt like a promise she might still keep.
“They’ll claim we falsified everything,” Ming repeated, quieter now.
Han pressed the key.
The transmission protocol completed with clinical efficiency. Forty-three seconds to encrypt, route through civilian emergency channels, bypass station command’s monitoring architecture. Each percentage point represented another severed connection. To command authority, to corporate tolerance, to the careful political equilibrium she’d maintained.
Han’s eyes tracked the adjacent monitor. Li-na-wei’s contamination readings remained stable at early-stage exposure. Reversible, if the source stopped immediately. But Xiao-wen’s cutting schedule showed another high-radiation operation beginning in six hours. The mathematics were simple. Treatment required cessation. Corporate required continuation.
Ming’s fingers moved across their tablet with bureaucratic precision, adding their personnel files to the transmission packet. Service records, credentials, performance evaluations: the documentation of competence that corporate would systematically dismantle. Better to establish credibility before the lawyers constructed their narrative.
“Evidence of qualification,” Ming said. “Before we become evidence of instability.”
Han understood. They were inoculating the investigation against the predictable corporate response. Not disgruntled employees. Qualified professionals. Not emotional overreaction. Documented assessment.
The distinction might matter to someone in Geneva.
The confirmation arrived as three ascending tones. Han watched the authentication codes populate her screen, OHA Geneva, investigative authority granted, deployment timeline: forty-eight hours.
No relief. Just the weight of what came next.
Her tablet flashed red. Commander Chen. Ming’s screen mirrored the alert.
Corporate security would arrive within minutes. Command monitoring would have flagged the unauthorized transmission by now. The bureaucratic machinery was already turning, preparing its response.
Han opened Li-na-wei’s file. Her fingers moved through the treatment protocols with practiced efficiency. Acute radiation exposure, chelation therapy schedules, decontamination procedures. She would need these protocols for dozens of crew members soon.
The documentation she could still control.
Xiao-wen arrived before security, salvage suit still sealed, face visible through the helmet’s faceplate. He cycled through the airlock without decontamination protocol.
“You’ve killed this station.” His voice carried the flat certainty of someone reciting prepared arguments. “Corporate will withdraw operations. Command loses half their revenue.”
Han met his eyes. Not malice there. Rationalization. A man who’d convinced himself acceptable losses were business.
“I understand perfectly,” she said. “You’ve been processing hot materials. Falsifying readings. Corporate knew, Ming found the memo calculating our deaths against profit margins.”
His expression shifted. Anger collapsing into fear as he understood the evidence had already traveled beyond his reach.
Security’s grip on her arm was professional, impersonal. Commander Chen’s face showed the careful neutrality of a man calculating his own survival.
Li-na-wei stood three meters away, grease still dark under her fingernails. Her hand moved, chest, then the small circular motion they’d developed for worth it across crowded mess halls.
Han’s throat closed. The contamination was already there, in Li-na-wei’s lungs, her blood. Seventy-two hours until OHA arrived. Weeks too late for treatment, just enough time to stop the killing.
She nodded once. Let security turn her toward the corridor.
Han’s fingers move across her own diagnostic interface, pulling up station maintenance logs that Ming quietly provided last week. Documentation that shouldn’t have been accessible to medical personnel, evidence of systematic protocol violations. She overlays Li-na-wei’s work schedule against radiation readings from the processing bay’s perimeter sensors, watching the correlation emerge with sickening clarity. Every spike in contamination corresponds to Li-na-wei’s shift assignments in adjacent sections.
“The ventilation work in E-6,” Han says, keeping her voice steady through discipline alone. “You reported unusual dust accumulation in the filters.”
Li-na-wei nods, her braids shifting against her shoulders. “Metallic particulate. I bagged it for disposal per protocol, but.”The bags went to standard recycling, didn’t they? Not hazardous waste processing.”
“There is no hazardous waste processing anymore.” Han pulls up the budget documentation, the cost-cutting memo from eight months ago that eliminated the specialized containment procedures. “Corporate directive. Salvage operations were deemed low-risk based on Xiao-wen’s assessment reports.” She highlights the radiation survey data: or rather, the absence of it. Blank fields where measurements should appear, perfunctory checkmarks where detailed analysis belonged.
Li-na-wei’s hand finds Han’s scarred wrist, thumb tracing the mottled skin where radiation burns left permanent damage. The touch grounds them both: shared knowledge of what those blank fields mean, what checkmarks hide, what cost-cutting actually costs.
“How many others?” Li-na-wei asks quietly.
Han has been tracking symptoms for three weeks, noting the subtle indicators others might dismiss. She’s identified seventeen crew members with probable exposure, all working maintenance or salvage-adjacent positions. All expendable in corporate calculations.
“Enough,” Han says, “that silence becomes complicity.”
The decision crystallizes between them without further words. Li-na-wei squeezes her wrist once, acceptance and permission together.
Han opens Ming’s documentation files, the ones marked with innocuous labels like “maintenance scheduling optimization” and “resource allocation review.” Inside: three months of systematic evidence. Radiation survey equipment signed out but never calibrated. Contamination protocols marked complete with timestamps that coincide with Xiao-wen’s profit reports to corporate headquarters. Safety inspections conducted by personnel who lack certification, whose signatures appear on dozens of forms in a single hour. Physical impossibility suggesting wholesale fabrication.
Li-na-wei leans over her shoulder, reading the data with a mechanic’s eye for systems analysis. “He’s been routing salvage through the water recycling intake,” she says, voice flat with recognition. “That’s why I kept finding metallic residue in the filtration membranes. I reported it four times.”
Han pulls up those maintenance reports. Each one acknowledged, filed, closed without action. The last one includes a note from station management: “Acceptable tolerance levels per corporate standards.”
“Corporate standards,” Han repeats, the words tasting like ash. She thinks of her own scarred face, the two colleagues who died, the corporate settlement that paid for silence. Not this time.
Han’s fingers freeze over the display as the pattern completes itself. Twenty-three crew members. Twenty-three maintenance workers whose shift rotations align perfectly with contamination events. Ming’s documentation shows the system: Xiao-wen processes hot salvage, radiation levels spike, management assigns maintenance to those exact sections within hours. Before proper decontamination, before cooling periods, before any pretense of safety protocol.
The jade plant’s leaves show faint discoloration she’d attributed to lighting. Now she recognizes it: radiation damage to chlorophyll. Even the gift carries contamination.
She pulls Li-na-wei’s hand from her face, holds it under the medical scanner. The dermal layer shows particulate embedment. Microscopic fragments of radioactive material ground into the whorls of her fingerprints from handling contaminated equipment.
“You’re all breathing it,” Han whispers. “Touching it. Drinking it in recycled water.”
Li-na-wei watches Han work with the quiet understanding of someone who’s learned every microexpression of crisis, anticipating needs before they’re spoken. Water bulb, tissue sample tray, the specific diagnostic tablet Han prefers for cellular analysis. Their practiced intimacy functions even as the diagnosis hangs between them like a countdown.
“You’re going to find more cases.” Statement, not question.
Han nods without looking up from the cascading data. Twenty-three names. Twenty-three exposure patterns. Twenty-three people who trusted the station to protect them.
Li-na-wei’s voice drops lower, takes on the edge it gets when she’s decided something irrevocable. “When you report this, they’ll try to bury it. Xiao-wen has corporate legal protection. Commander Chen won’t want an investigation that makes the station look unsafe.” Her calloused fingers brush Han’s scarred cheek: the touch grounding and heartbreaking, a reminder of what radiation takes. “Do it anyway. Document everything.” Her jaw sets. “I didn’t survive Earth’s pollution and three years in space to die from some corporate asshole’s profit margins.”
Han’s fingers move across the interface with surgical precision, each data point another nail in the coffin she’s building. Exposure dates cross-referenced with shift schedules. Maintenance logs showing Li-na-wei’s team repeatedly sent into contaminated sections without proper monitoring. Xiao-wen’s falsified radiation readings, Ming found the originals buried in backup systems. The evidence crystallizes into something undeniable: corporate negligence, systematic safety violations, deliberate concealment.
Li-na-wei’s breathing has steadied against her shoulder, exhaustion finally claiming her. Han saves the file with encryption Ming taught her, flags it for automatic transmission if she doesn’t check in every twelve hours. A dead man’s switch. Her hand hovers over the final command. The one that sends everything to Earth’s health authority, bypassing every chain of command that failed them.
Not yet. Three more crew members showing symptoms need documentation. The water system contamination needs confirmed sources. She needs forty-eight hours to make the case bulletproof.
Li-na-wei stirs, mumbles something about fixing the air scrubber in section D. Han pulls her closer, feeling the warmth of living tissue that her scans show is already changing at the cellular level, and begins typing faster.
Han’s fingers trace the contamination vectors on the screen, following the invisible pathways of poison through their home. The data doesn’t lie: it never does. Each amber tendril represents particles small enough to slip through standard filtration, isotopes with half-lives measured in years settling into lung tissue, bone marrow, thyroid glands.
She overlays the personnel rotation schedules and watches the pattern complete itself. Every maintenance worker who entered the tunnels. Every salvage handler who processed materials without proper scanning. Every crew member who showered in the decontamination facilities, washing contaminated sweat into water systems that feed the entire station. The laundry facility. Forty-seven confirmed cases. But those are only the crew members who came to medical bay for routine checkups, who happened to trigger her expanded screening protocols. How many others are walking around with cellular damage they won’t recognize until the symptoms manifest? Until their hair starts falling out, until the nausea won’t stop, until their white blood cell counts crash?
She runs probability models based on contamination density and movement patterns through the station’s ventilation network. Conservative estimate: another thirty to fifty personnel at risk. Optimistic estimate: thirty. Realistic estimate: sixty-three. Worst case, if the water contamination has been active as long as the maintenance logs suggest: ninety-seven.
Nearly a third of the station population.
Han’s hand moves to her own scarred neck, feeling the familiar tightness of damaged tissue. She remembers the progression. The fatigue she dismissed, the headaches she attributed to stress, the day her skin started sloughing off in the shower. She caught her exposure early and still carries the marks.
These people won’t be so lucky. Not unless she acts now.
Li-na-wei’s test results sit in a separate window, the numbers burned into Han’s memory. White blood cell count declining. Micronuclei present in lymphocytes. Chromosomal damage already beginning. The woman who laughs while elbow-deep in a malfunctioning air scrubber, who sketches impossible repair solutions on napkins, who touches Han’s scarred face with grease-stained fingers and calls her beautiful. That woman is carrying isotopes in her bone marrow now.
Han pulls up Li-na-wei’s work assignments. Six months of double shifts in the maintenance tunnels adjacent to the salvage bay. The tunnels where ventilation connects directly to Xiao-wen’s processing area, where particles settle in the ductwork, where no one thought to install radiation monitoring because the contamination was supposed to be contained.
She cross-references the tunnel access logs with medical records. Every maintenance worker who entered those spaces shows elevated markers. Every single one.
The pattern is undeniable. The contamination isn’t an isolated incident. It’s systemic infrastructure failure, corporate negligence crystallized into cellular damage, profit margins measured in becquerels accumulating in human tissue.
Han reaches for her comm tablet. Earth-based health authorities. Direct report. No intermediaries.
Her career ends the moment she sends it.
Her fingers hover over the comm interface. The message header already drafted: URGENT MEDICAL EMERGENCY - RADIATION CONTAMINATION EVENT - IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION REQUIRED. Earth Health Authority protocols mandate immediate quarantine and evacuation procedures for population-level exposure. Station command will have no choice but to comply once external authorities are involved.
She thinks of the three names from seven years ago. Chen. Okoye. Yamamoto. Dead because she’d trusted the system.
Li-na-wei’s laugh echoes in memory. That warm, unguarded sound she makes when solving an impossible mechanical problem.
Han attaches the compiled exposure data. Forty-seven files. Irrefutable evidence.
Her thumb moves to the send authorization.
One career. Hundreds of lives.
Not even a choice, really.
She presses send.
The files decrypt with her command authorization. Seven years compressed into clinical documentation. Tissue necrosis percentages, cellular mutation rates, her own screaming translated into measured symptom progression. Chen’s file shows the timestamps: forty-eight hours between her initial report and corporate medical review. Okoye lasted sixty-three hours. Yamamoto made it five days before multi-organ failure.
She’d believed in procedures then. Believed proper channels meant protection.
Ming’s documentation sits beside hers now. Procurement records, safety inspection overrides, emails with corporate counsel discussing “acceptable exposure thresholds” and “liability mitigation strategies.”
Evidence they couldn’t bury this time.
Han’s fingers hover over the transmission key. Once she sends this to Earth Health Authority, there’s no retrieval, no negotiation. Station command will strip her commission. Corporate will deploy legal teams. Ming will face criminal charges for accessing protected files.
Li-na-wei shifts closer, her calloused hand finding Han’s scarred wrist in sleep: an anchor, a reminder of what matters beyond regulations and career trajectories.
She presses send.
Han’s screen fills with Ming’s documentation: three years compressed into damning data points. Each falsified radiation reading appears in red alongside the actual measurement Ming reconstructed from maintenance logs and sensor archives. The discrepancy patterns are unmistakable: systematic underreporting whenever readings approached actionable thresholds.
