Read Chapter 28: The Booby Trap

The mining locker stank of ozone and old grease. Élise knelt beside the open crate, her headlamp cutting through the dim, and lifted a brick of plastique from its foam bed. It was heavier than she remembered. Cold. Patient.

“Sixty years old,” she said, turning it over. “Corporation bought this lot from a decommissioned Chilean operation. Never logged it in inventory. Deprez found it buried behind a false wall in storage.”

Marek squatted beside her, squinting at the faded markings. The Polak had been a demolition man in another life—before the mines, before the company, before all of it. “Detonators?”

“Fifty. Old-style electric. We’ll need to rig our own triggers.”

He grunted. “Better than nothing.”

They worked in silence for the next hour, laying charges along the approach corridor that led from the main airlock to the hub. Élise had studied the schematics until the lines burned behind her eyelids. There were three choke points where the corridor narrowed, where a boarding party would bunch up, where geometry did the work for you.

At the first, she placed a shaped charge behind a junction panel. At the second, she wired a daisy chain into the ceiling tiles. At the third—the sharp turn before the hub—she rigged something nastier: a double charge with a delay, designed to catch anyone who thought they’d cleared the first blast.

Marek watched her work, his face unreadable. “You’ve done this before.”

“Not here.” She crimped a wire, tested the connection. “On Phobos Station, we had a containment breach. The pressure doors failed. I had to—” She stopped. The memory was a sharp thing, still capable of cutting. “I had to improvise.”

He didn’t push. Instead, he handed her the next charge and pointed at the ceiling. “If they come in force, you want one above the door. Not on it. Above it. The blast wave drops straight down.”

She looked at him, then nodded. It was a good call.

---

The drilling robot squatted in the corner of the workshop like a sleeping beast—a tracked chassis, a hydraulic arm, and a cutting head the size of a man’s torso. It had been built to chew through lunar regolith, to bore tunnels where no human could survive. Élise intended to give it a different purpose.

“Can you strip the cutter?” she asked Yuki, who was already kneeling beside the machine with a tool kit.

“Already on it.” Yuki’s small hands moved with surgical precision, removing the retaining bolts on the cutting head. “We’ll mount the thermal lance we used on the Pod Three salvage. It’s got better range, better accuracy.”

“And the sensors?”

“Rear-mounted guidance camera still works. I’ll wire it to the control panel.” Yuki paused, looking up at her. “It won’t be subtle. They’ll see it coming.”

“That’s the point.” Élise crouched, running a hand along the robot’s armored flank. “They’ll have to stop it. Divert attention. Split their fire. While it’s chewing through their advance, we’re hitting the fuel line.”

“If it even gets close enough.”

“It will.” Élise stood, wiping dust from her palms. “We’re sending it straight down the corridor. These things were built to drill through solid rock. A few corporate soldiers won’t stop it.”

Yuki looked skeptical, but she didn’t argue. She went back to work, the whine of her tools filling the workshop.

---

They set the first test detonation at the far end of the base, in a maintenance crawlspace that had been sealed for years. Élise wanted to check the wiring, the charge placement, the timing. She wanted to know the explosives would fire when she told them to.

Marek handled the trigger. They crouched behind a blast shield near the corridor junction, ear protection clamped over their heads, and waited.

“Three seconds,” Marek said.

The detonation was quieter than she expected—a hard, percussive thump that she felt through the floor plates more than heard through the protection. Dust puffed from the crawlspace entrance. A moment later, the jagged crack of failing metal echoed through the corridor.

Élise pulled off her ear protection and moved forward. The blast had collapsed the far wall, as intended. Rubble choked the passage. The airlock door at the end of the crawlspace hung crooked in its frame, half-blown off its hinges.

But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the maintenance hatch behind them—the one they’d come through. The blast had distorted the corridor frame. The hatch had jammed shut.

Marek reached it a second after Élise did. He shoved against the wheel. It didn’t budge. He threw his shoulder into it. Nothing.

“We’re sealed in.” His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. He was already pulling his emergency torch from his belt. “Give me three minutes. I’ll cut through.”

Élise’s heart hammered. She forced herself to breathe. The corridor was an auxiliary passage, rarely used, not on the main power grid. The heating was already bleeding out through the ruptured crawlspace. She could feel the cold creeping in.

“Two minutes,” she said. “We don’t have three. Not at these temperatures.”

Marek grunted and got to work.

---

They made it out with a minute to spare. Élise’s fingers were numb inside her gloves, the rifle slung across her back frosting at the action. Marek’s torch died as he squeezed through the cut opening, the power cell drained.

They stood in the main corridor, breathing hard, sharing a moment of silent acknowledgment. They’d designed the charges to bring down the walls. They hadn’t accounted for the structure’s response—the way force traveled through the frame, the way a blast in one place could seal a door in another.

“We need to adjust the placements,” Élise said finally. “The main corridor has load-bearing junctions. If we set charges too close to those, we could collapse the whole base.”

Marek studied the schematic she pulled up on her wrist display. He traced a finger along the line of the approach. “We pull the charges back. Set them here, here, and here.” He tapped three points. “Away from the supports. Still in the kill zone.”

Élise considered it. The new placements were less aggressive—smaller kill zones, less collateral. But they were safer. Less likely to bring the roof down on their own heads.

“Do it,” she said. “I’ll coordinate with the drone launch timing. We need to collapse the corridor just as the boarding party commits. After the pod decoy pulls their attention to the far side.”

“And if they don’t commit?”

“Then we’ve got a fortified position and a lot of explosives.” She almost smiled. “That’s not the worst outcome.”

---

Later, she stood at the observation window in the command hub, watching the enforcement vessel’s running lights grow steadily brighter against the dark. It was closing faster than Osei had predicted. The twelve-hour ultimatum now looked more like ten.

The crew moved behind her in a quiet rhythm—checking weapons, reinforcing barricades, testing communications. They had a plan. It was audacious, fragile, and might kill them all. But it was a plan.

Inside her suit pocket, the personal effects she’d found that morning—a worn photograph, a folded letter, a child’s drawing—pressed against her thigh. She hadn’t had time to look at them properly. She’d been too busy laying charges and rigging sentries.

But she felt them there, insisting on what they were owed.

She pulled out the photograph. A man she hardly remembered—one of the casualties from Phobos, a miner with a crooked smile and a quiet laugh. The father of the family she’d never met. The debt she’d carried for years, wrapped around her chest like a second spine.

She turned the photograph over. On the back, in faded ink, was an insurance policy number.

Élise frowned. She’d been told the man had no coverage. That’s why the settlement had been denied. Why his family had never received a cent. But here was a policy number. An active one, if the stamp at the bottom meant anything.

She looked up at the enforcement vessel, its lights now unmistakable.

The corporation had lied. They had lied about the insurance, just as they had lied about the structural report, just as they had lied about everything.

She pocketed the photograph and walked toward the workshop, where Yuki was finishing the sentry. There was one more charge to rig, one more door to reinforce.

And when this was over—when the enforcement vessel was drifting dead in the black—she was going to find out what else they’d lied about.