Read Chapter 7: The Fabricated Report

The administrative wing was four levels above the habitation ring, and at this hour it was as dead as the surface outside. Élise moved through the corridor with her mag-boots set to whisper mode, the soft clack of each step swallowed by the recycler hum that never stopped, not even when the base slept.

The access door to Records was keyed to her repair chief credentials. That was the beautiful contradiction of her position—they gave her clearance to nearly every room on Luna Secunda, because when something broke, she had to be able to reach it. They never stopped to think about what else she might reach while she was there.

She palmed the lock. It cycled green.

The records room was smaller than she expected. Three server racks, a single work console, and a wall of optical storage that had been obsolete for a decade. The lighting was dim, the air dry and cold, and it smelled of ozone and recycled dust. No cameras inside—Fournier had always considered records a low-security area, which was its own kind of irony, given what she was here to find.

Élise sat at the console and plugged in her personal tablet. The corporate network would log her access, but with her maintenance authorization, they'd see a routine diagnostic sweep. She'd run twelve of those in the past week. One more would barely register.

The structural survey index came up on her screen. Six months ago, a minor seismic event—a moonquake that registered 3.2 on the Richter-equivalent scale—had prompted a mandatory integrity review. The report filed afterward had been stamped APPROVED by no fewer than four engineers whose names she recognized from the forge rotation. All of them had rotated home months ago. All of them were unreachable.

She pulled up the report and read it carefully, line by line.

*Structural integrity: baseline conditions confirmed. All load-bearing members within tolerance. No degradation detected. Recommend standard maintenance schedule.*

Standard boilerplate. The kind of language that existed to make regulators feel better without actually telling them anything.

But the report had been filed over a *data gap*.

Élise frowned, scrolling back up to the timestamp metadata. The survey itself—the instrument readings, the spectral analyses, the raw telemetry—spanned a window of forty-seven minutes. The report was timestamped fourteen minutes after the survey began. She checked the file architecture. The survey data had been decoupled from the report. That wasn't unusual on its own; reports were compiled after the fact, and raw data was often appended later.

But it was never supposed to be *deleted from the archive index*.

She pulled up the original survey log from six months ago. The raw file existed. It had a gap in the middle—fourteen minutes of instrument readings missing. Not corrupted. Not truncated by packet loss. Deliberately excised, the way you'd cut a stain out of a photograph.

She opened the gap's boundary markers and ran a search against the maintenance database. The hollow sections she'd mapped in the hab module corresponded to the exact time window of the missing data. She cross-referenced the coordinates. The mini quake had rattled the substructure in the eastern hab ring. Under normal conditions, the survey would have flagged the strain patterns in those sections.

The filed report said no degradation.

Élise sat back, staring at the screen. Her hands, calloused and scarred from fifteen years of wrench work, were steady on the console. But something cold had settled under her sternum.

They'd known. Six months ago, before the beacon was severed, before the data chip with its docking sequences, before the cargo manifests with their fabricated weights—someone had already compromised the structural records. They'd let the base *pass* inspection with substandard alloy holding up the walls around three hundred sleeping men and women.

Well. Roughly three hundred. She'd have to count the rotation board again.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the external drive. A compact slab of encrypted solid-state memory she'd salvaged from a decommissioned sensor array, wiped clean, wrapped in copper foil to defeat electromagnetic sniffing. The kind of thing a ghost carried.

Élise plugged it in and began the transfer.

The original survey file was large—several gigabytes of raw telemetry that the corporate system had never fully processed. The upload bar crawled across her tablet screen. She checked the corridor through the door's one-way window. Empty. The recycler hummed its eternal song.

While she waited, she went deeper.

The survey metadata contained a chain of digital signatures. Each engineer who'd accessed the file had left an imprint in the cryptographic ledger. She pulled up the chain and traced it backward through time.

First signature: the survey lead, an engineer named Okonkwo who had rotated home four months ago. His access was logged twice—once at the beginning of the survey, once at the final approval.