She scrolls through altered manifests. Materials flagged as contaminated in initial scans, then reclassified as clean after Xiao-wen’s assessments. The isotope signatures don’t lie: cesium-137, cobalt-60, traces of plutonium from decommissioned reactor components. All processed through the station’s systems, particles settling into ventilation ducts, water recyclers, the fabric of crew quarters.
The maintenance requests form their own narrative. Li-na-wei’s reports, technically precise and increasingly urgent, each one stamped DEFERRED or BUDGET CONSTRAINED. Han recognizes her partner’s careful documentation style, the way she always included cost-benefit analyses to make approval easier. None of it mattered when corporate profit margins entered the calculation.
She opens the internal communications Ming extracted. Her jaw tightens reading phrases like “acceptable exposure parameters” and “statistical risk modeling” and “liability containment strategies.” One message from corporate risk management to station command explicitly states: “Crew rotation timelines allow for cumulative exposure below actionable thresholds if individual incidents remain undocumented.”
They knew. They calculated. They decided her people were acceptable losses.
Han adds her medical logs: the cellular damage patterns appearing in blood work over eighteen months. Lymphocyte counts dropping. Chromosome aberrations increasing. The isotope signatures in tissue samples matching exactly what Ming’s manifests showed coming aboard. Her formal recommendations to station command, each one professionally worded, each one ignored or redirected to committees that never convened.
She attaches her analysis of contamination vectors: how particles migrated through life support systems, concentrated in high-traffic areas, accumulated in the rotating sections where crew spent their off-hours trying to maintain some semblance of normal gravity, normal life.
The report assembles itself in the precise language of military medical documentation. Exposure measurements in millisieverts, contamination vector analysis with particle migration models, cellular damage progression mapped against established radiation pathology timelines. She cross-references every data point with published research, making the document bulletproof against dismissal as speculation or panic.
Statistical projections fill the final section: mortality curves if intervention occurs within two weeks versus four weeks versus eight. The numbers are conservative, professionally cautious. They’re still damning.
Li-na-wei’s scans load last. Han’s fingers pause on the keyboard as false-color imaging renders her partner’s bone marrow: abnormal cell formations highlighted in amber and red, lymphocyte populations showing characteristic radiation damage patterns. She types the name into the patient identification field (Li-na-wei, Maintenance Technician Second Class) and her vision blurs.
She blinks hard, forces focus, continues entering the next forty-five names. Each one someone she’s treated for minor injuries, cleared for duty, shared meals with in the communal spaces. Each one showing early cellular indicators that will progress without intervention.
Her finger hovers over the transmission key. The cursor blinks in rhythm with her pulse, steady, trained, deceptively calm. She thinks of the radiation badge she wore during the incident that scarred her, how it had turned from yellow to red to that final, damning black. How the medic who’d treated her had looked away when explaining the prognosis, unable to meet her eyes.
She won’t look away.
The key clicks under her fingertip with a sound like a bulkhead sealing. The transmission counter spools up. Thirty seconds until it hits the first relay station. No recall function. No undo.
Her career uploads itself into the void alongside the medical data.
She keys in her medical authority codes: each digit a door closing behind her. The credentials that took eight years to earn, that survived the inquiry after the incident, that certified her fit to practice despite the scarring. She routes through civilian emergency channels, flags it imminent mass casualty, adds military medical and International Orbital Safety redundancies. Corporate lawyers can’t silence all three. Her training overrides her fear: when contamination spreads, you don’t ask permission to sound the alarm.
The transmission key yields under her fingertip. Encryption protocols engage. A soft chime she’ll remember forever. Data packets fragment and route through three independent channels, each one a lifeline she’s throwing toward Earth. The confirmation codes populate her screen in green text: received, authenticated, logged. She exhales. The truth is traveling at light speed now, beyond Xiao-wen’s manifests, beyond corporate filters, beyond her ability to reconsider.
Han’s fingers find the scars again, tracing the familiar topology of damage. The medical literature calls it “pathological self-soothing behavior”. Touching the evidence of trauma as if to confirm it’s real, as if to remind herself she survived worse than this. The pale patches feel different from the surrounding skin, slightly numb, slightly too tight. She’d memorized the radiation dosimetry reports from that day: 8.[^7] grays to localized tissue, cellular death in the dermal layers, permanent pigmentation loss. She’d studied her own case with clinical detachment, learning the progression of her own destruction.
The tablet chimes. Another system access revoked. This time her emergency medical override codes. They’re dismantling her authority piece by piece, reducing her from Lieutenant Han, Medical Officer, to a liability contained in a locked room. She watches her professional identity dissolve in real-time notifications.
But Li-na-wei’s cellular damage is documented now. The contamination patterns mapped. The correlation between Xiao-wen’s operations and exposure levels established beyond statistical doubt. Somewhere on Earth, in offices with gravity and weather and the luxury of distance, people are reading her report. Epidemiologists. Regulatory investigators. Perhaps even someone who gives a damn about the three hundred and forty-seven people living in these aging modules.
She pulls up Li-na-wei’s latest bloodwork on the tablet before remembering: access denied. The screen shows only the lock icon and a legal notice about corporate property rights. She closes her eyes and recalls the numbers from memory instead: lymphocyte counts, chromosome aberration frequency, micronuclei formation. The early markers, the ones that predict what comes next if exposure continues.
Her career is burning. Her freedom hangs on corporate lawyers’ arguments about proprietary information and chain of command. But the data is out there, traveling, landing, being read. She touches her scars again. Some prices you pay with your body. Some with everything else.
Another message: “Li-na-wei tried to reach you. They stopped her at the corridor checkpoint. She’s not detained, but they’re monitoring her movements now. Guilt by association.” Han’s jaw tightens. This is the calculus she’d accepted: her own consequences she could bear, but dragging Li-na-wei into the blast radius cuts deeper than professional destruction. She pictures those strong, grease-stained hands held up at a checkpoint, the confusion and anger in warm brown eyes as security explains she can’t visit her partner.
The next message takes longer to arrive: “Corporate counsel reviewing all medical records from the past eighteen months. They’re building a narrative. Unstable officer, traumatized by previous incident, seeing radiation threats everywhere. Classic pattern of PTSD-driven paranoia.” Han’s fingers still on the scars. They’ll use her survival against her, turn her hypervigilance into pathology, transform her expertise into evidence of unfitness. The irony tastes metallic: the incident that taught her to recognize these dangers will be weaponized to discredit that very recognition.
She stands motionless in her confined quarters, processing the implications. The security personnel outside her door are symptoms, not the disease. Foot soldiers in a system that protects profit margins over human tissue. Their discomfort changes nothing about the mathematics of radiation exposure, the cellular damage accumulating in Li-na-wei’s bone marrow, the contamination spreading through maintenance tunnels and ventilation systems.
Her scarred hand moves to the tablet again, checking the timestamp on Earth’s acknowledgment. Forty-three minutes since transmission. Somewhere in Geneva or Beijing, health officials are reading her documentation, seeing the exposure data, the falsified manifests, the pattern of corporate negligence. The machinery of accountability grinds slowly, but it’s grinding now. She’s set something in motion that can’t be stopped by locked doors or legal threats.
That has to be enough.
She reads the message twice, forcing her breathing to stay controlled. The medical supplies aren’t expensive: basic chelation agents, anti-nausea medications, potassium iodide tablets. Standard radiation exposure treatment. He’s not stealing evidence. He’s preparing his salvage crews for what comes next, what he knows is coming because he’s seen the contamination readings himself. He’s going to keep working them anyway.
Han’s fingers find the edge of her desk, grip until the scarred tissue aches. The captain’s voice continues its careful evasion while her mind catalogs casualties: Li-na-wei first, then the maintenance crews, then anyone who worked near contaminated sections. Xiao-wen’s supply request sits on her screen like a confession: he knows exactly what he’s done, knows the timeline, knows he has weeks to profit before bodies start failing.
Han’s medical training wars with the part of her that wants to look away, to not catalog the evidence written in Li-na-wei’s body. But she can’t stop seeing it: the slight asymmetry in pupil dilation when Li-na-wei tracks movement, the way she shifts her weight more frequently than usual, compensating for balance disruptions she probably hasn’t consciously registered yet. Early vestibular damage. Textbook presentation.
“The medication helps,” Li-na-wei says, still holding Han’s hand. Not talking about pain management anymore. Talking about the chelation therapy Han started three days ago, the moment the blood work came back. Talking about the thing they’re both pretending might be enough.
Han toggles through the scan images, each one a precise measurement of betrayal. The bone marrow showing decreased production. The thyroid already accumulating damage. The ovaries. She closes that file quickly, but Li-na-wei catches the movement.
“I wasn’t planning on kids anyway,” Li-na-wei says, voice steady. “Not in this place. Not with the way things are.”
The casualness of it breaks something in Han’s chest. She sets the tablet down, reaches up to touch Li-na-wei’s face with her scarred hand, feeling the warmth of healthy skin that won’t stay healthy. “You shouldn’t have to choose between your work and your cells functioning properly.”
“Neither should you have.” Li-na-wei turns her head, kisses Han’s palm where the scarring is thickest, where the nerve damage means Han can barely feel it. “But here we are.”
Through the window, the station’s lights reflect off the corporate hauler’s hull. Somewhere in the processing bay, Xiao-wen is calculating profit margins while the evidence of his negligence literally decays in the cells of everyone who trusted the station’s safety protocols. Everyone who believed someone was watching out for them.
Han was supposed to be that someone.
Han’s fingers move before her conscious mind catches up, pulling emergency evacuation protocols onto a secondary screen. The numbers are brutal: station capacity for rapid evacuation is one hundred twenty personnel. Current population is three hundred forty-seven.
“He’s counting on the chaos,” Han says, her voice clinical, detached. The only way to function through this. “Contamination scare, structural failure, emergency separation. By the time anyone sorts out what happened, it’s a tragic accident. Corporate liability contained to ‘decommissioned sections.’”
Li-na-wei’s jaw tightens. “The workers in those sections: they’re the ones who’ve been exposed longest. The ones whose medical scans would prove the contamination timeline.” She meets Han’s eyes. “He’s not just hiding evidence. He’s eliminating witnesses.”
The station shudders again as the hauler’s cargo systems engage. Through the wall, Han hears the muffled clang of heavy equipment moving into position. Her scarred hand finds her comm unit.
“Ming needs to see this,” she says. “Now.”
Li-na-wei nods, already copying the schematics to an encrypted drive. “And then we need to warn those sections. Before Xiao-wen seals them in.”
Han’s medical training catalogs the casualties automatically: forty-three assigned personnel, varying radiation exposure levels, treatment protocols already inadequate. But Li-na-wei’s correction cuts deeper.
“Fifty-seven,” her partner says, finger tracing the schematic. “Off-shift sleepers. Overcrowding pushes people into contaminated sections.” She highlights junction points with practiced efficiency. “Explosive bolts here and here. Quick separation. Structural failure from contamination damage: that’s how the report will read.”
Li-na-wei turns, and her warm brown eyes carry a mechanic’s cold assessment of the unthinkable. “Six hours. Maybe less if he’s already staged the equipment.”
Han’s scarred hand clenches. Fifty-seven people. Names she knows. Faces from her medical logs. Li-na-wei’s colleagues.
Not casualties. Targets.
Han’s fingers hover over the send command. Once she flags those files, station security will see. Command will ask questions. Xiao-wen will know someone’s interfering with his timeline.
Li-na-wei’s grip tightens. “Do it.”
The scarred tissue across Han’s neck flares hot. She thinks of the radiation ward, the ones she couldn’t save, their names still sharp in her memory.
She sends the flags. Fifty-seven priority medical alerts, each requiring immediate location verification.
“Now they’re all officially my patients,” Han says quietly. “And I’m evacuating them for medical assessment.”
Han’s screen fills with names. Her fingers move with surgical precision, flagging each one. E-5 through E-9. The contamination zone Xiao-wen’s been mining for profit.
Li-na-wei leans close, breath warm against Han’s scarred cheek. “Chen in E-6. He stores rice there.”
Han adds him. Fifty-three now.
“The electrician. Zhao. Sleeps in the E-7 closet.”
Fifty-four.
“That kid: the one who calls home from E-8.”
Fifty-seven faces. Fifty-seven people breathing poison while corporate spreadsheets calculate acceptable losses.
Han’s hand hovers over the send command. The data packet pulses on her screen: eighteen months of calculated murder dressed in corporate efficiency language.
She reads one more time. Can’t stop herself.
Subject: E-Section Exposure Projections, Q3 Review
The words blur. Her scarred tissue aches, phantom pain from nerve damage that never quite healed. She remembers waking in the hospital, her face wrapped in synthetic skin, a nurse’s careful voice explaining the shielding failure. Equipment malfunction, they’d said. Unfortunate accident.
Not accident. Choice.
Projected mortality: 12-15 personnel over 24-month period. Liability settlement range: 180,000-225,[^000] yuan per incident. Total exposure: 2.7M yuan maximum.
Recommended shielding upgrade cost: 8.3M yuan.
Recommendation: Continue current operations. Monitor quarterly.
