Read Chapter 6: The Hollow Ring

The crowbar dented the panel’s edge before Élise could find the seam. She cursed under her breath, adjusted her grip, and drove the flat end into the gap where the hab module’s wall met the floor plating. The metal groaned, then gave with a sharp pop that echoed through the empty corridor.

She’d told Sébastien she was checking on thermal cycling stress in Section C. It was the kind of maintenance lie that would hold for an hour, maybe two, before someone asked why the repair chief was prying open a wall with hand tools instead of running a diagnostic sweep.

The panel swung free on warped hinges. Behind it, the module’s skeleton should have been a lattice of reinforced durasteel beams, rated for lunar pressure differentials and micrometeorite impacts. Luna Secunda had been built to a spec that assumed the worst the Moon could throw at it.

What Élise found instead was a web of thin alloy struts, scored with the pale, uniform grain of cheap extrusion. They were the kind of supports used in temporary structures back on Earth—prefab sheds, emergency shelters, anything built to last five years, not fifty.

She ran her gloved fingers along the nearest strut. The surface was cold through the fabric. She tapped it with her knuckle.

The sound that came back was wrong. Hollow. Like knocking on a drum that had been tuned too tight.

“No,” she whispered.

She tapped again, harder. The strut vibrated with a resonance that shouldn’t exist in load-bearing structure. Real durasteel was dense, nearly dead to percussion. This sang.

Élise pulled her tablet from her thigh pocket and keyed up the structural schematics for this section. The display showed the original build spec: reinforced Y-class beams, cross-braced at thirty-centimeter intervals, rated for continuous operation at full hab pressure for seventy-five years.

What was actually in front of her didn’t match. The struts were spaced wrong, the alloy composition markers didn’t align with the drawings, and the welds at each junction point were clean and uniform in a way that suggested automated fabrication—not the hand-tooled work the original contractors had logged.

She swept the tablet’s scanner across the nearest strut. The readout came back in under a second.

A21-series alloy. Lightweight, cheap, corrosion-prone. Rated for low-pressure environments only.

Élise stared at the number. A21 was structural tin. You used it for scaffolding, for temporary bracing, for anything you planned to tear down and replace.

You didn’t use it to build the walls that held back the vacuum of the lunar surface.

She pulled back from the access panel and looked down the corridor. The hab module stretched fifty meters in either direction, all of it behind identical panels. If this section had been replaced, the others could have been too. Or the entire module could have been fabricated from cut-rate materials from the beginning—the paperwork doctored so well that the original inspections never flagged it.

She thought about the rupture near the ore conveyor. The clean, almost surgical cut through the primary line. The way the seismic sensors had logged a shockwave that was smaller than the damage it supposedly caused.

She’d told Fournier it was sabotage. He’d told her it was a seismic event.

Maybe both were true. Maybe someone had wanted her to look at the wrong thing long enough for the right thing to stay hidden.

Élise keyed the maintenance records from her tablet, pulling up the last full structural survey for Section C. The scan files stacked in chronological order, each one stamped with a green PASS indicator.

She opened the most recent—filed six months ago, after a minor quake had rattled the base. The technician’s notes described a routine inspection, no anomalies detected, all structural members within tolerance.

She checked the alloy readings logged in that survey.

According to the records, the walls in this section were Y-class durasteel, consistent with the original build spec. The scanner data showed density profiles that matched authentication markers. It was a textbook report, the kind that would survive any audit.

Except it was wrong.

Élise ran her scanner over the strut again, confirming the A21 reading. Then she pulled up the survey file and compared the numbers side by side.

The report claimed density readings of 7.85 grams per cubic centimeter. The strut in front of her read 2.70.

A21 extrusion could never produce a false reading like that. The paperwork had been altered after the fact, the original data scrubbed and replaced with fabricated numbers.

“No one checks these after the first year,” she murmured. “They just file them.”

That was the trick. Luna Secunda had been operational for over a decade. The original inspection cadence had lapsed long ago. Trust replaced verification, and someone had exploited that trust.

Someone with access to the maintenance database. Someone with enough authority to alter survey records and enough leverage to get replacement materials delivered through the normal supply chain.

Someone like Commander Fournier.

Or someone above him.

Élise closed the access panel and pressed it back into place with a dull click. The corridor looked normal again. Clean panels, sealed joints, the soft amber glow of emergency lighting along the floor.

Nothing about the module betrayed that it was a hollow shell wrapped in manufactured assurance.

Her tablet buzzed. A message from Sébastien: *“You missed the rotation meeting. Fournier asked where you were. I said you were in the lava tubes clearing a sensor fault. You owe me.”*

She typed a quick reply: *“Bring me an integrity scanner from Bay Two. Not the portable one. The handheld with the deep-penetration array.”*

The reply came faster than she expected: *“Why?”*

Élise looked at the panel again. If Section C was compromised, the rest of the base could be too. Every wall she walked past, every ceiling she slept under, every pressurized compartment between her and the surface was potentially a purchased lie.

She typed her response: *“I need to map the entire hab skeleton. Quietly. Tell anyone who asks I’m running corrosion checks.”*

She pocketed the tablet and walked toward the far end of the corridor, counting paces as she went. She stopped at the junction where Section C met Section B and pressed her palm against the wall.

She tapped the surface once.

The sound was solid. Dense. Correct.

She exhaled and moved on to the next junction, tapping as she went. Panel after panel, section after section, she mapped the resonance of the base with nothing but her knuckles and her ears.

By the time Sébastien arrived with the scanner, she’d found six more hollow spots. All in newer sections. All within the areas that the maintenance records claimed were inspected and certified within the last year.

None of it appeared in any report that existed on paper.

“How bad?” Sébastien asked, handing her the scanner.

“Worse than I thought,” she said. “The walls are made of tin. The reports say steel. And someone knew exactly which records to change so that no one would notice.”

She didn’t tell him the rest. That if the structure failed, the base wouldn’t just depressurize. It would collapse. A habitat rated for the Moon was supposed to handle decades of thermal cycling, micrometeorite impacts, and the slow creep of the regolith against its foundations.

A21 alloy cracked. It fatigued. It failed.

And when it failed, it would fail all at once.