Read Chapter 29: The Debt Paid

The maintenance bay smelled of ozone and scorched regolith. Élise had sent everyone to rotate through rest cycles—Nakamura and Reyes were catching an hour in the habitat module, the rest scattered across their defensive positions—but sleep wasn't coming for her. Not with the clock bleeding toward the enforcement vessel's arrival.

She found herself in the supply locker where they'd stashed the personal effects recovered from the secondary pod's storage bay. Boxes of crew belongings, mostly. A few sealed crates from the original mining expedition, the ones that had been "lost" in the transfer manifest and only surfaced when she and Patel had pried open the maintenance access panels.

The photograph was in her hand before she consciously reached for it. Dog-eared, creased down the middle. A man in his forties, arm around a woman with the same sharp cheekbones. Two kids in front, squinting into the sun. The back read *Kowalski—Phobos, Year 7*.

Jean Kowalski. The name still sat wrong in her throat.

She'd watched him die. Not dramatically—no explosive decompression, no heroic last words. He'd been in the corridor section that buckled during the containment failure. She'd pulled him out of the rubble herself, but the suit integrity was already gone. Minutes of air left. He'd looked at her and said *"My girls don't know I carried the policy."*

Then he'd died.

The corporation had paid her hazard bonus and moved on. She'd tried to file the claim on his behalf, but the settlement office had cited a technicality: Kowalski's policy had been voided six months before the incident due to a "risk assessment reclassification." She'd fought it for three months before the case disappeared into the corporate legal labyrinth. Eventually she'd given up.

The photograph trembled in her grip. Not from fear.

She slipped it into her breast pocket, next to the insurance policy number she'd memorized. Then she dug deeper into the crate.

Christophe's fingers were steady on the thermal lance's control board. "The sentry's ready," he said. "You want me to run another diagnostic?"

"Give me two minutes." Élise moved past him, into the dark recess of the locker. Her headlamp caught a stack of manila folders. Expeditions records, pre-Prometheus, dating back to the first survey runs. She flipped through them by feel, cataloguing by memory.

The folder on Kowalski was thin. Employment contract. Medical clearance. Next of kin declaration. She traced the signature line without needing to read it.

Then her fingers stopped.

The insurance rider was attached to the employment contract—standard corporate policy for high-risk personnel, the kind that paid out to survivors. But the rider had been amended. Someone had stamped it *VOID* in red ink, then affixed a new clause in dense legal type. She read the clause twice.

*Coverage terminates upon reassignment to designated high-exposure roles within the Phobos East structure. The corporation bears no liability for loss of life or limb resulting from structural compromise, containment failure, or force majeure events. Any claims arising from such events shall be considered null and void.*

She'd seen similar language before. It was boilerplate, designed to shield remote operations from secondary liability.

But it wasn't in Kowalski's original contract.

She pulled out his file. The signature on the amendment—it wasn't his. The loops were too practiced, the pressure too uniform. She'd spent fifteen years reading crew handwriting in repair logs. She knew what a rushed signature looked like when an engineer was signing off on their own doomsday.

This was a corporate legal witness stamp. Forged after the fact.

Élise sat back on her heels. The air recycler hummed overhead. Somewhere down the corridor, she heard the faint clang of someone adjusting the barricades.

"Élise?" Christophe's voice floated in from the bay. "Thermal lance is green. Want to see the test run?"

"In a minute."

She stared at the folder. The corporation hadn't just voided Kowalski's policy. They'd fabricated an amendment to their own records, backdated to make it look like he'd signed away his family's protection before the incident. Which meant someone in legal—or someone with access to legal—had known the containment failure was coming.

The same someone who'd fabricated the structural report that buried the evidence of Prometheus's sabotage.

She pulled out her slate, typed a quick string of commands. The insurance policy number glowed on the screen: *PX-447-K-9912*. She'd written it down the day she found it in the photograph—the number Kowalski had scrawled on the back in tiny, neat digits, as if he'd known the photograph would be the last thing to survive.