Her finger trembles on the send key. This ends everything. Her career. Her position. The fragile stability she and Li-na-wei have built in this metal shell floating in vacuum.
Ming’s message appears in the corner of her screen: Documentation backed up to three separate servers. They can’t erase all of it.
Han thinks of Chen storing rice in E-6, trying to make the station feel like home. Zhao sleeping in a closet because quarters are overcrowded. That kid, barely twenty, calling his mother every week from the one spot with decent signal.
Fifty-seven names on her list. Fifty-seven people whose deaths have already been budgeted, amortized, accepted.
She thinks of Li-na-wei’s cellular damage. Early stage. Treatable if caught now, if proper protocols begin immediately, if the contamination stops spreading.
If someone acts.
Her scarred fingers stop trembling. The pain in her face sharpens to clarity.
She hits send.
The data packet launches toward Earth. No recall. No taking it back.
The medical bay feels very quiet. Very small.
Very much like freedom.
Han’s message reaches Li-na-wei in the maintenance tunnels. Twenty minutes later she arrives, coveralls streaked with coolant, braids coming loose.
“What’s wrong?” She reads Han’s face, moves closer. “What happened?”
Han turns the screen. The spreadsheet glows between them.
Li-na-wei leans forward. Reads. Her breathing changes. Her jaw tightens.
“Maintenance personnel.” Her voice sounds distant. “Average replacement cost.”
She scrolls down. Finds her own department. Her own crew.
“Forty-five thousand yuan.” She laughs, sharp and wrong. “Including recruitment. Training.”
Her hands flatten on the desk. Those strong, capable hands that fix everything, that hold Han in the dark, that coax dying systems back to life.
“They knew.” Not a question.
“Eighteen months.”
Li-na-wei’s fingers curl slowly into fists. The warmth drains from her eyes, replaced by something Han has never seen there: something cold and precise as a cutting torch.
“The double shifts. The equipment failures. The sections they kept sending us into.” Her voice stays level. Controlled. “They were measuring how long we’d last.”
She looks at Han. “What did you do?”
“I sent it. Everything. To Earth.”
Ming’s hands shake as they spread the tablets across Han’s desk. Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, their eyes are red-rimmed but focused.
“Expedite decommissioning.” Ming’s soft voice has gone flat. “That’s the phrase. Section D-2 through D-5.”
Li-na-wei straightens. “My crew works D-3.”
“Fifty-seven people total in those sections.” Ming pulls up a schematic. “Xiao-wen requested authorization this morning. Structural compromise, he claims. Immediate action required.”
Han studies the highlighted sections. Maintenance tunnels. Worker quarters. The most contaminated areas: and the ones housing people who could testify.
“Venting schedule?”
“Forty-eight hours.” Ming meets her eyes. “He’s erasing the evidence. All of it.”
Han’s voice cuts through the medical bay’s hum. “I’m transmitting everything to Earth Health Authority. Unencrypted. Wide broadcast.” She watches their faces. “You have thirty seconds to leave.”
Li-na-wei moves closer instead, her oil-stained fingers already reaching for the power routing panel.
Ming removes their glasses, cleans them with deliberate care, replaces them. “Show me the transmission protocol.”
No hesitation. No questions about consequences.
Han’s throat tightens. “This ends all of us.”
“Then we end together.” Li-na-wei’s hands are already working.
Ming’s fingers dance across encryption barriers they helped design, exploiting administrator backdoors while Li-na-wei strips power from galley systems, crew quarters, even life support margins. Everything feeds the transmission array. Han’s scarred hands hover over the final authorization, tissue aching with phantom heat. One keystroke transforms evidence into broadcast, corporate property into public record. The medical bay dims as power surges outward. Her finger descends.
Han watches the transmission counter climb on her tablet: forty-seven terminals, ninety-three, one hundred twenty-six. The numbers accelerate as the emergency broadcast protocol forces every active screen to display the evidence. Her scarred hand trembles slightly, chronic pain flaring in the tissue damage, but she keeps her finger steady on the monitor.
Ming’s breathing quickens beside her. “Station command is trying to override. They can’t. Medical emergency protocols supersede everything.”
Through the bulkhead, Han hears voices rising. Shouts. The heavy clang of someone striking metal. The station’s ambient hum seems to shift, as if Tianzhou-7 itself is reacting to the revelation.
Her tablet chimes: incoming messages flooding the medical bay’s system. She scrolls through them, her trained eye cataloging the responses. Salvage workers demanding immediate health screenings. Maintenance crews refusing to enter contaminated sections. A security officer requesting private consultation about his radiation exposure.
“Han.” Ming’s voice is tight. “Xiao-wen’s moving. He’s at the salvage bay airlock controls.”
Han’s pulse spikes. She pulls up the station schematic, tracking the highlighted path Ming feeds her. Xiao-wen isn’t heading toward the command center or his quarters. He’s going deeper into the industrial section, toward the emergency decompression systems.
“He’s going to purge the evidence,” Han says. The words taste like metal. “The contaminated sections. He’ll claim it’s emergency containment.”
“Forty people are in those sections.”
Han is already moving, grabbing her medical kit from its secured cabinet. Her scarred tissue pulls painfully as she reaches, but she ignores it. She’s ignored worse. “Alert Li-na-wei. Tell her to get everyone out of sections E-6 through E-9. Now.”
Ming’s fingers fly across their tablet. “Station security is responding to the broadcast. They might reach him first.”
“They might not.” Han seals her kit and heads for the door. “Keep broadcasting. Don’t stop.”
The revelation fractures the station’s social architecture. In the rotating habitation ring, off-duty personnel cluster around shared screens, their faces illuminated by the damning spreadsheets. Han watches the feed from her tablet: a maintenance worker points at a line item calculating acceptable casualty rates, her voice rising above the others. Two salvage operators in the industrial section strip off their contaminated gear and walk away from their posts, leaving cutting torches drifting in zero-G.
The corporate security officer who requested the private consultation messages Han again: We weren’t told. Management kept separate exposure records.
Even the military personnel in Section C are reacting. Han recognizes Commander Wei’s voice over the general channel, demanding immediate access to the full contamination data. The chain of command is fracturing as individuals realize they’ve been protecting a system that considered them disposable.
Through the bulkhead, she hears Li-na-wei’s voice coordinating evacuation protocols with other mechanics. The station’s workers are organizing themselves, bypassing official channels entirely. Tianzhou-7’s real power structure (the people who actually keep it running) is asserting itself.
Xiao-wen’s voice fractures across station comms, demanding termination of the broadcast, but the damage cascades beyond containment. Han counts three dozen crew members downloading copies through her medical network monitor, watching file transfers bloom across her screen like contagion vectors. Ming’s lockout protocol loops the evidence on fifteen-minute intervals: cost-benefit analyses, falsified exposure reports, emails calculating acceptable mortality rates.
The corporate security feed shows Xiao-wen’s hands shaking as he tries override codes that no longer respond. Someone has physically cut the communication trunk lines. The truth replicates through too many systems now, forwarded to Earth-side journalists, regulatory agencies, family members. Han recognizes the pattern from medical school: once sepsis enters the bloodstream, you can’t extract it. You can only treat the systemic response.
Through the monitor, Han watches Li-na-wei emerge from the crowd converging on administration, her mechanic’s coveralls now marked with hastily-painted characters: 工人团结. Worker solidarity. The security feed captures her partner’s face (no longer exhausted, no longer compliant) as she leads two dozen laborers carrying welding torches and pry bars. Han’s chest tightens. The contamination she’d tried to contain has metastasized into something she can’t control from confinement.
The override chime cuts through the medical bay. Three sharp tones signaling corporate lockout. Han’s scarred hands move without hesitation: radiation monitor clipped to belt, emergency med kit secured across her shoulders. She pulls herself into the maintenance access panel, muscles remembering Li-na-wei’s route through the ventilation shaft. On the desk below, her lieutenant’s insignia catches the monitor light. The broadcast loops on, bearing witness.
The tunnel walls press close, metal warm against Han’s shoulder as she pulls herself forward. Her scarred fingers trace Li-na-wei’s penciled route. The lines soft from handling, annotations in her partner’s precise hand: thermal vent, watch clearance, junction box rattles, safe rest point. The paper trembles slightly. Not from fear. From the chronic nerve damage that flares in cold.
The radiation monitor clicks. Steady pulse becoming staccato as she moves deeper into the industrial section.
She pauses at a maintenance terminal, the kind techs use for diagnostic checks. Her lieutenant’s access codes still work. Corporate security moved fast, but not fast enough. The station’s sensor network unfolds across the small screen. Security teams cluster in habitation zones, checking crew quarters, medical storage, the commissary. All the obvious places.
Ming’s work. She recognizes their signature in the data patterns. False biosignature readings, looped camera feeds, carefully timed system glitches that send teams doubling back. Buying minutes with keystrokes and bureaucratic misdirection.
The monitor’s clicking intensifies. Han checks the reading: 2.[^4] millisieverts per hour. Elevated but manageable. She marks it on Li-na-wei’s map with a pencil stub, adding to the contamination pattern taking shape. Each data point another piece of evidence. Another body’s worth of exposure someone authorized.
She moves on, muscles burning from the awkward crawl. The tunnel slopes downward, following the station’s curve. Through the metal she feels the vibration of heavy machinery. The salvage bay’s cutting equipment, running at full capacity. Xiao-wen pushing his crews harder. Extracting profit before the investigation arrives.
Before anyone can stop him.
The ventilation grate appears where Li-na-wei promised. Han positions herself carefully, medical training making her movements silent. Below, through the metal lattice, the control booth’s windows glow. Inside, a figure hunched over displays.
She activates the recording function on her monitor. Watches. Waits.
Through the lattice, Xiao-wen’s profile cuts sharp against the display glow. His fingers move across the interface, delete, confirm, delete, each gesture leaving gaps in the digital record. Han’s monitor captures it all, timestamp and screen reflection visible in the booth’s window.
She catalogs what her training shows her. Elevated respiratory rate, visible even at this distance. The way he touches his neck repeatedly, checking his pulse. Classic anxiety response. His left hand tremors when he reaches for the tea bulb, liquid wobbling in the magnetic grip. Sleep deprivation, probably seventy-two hours minimum. The corporate logos on his suit seem to weigh on his shoulders.
He stops. Stares at something off-screen. His jaw works, grinding teeth. Then his hands resume their work, faster now. Desperate. Files vanish in clusters, manifests, radiation logs, worker exposure records. Everything that would connect profit margins to body counts.
Han’s fingers tighten on the monitor. The recording runs. Each deletion another admission. Another piece of evidence he doesn’t know she’s gathering.
Below, through the booth’s lower window, the processing bay spreads vast and bright with cutting torches.
The monitor’s alarm screams silent in her helmet. Radiation signature climbing. Thirty millisieverts, fifty, eighty. Through the lattice gaps, she watches the cutting torch bite into corroded metal, the container’s faded symbols now visible in full. She knows those markings. Knows them like she knows the scar tissue that tightens across her neck when she turns her head too fast.
Cesium-137. Medical waste from the old lunar facilities.
The workers don’t see it. Don’t see the shimmer of particles dispersing through the bay’s atmosphere, riding air currents toward the ventilation intake. Xiao-wen watches from his booth, tablet in hand, and doesn’t stop them.
Her scarred hand finds the monitor’s record function. Not negligence. Not anymore. He knows exactly what he’s cutting open. Knows what it will do.
Just like before. Except this time, she’s watching it happen.
Her thumb hovers over the transmit button. The smuggled device feels heavy, warm from her palm. Multiple recipients queued. Station command, Earth regulators, the independent journalist Ming found. Send this and there’s no cover, no retreat. Only evidence.
The radiation monitor climbs. Ninety millisieverts. Workers still cutting.
She presses send.
Everything changes in the silence that follows.
The alarm’s first pulse shivers through the hull. Han steps into the corridor, scarred face catching harsh overhead light. Her hand finds the transmit button. Station-wide channel. Her voice cuts through static. “Contamination levels. Decompression sequence initiated. Evacuation routes.” Each word a scalpel. “Xiao-wen’s in control booth E-7.”
Security cameras track her. She doesn’t hide anymore.
The cutting torches ignite across three sections simultaneously. Han watches through hijacked camera feeds on the smuggled tablet, her scarred fingers steady against the screen’s surface. Xiao-wen’s safety overrides are gone. The plasma cutters burn at maximum intensity, slicing through bulkheads that took months to install, that house power conduits and life support lines, that separate pressurized zones from vacuum.
The booth’s interior camera shows him in profile. Sweat darkens his collar. His hands move with the same practiced efficiency he once used to maximize salvage yields, now applied to destruction. The cutting sequence displays on his monitor: red lines carving through station schematics like surgical incisions through flesh.
Han’s medical training catalogs the signs. Elevated heart rate visible in neck pulse. Shallow breathing. Tremor in his dominant hand. A man past calculation, operating on pure survival instinct.
“Xiao-wen.” She keeps her voice level on the private channel. “The structural supports in E-6 can’t handle asymmetric pressure loss. You’ll cascade the failure into habitation sections.”
His laugh comes back broken. “You documented everything. You made me the villain.” The camera catches him pulling up personnel rosters. Highlighting names. His crew. The workers who operated his equipment, who followed his orders, who knew what the radiation badges really showed. “They’ll testify. Corporate will sacrifice all of us to protect the board.”
