Read Chapter 14: Aftermath: The Taken Doors

The door grated open before Élise finished the override sequence. Callum was through it in a half-crouch, his wrench held low, eyes sweeping the corridor. Empty. The emergency lights stuttered overhead in alternating bands of amber and red, painting the passage in the color of a slow-motion catastrophe.

She followed him into the heart of the airlock control nexus. The room was compact—a single technician’s workstation wrapped around the main pressure-lock console, its monitors showing live feeds of the four external bays. The low hum of circulation fans. The smell of soldered metal and stale coffee.

“Get the bolts on,” Élise said, already moving to the console. Her fingers found the master chassis lock. She punched in her code—the same one she’d used for nine years—and was unsurprised when it still worked. Management had never bothered to change the access tiers for repair chiefs. They assumed she’d never have reason to use them.

Callum drew the deadbolt across the inner door and leaned his weight against the frame. “They’ll have security here in ninety seconds.”

“Then we’d better do this quickly.”

She toggled through the airlock control interface, disabling remote access, cutting the management override codes, and redirecting primary command authority to her personal station. A red line crawled across the screen: LOCKDOWN ACTIVE. Then she killed the latch on the inner maintenance corridor door. A dull clunk echoed through the walls.

“Outer hatches?” Callum asked.

“Still operable.” She eased the pressure readouts on Bay Two. The cargo lock was cycling. “But that’s not what I want.”

She pulled up the bay allocation schematic and traced the line from Bay Three. The cargo bay held the launch frame and the shuttle-assembly kit—the only spare parts that could make the surviving vessel spaceworthy for the long haul. She keyed in the command to raise the bay’s environmental seal and felt the faint tremble run through the deck plating.

Then she saw the warning.

ACCESS DENIED. BAY THREE IS UNDER ACTIVE FERRY PROTOCOL.

Élise stared at the screen, a cold knot settling in her stomach. “Callum.”

He was beside her in two steps. She pointed at the console. The ferry protocol icon showed a small vessel icon drifting through the airlock cycle, currently in the transition chamber. Someone had initiated a cargo transfer in the last few minutes. That wasn’t a shuttle. That was a cargo lifter docked outside, loading up parts.

“They’re stripping us,” she said, her voice flat. “While we were making our move, they started moving hardware.”

“How much did they get?”

She checked the manifest history. “Initial listing. The launch frame sections. Half the guidance kit. If they complete this cycle, the lifter is gone, and so is the frame.”

“Can we abort it?”

“You’d need someone physically in the bay to override the load protocol, but the inner door from here is—” She looked up. The access corridor to Bay Three’s vestibule connected through the same junction she’d just deadbolted from the inside. There was a second way in from the far side of the ring, but the pathway looped through the personnel quarters and the mess hall. Five, six hundred meters of open corridor. “We can’t get there in time from here.”

“We could unlock the door.” Callum’s jaw tightened. He could read her refusal before she voiced it.

“If I unlock that door, security gets in. We lose the airlock controls before we’ve even secured them.”

“And we lose the frame if we don’t.”

The floor rocked slightly beneath them. An airlock cycle completing. Élise looked at the four camera feeds. The fourth one showed the lifter directly below, its bay mouth open, waiting. She checked the countdown on the ferry protocol: twelve minutes until final latch release.

She made her choice.

“Let’s go.”

Callum didn’t argue. He pulled the deadbolt and shoved the door into the frame, wrench up. They came out into the main corridor at a sprint, boots drumming on the deck grating. The noise carried, and the echo amplified every step.

They reached the vestibule to Bay Three without encountering anyone. Callum moved to the manual wheel as Élise punched the interior keypad. The seal hissed and the heavy door—a transfer hatch intended for bulky loads—ground open on powered rollers. Inside, the bay was a cavern of stacked crates, pallets, and the skeletal geometry of the shuttle-assembly jig. The air smelled of cutting oil and ozone.

