Read Chapter 33: Aftermath: The Boarding

The emergency klaxons had barely stopped screaming before the hull shuddered—not the vibration of a laser strike, but the dull, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* of magnetic clamps seating themselves against the outer skin.

“Secondary airlock, Sector C,” Nadia’s voice crackled over the suit comms. “They’re cutting through. Plasma torches. At least six signatures.”

Élise pressed her palm flat against the wall of the maintenance shaft where she’d taken cover, feeling the percussion travel through the metal like a heartbeat. *Six.* Maybe more. The enforcement vessel was dead in the water, their fuel line vented into the black, but they’d still managed to push a boarding party across the gap before the emergency bulkheads could seal.

She’d expected this. Hoped for it, even. A captured soldier was leverage. A captured soldier who knew the ship’s systems was intelligence. And Vasseur—if he was among them, wounded as the transmission had suggested—was the entire mission.

“Ravi, status on the sentry?”

“Still untested,” he replied, breathless. “Thermal lance is cycling. Target lock on the comms array is holding, but I don’t trust the tracking algorithm at close range. It might just as easily put a hole in the main corridor bulkhead.”

“Hold it back, then. Don’t fire until I give the word.” She checked her weapon—a modified plasma cutter of her own, rigged for variable pressure. Not a soldier’s tool, but she’d used worse. “Everyone to their positions. Let them come to us.”

The airlock’s inner door groaned as the cutters chewed through the secondary seal. Élise counted the seconds between shockwaves. *Fast. Professional.* These weren’t corporate rent-a-cops. These were actual military contractors, used to boarding cold, silent stations and overwhelming the defenders before they could organize.

They’d find this station anything but silent.

The inner door gave way with a shriek of torn metal. Élise heard the muffled thump of pressurized suits pushing through, boots landing on the deck plating. Then a voice—garbled through suit speakers, but unmistakably human: “Clear. Moving to maintenance junction four.”

Élise let them take two more steps into the corridor before she triggered the first charge.

It was a small one—barely more than a flash-bang load, rigged from a spent oxygen cylinder—but it did its job. Light bloomed at the end of the corridor, and the lead boarder staggered, reflexively firing his weapon at the glow. The bolt ricocheted off the angled bulkhead and buried itself harmlessly in the ceiling.

“Now,” Élise said.

Two of her crew popped out from recessed maintenance alcoves, tethers snaking behind them. They fired their cutters in wide arcs, not trying to kill—just to force the boarders to scatter. One of them dove left into cover. Another went right. The third, the point man, was already down on one knee, shaking the stars out of his vision.

Élise moved in the confusion, keeping low, hugging the shadow line along the wall. Fifteen years of remote-station work had taught her every quirk of this base’s architecture, every dead spot in the emergency lighting, every seam where a body could press flat and disappear. A soldier relied on training. Élise relied on knowing the walls themselves.

She reached the bound man—the one who’d taken cover—and slammed the butt of her cutter into the side of his helmet. The suit’s visor cracked, and he went limp. She hauled him into the recess and slapped a magnetic restraint around his wrists.

Behind her, chaos had become a controlled exchange. The two remaining active boarders had found their discipline, firing measured bursts down the main corridor, forcing her crew to keep their heads down. They were advancing in alternating leaps, covering each other.

“Ravi, are they near the sentry’s sightline?”

“Twenty meters. Fifteen.”

“Let them reach ten. Then fire.”

She heard his breath catch. “Élise, the tracking algorithm still isn’t—“

“Ten meters, Ravi. Trust it.”

She couldn’t see the relay feed from her position, but she could imagine it: the sapper drone, repurposed from a mining platform years past its service life, its thermal lance angled down the corridor. It had been designed to drill through regolith, through frozen water deposits, through the hardest rock the moon could throw at it. A suit rated for vacuum was nothing against it.

The boarders reached the ten-meter mark. Halted, perhaps sensing the wrongness of the corridor. Too quiet. Too still.

“Fire.”