The cutting sequence accelerates. Estimated completion: four minutes.
Han switches channels. “Li-na-wei, he’s targeting the E-6 junction. If those supports fail. Her partner’s voice carries the focused calm of someone already moving.”Reinforcement team is thirty seconds out. We can’t stop the cuts but we can brace the adjacent sections.”
“Ming, I need those corporate messages on every screen. Now.”
“Already broadcasting.”
Han watches Xiao-wen’s face as the evidence of his disposability floods the station’s displays. His hands finally stop moving.
The messages cascade across every screen. Ming’s intercepts play in real-time: corporate legal demanding Xiao-wen purge all records, operations management ordering him to maximize final extraction, PR instructing him to prepare for termination, finance calculating his severance against potential lawsuit costs.
Han watches Xiao-wen’s face fragment across multiple feeds. His contract materializes on the main display: compensation structure laid bare. Performance bonuses tied directly to reduced safety margins. Liability waivers embedded in employment terms. Insurance policies that pay out more for his death than his testimony.
“They built you into a weapon,” Han says quietly into the channel.
His hands hover over the controls. The cutting sequence pauses at seventy percent.
“Then aimed you at us,” she continues. “Calculated exactly how much risk you’d accept. How much conscience you’d trade. What it would cost to make you disposable.”
The personnel roster still glows on his screen. Names of workers who trusted his judgment. Who followed his lead into contaminated zones because he said it was safe.
His finger moves toward the emergency stop.
Han’s fingers fly across the emergency override panel. The cutting sequence accelerates: bulkhead integrity warnings cascade down her screen in angry red. Through the observation port, she watches manipulator arms swing contaminated debris toward the main processing corridor. Toward crew quarters beyond.
The radiation monitor in her hand climbs past yellow into red. The needle trembles at the edge of purple.
“Catastrophic exposure risk,” the automated voice announces with perfect calm. “Immediate evacuation required.”
She pulls up the bay’s access logs. Xiao-wen sealed every entrance twelve minutes ago. Overrode the emergency releases. The workers inside never had a chance to run.
Her comm crackles. Li-na-wei’s voice, breathless: “Han, the maintenance tunnels,”
“I see it.” The cutting pattern. Deliberate. Surgical. Designed to breach the bulkheads that separate contaminated sections from clean. To force a station-wide evacuation that will scatter witnesses, destroy evidence, justify corporate abandonment of liability.
Han’s hands move through the wreckage. Manifests showing falsified readings, three months of doctored reports. The confession letter’s intact portions reveal more: thought I could make it right before anyone else got hurt like you did.
The autonomous cutting sequence targets structural supports. Calculated. Each breach will force progressive bulkhead failures.
He’s not covering his tracks. He’s triggering a catastrophe that makes investigation impossible.
The radiation monitor screams. Purple zone. Lethal exposure in hours.
Han’s fingers grip the tunnel rail, pulling herself through zero-G toward D-section. The external camera feed flickers. Not escaping. Spreading it.
He’s contaminating the habitat ring. Making evacuation the only option. Destroying evidence in chaos.
She keys emergency broadcast: “All personnel, Lieutenant Han. Contamination breach active. Seal bulkheads C-through-F. He’s weaponizing the salvage.”
Her boots mag-lock. She launches forward.
Han’s mag-boots release. She launches through the access tunnel into Section D.
The cargo sled sits abandoned. Radioactive components scattered across the corridor like seeds. Deliberate pattern. Her dosimeter shrieks: three hundred millisieverts, four hundred, climbing.
She pulls herself along the ceiling rail. Below, the components glow faintly in her scanner overlay. Navigation problem. Each second of proximity adds exposure. Each detour costs time.
Xiao-wen’s boot disappears through a maintenance hatch. Forty meters ahead.
“Multiple hot spots in the habitat ring.” Li-na-wei’s voice crackles through comms. “He’s seeding them like,”
Static.
Han’s scarred tissue burns. Phantom pain or real exposure: doesn’t matter. She kicks off the rail, sailing over a cluster of fuel cells reading eight hundred millisieverts. Her trajectory carries her past the worst contamination. She catches the hatch frame, pulls through.
The maintenance tunnel narrows. Pipes and conduits crowd the space. Her headlamp catches movement, Xiao-wen’s silver-streaked hair, his reinforced suit scraping against metal.
She gains. Ten meters. Eight.
He glances back. His face in her lamplight shows something she didn’t expect. Not calculation. Not swagger. Fear, yes, but also. Relief?
The tunnel opens into the zero-G manufacturing module. Xiao-wen reaches a bulkhead, fingers fumbling at the override panel. His corporate codes still work. The lock disengages.
Han pushes harder. Five meters.
He turns. Through the porthole their eyes meet. His mouth moves. She reads the words: “I’m sorry.”
Not sorry for stopping. Sorry for everything before.
The bulkhead seals. His hand moves to the vent control.
Han twists, reaching for the tunnel frame. The corridor behind her explodes. Atmosphere screams outward. The decompression slams her forward. Her helmet cracks against the sealed hatch. Her vision whites. Her fingers find purchase on the porthole rim.
She holds.
The corridor holds vacuum. Han’s suit integrity light blinks amber. Micro-fractures in her helmet seal. She has minutes.
The maintenance crawlspace Li-na-wei showed her. Two bulkheads back. Han reverses, her movements economical despite the screaming in her lungs. The access panel resists, then yields.
She pulls herself through the narrow passage. Pipes press against her scarred side. The pain is white-hot, real this time. Her dosimeter reads six hundred millisieverts cumulative. Approaching the threshold where her body will start breaking down at the cellular level.
The crawlspace opens into the rotating habitat section. Artificial gravity catches her like a fist. She drops hard, three meters to the deck. Her knees buckle. The scarred tissue across her neck and shoulder ignites. Nerves damaged years ago suddenly screaming.
Through tears she sees him. Xiao-wen, forty meters down the curved corridor, dragging another container. Not toward the airlocks. Toward the central nexus.
The water recycling system.
Her mind calculates automatically: distribution to every inhabited section within four hours. Contamination in drinking water, food preparation, hygiene systems. Everyone exposed.
Han forces herself upright. The deck tilts beneath her: rotation vertigo mixing with radiation sickness. Her legs respond sluggishly. The scarred tissue has seized, muscles locked in spasm.
Forty meters. She counts the distance in heartbeats.
Xiao-wen glances back. Recognition flashes across his face. He abandons the container, sprints toward the nexus access panel. His fingers fly across the keypad.
She runs. Each step sends lightning through her damaged nerves. The corridor curves away, artificial gravity pulling her sideways. Her dosimeter screams seven hundred millisieverts.
The panel slides open. He’s reaching for the container again.
Han doesn’t slow. She lowers her shoulder (the scarred one, already destroyed) and drives forward with everything remaining.
They collide at the threshold.
The impact drives air from both their lungs. Xiao-wen’s elbow catches her temple. Stars burst across her vision. The container tumbles, lid separating, and she sees the fragments, fuel pellets, still glowing faintly, scatter across the deck plating in slow arcs.
His hands find her throat. Pressure builds behind her eyes.
“They’ll replace us,” he gasps. Blood from his split lip spatters her face. “At least this way, evidence,”
Her dosimeter’s shriek becomes continuous. Eight hundred millisieverts. Nine hundred.
Han’s training overrides pain. She pivots, drives her palm upward into his extended elbow. The joint separates with a wet pop. Xiao-wen’s scream cuts off as shock hits.
Corporate security materializes at corridor’s end. They don’t advance. Just watch. Calculating.
She understands. Two contaminated witnesses. Problem solved.
Her hands shake violently as she crawls to the emergency panel, sweeps glowing fragments into shielded containment. The dosimeter screams. One thousand millisieverts. The water system holds.
Han’s quarters: four meters by three. Military-issue bunk. Desk bolted to wall. The window a hand-width circle of reinforced polymer.
The security team strips her space methodically. Medical tablet: gone. Personal communicator: gone. They miss Ming’s backup monitor because it looks like a data drive, buried in a drawer under old supply requisitions.
She doesn’t watch them search. Watches through the window instead.
Xiao-wen passes at 1430 hours. Two lawyers flank him, crisp suits incongruous against the station’s utilitarian corridors. His arm moves in an expansive gesture, explaining, justifying. One lawyer nods. The other takes notes on a tablet that probably costs more than her annual salary.
His posture tells the story. Shoulders back. Head high. The slight swagger of someone who’s already calculated the outcome and found it favorable.
Han’s hands press flat against the desk surface. The metal is cold. Her scarred tissue aches: phantom sensation, psychosomatic, the pain of helplessness wearing the mask of old injury.
Three sections away, salvage processing continues. She knows because the station’s ambient vibration carries the rhythmic pulse of cutting equipment through the hull. Xiao-wen’s crew working double shifts. Corporate efficiency.
The security team finishes. Senior officer (Chen, she’s treated him for hypertension) meets her eyes briefly. Something flickers there. Apology? Warning? Then the professional mask drops back into place.
“Lieutenant Han. You’re confined pending investigation. Unauthorized communications causing economic harm to corporate operations.”
The phrasing is careful. Not safety violations. Not contamination protocols. Economic harm.
“How many casualties?” Her voice comes out steady.
Chen’s jaw tightens. “Not your concern.”
The door seals. Magnetic lock engages with a solid thunk.
She sits at the desk. Pulls out the backup monitor. Powers it on.
The dosimeter readings paint the station in gradients of death. And the pattern is spreading.
The magnetic lock disengages at 0047 hours. Li-na-wei slips through, maintenance panel tool in one hand, the other carrying equipment wrapped in anti-static cloth.
Her smile cuts crooked across her face. Fear and determination in equal measure.
“Seventeen minutes.” She’s already moving, unwrapping the dosimeter. Military-grade, stolen from supply. The communication link comes next: jury-rigged from environmental sensor feeds, the kind of improvisation that makes Li-na-wei invaluable and constantly overworked.
Han takes the equipment. Their fingers brush. Li-na-wei’s hands are trembling.
“I mapped the hotspots.” Li-na-wei pulls up schematics on the link. “Everything I could access without triggering alerts.”
The dosimeter syncs with Han’s backup monitor. Data floods the screen.
Sections E-5 through E-9 burn red. Radiation levels spiking in concentrated patterns. Not random contamination. Deliberate staging.
Han’s breath stops.
“He’s moving it all to specific zones.” The realization hits like decompression. “Xiao-wen’s consolidating the contaminated materials.”
Li-na-wei’s face goes pale. “Why would he,”
“To jettison them.” Han’s voice sounds distant to her own ears. “Emergency compartmentalization. Blow the sections. Scatter the evidence across orbital space.”
And everyone inside with it.
The data packet decrypts in fragments. Corporate letterhead. Eighteen months of correspondence.
Han reads standing, unable to sit.
Cost-benefit analysis: wrongful death settlements versus safety protocol implementation. The numbers laid bare. Deaths cheaper than prevention.
Xiao-wen’s name appears in twelve separate threads. “Reliable operator.” “Understands operational necessities.” Commendations for efficiency gains.
Her hands shake. The scarred tissue on her neck burns phantom-hot.
The final message carries yesterday’s timestamp. Authorization for “emergency compartmentalization procedures.” The language sterile, bureaucratic. Making murder sound like inventory management.
She thinks of the crew members already dying. Li-na-wei unconscious. Ming beaten.
All of it calculated. Acceptable losses.
The rage that fills her is cold, surgical. Precise as a scalpel.
The corridor strobes red. Her scarred tissue aches with each footfall. Old radiation damage predicting new exposure.
Section E-7’s airlock cycles green to amber. Twelve minutes. Then E-6. Then C-4 where the injured wait.
She pulls the emergency override panel. Xiao-wen’s codes scroll past. Her fingers find Li-na-wei’s bypass. The lock disengages.
Forty-three names. She knows them all. Their medical histories. Their families.
She runs.
The water reclamation nexus. Xiao-wen’s back to her, both hands working the access panel. Contaminated fuel fragments glint on the deck beside him: not disposal, installation.
Station-wide poisoning. The perfect justification for emergency decompression.
He turns. Wrench raised. His eyes show no calculation now. Only animal panic.
“You don’t understand the quotas,” he says. “The debt.”
She understands he’ll kill everyone to hide what he’s done.
Han’s hand hovers over the emergency override panel. The metal is cold under her fingertips. Her eyes track between two displays: the medical monitor showing Li-na-wei’s vitals, the airlock sequence countdown.
Heart arrhythmia. Respiratory distress. Radiation markers spiking.
She calculates with the brutal precision of someone who has watched people die before. Li-na-wei has three minutes before irreversible organ damage. Maybe five before death. The numbers are exact. She knows them the way she knows her own scarring.
The airlock sequence shows seventy seconds.
Forty-three people in sections D through F. She knows their names. Their medical histories. Which ones have children. Which ones send money home.
Seventy seconds.
Her medical training provides the protocols automatically. Li-na-wei needs immediate chelation therapy. Cardiac stabilization. Oxygen supplementation. Each second of delay compounds the cellular damage. The scarred tissue on Han’s neck tightens with phantom pain. Her body remembering what radiation does to human flesh.
