Read Chapter 27: Aftermath: The Siege Mindset

The mess hall smelled of recycled air and nervous sweat. Élise stood on a crate near the serving line, a tablet in her hand, and waited for the last of the crew to trickle in. Sixty-three faces looked back at her. Sixty-three people who had signed contracts with Prometheus Astromining for a two-year rotation, not a war.

She didn't give them time to settle.

"Twelve hours," she said, her voice carrying without shouting. "That's what the enforcement craft has given us. Twelve hours to surrender the mutineers—which means everyone in this room who hasn't been shipping ore back to Earth with their eyes closed for the past month."

A few nervous laughs. Good.

"The vessel out there is armed. Military-grade, according to Deprez's read of the transponder signature. It's not a rescue. It's a cleanup operation." She paused, letting the word *cleanup* hang. "Prometheus wants this base sterilized. They want the incident reports to say 'catastrophic failure, no survivors.' They've done it before."

Deprez stood at the back, arms crossed. He nodded once.

"So here's what we're going to do." Élise pulled up a schematic on her tablet and threw it to the mess hall's main display. The enforcement vessel rotated slowly, rendered in wireframe. She highlighted a thin line running along its underside. "External fuel line. It feeds the main reactor and, critically, the weapons array. It's exposed because the ship was designed for boarding actions, not prolonged combat—it expects to intimidate, not to fight."

She zoomed in on the line where it curved near the engine housing. "We hit this, the weapons lose feed pressure within three seconds. The ship is dead in the water. They can't fire on us, they can't chase us, and they're forced to negotiate from a position of weakness."

Marta, one of the geologists, raised a hand. "Hit it with what? We don't have weapons that can reach orbit."

"Orbital mechanics aren't our friend here," Élise admitted. "But the vessel is coming to us. It has to. The shuttle bay on the far side of the base—that's its only berthing option. It'll approach at low altitude to match our rotation and lock on to the shuttle's docking collar."

She switched the display to a tactical view of the base's exterior. "That means it'll pass within range of our maintenance drones. Specifically, the heavy-cutters we use for debris clearance on the solar array." A tight smile. "They're not weapons, but they can carry a charge. And they're already programmed for autonomous flight."

The room went quiet. Élise could see the calculation happening behind their eyes—the shift from *this is impossible* to *this is maybe possible, if we're lucky and fast and fearless*.

"The second piece," she said, before anyone could drift into doubt, "is the secondary escape pod. The one I found on the far side of the base. It's damaged, but it's repairable—and it doesn't need to carry people." She pulled up the schematics for the pod. "We launch it empty, with a distress beacon set to mimic our transponder signature. A decoy. The enforcement vessel's sensors will track it as a potential escape attempt. It buys us confusion—and in a fight, confusion is worth more than armor."

"The pod's hull integrity is marginal," Osei said from near the front. His engineering apprentice, Yuki, sat beside him, cleaning her glasses with the practiced calm of someone who had learned not to react to bad news. "Can we even get it to launch?"

"We don't need it to survive re-entry," Élise said. "We need it to fly for five minutes and then blow up, convincingly. That I can do with the parts we have."

Duval was standing by the door. He hadn't sat down when the assembly was called. His arms were folded, his expression unreadable. Élise met his eyes and didn't look away.

"I'm not going to pretend this is a good option," she said, addressing the room but holding Duval's gaze. "It's not. The good option was the rescue we were promised. The good option was a corporation that honored its contracts. We don't get that. What we get is a choice: roll over and let them take us apart piece by piece, or fight for a chance to see Earth again."

She stepped off the crate. "I'm not going to force anyone. This is a mutiny—I'm not going to dress it up as anything else. If you want to surrender, if you think you can make a deal with the boarding party, that's your call. But you need to make it now, and you need to make it openly. I won't have anyone on my crew pointing a weapon at their own people in the middle of a firefight."