The thermal lance roared. Élise felt the heat bloom from halfway down the corridor, saw the flash of white-orange light reflected on the walls. One boarder screamed—a short, sharp sound cut off abruptly. The other dove backward, firing wildly, his bolts chewing into the drone’s chassis before it tracked and caught him mid-retreat.

Then silence.

Élise waited a full thirty seconds before moving, scanning for movement. Nothing. She made her way down the corridor, stepping over scorch marks and the twisted remains of what had been a very expensive suit.

The first boarder was dead. The second was dying—his suit had breached along the seams, and his blood was freezing into dark crystals on the deck. Élise knelt beside him, feeling for a pulse she knew wasn’t there. She found nothing.

But there was a third body—the one who’d been mid-retreat, his suit mostly intact, only the shoulder scorched where a glancing blow from the lance had cut the fabric. He was alive, breathing in short gasps, and when she pulled off his helmet, she recognized the face.

“Dr. Vasseur.”

His eyes blinked up at her, glassy with pain and something else. Relief, maybe. Or fear of what she’d ask next.

“Élise.”

“You’re a mess.” She pulled a med-kit from her belt and began sealing the wound on his shoulder. “But you’re alive. That’s more than I expected.”

“I need to tell you—“ He coughed, blood flecking his lips. “The contracts. Earth-return contracts. They sealed them. The board of directors, Earth-side. If they can’t retake the base, they’re going to—“

“Blow it up from orbit,” she finished. “Yeah, we figured that part out. That’s why we’re still here.”

He shook his head, urgent. “Not from the enforcement vessel. From Earth. They have a failsafe. A demolition charge, buried in the base’s original construction. I don’t know where, but it’s wired to a relay satellite. If they don’t hear from the enforcement captain within a certain window, they trigger it.”

Élise’s blood ran cold. A failsafe charge, embedded in the foundation. It made sense—corporate paranoia, insurance against a labor dispute turning violent. The corporation that built this base had never planned for it to be lost.

“How long?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me that.” Vasseur closed his eyes. “They were going to kill me anyway. The poison—they said I’d served my purpose. I was just a bargaining chip. Once the boarding party took the base, I’d be discarded.”

Élise looked up as Nadia arrived, her face pale inside her helmet. “We have five prisoners. Two dead, including one of theirs. No casualties on our side, except—“ She gestured at the wrecked drone. “We’ll need to rebuild the thermal mount, but it’s salvageable.”

“Vasseur says there’s a demolition charge somewhere in the base’s original construction. Corporate failsafe.”

Nadia’s expression shifted. “I heard rumors about that. Never confirmed.”

“Now it’s confirmed.” Élise stood, looking down at the doctor. “We have prisoners. We have leverage. But if that failsafe is real, we don’t have time to negotiate.” She turned to Nadia. “Get the prisoners to the main bay. Strip their gear, keep them under guard. Vasseur goes to medical. Tell them what he needs for the poison—whatever they have, they use.”

Nadia nodded and began hauling the first prisoner upright.

Élise crouched beside Vasseur again, lowering her voice. “Where’s the enforcement captain? Is he coming for us, or is he going to run?”

“He can’t run. The fuel line’s compromised. He’s dead in the water, just like you planned.” Vasseur smiled through the pain. “He’s furious. And scared. When he realizes you’ve captured his boarding party—“

“Then he’ll have to talk to me.” Élise pressed a new bandage on his shoulder. “And I have a few things to say to him.”

She rose and walked to the breach, looking out through the ragged hole in the airlock where the moon’s silent dust stretched toward the horizon. Far out in the black, she could see the enforcement vessel—a small, dark sliver against the stars. Disabled, but patient. Waiting.

From Earth’s relay, the clock ticked toward an unknown deadline. Somewhere beneath her feet, in the base’s foundation, was a charge she’d never known about. A fail-safe for a corporation that had never trusted its people.

She touched the pocket where Kowalski’s forged insurance policy sat, folded against her chest. In a few hours, she might be dead. A few hours after that, this whole base might be nothing but debris. But if she could talk to the captain, if she could make him believe that holding the base meant holding nothing but a tomb—

She turned away from the breach and walked back into the base.

There was work to do.