Sixty seconds.
The override panel requires a command authorization code. Then a biometric scan. Then a physical key she wears on a chain around her neck. Three layers of security to prevent accidents. To prevent panic. To ensure only someone who understands the consequences can make this choice.
She understands the consequences.
Fifty seconds.
Li-na-wei’s hands in her hair this morning. The smell of soap and machine oil. The way she laughs with her whole body. The future they’ve planned in whispered conversations: somewhere with a real sky, real gravity, real safety.
Forty seconds.
Forty-three people who trusted her to keep them alive.
Thirty seconds.
Her hand moves to the chain around her neck. The key is warm from her body heat. She pulls it free, the chain catching briefly on her collar before breaking loose.
Han’s key slides into the override panel. Her fingers move through the authorization sequence. Muscle memory from a thousand drills. Xiao-wen’s voice rises to a shout behind her, something about liability and corporate protection, but she’s stopped processing his words.
She sees his reflection in the polished metal of the panel. The wrench raised. The trembling hand already hovering over the biometric scanner that will kill forty-three people.
“They’ll prosecute you,” he says. “I entered the code under duress. You forced your way in here. You’re the one,”
His hand drops toward the scanner.
Han moves. Not toward the override. Not toward him.
She drives her elbow into his wrist. The wrench clatters against the bulkhead. Her other hand catches his collar, yanking him away from the panel. He’s lighter than she expected. Softer. A man who calculates risk from a distance.
Her knee finds his solar plexus. He folds.
The biometric scanner blinks, waiting. Unauthorized. Sequence suspended.
Fifteen seconds.
Through the observation port she watches Li-na-wei’s body arch in another seizure. Her medical training catalogs everything automatically. Acute radiation syndrome. Stage three. Cardiovascular collapse imminent. Requires immediate chelation therapy. Cellular support protocols. Equipment that exists only in her medical bay.
Two decks away. Three minutes at a run.
Behind her, the corridor fills with sound. Plasma cutters. Corporate security breaching the sealed hatch. Voices demanding she stand down. Procedure. Authority. Compliance.
They’ll restrain her the moment they breach. Zip ties. Sedation if she resists. Protocol for compromised personnel.
Li-na-wei convulses again. The monitor screams.
Xiao-wen groans. Shifts. His hand crawls toward the scanner.
The override panel blinks. Waiting.
Fourteen seconds.
Her hand hovers. The override requires a four-digit code plus biometric confirmation. Two seconds minimum. Xiao-wen is three meters away, conscious, calculating. If she turns her back he reaches the manual controls. If she secures him first the timer expires. The security team will execute corporate orders, not medical necessity. Mathematics without solution. Physics without mercy. Every permutation she runs terminates in catastrophe, the variables refusing to balance no matter how she weights them.
The monitor’s alarm pierces through calculation. Li-na-wei’s rhythm fragments into ventricular fibrillation. Thirty seconds before brain damage becomes permanent. The airlock timer drops below forty-five seconds. Orange light bleeds through the hatch seal where security cuts entry. Han’s scarred tissue burns with phantom heat, radiation memory written in nerve and skin. Her hand moves. Not toward the override panel. Not toward Xiao-wen. Toward the medical kit mag-locked to her belt. The choice makes itself through muscle memory older than thought.
Han’s fingers trembled above the control panel, the scarred tissue on her left hand pulling tight with the tension. The emergency release glowed amber beneath her palm: one touch to flood the tunnel with medical nanites, the only treatment that could counter the radiation poisoning fast enough to save Li-na-wei’s life.
But the contamination protocols were hardwired into the station’s core systems. The moment she triggered the nanite dispersal, every bulkhead between the medical bay and the salvage bay would seal automatically. Forty seconds. That’s how long Xiao-wen needed to complete his purge sequence, to vent the contaminated materials and all physical evidence into the void.
The security feed showed Li-na-wei’s convulsions intensifying. Blood vessels rupturing beneath her skin, creating dark patterns that spread like ink in water. Han had seen this progression before. Had felt it in her own body during the incident that left her scarred. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before cellular breakdown became irreversible.
The airlock purge timer on Xiao-wen’s panel read seventy-three seconds.
Ming’s voice crackled through the emergency channel. “Corporate security is breaching corridor C. They’ll reach you in two minutes.”
Two minutes to decide. Save Li-na-wei and let Xiao-wen destroy the evidence that could prevent this from happening to dozens more. Or stop Xiao-wen and watch the woman she loved die while Han stood helpless behind reinforced glass.
The medical monitor shrieked as Li-na-wei’s heart rhythm destabilized. Her hand still reached toward the radiation leak, fingers splayed against the sealed panel. Still trying to complete the repair. Still choosing the collective over herself.
Han had taught her that. Had made it sound like honor instead of suicide.
The amber light pulsed beneath her scarred palm, waiting for her choice.
Han’s scarred fingers hovered over the emergency release, the mottled tissue pulling tight across her knuckles. Through the observation port, Li-na-wei’s hand remained extended toward the sealed panel. That same reaching gesture from three nights ago in their quarters, when she’d traced the radiation scars on Han’s neck and promised she understood the cost of duty.
“I’ll always finish what I start,” Li-na-wei had whispered. “You taught me that.”
The words had felt like intimacy then. Now they felt like complicity.
The security feed showed blood vessels rupturing beneath Li-na-wei’s skin in branching patterns Han recognized from her own medical scans, from the incident that left half her face marked. She knew the progression: cellular breakdown, organ failure, the body consuming itself from within. The treatment existed: chelation compounds, targeted nanites, protocols Han had perfected through her own survival.
But the compounds were locked in the medical bay. The nanites required her hands, her presence, her immediate intervention.
And the moment she triggered the emergency release, every bulkhead between her and Xiao-wen’s salvage bay would seal. Forty seconds. Enough time for him to complete the purge sequence and erase everything.
Han’s fingers closed on the release mechanism. The monitor showed Li-na-wei’s synaptic patterns fragmenting. The same cascade she’d watched in the mirror during her own treatment, neurons misfiring as radiation tore through cellular structures. Four minutes to brain damage. The chelation compounds were three sections away, past two security checkpoints Ming couldn’t override.
But the maintenance tunnel had emergency medical caches. Outdated compounds, lower efficacy. Li-na-wei had shown her those caches herself, laughing about the expired supplies management forgot existed.
Forty percent survival rate. Maybe less with Li-na-wei’s exposure levels.
The airlock purge sequence hit sixty seconds.
Han released the mechanism. The bulkheads stayed open. She ran toward the maintenance tunnel, leaving Xiao-wen’s evidence intact behind her.
The intercom crackled. Xiao-wen’s voice, measured and concerned. “, Officer Han’s documented instability following her radiation incident. Earth Control, review her complaint history. The pattern is clear.”
Han’s chest tightened. Every safety report she’d filed. Every protocol violation she’d documented. All of it now evidence against her.
“Recommend immediate psychiatric evaluation and relief from duty.”
He’d been building this for weeks. She’d walked right into it.
Han’s fingers found the scarred tissue on her neck. The maintenance tunnel. Coolant vapor would eat through skin. Her skin had already burned once.
Seventy seconds.
Ming’s tablet held everything. Li-na-wei’s heart was failing. Xiao-wen’s finger hovered over the purge button.
The tunnel entrance was three meters behind her. Nobody watching.
She moved.
The coolant vapor would strip skin from bone in the narrow places. Han knew the chemical composition, the burn rate, the way it would find the scar tissue first: always the damaged cells, always the weak points.
Three paths. All impossible.
Forward: Xiao-wen and the torch and the purge controls that would vent atmosphere from six sections.
Back: Corporate security and Ming somewhere in their custody with the only evidence that mattered.
Down: The medical bay where Li-na-wei’s heart was failing, where the radiation counters were screaming, where Han’s locked-out access codes meant she couldn’t even open the medication cabinet.
The maintenance tunnel entrance sat behind a panel marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Li-na-wei had shown her during their second week together, not their first. Han’s memory corrected itself even now, even here. Precision mattered. The tunnel dropped through three sections, bypassed the security checkpoints, emerged near the salvage bay’s secondary airlock.
Contaminated. The coolant leak had been on the maintenance schedule for eight months. Budget constraints. Li-na-wei had patched it twice with materials she’d fabricated herself, but the vapor still accumulated in the narrow sections where the tunnel bent around structural supports.
Han’s hand moved to her neck. The scar tissue had no sweat glands, no proper nerve endings. It would burn differently this time. Deeper, maybe. The damaged collagen would denature faster than healthy skin.
She ran the calculation. Exposure time: four minutes minimum. Burn severity: second degree, possibly third in the scar tissue. Treatment required: immediate decontamination, synthetic skin grafts they didn’t have in inventory.
Survivable.
Li-na-wei had shown her the tunnel because she’d wanted Han to know every escape route. Every way to stay alive. Every path that might lead home.
The panel release clicked under Han’s fingers. The tunnel opened into darkness and the sharp chemical smell of coolant vapor.
She dropped inside.
The tunnel had stripped her. Not skin yet but the certainty she’d carried down from the panel entrance.
Xiao-wen’s fear changed the equation.
A man who believed in his own survival would fight. Would use the torch, the purge controls, the corporate protection he’d trusted. But Han had seen that expression before. In the mirror. After the incident. After she’d understood that the company had already written the report, already decided who would carry the blame, already calculated the acceptable loss.
He was dead. Corporate had decided. The falsified evidence would work whether he lived or not. Better if he didn’t, probably. Cleaner narrative. Reckless contractor and negligent medical officer both eliminated. The station’s problems solved with two funerals and a restructured safety protocol that would change nothing.
The chelation compound sat in a magnetic case behind a false panel. Three doses. Li-na-wei had welded the cache herself, had tested the seals, had made Han memorize the location.
Four minutes.
Han’s scarred hand closed around the case. The coolant vapor was already eating through her sleeve.
The case was cold enough to burn. Han’s fingers found the magnetic seal through muscle memory: left thumb depression, twist counterclockwise, pull straight out. Li-na-wei’s welds held perfect even as the surrounding bulkhead corroded.
Three ampules. Clear liquid that caught the emergency lighting like captured stars.
Han counted heartbeats. Li-na-wei’s heart, somewhere above in the habitation ring, pumping contaminated blood through failing vessels. Four minutes meant cellular damage. Five meant irreversible cascade. Six meant choosing which organs to sacrifice.
The torch light shifted behind her. Xiao-wen adjusting his stance, recalculating.
Han closed the case. Her scarred tissue screamed as supercooled metal touched skin. She didn’t let go.
Three doses. One patient. One choice that wasn’t a choice at all.
Ming’s tablet glows in the checkpoint shadow. Two guards, fifteen meters. The evidence exists in quantum superposition. Both salvation and irrelevance until transmitted.
Han’s medical training screams triage priorities: save the most lives. Her scarred hands know different math: Li-na-wei’s pulse against her fingers in the dark, counting seconds until morning.
The communication array waits. So does Li-na-wei.
Both dying while Han stands motionless.
The airlock timer counts down. Sixty seconds. Han’s reflection ghosts across the viewport: mottled scarring mapping radiation’s path across her face. Xiao-wen’s falsified reports have already rewritten that tissue as evidence of recklessness, not survival.
Her hands don’t shake. A thousand emergencies trained the tremor out.
The jade plant’s magnetic pot presses against her palm through the pocket fabric. Li-na-wei chose it because jade means endurance. The weight feels like accusation now. Every gift a debt unpaid.
Han’s fingers hover over the emergency override panel. The metal is cold. Always cold in the corridors, but this cold travels up through her scarred tissue like memory.
Ming’s voice crackles through her earpiece. “Oxygen saturation thirty-two percent.” The clinical precision doesn’t mask the fear underneath. “Core temperature thirty-nine point four and climbing.”
Han knows the progression. Cellular damage accelerating. Mitochondrial failure. The body consuming itself trying to repair what radiation has already destroyed.
“Four minutes.” Ming’s voice breaks on the number. “Maybe four minutes before,”
“I know.” Han cuts the words short because she does know. She watched it happen before. Counted down those same minutes while her own skin blistered and her hands couldn’t hold the instruments steady enough to save anyone.
The security feed flickers on her tablet. Li-na-wei’s hand reaches toward the tool loops on her coveralls. That habitual gesture. Always reaching for something to fix. Her fingers open, close. Open again. Can’t quite grasp the wrench.
Han’s throat closes. She forces air through it anyway.
The medical bay is three sections away. The supplies she needs are in the locked cabinet. The cabinet she can’t reach because corporate security sealed the bulkheads. Because Xiao-wen’s lawyers wrote the protocols that prioritize evidence preservation over human life.
Li-na-wei’s fingers slip off the wrench. Fall to her side.
The override panel waits. Green light steady. One authorization code and the bulkheads open. One choice and she can run. Can reach the medical bay. Can try to save the woman whose hands have traced every scar on her body with such careful tenderness.
Ming’s voice again. “Han. The salvage bay. He’s starting the cutting sequence.”
The tablet shows new data. Pressure readings. Structural stress. The mathematics changing.
