Read Chapter 26: The Second Turn

The alarm cut through the mess hall like a knife through foil—three sharp bursts, then silence. Every head turned to the overhead speakers. Élise’s spoon clattered against her tray as she was already rising, heart hammering against her ribs in a rhythm she recognized too well. That was not the ration warning, not the airlock chime, not any of the hundred mundane alerts she’d learned to filter out over fifteen years.

That was the emergency band.

She crossed the corridor in six long strides, Osei falling in beside her, his face a mask of controlled panic. “It’s coming from the inbound vessel,” he said, breathless. “They’re transmitting on the standard distress frequency. Signal’s clean, no encryption.”

“Distress?” Élise pushed through the command room door. “They’re supposed to be rescuing us, not calling for help.”

The main display was a wash of static and garbled text. Osei slid into his console chair and pulled up the decoded feed. The message repeated on a loop, crisp and professional, each word landing like a hammer:

*To Luna Secunda Command. This vessel is operating under corporate charter. You are in violation of Helios Corporation Regulation 14-B: unauthorized seizure of corporate assets, mutiny, and hostile intent. Surrender all personnel involved in the uprising within twelve hours of this transmission or face immediate destruction. Do not attempt to negotiate. Do not approach. Compliance is mandatory.*

The room went very quiet. Someone—Konstantin, Élise thought—let out a low whistle. Duval, standing near the door with his arms crossed, had gone the color of chalk dust.

“It’s not a rescue,” Osei said, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s an enforcement squad.”

Élise stared at the message. Twelve hours. Twelve hours was nothing. Twelve hours was the difference between a cup of coffee and a dead crew. She forced herself to breathe, to push past the cold knot tightening in her chest. She had been here before—not this exact moment, but the shape of it. The moment when the corporation’s hand came down, and everyone looked to her to find the way out.

“How many are on board?” she asked, her voice flat and functional.

Osei’s fingers flew across the console. “Signal’s tight-beam. I’m reading a crew complement of eight, minimum. But the vessel’s mass says otherwise—that hull is armored, and the drive signature is consistent with a military-grade interceptor. You don’t need a boarding party of eight to bring an enforcement action. You need a skeleton crew and enough firepower to make a point.”

“Or to make an example,” Deprez said from the doorway. His face was unreadable, but his hand rested on the rifle at his hip—the one Élise had let him keep. “Corporate enforcement doesn’t negotiate. They don’t take prisoners back for trial. They cull.”

“That’s not—” Duval started.

“I’ve seen it,” Deprez cut him off, his voice low and bitter. “Helios 4. They sent a vessel just like that. Claimed it was an evacuation transport. It was a cleanup crew. They didn’t want survivors. They wanted a closed file.”

Élise turned to face the room. Twelve hours. She could feel the seconds draining away, each one a drop of blood from an open wound. The crew was watching her, waiting for the plan, waiting for her to make the impossible possible. She had done it before. She had talked her way out of locked rooms, out of corporate audits, out of the wreckage of a burning station that had taken everyone else.

But she had never talked her way out of a gun.

“What are our options?” she asked, keeping her voice level.

Osei shook his head. “We can’t outrun them. They have acceleration we can’t match. We can’t outgun them—even with Deprez’s collection, we’re not a military installation. And we can’t negotiate, because they’ve already set the terms.”

“Then we don’t fight them on their terms,” Élise said. The thought crystallized in her mind, sharp and clear. She looked at Osei. “That vessel. It’s got a fuel line, right? Exposed. Standard for military interceptors—they trade armor for speed, and the external fuel lines are a vulnerability nobody bothers to address because nobody expects a ground-based crew to have long-range weapons.”

Osei’s eyes widened. “We don’t have anything that can reach them.”

“We have the shuttle,” Élise said. “We have the secondary pod. We have the base’s maintenance drones, which can be refitted with proximity charges. We have fifteen years of accumulated engineering expertise sitting in this room.”

Duval stepped forward, his earlier bravado gone. “That’s a plan to die in. If we fire on a corporate vessel, there’s no going back. No deal, no mercy, no—“

“There was never going to be mercy,” Élise said, turning to face him. “You read the transmission. Surrender the mutineers or be destroyed. They’re not coming to rescue us. They never were. The FalconKey signal was a trap—someone knew what we were doing before we did it, and they sent this ship to close the file on us.”

The words hung in the air. She could see the crew processing them, the grim arithmetic of their situation settling into each face. Twelve hours. Twelve hours to decide if they would die on their feet or on their knees.

Élise looked around the room—at Osei, at Deprez, at Duval, at the others who had followed her this far. She had won them once by appealing to their hope. Now she had to win them again, with something harder and sharper.

“We are not going to surrender,” she said, her voice carrying the weight of command. “We are not going to wait for them to blow us out of the sky. We’re going to use those twelve hours to make them wish they’d never sent that message.”

The room was silent. Then, slowly, Osei nodded. Deprez’s grip on his rifle tightened, but his eyes were steady.

Duval looked at her for a long moment, then gave a single, sharp nod.

“Good,” Élise said. “Because we have work to do.”