Read Chapter 38: Aftermath: The Flames

The shockwave hit them like a wall of stone.

Élise felt it through the soles of her boots—a deep, resonant thrum that traveled up through the regolith and into the shuttle's landing struts. Through the forward viewport, the enforcement vessel bloomed into a column of white-orange fire, impossibly bright against the black sky. The fireball expanded with a deceptive slowness, a flower opening in vacuum, before collapsing into itself and spraying debris in every direction.

She didn't realize she'd been holding her breath until it came out in a shuddering rush.

"Everyone accounted for?" she asked, her voice hoarse from the acrid tang of recycled air and adrenaline.

Kowalski's voice crackled through her suit comms. "Michaels is here with me. Reyes? You there?"

A pause that stretched too long. Then Reyes's voice, strained but steady: "I'm here. Vasseur's with me. He's—he's bleeding through the seal."

Élise turned in her seat, craning to see through the cramped shuttle cabin. Reyes was hunched over Vasseur's prone form, her gloved hands pressed against his side where the blood had already wicked through the pressure suit's outer layer, frozen into dark crimson crystals around the wound.

"How bad?" Élise asked.

Reyes looked up. Her faceplate was fogged with effort. "Bad enough. We need to get him to the med bay within the hour, or the cardiotoxin won't be the thing that kills him."

The shuttle's pilot—a young engineer named Okonkwo whom Élise had pulled from the base's maintenance rotation for this madness—was already steering them away from the expanding debris field. His hands moved over the controls with a practiced calm that belied the tremor in his jaw.

"Base, this is Osprey One," he said. "Status check. We're inbound with wounded. Repeat: wounded. Requesting med bay prep and a clean corridor."

Static. Then Callum's voice, tinny and tight with relief. "Copy, Osprey One. Corridor's clear. We saw the fireworks from here. Glad you're not part of them."

"Glad we're not part of them too," Élise said. She unclipped her harness and moved back toward Vasseur, crouching low in the narrow aisle. The scientist's eyes were open, glassy with pain, but he tracked her movement.

"You still alive, Doctor?" she asked.

Vasseur's lips twitched—something that might have been a smile or might have been a grimace. "Your hospitality was... more eventful than I anticipated." His accent was thicker now, the words slurred slightly. "Apologies for the mess."

"Save your strength. We're not done with you yet."

She turned to Reyes. "Pressure's holding?"

"For now. But he's lost a lot. I gave him what I could from the trauma kit, but he needs real plasma, real surgery." Reyes's voice dropped. "And we still have the deadline. The cardiotoxin. How much time did we lose on that vessel?"

Élise checked her suit display. "We're inside the window. Barely." She didn't add what she was thinking: that the detour had cost them time they couldn't afford, and that Vasseur's useful knowledge of the corporation's plans would die with him if the toxin hit its mark.

She moved back to the cockpit and settled into the co-pilot's seat. Through the viewport, the debris field was already spreading, glittering fragments catching sunlight as they tumbled into lunar orbit. The enforcement vessel was gone—nothing but metal confetti and vaporized systems where a warship had been.

"We did it," Okonkwo said quietly. "We actually did it."

Élise didn't answer. She was watching the base loom larger in the viewport, its familiar blocky silhouette a comfort she hadn't expected to feel. The landing pads were lit, the habitation modules glowing warm against the gray regolith. Home. For now.

The landing was smooth, almost anticlimactic after the chaos of the past hours. The shuttle settled onto Pad Two with a soft thud, and the hatch cycled open before the dust had even settled.

Callum was waiting at the airlock junction, his face drawn but his eyes sharp. He reached out and clasped Élise's forearm as she stepped through. "You look like hell."

"Feel like it too." She glanced past him at the corridor beyond. "Status?"

"Base is secure. Ferris and the contractors are still locked down in the shuttle bay—Nakamura's watching them with a plasma torch and a very bad attitude." Callum fell into step beside her as they moved toward the med bay. "We lost the external sensor array, though. The shockwave took it out. Whatever shielding remained on the dish, it's gone now."

Élise stopped walking. "Gone?"

"Gone as in orbital debris. We're flying blind. No ground scans, no early warning, nothing above us but the naked sky and whatever the shuttle's own sensors can pick up." Callum's jaw tightened. "If the corporation sends another vessel, we won't know until it's in our laps."

"Then we'll see it when we see it." Élise resumed walking. "One crisis at a time."

The med bay was a controlled chaos of voices and equipment. Dr. Okafor, the base's chief medical officer, had Vasseur on a table within minutes of his arrival, cutting away the ruined pressure suit with surgical precision. Reyes stood against the wall, her arms crossed, her face pale beneath the grime of the boarding action.

"How is he?" Élise asked.

Okafor didn't look up. "Blood loss is significant, but manageable if I can get a transfusion going. The cardiotoxin is a different matter. I'd need a specific counteragent, and we don't have one on base."

"What do we have?"

"Stabilizers, at best. I can slow the toxin's progression—maybe buy him another twelve hours." Okafor finally glanced up, meeting Élise's eyes. "But not forever. If we don't get the counteragent, the clock is still running."

Élise nodded slowly. "Then we make the clock work for us. Twelve hours is time enough to ask him everything we need to know about the corporation's plans." She turned to Reyes. "You did good out there. Get some rest."

Reyes shook her head. "I'd rather stay. Keep an eye on him. He told us the truth about the demolition charge—that's worth something."

"That's worth everything," Élise said quietly. "Without that warning, we'd be sitting on a bomb right now."

She left Reyes with Vasseur and made her way to the command deck. The room was quieter than she expected—a handful of crew at their stations, monitoring panels that showed nothing but static on the sensor feeds. The great dome window at the front of the deck offered a clear view of the lunar surface, the crater field pristine and silver under the unfiltered sun.

Callum was already there, standing at the observation rail with his back to the room. He didn't turn when Élise approached.

"They're all looking at me," he said. "Waiting for a plan."

"They're looking at us," Élise corrected. "We're the ones who got them this far."

"And now?" Callum finally turned. His face was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "The enforcement vessel is gone. The demolition charge is still buried under our feet, waiting for a signal that might never come—or might come any minute. We have no sensors, no rescue, and a dying man who holds the last pieces of a puzzle we don't fully understand."

"So we keep going." Élise stepped to the rail beside him, looking out at the moon. "We clear the demolition charge if we can find it. We interrogate Ferris and the contractors for everything they know. We buy Vasseur time and get the counteragent any way we can." She paused. "And we check what we have left. Ships, fuel, resources. We count every asset we've got, and we figure out how to make it stretch."

Callum was quiet for a long moment. Then he let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "You make it sound simple."

"Nothing about this is simple." Élise looked at him, and for a moment her certainty softened into something more human. "But we're still alive. We still have a base. We still have each other. That's more than I had the last time I survived an evacuation."

It was the closest she'd come to acknowledging it aloud—the old wound, the one that had driven her to take this posting in the first place. Callum didn't press. He only nodded, a gesture of understanding that needed no words.

"All hands to the command deck," he said, his voice carrying across the room without needing a PA system. The crew turned from their stations, drawn by the authority in his tone. "We've survived tonight. Now we plan for tomorrow."

Élise watched them gather. Twenty-three faces—engineers, scientists, medics, miners—all looking at her and Callum with a mixture of exhaustion and hope. The sensor array was dead, the sky above them silent and unknowable. But beneath their feet, the moon was solid. The base was theirs.

She stepped forward to meet them.