The structural alarm cuts through her earpiece. Different frequency than medical alerts. This one resonates in her chest cavity. In her scarred tissue.
The tablet updates. Pressure differential expanding in Section E-7. Xiao-wen’s cutting torch working through the support struts his salvage operations already weakened. Not just destroying evidence. Creating a failure cascade.
Han’s fingers move across the screen. Pulling up station schematics. Habitation sections adjacent to the breach point. She counts the occupied quarters. Forty-seven crew members. Twelve families. Five children under ten years old.
The mathematics change. Not one life against evidence anymore. One life against dozens.
Li-na-wei’s breathing rattles through the comm. That wet sound. Fluid in the lungs. The body drowning itself.
The pressure readings fluctuate. Thirty seconds until the first strut fails. Maybe ninety until the cascade reaches habitation sections. The numbers don’t account for variables. For how badly Xiao-wen’s operations compromised the structural integrity. For how many people won’t reach emergency shelters in time.
Triage mathematics becoming mass casualty calculations.
Han’s hand moves to the override panel.
Ming’s uniform is torn at the shoulder. Blood on their temple. They fought someone to get here.
The tablet’s weight settles in Han’s palm. She doesn’t look at the screen. The evidence Ming compiled over weeks. Proof that will destroy Xiao-wen’s career. His company. Maybe trigger reforms that save future crews.
“The transmission confirmed?” Her voice steady despite everything.
Ming nods. “Three agencies. Time-stamped. Encrypted backups.”
The documentation exists now beyond this station. Beyond corporate reach. Beyond Xiao-wen’s ability to erase.
Li-na-wei’s breathing stops on the comm. Restarts. Stops again.
The tablet could save dozens of future victims. The medical supplies could save one person now.
Han’s scarred fingers tighten on the device.
Han’s medical training catalogs the sequence: airlock breach, explosive decompression, the habitation ring’s support struts already compromised by months of Xiao-wen’s cutting. The math is simple. Sixty seconds until vacuum. Three minutes until Li-na-wei’s brain damage becomes irreversible.
The tablet’s edge cuts into her palm. Evidence or person. Future or present.
Her scars ache with phantom radiation burns.
Han runs toward the salvage bay. The choice tears through her like radiation. Ming’s footsteps follow. Her scars burn. She’s abandoning the person she loves to save dozens who might already be dead. The medical oath breaks inside her chest. She doesn’t slow down. The salvage bay door reflects her face, mottled, determined, unrecognizable.
Han’s fingers closed on Xiao-wen’s wrist before her mind registered the decision. Combat reflexes from another life. His skin felt warm, alive, uncontaminated. The ceramic shard embedded in her palm ground deeper as she twisted his arm toward the console.
“What are you,”
She slammed his hand against the biometric scanner. Wrong angle. The authorization sequence required specific pressure points. She’d watched him do it a hundred times through security feeds while confined to medical bay. Her scarred tissue screamed as she repositioned his fingers, forcing them flat against the reader.
The countdown stuttered. 47 seconds. 46. 45.
Xiao-wen tried to pull away but she had leverage, mass, desperation. Her other hand found the radiation display controls. The numbers glowed amber, climbing toward red. She rotated the screen with her elbow, shoving it toward his face like evidence at a tribunal.
“Look at it.”
The scanner beeped. His biometrics registered. The sequence reversed itself, purge protocols canceling with his own authorization signature. The countdown stopped at 31 seconds.
Han didn’t let go. Blood from her palm mixed with his sweat on the console. The radiation readings held steady on the screen between them. The booth’s internal sensors, not the salvage bay. The numbers climbed as she watched. 47 millisieverts. 52. 58.
His booth. His workspace. Where he’d been processing hot materials for weeks, bypassing the scanners, breathing contaminated air every shift.
“These are your readings,” she said. “Not mine. Not the bay’s. Yours.”
The color drained from his face. She watched him calculate, watched the numbers become real, watched the swagger collapse into something raw and terrified. He’d been standing in his own radiation shadow, counting profit while his cells died.
Xiao-wen’s hand shot toward the screen as if he could wipe the numbers away. The gesture collapsed halfway, fingers trembling in the recycled air. Han watched the calculation happen behind his eyes. The millisieverts converting to cellular damage, to probability curves, to the timeline she’d lived through with her own scarred flesh.
“No.” The word came out small. Corporate confidence stripped to bone. “That’s: the sensors are wrong.”
She didn’t move from the exit. Her palm still bled onto the deck plating, steady drops marking seconds. “The sensors work fine. You just never checked them on yourself.”
He looked at his hands. Turned them over like they belonged to someone else. The calluses, the metal stains, the skin that felt normal but was already dying from the inside. Past the threshold. Past where treatment could reverse the cascade.
“Six hours,” Han said. Her voice carried the flatness of clinical assessment. “Maybe eight if your kidneys hold. Nausea first. Then the headaches. Your bone marrow stops producing around hour four.”
His legs gave out. He caught himself on the console edge.
“You can still stop the purge.” Han didn’t move from the terminal. Her fingers rested on the manual override, not hovering: committed. “Open the bay. Let me document what’s inside.”
His hands shook harder. The tremor spread up his forearms, into his shoulders. Radiation sickness or fear, the symptoms looked the same.
“They’ll send treatment,” he said. The words came out desperate. “Corporate has protocols. Medical evacuation.”
“For executives.” Han’s scarred tissue pulled tight. “You’re a salvage operator who contaminated a station. They’ll quarantine you here and let the math finish.”
He looked at the screen. At the profit projections that meant nothing now. At the insurance payout he wouldn’t live to spend.
“Li-na-wei,” Han said. Quiet. Precise as a scalpel. “She’s dying because you cut corners. You can’t save yourself. But you can save the evidence that might save others.”
Xiao-wen stared at his wrist where her fingers had been. The darkening wasn’t dramatic: just a shadow beneath tan skin, like bruising that hadn’t quite surfaced. He touched it with his other hand, pressing, checking.
“That’s not. Back at his arm.”The sensors are wrong.”
“They’re not.” Han kept her voice level. Clinical. The way she’d learned to deliver fatal diagnoses. “You’re already symptomatic.”
Han caught his wrist again, but gently now. She turned it toward the light. The veins beneath his skin had darkened to charcoal, spreading like ink in water. Vascular collapse. Hours ahead of schedule.
She released him. Her hand found the terminal, pulling up the station schematic. The other hand lifted her communicator. Ming’s voice waited. Li-na-wei’s flatline timer counted down: a second purge sequence she couldn’t stop.
Han’s voice cut through the comm channel before Xiao-wen could process what his instruments were telling him. “Containment breach. Your booth is already compromised.”
She watched his hand hover over the purge control, saw the exact moment comprehension registered. His eyes darted from the monitor to the sealed door behind him, calculating distance, calculating time. The math was simple. Brutal.
“The core cracked during transport,” Han said. Her voice stayed level, clinical. “You’ve been breathing it for six minutes.”
Xiao-wen’s free hand moved to his throat. Involuntary. The gesture of a man feeling for symptoms he’d spent years pretending didn’t exist. His fingers trembled: early neuromuscular response or simple fear, Han couldn’t tell from the security feed.
“If you trigger that purge,” she continued, “the decompression will pull contaminated atmosphere through ventilation ties into habitation sections. Forty-seven people die in the first thirty seconds.”
His finger lifted from the control. Pulled back. His breathing accelerated on the audio feed, sharp and shallow.
“Or you can seal the bay. Emergency containment protocol seven-seven-alpha. It locks you in.” Han’s scarred tissue ached, phantom pain from her own exposure years ago. “But it stops the spread.”
Xiao-wen stared at the monitor. The numbers climbed. His corporate authorization codes meant nothing against physics, against the particles already destroying his cells.
“How long?” His voice cracked.
Han pulled up the exposure data, cross-referenced it with the readings. Her training demanded honesty. “Four hours. Maybe six.”
“And if I seal it?”
“I can walk you through palliative protocols. You won’t be alone.”
His hand moved toward the containment controls. Stopped. Moved again. The tremor was worse now, spreading up his forearm.
Ming’s voice crackled in Han’s other ear. “Medical override standing by. Li-na-wei’s got three minutes.”
Han’s thumb hovered over the communicator. One choice. One authorization.
Xiao-wen’s hand jerks back from the control panel. His eyes lock onto the radiation monitor he’d been ignoring, and Han watches the precise moment understanding penetrates: the numbers aren’t climbing, they’ve already climbed. Past yellow. Past red. Into the range where cellular damage becomes irreversible.
“That’s not,” His voice catches. He taps the monitor like it’s malfunctioning. “The containment field. Han keeps her tone flat, medical.”Micro-fracture in the reactor housing. You’ve been in a hot zone for seven minutes.”
His breathing changes. Faster. Shallower. Autonomic response to particle bombardment, his nervous system already registering what his conscious mind refuses to accept. The finger hovering over the purge control trembles. Not hesitation now, but the first neuromuscular degradation.
Through the security feed, Han sees his other hand rise to his neck, feeling for his own pulse. Checking. Confirming. The gesture of a man who suddenly understands he’s already dead, just hasn’t finished dying yet.
The purge control blinks, waiting for authorization. Forty-seven lives suspended on his choice.
Han’s fingers freeze over the communicator. Li-na-wei’s face surfaces in her mind: that morning’s smile, grease-stained hands touching her scarred cheek. Ninety seconds. The number burns like radiation exposure, each second a cell dying.
Through the feed, Xiao-wen stares at his trembling hand. Still alive. Still capable of killing forty-seven others.
“Ming.” Her voice cracks. “If I don’t stop the purge. Ming’s tone carries something she’s never heard before: permission.”I’m asking what you choose.”
The medical override code sits in her throat. Seven digits. Li-na-wei’s heartbeat irregular on Ming’s distant monitor. Xiao-wen’s finger drifting toward the purge control.
She cannot save everyone.
She has never been able to save everyone.
The cutting torch dies. Corporate security hesitates in the sudden darkness. Protocol confusion, no orders for station-wide contamination events. Han counts heartbeats. Three. Five. Ming’s channel crackles: “Medication administered.” Through the feed, Xiao-wen stumbles toward the airlock, one hand clutching his stomach. The radiation monitor screams numbers that mean six weeks, maybe eight. He’s looking at the evidence locker. His other hand reaches for the release.
Han’s fingers hover over the medical override panel. The radiation signature from the salvage bay tells her everything. Cellular destruction already cascading through Xiao-wen’s bone marrow, his lymphatic system beginning its catastrophic collapse. She’s seen this progression before. Felt it. The monitor shows his hand trembling toward the evidence locker, each movement slower than the last, his body already becoming evidence itself.
The tunnel is too narrow. Han’s shoulders scrape against conduit housings, tearing her uniform sleeve. The scarred tissue on her neck pulls tight with each breath. Old radiation damage doesn’t stretch like healthy skin. Pain blooms white-hot across her collarbone. She ignores it. Li-na-wei’s vital signature burns in her mind: oxygen saturation dropping, cardiac rhythm irregular, the specific pattern of acute radiation syndrome in its second phase.
Behind her, the cutting torch punches through the access hatch. Sparks cascade like orange rain. Corporate security doesn’t shout warnings anymore. They know where she’s going.
Ming’s voice crackles through her comm. “Fifteen meters. Left junction.”
Han takes the turn too fast. Her hip slams into a support strut. The impact sends lightning through her pelvis but she’s already pushing forward, boots finding purchase on the maintenance ladder rungs. Her hands know this route, Li-na-wei showed her the shortcuts, the places where lovers could meet away from surveillance. Now those same passages carry her toward a different kind of intimacy: the moment she chooses who lives.
The salvage bay access hatch appears above her. Through the porthole she sees Xiao-wen’s silhouette in the control booth, backlit by warning displays. His movements are wrong: too slow, too careful. She recognizes the precision of someone whose nervous system is beginning to misfire. He’s already dying. Has been since he opened that container.
The purge countdown flashes: twenty-seven seconds.
Her medical override code is still active in the system. Ming’s work, probably. Or maybe corporate security hasn’t updated the lockout protocols. Doesn’t matter. Han’s fingers find the emergency panel beside the hatch, muscle memory from a thousand safety drills.
She enters the code.
The hatch unseals with a pneumatic hiss.
Han pulls herself through into the control booth as Xiao-wen turns, his eyes already showing the first signs of vascular damage: tiny hemorrhages in the sclera like red stars.
Han’s hand closes around Xiao-wen’s wrist before his fingers reach the override. His skin is hot, fever-dry. She doesn’t speak. Words won’t change what’s already happened to his bone marrow, his intestinal lining, the delicate architecture of his DNA.
Instead she pivots his arm, using his own momentum against him. Combat first aid training: control the limb, control the patient. His palm slams flat against the medical scanner she installed last month. The one corporate oversight said was unnecessary expense.
The display populates with data. White blood cell count: catastrophic. Chromosome aberrations: extensive. Radiation dose estimate: 8.[^7] Gray. Survival probability: 2%.
“Look,” Han says. Her voice is steady. Clinical. “Look at what you did to yourself.”