She entered the number into the base's financial archive system. It took four attempts to access the legacy database—the corporate encryption had shifted during the mutiny—but she got in.

The policy was still active. Technically. The account held enough to pay out in full, if the policy had been honored. Instead, it had been frozen under the voided rider. The funds sat there, accumulating interest, waiting for a claim that would never be filed.

Her jaw tightened.

"Christophe."

"Yeah?"

"You said the thermal lance is green."

"It is."

"Good. When the enforcement vessel arrives, I want that sentry aimed at their comms array first."

Christophe's eyebrows rose. "That's a new target. We agreed on the fuel line."

"Plan's changed. I need them deaf before I need them dead."

He didn't argue. He just nodded and turned back to the control board.

Élise closed the folder, slipped it under her arm, and walked to the forward ops station. Duval was there, poring over the drone flight paths. He looked up when she entered.

"You should be resting," he said.

"I found something." She dropped the folder on the console. "Kowalski's insurance. The rider that voided it wasn't his signature. It was forged."

Duval read the amendment, his face going still. "You're sure?"

"I've read more forged signatures than real ones. Fifteen years of paperwork audits on remote stations. This is a corporate legal stamp."

"Even if you can prove it—"

"I don't need court. I need leverage." She pulled the photograph from her breast pocket, tapped the policy number on the back. "The policy is still funded. The corporation froze it, but they never cancelled it. If I can get the right person on the comm line, I can push through a payout."

"Élise, we're in the middle of a mutiny. There's no one on the other end of the line who's going to authorize a settlement."

"There's someone." She held his gaze. "When the enforcement vessel shows up, they're going to demand surrender. We're going to give them our list of demands. And at the top of that list, I'm going to name Jean Kowalski and his family. Full payout. Public acknowledgment of the forged rider."

Duval opened his mouth, closed it. "They'll laugh."

"Let them laugh. But they'll have to explain why they're laughing. And once the board sees that explanation, they'll know we have copies of the original documents. Not the amended ones. The originals."

She pulled the folder's contents onto the console. Beneath the forged rider, tucked behind the employment contract, was the original policy declaration. The one that named his two daughters as beneficiaries. The one that promised full payout on death in service.

"Kowalski carried this policy because the corporation required it. It was part of his hazard compensation. They voided it to save money. They forged his signature to make it legal." Her voice was flat, controlled. "I owe his family this. Not because I failed to save him—I did what I could. But because I stood by while the corporation erased him."

Duval was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "It'll cost us time. Time we don't have."

"Time is leverage. They're coming in under ten hours. If we let them board, we lose. If we fight them off, we still have to deal with the next vessel. But if we hold the proof that their own corporation committed fraud to avoid paying a family for a death they caused—"

"We make the mutiny about justice, not piracy."

"Exactly."

Duval reached out, straightened the folder. "Kowalski. Phobos. The miner who died before you left."

"He was a miner. He had a wife and two kids. I watched him die in a corridor that shouldn't have failed."

"You weren't the one who caused it."

"No." Élise put the photograph back in her pocket. "But I'm the one still standing. And I don't walk away from debts."

Christophe's voice crackled over the intercom. "Élise, thermal lance test complete. Sentry's operational. Acknowledging new targeting protocol."

"Good." She pressed the comms toggle. "Keep it cold until I say otherwise. We have one shot at this."

She turned back to Duval. "When the vessel arrives, I want the comms channel open first. I'll talk to their captain myself. Give them two choices: honor the policy, or deal with the consequences."

"And if they choose neither?"

"Then we test the sentry."

The corridor lights flickered—the power grid groaning under the strain of the fortifications. In the distance, the first low rumble of the enforcement vessel's approach vibrations trembled through the deck plating.

Ten hours, maybe less.

For the first time since the mutiny began, Élise felt ready.