Read Chapter 23: The Armorer's Secret

The locker was where Deprez said it would be, but that didn’t make what was inside any less startling. Élise knelt on the cold plating of the sub-basement storage deck, her headlamp cutting through the dust that had settled undisturbed for years. The door had been welded shut, then re-welded with a patch job that looked like it had been done in a hurry.

Behind her, Mbeki whistled low. “That’s not a crowd-control rifle. That’s a full-spectrum kinetic rifle with a chemcell battery.”

“How do you know that?” Élise asked.

“Because I spent four years on the mass-driver defense line at Tranquility Station,” Mbeki said, stepping closer. “Those were standard issue for the lunar garrison corps. They decommissioned them a decade ago. Somewhere.” She paused. “People were supposed to turn them in.”

Deprez stood in the corridor, arms crossed, jaw tight. He was older than most of the crew, with the kind of quiet stillness that came from having been in places that required it. When he spoke, his voice was flat.

“I turned mine in. But I kept the backups.”

“You brought six rifles to a mining base that never authorized personal weapons,” Élise said, not looking away from the locker. She counted the long, dark shapes stacked against the interior wall like fishing rods in a garage. “For your own safety, you said.”

“I said I brought them for my own safety,” Deprez replied. “I didn’t say that was the only reason.”

Élise stood, wiping dust from her knees. The locker was nearly the size of her repair bay, crammed with racks of ammunition cells, two full pressure suits that had been stripped of their ID tags, and a medical trauma kit that looked more military than civilian. Whatever Deprez had been preparing for, it hadn’t been a routine two-year rotation on a helium-3 mining platform.

“Walk me through it,” she said.

Deprez uncrossed his arms. He looked tired, but not apologetic. “Fifteen years ago I was on a base in the southern crater region. Helios 4. You know the name?”

Élise did. Everyone in the industry did. Helios 4 had been a mid-size operation, forty crew, owned by a Franco-British consortium that had since been absorbed into three different shell companies. The official report said a micrometeorite strike had compromised the habitat’s integrity during a solar storm. Casualties: forty. Survivors: zero.

“I was on shore leave on Earth when it happened,” Deprez said. “So I lived. But I read the report, and I knew people there. I knew the quality of their welds. I knew their evacuation protocols. And I knew that the consortium’s insurance payout came through in eleven days.” He let that hang. “Three weeks before the ‘accident,’ the board had voted to shutter the operation because the helium-3 yield hadn’t met projections.”

Élise felt the cold creep up her spine. “You think it was intentional.”

“I don’t think,” Deprez said. “I know. I saw the engineering logs. My cousin was the assistant chief and he kept copies. He sent them to me a month before the strike.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’ve got them memorized. The meteorite that ‘hit’ them was tracked by every deep-space monitoring station for six days before impact. International regulations require an intercept attempt if a body is on a collision course with an inhabited facility. No attempt was made.”

Silence filled the corridor. Mbeki shifted her weight. Somewhere above them, the ventilation system hummed its familiar, broken rhythm.

“So when I got hired here,” Deprez continued, “I decided I wasn’t going to be caught flat-footed again. I pulled some old favors, got these off the black market, and had them shipped in parts hidden inside the life-support replacement units. Technically, they were never in the manifest because they never existed.”

“And you’ve been sitting on them this whole time,” Élise said.

“Waiting for the day I’d need them.” He met her eyes. “Today kind of qualifies.”

Élise studied him. The man had lied to her—or at least omitted a significant detail—for the entire duration of their mutiny. But his lie had been born from the same fear that had driven her to act: the certainty that the corporation would let them die to protect its bottom line. She couldn’t fault him for that.

What she could fault him for was the secrecy.

“I’m confiscating five of the six,” she said. “And every round of ammunition you have.”

Deprez’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue.

“You keep one,” Élise continued. “Because you’re the only person here who’s fired one in anger, and if it comes to that, I want someone who knows what they’re doing. But you report to me every morning at 0600, and if you so much as breathe a word about this cache to anyone without my permission, I’ll space the last one too.”

“Understood,” Deprez said.

“The medical kit stays here,” she said. “And the suits. We may need them.”

She turned to Mbeki. “Get Osei and Callum. I want these rifles broken down and distributed to the people I trust. That’s you, Deprez, Callum, Osei, and Chen.” She paused. “And get Duval.”

Mbeki’s eyebrows rose. “Duval? He’s been on the fence about the mutiny from day one.”

“That’s exactly why he gets a weapon,” Élise said. “If he’s armed, he thinks he’s part of the solution. If he’s not, he starts wondering what he has to gain by betraying us to whoever shows up at the end of those seventy-two hours.”

Mbeki nodded slowly. “Divide and conquer.”

“Incentivize loyalty,” Élise corrected. “There’s a difference.”

She pocketed two of the energy cells and slung one of the rifles over her shoulder before heading back toward the main corridor. Deprez fell into step beside her, his face unreadable.

“You’re not as stupid as I thought you’d be,” he said quietly.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week,” Élise replied.

They emerged from the sub-basement into the main habitation ring. The lights were dimmed to conserve power, and the air had the faint metallic taste of recycling systems running at near capacity. Rationing had cut the environmental output by ten percent—enough to stretch the oxygen reserve an extra twelve hours, but enough to make everyone feel the walls closing in.

As they passed the mess hall, Élise caught a glimpse of the crew clustered around the video screen. The image was fuzzy—a rendering, not a feed—but she could make out the shape of the incoming vessel. It was long and angular, all hard lines and no visible markings, military design language translated into civilian form.

“Götterdämmerung,” read the caption beneath it. “Registry: Private Charter. Departure Point: Ceres.”

Ceres. That meant the vessel had been traversing the belt for weeks before it ever received the FalconKey signal. Which meant—as Élise had already concluded—someone had known the mutiny was coming before it happened. Someone had dispatched a ship to intercept them before they even made their move.

“That’s not a rescue vessel,” Deprez said, his voice low.

Élise watched the screen. The ship’s thrusters were visible even in the crude rendering, oversized for a transport, positioned for rapid acceleration changes. Combat configuration.

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

Her comm chimed. She tapped it, and Osei’s voice filled her ear.

“Élise, we’ve got a problem. I’m reading power draw from the management shuttle’s comm array. It’s transmitting.”

“To who?”

“To the same frequency band as the incoming vessel,” Osei said. “They’re talking to each other.”

Élise gripped the rifle strap tighter. The management shuttle had stopped firing an hour ago. Now she knew why.

They weren’t trying to escape.

They were coordinating.