Xiao-wen tries to pull away. She holds firm. The numbers update in real-time as the scanner processes his cellular damage. His hand shakes against the glass. Not from fear yet. From the radiation destroying his nervous system’s fine motor control.
The purge countdown reaches nineteen seconds.
Through the booth window, contaminated debris floats in the processing bay like a constellation of death.
Xiao-wen’s eyes track the numbers. His pupils are blown wide: acute exposure symptom, Han’s clinical mind catalogs automatically. The flush spreading across his cheekbones isn’t shame. It’s his capillaries failing.
He wrenches toward the override panel. Han moves with him, combat training overriding exhaustion. She catches his wrist mid-reach and slams his palm against the scanner’s glass surface. Holds it there with both hands.
“Watch,” she says.
The display refreshes. Lymphocyte count dropping in real-time. Chromosome damage spreading through the cellular map like cracks through ice. His hand convulses against the glass. Not voluntary. Nerve damage progressing.
The numbers don’t lie. They never do.
His body is already dying. Has been since he opened that container.
The timer hits fifteen. Ming’s voice fractures through static, where are you, while Li-na-wei’s medical code burns red on Han’s wrist. Han doesn’t look away from Xiao-wen’s eyes.
“The marrow goes first,” she says. Each word precise. “Metal taste. Permanent. Your cells turn traitor.”
She touches her scarred throat.
“You become the contamination.”
His hand shakes. Not from fear. From cellular collapse already beginning.
His finger stops. The display reflects in his eyes, names, not numbers. Chen’s daughter. Ravi’s husband. The woman who laughs at his jokes in the commissary.
The abort command blinks.
“They trusted me,” he whispers.
Han watches the corporate mask crack. Underneath: just a man who forgot people bleed.
“Choose,” she says.
He presses abort.
Han watches his eyes track the blue glow across her scars: the way the radiation makes the pale patches luminescent against darker skin, a topographical map of cellular death. She doesn’t look away. Lets him study what three minutes of unshielded exposure did to her five years ago on the Kunlun Station. The metallic taste floods her mouth, phantom sensation triggered by proximity to active contamination, but she swallows it down.
“The particles are already in your lungs,” she says, voice level. Medical fact, not threat. “From handling unshielded materials for the past six weeks. Your crew’s too. The readings I’m showing you aren’t predictions. They’re diagnoses.”
Xiao-wen’s hand hovers over the purge control, trembling now. The swagger has drained from his shoulders. He’s calculating, she can see it: weighing corporate liability against personal survival, profit margins against radiation half-lives.
She pulls up Li-na-wei’s biometric feed on the smallest screen, tucked in the corner where he has to lean close to see it. Heart rate elevated. Oxygen saturation dropping. The numbers update in real-time, each refresh a countdown.
“She was repairing the ventilation junction in Section E-6 yesterday,” Han says. “Where you stored the reactor cores before processing. Sixteen-hour shift because maintenance is understaffed.” Her finger taps the screen, leaving a smudge. “Your efficiency metrics did this.”
The Cherenkov glow pulses brighter as solar radiation penetrates the station’s weakened shielding. Another system Li-na-wei flagged for repair three months ago, another requisition Ming marked as denied for budgetary reasons. The light catches the metal residue staining Xiao-wen’s hands, makes it shimmer like contaminated water.
“You can’t cut your way out of radiation,” Han says. “It doesn’t negotiate. It just burns.”
The containment cylinders pulse brighter. Han’s fingers find the magnetic locks, rotating each sample forty-five degrees so the blue light intensifies. She angles her face deliberately into the glow, turning the left side toward him. The scarring catches the radiation like a relief map: raised tissue casting shadows, the pale patches luminescent against surrounding skin.
“Look,” she says. Not a request.
Xiao-wen looks. She watches his throat work as he swallows.
The light transforms her scars into something almost beautiful. Terrible. The mottled patterns shift with each pulse, showing him the progression: first-degree burns at the edges, second-degree where the exposure concentrated, third-degree at the epicenter near her jaw. The medical record made flesh.
“This is what ‘acceptable risk’ looks like after three minutes,” Han says. “Your crew has been breathing it for six weeks.”
She rotates another cylinder. The manifests between them glow blue at the edges, profit margins illuminated by contamination. His handwriting on the inspection waivers turns spectral.
“These numbers?” She taps the documents. “They’re not abstract. They’re Chen’s lungs. They’re Li-na-wei’s bone marrow. They’re your hands.”
Xiao-wen’s hand hovers over the abort command. His eyes track between the glowing button and the biometric display where another name transitions. Yellow to red, the color of emergency. Chen. Equipment operator. Father of two girls who draw pictures on the mess hall walls.
Han doesn’t wait for permission. She reaches past him, fingers steady despite the proximity, and taps Chen’s file open. The chest scans fill the screen: bilateral ground-glass opacity spreading through both lungs like frost on a window. She’s seen this pattern before. In mirrors.
“Six weeks,” Han says. “Maybe. Without treatment we can’t provide here.”
The blue light from the samples reflects in Xiao-wen’s eyes. He’s calculating. She can see it: the cost-benefit analysis running behind his expression, weighing Chen’s life against quarterly projections.
The ventilation map pulses with her annotations. Red lines branch like arterial systems through the station’s infrastructure. Han traces the path with one finger against the screen. Recycling intake, filtration bypass, distribution nodes. Each junction marked with exposure times and particle density calculations.
“Fourteen minutes to crew quarters. Chen’s daughters sleep in C-7.” Her finger moves. “Twenty-two minutes to mess hall. Shift change at 0600. Forty people.” Another junction. “Thirty-one minutes to medical bay.”
She doesn’t say Li-na-wei’s name. Doesn’t need to.
The detector’s clicks accelerate. Han’s scarred tissue catches the booth’s harsh light: pale patches mapping her previous proximity to death. “I’ve calculated my exposure threshold. Seven minutes before cellular damage becomes irreversible.” Her voice remains steady, clinical. “I’ve already lost three years of life expectancy to radiation. I’ll spend seven more minutes standing here if that’s what accountability costs.”
Xiao-wen’s hand hovers frozen above the purge controls.
The speakers crackled first: a moment of static that made Xiao-wen glance up reflexively. Then Ming’s voice filled the booth, the corridors, every pressurized space on the station. Not shouting. Not dramatic. Just that careful, precise tone they used for official announcements, each word enunciated with administrative clarity.
“This is Administrator Ming, Station Records. Broadcasting on all channels. You are witnessing live feeds from Salvage Bay Control Booth E-7.”
Xiao-wen’s monitors flickered. His own face appeared on every screen. The profit projections vanished, replaced by manifests with their doctored radiation readings highlighted in red. His hand still hovered above the purge controls, frozen in the frame like evidence.
“Corporate encryption bypassed under emergency protocols,” Ming continued. “Feeds routing to Earth Authority, Lunar Coordination, all station personnel. Timestamp authenticated. Recording irrevocable.”
The booth’s walls seemed to contract. Xiao-wen stared at his reflection: silver-streaked hair, calculating eyes, hand poised to kill. On the screens, his expression shifted through recognition, denial, trapped animal panic. Every crew member watching. Every authority. Every future employer who might have overlooked corner-cutting now seeing him choose between murder and accountability in real time.
“No.” His voice cracked. “You can’t,”
“Already done.” Ming’s tone held something Han had never heard before: quiet satisfaction. “Your privacy ended when you made it everyone’s problem. Your deniability ended when you reached for those controls.”
The manifests scrolled across the monitors, dates, materials, falsified readings. His handwriting on the approval signatures. The pattern unmistakable, documented, broadcast.
Xiao-wen’s hand dropped from the controls. He looked at Han, then at his own multiplied face on the screens. Hundreds of people watching him decide who he was.
The booth’s recycled air tasted like metal and ending.
Han’s fingers moved to her collar. The medical recorder sat clipped there, its indicator light steady red. Had been red since she’d entered the booth.
“Every word,” she said. Clinical. Detached. The voice she used documenting symptoms. “Your admissions about falsified radiation readings. Your knowledge of contaminated materials. Your calculations trading worker safety for processing speed.” She tapped the device. “Queued in the station’s black box system. Irrecoverable. Even if you destroy me.”
Xiao-wen’s eyes tracked to the recorder, then back to her face. The math changing again. Evidence multiplying.
“Medical recorders have legal standing,” Han continued. “Authenticated timestamps. Tamper-proof encryption. Used in liability cases.” She paused. “Like the one that documented my radiation exposure. The one that proved corporate negligence.”
The booth’s lighting made the recorder’s red indicator reflect in his monitors. A small light. Steady. Unblinking. Watching him the way she watched symptoms progress, patient, thorough, inevitable.
“It’s already over,” she said. “The question is what you do next.”
Han’s hand moved to the panel, not touching, just indicating. “Last week’s maintenance.” Her voice flat. Matter of fact. “Li-na-wei logged it as coolant line inspection. Took six hours.”
She watched his eyes track to the maintenance records on his secondary screen. Finding the entry. Signed off. Approved.
“She installed a mechanical bypass. Manual valve. Crawlspace access behind this booth.” Han’s scarred hand gestured to the wall behind him. “Old-style failsafe. No electronics. No remote activation.”
The purge controls glowed under his fingers. Responsive. Obedient. Meaningless.
“Your console can send the signal,” Han said. “But the valve won’t open. Not unless someone crawls back there. Knows which junction. Knows the sequence.”
She met his eyes.
“Only I know.”
His hand trembled above the controls. Shaking. Visible even through the reinforced glove.
The monitors cycled. Personnel frozen in corridors. Corporate logos flashing alert status. His crew: faces upturned. Watching him through the observation ports.
Ming’s voice, relentless. Measured. Each manifest number a documented choice. Each discrepancy his signature.
Xiao-wen’s eyes found his own reflection in the dark screen. Found the future there.
His face cycled through the calculations. Denial first: jaw tightening, head shaking fractionally. Then anger, color rising in his cheeks. Recognition came slower. His eyes dropped to a side screen. His own exposure logs. The numbers climbing. Green to yellow to amber.
His fingers jerked back from the purge controls. Burned. Hovering in the space between choice and consequence.
Her wrist detector clicked. Clicked. Counting down what remained.
Her fingers didn’t flinch against the containment vessel’s warmth. The radiation counter on her wrist accelerated its rhythm (click-click-click) but she kept her hand steady, professional. A demonstration.
“Day one, acute radiation syndrome presents as nausea.” Her voice carried the flat precision of a death notification. “The kind where you can taste metal in your mouth. Copper and iron. Your own blood cells breaking down.”
Xiao-wen’s gaze dropped to the vessel. To the corporate logo etched into its base. His pupils contracted.
“You recognize it,” she said. Not a question.
“That’s.”Tiangong Reclamation’s parent company. Yes.” She rotated the vessel slightly. The logo caught the harsh overhead lighting. “Same liability structure. Same legal team. I checked.”
His hand moved unconsciously to his collar. Loosening it.
She pulled up files on his monitor with her free hand. Legal documents scrolled past. Contract clauses in dense text. “Day three, the vomiting starts. Can’t keep water down. Your crew reported these symptoms two weeks ago. You logged it as food poisoning.”
“The galley had. She highlighted a passage. Liability limitations. Acceptable exposure thresholds calculated against operational costs.”Hair comes out in clumps. Skin bruises from capillary hemorrhage. You’ve seen the bruising. You told them it was from equipment handling.”
His breathing had gone shallow. Fast.
“Week two. The latent phase.” Her scarred hand remained steady on the contaminated vessel. “Victims feel better. Corporate representatives suggest malingering. Delayed treatment protocols. I have the communications logs from my incident. Would you like to compare them to yours?”
She advanced the documents. Identical clause structures. The same lawyer’s signatures across seven years. The same calculated risk assessments.
“They did the math, Xiao-wen. Deaths per quarter versus liability payouts versus profit margins.” Her wrist counter screamed now. “The numbers always work. Until they’re your numbers.”
She pulled up the archived communications. His own company’s letterhead filled the screen.
“Week three begins the manifest illness phase.” She turned her face fully toward him. Let the overhead lights catch every mottled patch, every boundary where radiation had rewritten her skin. “Hemorrhaging from mucous membranes. Eyes, nose, gums. Organ failure cascading through systems faster than we can support them.”
Her finger moved across his monitor. Highlighted names in the medical logs. Chen. Rodriguez. Park. His salvage crew.
“Your own DNA stops repairing itself.” She tapped each rising exposure reading. “Chromosomes shatter. Cell division becomes impossible. You’re dying at the molecular level while you’re still conscious enough to understand it.”
His hand had moved to his throat. Pressing against his pulse point as if checking for symptoms.
“These people trust you.” She advanced to the latest readings. Critical thresholds crossed. “They call you ‘Lao Xiao.’ They invite you to their children’s birthday parties in the habitat ring.”
His breathing. Shallow now, rapid. The physiological response to recognition. To pattern completion.
To inevitability resolving from probability into certainty.
She placed her scarred hand directly on the containment cylinder. The metal cold against damaged nerve endings that still registered temperature wrong, still sent phantom signals of burning.
“This is what happened to me.” Her voice steady. Clinical. “Tiangong Reclamation. Different station. Same cost-benefit analysis.”
