Read Chapter 15: The Vote

The mess hall smelled of recycled coffee and something faintly chemical from the reclaimer unit that had been coughing all shift. Élise stood at the head of the longest table, her fingers wrapped around a lukewarm mug she had no intention of drinking from. Behind her, the wall clock ticked toward the evacuation hour—forty-six minutes now.

She let them settle. Sixty-three faces, minus the two security guards still zip-tied in the storage locker off Bay Three. Sixty-one. The murmur died as she raised a hand.

“You all know why we’re here.” Her voice carried without effort. Fifteen years of shouting over vacuum-suit comms had trained it. “Management thinks they’re leaving in forty minutes. They think we’re staying behind to hold the base together while it falls apart around us. They think that’s acceptable.”

A few muttered agreements. Somewhere in the back, Dmitri leaned against the bulkhead, arms crossed, watching her with those flat, patient eyes. She’d spoken with him for twenty minutes before this. He’d agreed to hold his people until the vote. She knew it cost him.

“The structural report is real,” she continued. “The oxygen leak was staged. The ferry protocol was stripping our only shuttle before they even announced the evacuation.” She let that land. “I’ve seen the numbers. We have three weeks, maybe four, before the main truss gives way. The managers don’t care. They’re on a bird out of here.”

Callum stood by the doorway, his broad frame blocking the exit in a way that was probably accidental but felt deliberate. He nodded once at her.

“I’m not asking you to trust me,” Élise said. “I’m asking you to trust the math. The base will kill us if we stay. The managers will leave us here to die. We have one option—take what’s ours and find another way home.”

She paused. The silence stretched.

“I need a vote. Not a show of hands for management.” She almost smiled. “A real one. Who’s with me?”

For a moment, nothing moved. Then Dmitri’s hand went up, slow and deliberate. The men around him followed—six, eight, twelve of them. Callum’s hand went up next. Then a woman from hydroponics, then a technician she’d seen at the reactor core meetings. Hands rose in clusters, some hesitant, some immediate.

Élise counted. She’d done this before, in a different way, on a different station. Counting the living. Counting the dead. Counting who was willing to fight.

“Thirty-seven,” she said when the last hand went up. “Thirty-seven for. Eleven against.”

The dissenting group sat together near the far wall. A wiry man named Osei—a communications tech with a narrow face and anxious eyes—cleared his throat. “And the other thirteen?”

“Undecided,” Élise said. “They get to watch. But they don’t get to interfere.”

Osei stood. His chair scraped against the deck plating. “This is mutiny, Élise. You know that. Even if we take the shuttle, even if we survive, Earth will see us as criminals. The consortium has lawyers. They have navies. They have the ability to make our lives hell for the rest of our natural lives—if we make it back at all.”

“You think they’ll be more forgiving if we stay here and die quietly?” Dmitri’s voice was gravel wrapped in steel. “They already wrote us off. The evacuation list didn’t have your name on it, Osei. Mine either. We’re cargo to them. Disposable.”

Osei flinched but pressed on. “That’s why we negotiate. We let them leave, we stay, we broadcast our situation to Earth, we show them the structural reports—make it a public relations problem. They’ll have to send a rescue. They won’t want the bad press of abandoning a crew.”

“Public relations,” Dmitri repeated, his lip curling. “You want to bet our lives on hashtags.”

“I want a plan that doesn’t end with us in chains,” Osei shot back.

The room erupted—shouts overlapping, fists on tables, someone throwing a chair that clattered against the far wall. Élise let it go for five seconds, then slammed her palm down hard enough to rattle the mugs.

“Enough.”

The noise died.

She looked at Osei. “You’ve got a fair point. Earth might send help if the story got out. But the antenna is the only way to tell that story—and management controls it. They’ve already proven they’ll silence what they don’t want heard. The oxygen leak was rigged to keep us docile. What makes you think they’ll let you broadcast a word against them?”

Osei’s mouth opened, then closed.

“We vote again in three days,” Élise said. “If you want to make your case, you make it then. But for the next seventy-two hours, we need unity—or we don’t get off this rock.” She turned to the room. “The shuttle leaves in thirty minutes. We’re taking control of it. That means the antenna goes dark first. No orders from Earth, no countermands, no messages telling security to shoot us in the back. We cut the line, we hold the base, and we plan.”

She scanned the room. “Anyone have a problem with that?”

No one spoke. Osei’s jaw tightened, but he sat down.

“Good.” Élise pulled a datapad from her jacket, unfolded the screen, and placed it on the table. A schematic of the base glowed green against the dark. “Callum, Dmitri—you’re with me. The antenna relay is in the comm shack near the north spoke. Two technicians on shift. I need them locked out before they notice anything.”

“I can handle that,” Callum said.

“Dmitri, take six of your people and secure the shuttle bay. Do not let management board. Do not let them strip parts. If they try, you stopped them peacefully—but you stopped them.”

Dmitri grinned. It wasn’t a warm expression.

“The rest of you,” Élise said, “go back to your shifts. Act normal. If anyone asks, we’re preparing for a routine inspection. No one talks about the vote. No one mentions the airlock controls. We have three days to make this work, and I intend to use every second.”

The room broke apart—murmurs, the scrape of boots, the low hum of conversation. Élise stayed at the table, watching the schematic, until Callum approached.

“Eleven against is a lot.”

“It’s a minority,” she said.

“It’s a faction.” He lowered his voice. “Osei’s a comms tech. If he gets to the antenna before we do—”

“He won’t.” She looked up at him. “You’re going now.”

He nodded and left. Élise watched him go, then pulled out her own comm unit and keyed a short message to Dmitri: *Ship’s manifest. I need to know who can fly.*

The response came back in seconds: *Working on it. Names soon.*

She pocketed the unit and headed for the north spoke, the schematic still burning in her mind. The shuttle sat in Bay One, forty-seven seats, life support for a crew of maybe a dozen more if they stripped the cargo bay. Sixty-one souls, minus the eleven who wouldn’t join—fifty if they all came. Maybe fifty if they had to take the dissenters too—she wouldn’t leave them behind, even if they voted no.

There was no math that fit fifty people in a shuttle rated for fifteen on long-haul life support. Not for the trip they needed to make.

She’d solve that later. First, she needed the antenna dark.

The comm shack door slid open as she approached. Callum was already inside, one arm behind a technician’s back, the other keying commands into the relay console. The technician—a nervous kid with a bleed patch on his forearm—looked at Élise with wide eyes.

“You can’t do this,” he said.

“I’m doing it.” Élise stepped to the console and watched the antenna status light flick from green to amber. “We need three days of silence. Then we’ll talk.”

She reached past Callum and pulled the main power relay. The console went dark. The status light died.

For the first time since arriving on Luna Secunda, the base was blind.

Élise let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Callum—shuttle bay. Make sure Dmitri’s holding the line.”

He left. She stayed, staring at the dead console, listening to the base hum around her. Outside, she knew, management would be realizing their comms were gone. Panic would follow. Then reprisals.

She had three days to turn a mutiny into a way home.

Then the floor shuddered—a deep, resonant thump that traveled up through her boots and into her chest. It wasn’t the structural failure. It wasn’t the mining rigs.

It was the shuttle’s main engine firing.