Read Chapter 18: The Hidden Reserve

The maintenance corridor smelled of scorched metal and recycled air, a combination Élise had learned to read like a weather report. She paused at the junction, running her glove along the wall seam. The temperature differential was off by three degrees—something heavy was running behind this section, something that drew power the base could barely spare.

She checked her tablet. The schematics for this level showed nothing but ballast tanks and a dead-end crawlspace. But the schematics also showed a wall where she was standing.

"Callum, I need a pry bar and a thermal camera at sector J-7."

His voice crackled through her helmet com. "We're kind of busy holding off a corporate death wish here."

"Five minutes." She pressed her palm against the panel. It gave slightly. "I think there's something behind this bulkhead."

The base lurched again, an engine detonation echoing through the deck plates. Management's shuttle was still hammering at the outer doors, and with each impact, Élise felt the stress fractures propagate through the structure like cracks in an eggshell.

Callum arrived with Dmitri in tow, both men hauling equipment. Dmitri's face was still tight from the Amir incident—the kill-switch behind his eyes hadn't fully disengaged. Élise filed that away for later. Right now, she needed her best engineer, not her most volatile one.

"There." She pointed at the seam. "That's not load-bearing. That's a hatch."

Dmitri ran the thermal camera over the surface. His eyebrows climbed. "There is heat behind. Active systems. Nothing on the registry."

They worked in silence for eight minutes, the base shuddering periodically beneath them. When the panel finally came free, a sealed magazine waited behind it—corporate gray, stamped with the Atelier Luna Secunda logo, and marked with a nitrogen purge symbol that made Élise's stomach drop.

"Stand back," she ordered. "That's a cryo storage marking."

The seal was still intact. The numbered dial indicated it hadn't been opened since activation. Dmitri cracked the inspection port and aimed his flashlight inside.

The beam illuminated rows of white cylinders, each one stenciled with a date and an oxygen purity readout.

"Mon Dieu." Élise counted them. Twelve cylinders. Each one rated for forty-eight hours of life support for a single individual. She did the math quickly: 576 hours of breathing time, concealed behind a false wall in a maintenance corridor that no one in the lower decks had reason to visit.

"How long has this been here?" Callum asked.

Élise checked the manufacture dates. Eighteen months ago. Nine months before the corporate takeover. Before the new management team had arrived with their smooth assurances and their efficiency reports.

"They knew." Her voice came out flat. "They knew this base was going to fail, and they cached their own survival supplies before the first collapse."

Dmitri laughed, a harsh bark. "So corporate has been preparing escape pods while telling us to tighten our belts."

"Not escape pods." Élise ran her hand over the nearest cylinder. "Insurance. If the base failed and Earth sent a rescue, they'd have their own air to wait out the chaos. If the base failed and no rescue came..." She trailed off. The rest of the sentence wasn't worth saying aloud.

Callum was already on the radio. "Élise found a supply cache. Repeat, we have a confirmed oxygen reserve in sector J-7. Twelve cylinders, full integrity."

The channel exploded with questions. Élise killed the audio for a moment and looked at Dmitri.

"This changes things," she said. "Release them to the crew."

Dmitri's face went hard. "You want to give air to the people who voted against us? To Osei's people, who are still trying to talk to Earth?"

"Everyone on this base is breathing the same recycled molecules." Élise keyed the channel back. "Listen up. We found a corporate reserve cache. Management concealed oxygen they had no intention of sharing. This is your air now. Every station gets a rotating supply from this cache, distributed equally. No one goes without."

The silence that followed was different from the earlier tension—not hostile, but stunned. Then a voice came through, one of the miners who had voted against her plan.

"Marchand, that's... that's real oxygen? Enough for everyone?"

"For a time," Élise said. "It's a bridge, not a solution. But it's an honest one."

She heard Dmitri mutter something under his breath in Russian, but when she looked at him, he was already hauling the first cylinder out of the magazine. The action was its own kind of vote.

They spent the next forty minutes cataloging the cache and establishing a distribution schedule. Élise stationed two miners at the magazine with instructions to log every cylinder release. By the time the last cylinder was inventoried, word had spread through the entire habitable section of the base. The mood had shifted—not to optimism, exactly, but away from despair. There was a difference between dying and being handed a tool to postpone dying. The crew understood that distinction intimately.

"Élise." Osei's voice cut through the channel. She'd kept him on the periphery since the antenna incident, but his auxiliary uplink had restored some of his faction's communication capacity. She braced herself for another argument.

"We need to talk about the shuttle," he said. It wasn't a challenge. That unsettled her more.

"What about it?"

"I've been running diagnostics through the auxiliary systems. The navigation computer is hard-locked to the corporate network. Even with the antenna down, the management shuttle was pinging it for authorization codes before they started their burn. If we can't unlock the nav, the Dragonfly can't fly a rendezvous trajectory."

"Then we unlock it." Élise began walking toward the main engineering bay. "What do you need?"

Osei hesitated. "The override codes are in the corporate vault on the command deck. It's sealed with a biometric lock that only senior management can open."

"And management is currently trying to blast their way through our airlock doors."

"They are." Osei's voice carried an edge she hadn't heard before. "But I've been analyzing their burn pattern. They're not trying to leave. Not exactly."

Élise stopped mid-stride. "Explain."

"The shuttle is firing against the outer doors, but the trajectory isn't escape-oriented. They're actively degrading the door structure—burning it down. If they were trying to leave, they'd have attempted a hard separation and blown the outer seal. Instead, they're targeting specific stress points, weakening the whole assembly."

Dmitri's voice came over the channel. "They're not trying to get out. They're trying to make sure no one else does."

The words hung in the recycled air.

"They're going to compromise the outer door integrity," Élise said slowly. "If they burn through enough structure, the door will fail under pressure differential. We'll lose all atmospheric integrity in the hab ring—or worse, vent the whole base."

"Then we need to stop them." Osei's voice was steady. "But the only system that can override a shuttle's flight controls is the command deck console, which is sealed in the vault with the access codes we don't have."

Élise looked at the oxygen cylinder in her hands. The corporation had hidden air from its workers. They had armed their shuttle to destroy the base rather than surrender it. Nothing about this was an accident. Every decision, every concealment, every prepared contingency strain had been engineered by someone who never intended to share space with the people they commanded.

"The vault has a secondary access," she said. "Corporate maintenance protocol on Atelier installations—there's a physical override behind the command deck's false bulkhead, intended for emergency inspections. I saw it twelve years ago when I worked the Titan facility. Same design."

Osei's silence was loud.

"I need you to map the override path," Élise continued. "You know the command deck layout better than anyone. Take Callum with you—he can handle the physical lock. I'll hold the airlock controls and make sure our shuttle sees the sun."

"And you trust me to do this?" Osei asked. The question carried weight.

"The oxygen I just released came from people who decided I was expendable." Élise's voice was hard. "I have no use for that decision. I have use for a communications officer who knows how to hack a corporate lockout. So yes, Osei, I trust you to do your job. Prove me right."

She cut the channel before he could respond. Dmitri was watching her with an unreadable expression.

"You are giving him weapons," Dmitri said quietly. "He could turn them on us."

"He could." Élise met his gaze. "But the alternative is waiting for the corporation to finish what they started. I would rather take that risk with my eyes open than burn out an airlock door closed."

The base shuddered again. On the monitors, the management shuttle's engine flare was visible through the outer viewports, cutting steadily through the door's emergency plating. They had hours at best before the structure failed completely.

Élise dropped the oxygen cylinder at Dmitri's feet. "Secure the cache. I need to reach the airlock control room before our friends upstairs weld us permanently to this rock."