Read Chapter 25: The Report Malfunction

The hull shuddered under Élise’s boots as she crossed the service corridor, and she froze, one hand flat against the cold metal. The vibration wasn’t from the base’s life support or the ancient drilling rigs. It was rhythmic. Deliberate. The kind of pulse that came from a docking clamp being tested.

“Osei,” she said into her comm, voice low. “Tell me that shudder is the shuttle’s thrusters warming up.”

A pause. Then Osei’s voice, tinny through the speakers: “Negative, Chief. Shuttle’s cold. That’s coming from the secondary airlock, Section F. Someone’s cycling the outer seal.”

Deprez’s figure on the hull. The management shuttle. The approaching vessel from Ceres. Too many things moving at once, and Élise hated it. She was a repair chief. She liked problems she could weld shut or bolt down.

She changed course, heading for the maintenance archive—a cluttered back room off the lower deck where she had stashed the original structural reports after Duval had tried to bury them. It felt like years ago, though it had been less than a month. Chapter 7 of her life, the paperwork that had started this whole thing.

The archive door was unlocked. Inside, the air smelled of dust and ozone. She pulled the physical folder from a cabinet, cracking the plastic spine. The report was dry: stress fractures, pipe fatigue, load-bearing failures. All the reasons Luna Secunda was supposed to be abandoned. All lies, as it turned out—or at least, not the whole truth.

She laid the pages flat on the cluttered desk, running a flashlight over the dense diagrams. That was when she noticed it. A page that shouldn’t have been there. The report’s binding had been slit, not torn, and a single sheet of thin polymer was tucked between the main body and the appendix. It was a different paper stock. Older. Worn at the edges.

Élise pulled it out. The sheet was a schematics page—but not for the base’s main structure. It showed a small, isolated module on the far side of the crater rim, connected to the main base by a pressurized tunnel marked in faint red ink. The tunnel was labeled “MAINTENANCE ACCESS ONLY,” but the module itself had a designation she didn’t recognize.

“Pod-B. Emergency Egress.”

She traced the red lines. The module was buried under the regolith shelf to the west, well outside the base’s regular sensor sweep. That was why they’d never found it in their own inventories. It wasn’t on the official registry. Someone had built it, hidden it, and then buried the map inside a falsified structural report. The question was who.

Élise ran her fingers over the handwriting in the margins. Small, neat French script.

*“If they lie about the walls, they will lie about the exit.”*

Her breath caught.

The report had been fabricated to justify abandoning the base. But the person who wrote that line had known the real reason behind the lie. They’d hidden an escape route inside the very document meant to doom them.

She pulled out her tablet and keyed up a map of the base’s external envelope. She had to zoom out twice before the marker appeared—a small, blinking dot on the far western ridge, nearly two kilometers from the main habitat. Two kilometers of unpressurized surface. But if the tunnel was intact, she wouldn’t need to cross the surface. She’d only need to get to the access hatch.

Her comm crackled again. This time it was Duval.

“Élise. A word.”

She closed her eyes, counted to three. “Go ahead.”

“The rescue vessel is five hours out. My crew is getting restless. The ones who still support you are starting to wonder why you’re not preparing a welcome party.”

“Because I’m not sure it’s a party,” she said flatly. “You should see what I’m looking at. Report to the maintenance archive. Alone.”

A pause. Then Duval’s voice, softer: “Fine.”

She spent the next four minutes photocopying the hidden schematic, then sliding the original back into the report’s slit binding. If Duval was coming, she needed to know what she was willing to show him.

He arrived with his hands in his pockets, wearing the same uneasy expression he’d had since the ultimatum. Élise set the copied schematic in front of him.

“This is Pod-B,” she said. “A secondary escape pod, hidden off the far ridge. It’s not in your inventory. It’s not in anyone’s inventory. It was deliberately concealed.”

Duval picked up the paper, scrutinized the diagram, then set it down. “That’s the access tunnel from Section H. I’ve walked that corridor. It dead-ends in a bulkhead. Solid titanium.”

“It’s a false bulkhead,” Élise said. “Someone built it to look permanent. The actual tunnel cuts through behind it.”

“Who showed you this?”

“No one. It was hidden inside the structural report that Helios used to justify shutting us down.”

Duval’s face went still. He took a slow breath, then looked at the page again. “If they tried to abandon this base once before—if they anticipated needing an escape route—then the previous crew knew something we don’t. They were planning for a betrayal.”

“Or they already survived one,” Élise said. “Helios 4.”

Duval studied her in the dim yellow light. “Deprez’s theory. Corporate butchery.”

“Deprez thought the company destroys bases that get too close to something they don’t want found.” Élise tapped the schematic. “This pod was hidden. Maybe because it’s the way out. Or maybe because it’s the reason they were going to be killed in the first place.”

“Pod-B is functional?”

“Unknown. The schematic has a damage asterisk—frame stress, possible atmospheric breach. It’ll need work. But it’s repairable.”

Duval was quiet for a long moment. “So we have options. Wait for the vessel—whatever it is—or go on foot across two klicks of regolith and try to bring a derelict escape pod online.”

“Three options,” Élise said. “We stay, we welcome the vessel, or we split. Pod-B is too small for the full crew. But it could carry eight to ten people. Enough for a skeleton team to attempt a return to Earth.”

“And the others?”

“The base has a full complement of volunteers. You know that.”

Duval laughed, humorless. “You’re offering me a lifeboat seat while the rest burn.”

“I’m offering you a choice. But I need to see the pod first. I need to know if it’s real or if this is a trap left by the same people who filed a false report on our walls.”

Duval handed the schematic back. “If the vessel is hostile, what’s your play?”

“We don’t let them board. We lock the airlock, we go dark, and we move for Pod-B in the confusion. Or we let them in and hope they’re exactly what they say they are.”

“And the mystery figure on the hull?”

“They’re the wildcard,” Élise admitted. “Every move we make, they’re a step ahead. They could be corporate. They could be Helios. They could be someone who wants exactly what we want.”

Duval rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I’ll support you one more shift. But if that vessel is hostile, the airlock is the only way in. And I won’t be the one standing in front of the breach.”

“You won’t be,” Élise said. “I will.”

She watched him leave, then retrieved her pressure suit from the locker. She would need to move fast, before the vessel’s arrival made movement across the surface untenable. Two kilometers on foot, outside the base. If the pod was dead, she’d burned the last hours of her credibility on a ghost.

But if it was real, it was a second door—and the corporation had only budgeted for one way out.

She sealed her helmet, cycled the lock, and stepped onto the lunar surface. The sky was black and hard, and in the distance, the incoming vessel was now visible: a cold, bright point growing slowly against the stars. She checked her bearings and started walking west, leaving behind the only base she had left.