She pulled up her own medical file. The progression images. Day one through day twenty-one.
“The corporate representative. A man in his forties. Silver-streaked hair. That same easy smile that didn’t reach his eyes.”He looked exactly like you’re looking right now.”
Xiao-wen’s hand moved from his throat to grip the desk edge. Knuckles white.
“He had the same spreadsheet open when my colleagues started dying.”
“The readings were,” His voice cracked. “Within acceptable parameters. I followed. The systematic underreporting. Numbers reduced by half, then thirds.
She pulled up the archived photo. Her corporate representative. That same defensive lean.
Xiao-wen saw himself. Same posture. Same hollow words forming in his mouth.
He looked at her scars. His reflection there. Unbearable.
His hands convulsed, knocking the medical report to the deck. Seventeen names. Two his own crew.
“I have a daughter on Earth.” Whisper. “I needed the bonuses.”
As if personal desperation could balance bodies.
Han’s detector clicked faster. The scarred tissue on her neck tightened.
“So did the man who died in the bed next to mine.” Quiet. Precise. “His daughter got a settlement check that couldn’t pay for the funeral.”
The impact drives the breath from her lungs. His elbow catches her ribs and her vision whites out for a heartbeat. Training takes over. She shifts her weight, uses his forward momentum. Her fingers find the pressure point below his wrist.
He gasps. His grip loosens.
She doesn’t let go. Instead she forces his hand down, makes his palm flat against the console surface where the core sample rests. The detector’s wail climbs higher. The radiation reading spikes. Yellow to orange to red.
“Feel that?” Her voice comes out ragged. “That’s what you brought onto this station.”
He tries to pull away. She holds him there. Three seconds. Five. Not long enough to cause damage. Long enough to understand.
“That’s what’s in Li-na-wei’s lungs right now.” She releases him suddenly and he stumbles back against the viewport. “That’s what’s killing her while you reach for that lever.”
The booth shudders again. Metal screams as the security team’s cutter peels back another layer. Smoke begins filtering through the seal. The emergency lighting strobes red.
Xiao-wen stares at his hand. At the detector. At the medical display where Li-na-wei’s heart rate stutters irregularly.
“If you pull that lever,” Han’s voice cuts through the alarms. “If you vent this bay, the contamination disperses through the station’s external vents. The recycling systems pull it in. Everyone dies. Not just the evidence. Everyone.”
She steps between him and the controls. Her detector still screaming. The core sample’s fractures spreading like veins through ice.
“Or you can help me contain this.” She meets his eyes. “You can save them. Starting with her.”
The medical display flickers. Li-na-wei’s oxygen saturation drops another point.
Sixty seconds until the security team breaches the inner door.
Forty-five until the core sample fails completely.
The spin sends them both crashing into the equipment rack. Monitors explode in cascades of sparks. Han’s shoulder strikes the edge of a console and her scarred tissue tears. She feels the wetness spreading under her uniform, warm against cold recycled air.
But she doesn’t release him.
She uses the momentum to drive him forward, his face inches from the medical display. Li-na-wei’s oxygen saturation: 72%. Heart rate erratic. The waveform stuttering like a dying engine.
“Watch,” Han forces the word through gritted teeth. Her fingers dig into his wrist, holding him there. “Watch her die.”
The numbers drop. 71%. 70%.
Xiao-wen makes a sound. Not quite a word. His free hand scrabbles at the console edge, seeking purchase, seeking escape.
The radiation alarm’s pitch climbs impossibly higher. The core sample’s containment field flickers. Thirty seconds.
“This is what you chose,” Han says. Blood drips from her jaw onto his collar. “Every time you falsified a reading. Every shortcut. Every acceptable risk.”
69%.
The security cutter screams through metal somewhere behind them.
Han’s voice cracks raw as she forces his hand flat against the lever, her blood smearing across the metal. “Look at her!” The words tear through the shrieking alarms. “This is your acceptable risk. She’s dying because you needed quota, because bonuses mattered more than the radiation signatures you deleted.”
Her scarred fingers lock around his wrist like surgical clamps. The reopened tissue screams but she doesn’t flinch. She can’t.
“Every manifest you altered. Every reading you buried.” The blood runs hot down her collar, drips onto his knuckles. “This is what they bought.”
68%.
The containment field flickers again. Twenty seconds.
“Look at what you purchased with her life.”
The monitor’s glow catches the silver in his hair, illuminates the calculation dying in his eyes. Li-na-wei’s smile stares back at him. Grease-stained hands, those careful braids, the woman who’d welded the very supports his cutting had compromised.
The detector screams higher. Fifteen seconds.
His hand jerks sideways. Not the purge. The emergency protocol.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and enters his authorization code.
The codes cascade across the screen: each digit a confession, each authorization level a surrender. The purge sequence freezes at 00:[^04]. Containment barriers slam down through the salvage bay with hydraulic finality. Scrubbers roar to life, drowning the klaxons. Han releases him, stumbles toward the breaching door, her detector still shrieking. Li-na-wei’s vitals still falling. Every second now measured in contamination spreading through her partner’s bloodstream.
Han doesn’t wait to watch him complete the sequence. She’s already turning, already calculating. The medical bay is three sections away, Li-na-wei’s vitals dropping with each second, the contamination spreading through tissue with mathematical certainty. Her detector shrieks as she passes through the doorway, the readings spiking from materials she’s been breathing, touching, standing near for the past hour.
Behind her, Xiao-wen’s voice cuts through the dying klaxons: “The secondary cache,” He’s standing now, one hand still on the console as if it might pull him back toward the choice he didn’t make. “Section E-9, behind the coolant manifold. Medical supplies. Radiation chelators. I kept them for,” He stops. For what? For profit? For leverage? For the workers he knew he was poisoning?
Han doesn’t acknowledge him. Her legs drive her through the corridor, her scarred tissue screaming with each impact against the deck plating. Ming’s voice echoes through the station-wide comm, still broadcasting, turning Xiao-wen’s surrender into public record. She hears fragments (“containment active”) “corporate logs unsealed”, “Earth authorities responding”, but it’s all background noise against the rhythm of her own heartbeat and the memory of Li-na-wei’s laugh, her warm hands, her steady presence.
The radiation detector’s pitch changes as she clears the salvage section. Lower. Still dangerous. She’s been exposed too: she felt it the moment she entered that control booth, recognized the familiar heat-that-isn’t-heat, the taste of metal that has nothing to do with the station’s recycled air. She knows exactly what’s happening inside her cells right now, the cascade of damage, the clock starting again.
But Li-na-wei doesn’t know. Doesn’t have Han’s experience reading her own body’s warnings. Doesn’t have time for Han to stop and calculate acceptable losses.
Two sections left. Han runs.
The console lights shift from emergency red to containment amber, each indicator a small confession. Xiao-wen’s hand trembles as he enters the final sequence. Not the purge that would scatter evidence across the orbital path, but the lockdown that will preserve every gram of contaminated material, every falsified manifest, every decision he made when profit outweighed lives.
The numbers freeze: 00:[^04]. Four seconds from catastrophe. Four seconds from becoming the kind of killer who can’t rationalize away the bodies.
Han sees his reflection in the dark screen between status indicators: silver-streaked hair, calculating eyes, the easy smile completely gone. He looks older suddenly. Smaller. His corporate logos catch the amber light like accusations.
“They’ll take everything,” he says. Not to her. To himself. To the future he just chose over the one he’d built.
Han’s already at the door, her detector still screaming. She doesn’t have time for his regrets. Li-na-wei’s cells are dying with the same mathematical certainty that governed his profit margins.
Behind her, she hears him sit down heavily, the sound of a man who’s finally stopped running his calculations.
The barriers drop like guillotines. Hydraulic rams driving tungsten-reinforced steel through their channels with the inevitability of physics. Each section seals with a magnetic clamp that reverberates through the deck plating. Twenty-three barriers. Han counts them by vibration through her boots, the rhythm of accountability made mechanical.
The scrubbers engage with a rising howl, industrial fans pulling contaminated atmosphere through ceramic filters at pressures that would collapse human lungs. The sound fills the bay like machinery screaming its purpose. Every particle of evidence, uranium dust, falsified isotope signatures, the molecular proof of his corner-cutting, gets trapped in filtration media that corporate investigators will catalog grain by grain.
Xiao-wen’s console logs every second of the sequence. Permanent. Admissible. Damning.
The silence hits like vacuum. Han’s ears ring with the absence of klaxons, filled only by the scrubbers’ industrial wheeze and Xiao-wen’s shuddering breath as he collapses forward, forehead against the console where his authorization codes burn green: confession rendered in alphanumerics. His hands shake. The screen reflects in his eyes like judgment already passed.
Han doesn’t look back. Her boots find purchase against the deck plating, muscle memory carrying her through the hatch as Xiao-wen’s confession scrolls behind her. The detector’s shriek follows her into the corridor. Li-na-wei. The name pulses with each heartbeat. Her scarred fingers key Ming’s channel: “Clear path to Medical. Now.” Security’s shouts fade behind sealed bulkheads as she runs.
Han’s medical training takes over before conscious thought. She crosses the bay in three strides, her scarred hand already pulling the emergency kit from its mount. The cardiac monitor screams: ventricular tachycardia, the rhythm chaotic, Li-na-wei’s strong heart struggling against cellular damage Han knows too intimately.
“Stabilize the rhythm first.” Her voice is steady, clinical, nothing like the terror clawing her throat. She keys the automated system, adjusting the chelation flow rate. Too fast and Li-na-wei’s kidneys fail. Too slow and the radiation keeps destroying tissue faster than the drugs can bind it.
Li-na-wei’s body arches against the restraints. Her eyes roll back, showing whites. A thin line of blood traces from her nose: capillary damage, early stage. Han’s own scars burn with phantom pain, her body remembering this exact progression. The pale patches on her neck tighten as she works.
The radiation counter clicks steadily. 847 millisieverts accumulated exposure. Survivable. Barely. If the treatment holds. If the drugs reach her marrow before the damage cascades. If Han’s hands stay steady despite the tremor starting in her fingers.
She checks the IV line. Monitors Li-na-wei’s pupils, reactive, sluggish but present. Palpates her abdomen, tender, early inflammation. Every assessment point matches Han’s own medical records from five years ago, the night she lay in a bay just like this one while doctors fought to save her.
“Not you.” The words escape before she can stop them. “Not you too.”
Li-na-wei’s braids have come loose, black hair spreading across the white pillow. Her mechanic’s coveralls are cut away, revealing skin already showing the first flush of radiation erythema. Her hands twitch against the restraints.
The monitor alarm shifts pitch. The rhythm is deteriorating.
Ming’s voice crackles through the comm (“Corporate emergency reserves released, full decontamination suite en route, ETA four minutes”) and Han’s eyes lock on the cardiac monitor where Li-na-wei’s heart rhythm stutters, catches, finds its pattern again. The jagged peaks smooth into something survivable. Something like hope.
The chelation drugs are working. Binding the radioactive particles. Giving Li-na-wei’s body a chance to fight.
Han’s scarred fingers find Li-na-wei’s wrist, feeling the pulse strengthen beneath grease-stained skin. Even now, even dying, her partner’s fingernails show the black crescents of her trade. The hands that kept the station alive, that touched Han’s face in the dark, that sketched impossible repairs on napkins over breakfast.
Those hands twitch. Li-na-wei’s eyelids flutter.
“Stay with me.” Han’s voice breaks on the words. “Stay.”
The oxygen saturation climbs. 89. 91. 93. The numbers Han has been holding her breath for, the way she held it in her own hospital bed five years ago, waiting to learn if she would live or die.
Li-na-wei’s chest rises. Falls. Rises again.
Through the observation window, Earth Authority vessels materialize from the black. Clean white hulls with enforcement insignia, their approach vectors precise and inevitable. Han watches them close, feeling something unfamiliar loosen in her chest. Not relief. Not yet. But recognition that someone with actual power is finally coming.
The security feed flickers on her peripheral tablet. Xiao-wen sits motionless in the sealed control booth, flanked by armed personnel. His hands rest on the console, palms up, as if he’s trying to understand what they’ve done. The easy smile is gone. The calculating eyes are empty. He looks at his stained fingers the way Han once looked at her scarred face: seeing the permanent mark of choices that can’t be unmade.
His corporate logos seem obscene now. Complicit.
Han’s throat closes. Li-na-wei’s pulse beats against her fingertips. Irregular but present, fighting. The squeeze is barely pressure, muscles depleted by the decontamination drugs tearing through contaminated tissue. But Li-na-wei’s eyes find hers. Focus. Recognition.
Han allows herself three seconds. Counts them. Lets the relief flood through scarred tissue that remembers every patient she couldn’t save.
Then she reads the symptom progression data and begins calculating treatment protocols for fourteen more.
The moment holds. Then Ming’s tablet chimes. Fourteen names. Fourteen contamination readings crossing threshold markers.
Han releases Li-na-wei’s hand with deliberate care. Her scarred fingers find the treatment protocols she’s already memorized. Fourteen more battles. Fourteen workers whose cells carry Xiao-wen’s calculated risks.
She stands. Her jaw sets with familiar weight.
She’s prevented catastrophe. The suffering she couldn’t prevent waits in the corridor.