The silence stretched. She could feel the weight of it—the fear, the doubt, the exhaustion of a crew that had been pushed to the edge of what humans could endure and then pushed further.

Then Marta spoke. "I'm in."

A chorus of assent followed, ragged but real. Heads nodded. Hands went up. Someone in the back shouted, "Fuck Prometheus," and the tension cracked into something approaching grim laughter.

Duval didn't move. Élise watched him, waiting.

Finally, he uncrossed his arms. "I have a family on Luna Secunda." His voice was quiet. "If this goes wrong, they'll be told I died in a mining accident. They'll never know the truth."

"They'll know," Élise said. "When we're back, they'll know. That's the only promise I can make."

Duval held her gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded—a small, almost imperceptible movement. "Alright. I'm in."

He didn't say he was sorry. She didn't ask him to.

---

The fortification work began immediately. Élise divided the crew into teams: one to run wiring and sensors along the main corridor, one to reinforce the airlock's inner hatch with structural plating from the warehouse, one to begin the repairs on the secondary pod under Osei's direction. Deprez took a team to inventory the remaining ammunition and distribute it to defined positions along the defensive line.

"You're putting me on the corridor," Duval said, falling into step beside Élise as she walked toward the munitions locker. It wasn't a question.

"I'm putting you where I can see you," she said. "And where you can see everyone else. You know the crew's weak points better than I do."

He absorbed that with a grunt. "And if I decide to change my mind during the fight?"

Élise stopped and turned to face him. She was aware, suddenly, of how tired she was—the bone-deep weariness of someone who had been holding a crisis together for too many days. But she kept her voice steady.

"Then you'll have earned whatever happens to you," she said. "But I don't think you will. You had a choice to sabotage that airlock. You could have done it. You didn't. That tells me more than any loyalty oath."

Duval studied her for a moment. "You're a hard woman, Élise."

"I'm a repair chief. I fix things." She resumed walking. "Right now, this crew is a thing that's broken. I intend to fix it."

---

The main corridor became a fortress in miniature. They had limited time and limited materials, but they had creativity and desperation, and those counted for more than steel. Crew members who had spent their careers operating drills and haulers worked with a precision that surprised her—bracing doorframes, stringing sensor wire, welding mounting points for the rifles Deprez had stockpiled.

At the far end of the corridor, where the passage widened into the staging area, Yuki was directing a team of three as they mounted a heavy cutting torch on a tripod salvaged from the geology lab. She looked up as Élise approached.

"Improvised sentry," she said, patting the torch's housing. "It won't fire like a rifle, but anyone coming through that door is going to get a very unpleasant surprise."

"Range?"

"Effective at five meters. Devastating at two." Yuki grinned—a fierce, tired expression. "It'll do."

Élise nodded and moved on. At the airlock, she found Deprez kneeling by the inner hatch, running a hand along the seam where they'd welded an extra layer of plating.

"Structural integrity's better than I expected," he said without looking up. "Whoever built this base knew what they were doing."

"Prometheus uses the same prefab templates for all their lunar facilities," Élise said. "They're designed to survive a direct meteorite strike." A pause. "They just weren't designed for what's about to come through that door."

Deprez stood, dusting off his knees. "You really think we can pull this off?"

"I think we don't have a choice." Élise looked down the corridor, at the crew working in focused silence, at the hardened positions taking shape, at the fragile hope they were building out of scrap metal and stubbornness. "And I think that's the only thing that matters."

Deprez followed her gaze. "The boarding party won't be amateurs. They'll have training, armor, comms."

"We have the home-field advantage," Élise said. "We know every corner of this base. Every crawlspace, every junction box, every place a body can fit. They don't."

"That's not nothing."

"It's something." She allowed herself a small, grim smile. "It'll have to be enough."

Above them, the base's display screen flickered, updating the countdown. Eleven hours, forty-two minutes. The enforcement vessel was closing, a dark speck against the indifferent stars.

Élise watched it for a moment, then turned back to her crew and got to work.