At the far end, a motionless cargo lifter squatted at the lock, its robot arms already cradling a bundle of struts that used to belong to the launch frame. Two figures in grey trousers and dark jackets stood at the terminal beside the lifter, their backs to them. One was tall, wiry, with a shaved head. The other was short, broad-shouldered, with the flat posture of a man who’d spent years at a desk but still knew how to throw a punch. Maintenance security, not corporate suits. Probably hired for the evacuation detail.

“Hey!” Callum shouted.

Both men turned. The tall one flashed a badge from his belt—a security emblem, silver and plastic. “This bay is under agent protocol. You’re not cleared.”

“This bay is under my command,” Élise said. She stepped forward, letting the bulk of the machinery frame her silhouette. “We’re terminating the ferry transfer. Shut it down.”

The tall man shook his head. “The order came from the regional controller. Not from—whatever you are.”

“I’m the repair chief. And that order came from a company that’s about to abandon you along with the rest of the crew.”

The broad-shouldered man glanced at his partner. The hesitation was brief, but it was enough for Callum to close half the distance.

Then the tall man moved—not for the terminal, but for the wall. His hand went for a secure communications panel, a hardline tethered to the command deck. Callum swung the wrench. It caught the security man across the forearm, and the panel crunched with the impact. The man grunted and came in low, driving the crown of his head into Callum’s ribs.

They collapsed together in a tangle of limbs and swinging fists. The broad-shouldered man was already moving, fast for his size, making for the ladder that led up to the lifter’s cockpit. Élise threw herself into his path.

He was heavier. He drove her back against a crate stack, and something sharp bit into her shoulder. She twisted, brought her knee up into his solar plexus. He folded, but not far. He grabbed her wrist, squeezing until the bones ground, and tried to spin her off balance. She remembered this move. A security takedown drill. She’d seen it seventy times at remote-station training, and always hated that they trained it on recruits who couldn’t fight back.

She let him spin her. Let go of her center. Went with the momentum and brought her free elbow around in an arc that landed squarely against the hinge of his jaw. His grip loosened. She pulled her hand free and shoved him backward into the cargo lift’s support stanchion. He sagged, dazed.

Behind her, Callum had his man on the floor, one knee on his chest, the wrench pressed flat against his throat. The security man was still, breathing shallow, palms flat and turned up.

Callum looked at Élise. “They’ll get up.”

“They had every intention of leaving us here.” She said it without heat, as a matter of observation. She walked to the transfer terminal and began the manual shutdown sequence. The lifter’s arms locked mid-motion. The countdown froze at four minutes.

The noise of the fight hadn’t drawn anyone else. Not yet.

Callum pulled the security men to their feet, herded them to the inner door, and shut them into the corridor with the deadbolt thrown. He came back to Élise’s side at the terminal, hands shaking slightly from adrenaline.

“Alright then,” he said, breathing heavily. “We have the airlock. We have the parts. What we don’t have is an army. How many people can we actually call allies?”

Élise leaned against the terminal, letting the vibration of the base’s systems travel through the metal and into her bones. It felt more solid than her own footing did. “Ten at last count. Plus us, and Hélène. I can’t say who else clearly aligns.”

“Management just put forty-seven of our crew onto a shuttle headed somewhere with a lifeboat. That tells the remaining sixty-three exactly which side they’re not on.”

She turned from the terminal and looked out through the bay’s observation window. The lifter hung motionless now, frozen in a state of half departure, waiting for a command that would never come. In the far distance, beyond the bay’s pressure seal, thin plumes of dust drifted across the lunar surface, kicked up by an undercurrent of engine bleed.

“That’s what I’m counting on,” she said. “Eventually, people make the choice that doesn’t feel like dying alone.”

The vibration she felt through the deck changed. Callum heard it too—a new sound beneath the hum, a rhythmic resonance like footsteps on a walkway. It was still distant, but it was coming closer. He met her eyes.

“That’ll be the next door we need to take,” he said.

“No. That’s the next door we need them to open for us.”

They turned together and began walking back toward the airlock control room, heading to the corridor junction that faced the tide coming toward them.