Read Chapter 34: The Interrogation

The floor of the main bay was cold through Élise’s kneepads. She’d stripped off her pressure suit an hour ago, and the recycled air felt thin and sour. The captured boarding-party leader sat cuffed to a bolted chair in the center of the light pool, his face a roadmap of bruises and contempt. His name was Ferris. She knew that much from his patch before they’d stripped him of armor.

“Six hours,” Ferris said, for the third time. He had a nasal voice, like a man perpetually explaining something simple to a slow child. “That’s what I’m giving you. When Earth gets our last burst, they’ll see the ship went dark, the boarding team went silent, and they will do what they were built to do.”

Élise leaned against the workbench, arms crossed, letting the silence stretch. Behind her, Callum stood with a plasma cutter still in his grip, a half-hearted prop for intimidation. Tessa was at the far console, ostensibly logging the other four prisoners, but her eyes kept flicking to the exchange.

“You already said that,” Élise replied. “Earth will trigger something. You called it a failsafe. What exactly is it?”

Ferris smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “You think you’re clever, Marchand. You disabled a Tyrus-class corvette with a mining laser and a decoy made of scrap. That’s impressive. But you don’t understand the architecture. That ship isn’t just a vessel. It’s a custody instrument. It carries a self-destruct charge in its reactor housing—enough to atomize the hull, the prisoners, and anything within a five-kilometer radius. If the ship doesn’t respond to Earth’s ping with the correct authorization code within six hours of silence, it goes up. And you’re sitting three klicks from where it’s drifting.”

Élise’s stomach tightened. She kept her face neutral.

“The base,” she said. “That’s what this is about. The ship blows, we get caught in the blast wave.”

“The ship blows, you get caught in the blast wave,” Ferris corrected. “And if you somehow survive that, Earth still has the demolition charge in your foundation. You’re standing on a corpse with two bullets in it, Marchand. You just haven’t figured out which one kills you first.”

Callum stepped forward. “You’re lying.”

“I’m dying,” Ferris said, with a mirthless laugh. “I took a gut wound when your people breached the airlock. I can feel it bleeding inside me. I don’t have a reason to lie. I have a reason to negotiate.”

Élise studied him. The wound wasn’t visible under the thermal wrap they’d applied, but his color was bad, gray at the edges of his mouth. She believed him about the injury. The rest—the failsafe, the countdown—that was harder to test.

“How do you know the countdown?” she asked.

“Because I was the one who launched the boarding action,” Ferris said. “Standard protocol. If the primary mission goes silent and we don’t re-establish the link within six hours, the ship’s AI runs an integrity check. If it finds no authorized command, it initiates the core purge. That’s not a human decision. It’s firmware.”

“So if we get to the ship and input the right code, we can stop it?”

Ferris tilted his head. “There isn’t a code, per se. There’s an authorization token. It’s generated at launch, tied to the mission commander’s biometric signature. Captain Reyes had it. She’s dead—your little laser cooked her in the command chair before her backup could even initiate.”

“Then the ship is already past saving,” Élise said, testing.

“No,” Ferris said, and the word slipped out with a hungry edge. “The token is stored in the vessel’s AI core. You can’t forge it, but you can pull it out of the memory lattice and use it to manually trigger the shutoff sequence. If you have someone who can jack directly into the core, you’ll have full control of the ship. Life support, weapons, fuel—all of it. You’d have a working spacecraft, Marchand. You’d have a way off this rock that doesn’t depend on Earth’s mercy.”

Élise let the silence sit. The implication hung in the recycled air, shimmering like heat off a thruster plume. A working Tyrus-class corvette. Enough delta-v to reach the transfer orbit. Enough life support for a dozen people, maybe more if they stripped the cargo bay.

She did not let her face change.

“And if we don’t get the token out in under six hours?”

Ferris shrugged, then winced as the motion pulled at his wound. “I’d say you have a little under five and a half left. The ship’s clock started the moment we lost comms with the base. You know how these things work. They’re not forgiving.”

Callum stepped closer, plasma cutter humming. “How do we know you’re not feeding us a story to send us into a trap?”

“Because I’m bleeding out on your floor,” Ferris said. “And I want to live long enough to see my daughters again. If you take that ship, you can also take me as a prisoner of war. I’ll get a cell on Earth instead of a burial in regolith. That’s the best outcome I’m ever going to get from this job. I’m not going to sabotage that for a corporation that was going to cut our hazard pay the moment we landed.”

Élise heard a whisper of motion behind her. Tessa had left her console and was standing at her elbow, holding a tablet. Her face was pale.

“Chief,” Tessa said quietly. “The medical bay just finished the spectroscopic workup on Vasseur’s blood. They found the compound. But there’s something else in the samples.”

Élise turned. “What?”

“A secondary agent,” Tessa said, pitching her voice low enough that Ferris couldn’t hear. “It’s not a toxin. It’s a tracer. A long-chain polymer with a unique spectral signature. It’s designed to be detectable from orbit. They’ve been tracking him—his physical location—since before he was taken. The moment we move him somewhere the corporation doesn’t expect, Earth will know something’s changed on the ship.”

Élise processed this. Vasseur thought he’d escaped when they pulled him from the boarding party. But he was still a walking beacon, a signal fire pointing directly at any strategy they chose.

“Can we filter it out?” she asked.

“His bloodstream is saturated with it. It would take thirteen hours to clear with the dialysis rig we have, and we don’t have thirteen hours. We have five.” Tessa’s eyes were bright with a fear she was trying to contain. “If we take him on a boarding action, they’ll see exactly where we are. If we leave him, he’s got maybe thirty minutes before the inhibitor hits his heart.”

Élise looked back at Ferris. The man was watching them both with the patient attention of a predator who’d already lost the hunt but wanted to see the cubs maul each other.

“How many people can your ship’s life support hold in a sprint configuration?” she asked.

Ferris blinked, surprised by the question. “Sprint? Maybe eight. Ten if you don’t care about comfort and you strip the recreational quarters.”

“And the AI core. Where is it physically located?”

“Deck two, aft, behind the command chair. There’s a maintenance hatch. You need a master key or a cutting torch. The core itself is shielded—you can’t access it by remote. You have to be physically present.”

Élise nodded. She turned to Callum.

“Get the drone prepped for transfer. Full propellant. We’ll need it to shuttle a team to the hull, because our damaged main airlock is still cycling.”

Callum’s jaw tightened. “You’re going to board it.”

“I’m going to board it,” she said. “And I’m taking Vasseur with me. He knows the ship’s systems better than anyone alive. If that tracer points at us, we’ll use it—let them think we’re trying to rescue him. Confuse them long enough to get the token.”

“That’s not a plan,” Callum said. “That’s a suicide run with a live radio beacon on your chest.”

Élise turned to meet his eyes. “Then you give me a better option. We have five hours before the ship vaporizes. We have an unknown window on the foundation charge. And we have a corporation that is willing to murder its own engineers to keep this base under their thumb. If we don’t seize that vessel, we’re dead. All of us. There’s no second act after this.”

She looked down at Ferris, who was still smiling his broken smile.

“And you,” she said. “You’re going to tell me everything about that ship’s layout. Every hatch, every guard position, every system you know. You’re going to earn that cell on Earth.”

Ferris nodded slowly. “I’ll tell you everything. But I’m going to warn you, Chief. The AI on a Tyrus-class isn’t just a computer. It’s got a personality. It’s trained to recognize threats. And it’s already decided that anyone who wasn’t on the approved manifest is a hostile. You’re not walking up to the core—you’re walking into a machine that’s been waiting for you to make this exact mistake.”