Second signature: a secondary reviewer named Ostrowski. He'd accessed the file exactly once, forty-eight hours after Okonkwo's approval. His stamp said VERIFIED.

Third: Commander Fournier.

Élise froze on that name.

Fournier's signature was there, cold and digital, attached to the report a week after the review was completed. His stamp carried a code that indicated a *manual overridespecifically annulling the anomaly flag that the system had automatically generated when the data gap was detected.

He hadn't written the report. But he'd signed off on sweeping the discrepancy under the rug.

Or someone had forced his hand.

She stared at the signature for a long moment. Fournier, who had dismissed her sabotage report with a wave of his hand. Fournier, who had told her to classify it as a seismic event. Fournier, who had welcomed her into the command circle with easy confidence and a tired smile.

She'd worked under commanders before. Some were competent. Some were corrupt. Most were both in equal measure, depending on the day. Fournier's file was clean—too clean, actually, which she should have noticed before.

She copied his signature metadata to the external drive as well. Every piece was ammunition. Every byte, a stone in the sling she was building.

The transfer completed. The original survey file, the anomaly flags, the gaps, the signature chain—all of it now lived on her drive, separate from the corporate network, separate from the lies.

She disconnected the drive and pocketed it. Then she pulled up the file she'd just copied a third time and ran a checksum against the archived version. They matched, and she hadn't touched the original, so there'd be no trace of her access beyond the routine diagnostic.

---

She was halfway out of the room when the door chimed.

Not a lock failure. Not an access denial. A chime.

Someone was *calling* her.

Élise checked her tablet. The incoming request came through the internal comms system, encrypted end to end. The sender ID flashed on the screen: O'BRIEN, C.

Callum O'Brien.

The union delegate.

She hesitated. The comm request blinked at her, patient, waiting. He wasn't supposed to know she was here. The records room wasn't on the union's list of approved workspaces, and she'd routed her access as a diagnostic sweep to the ventilation systems on this level. But O'Brien had been a crew chief for twelve years before he'd taken the union post. He knew every shortcut, every closed door, every blind spot in the base's network architecture.

She'd never told him about the chip. She hadn't told anyone.

But she'd told Sébastien about the structural records. And Sébastien had a big mouth when he was worried about his brother.

She accepted the call.

"You're out of your rack, Marchand." O'Brien's voice came through the speaker, rough and accented with the Midlands edge Stuart had in his files. He didn't sound accusing. He sounded *certain*, like a man who'd been expecting her.

"I could say the same to you, O'Brien."

"Could. But I'm the union delegate. It's my job to know what the company doesn't want me to know." There was a pause. "And what you're doing right now falls into that category."

She weighed the risk. The corridor was empty. Her drive was secure. Her tablet had never touched the corporate network.

"I'm doing a diagnostic scan," she said.

"You're pulling files from the administrative server." He said it flat, no question in it. He knew. "And I'm going to guess you found what you were looking for, and that it's not good."

She was silent.

"I've got something too," he said. "But I don't want to do this over an open channel."

Élise realized her heart was beating a little faster. Hope was a dangerous drug. She'd learned that the hard way—had learned that relying on anyone else on a remote station was a gamble, that people died when they trusted the wrong person. She'd been alone for fifteen years in the quiet spaces between missions, building a routine that kept her alive and kept her from thinking about the things she'd left behind.

But she'd found Sébastien. And the chip had found her.

Maybe one more ally wouldn't kill her.

"Where?" she asked.

"Level three, module B," he said. "The rec room. You know the corner with the dead plant?"

"Everyone knows the dead plant."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Come alone."

The line went dead.

Élise looked down at the encrypted drive in her hand. The original survey file, the forged report, the signature chains that linked Fournier to a six-month-old cover-up. And in her quarters, hidden under a loose floor panel, the data chip with a docking sequence that would bring something out of the deep dark in under seventy-two hours.

She had pieces. She still didn't have the whole picture.

But she was starting to see the shape of it. The shape of something that had been planned for months, maybe longer. Something that needed the base hollowed out and silent, its beacon cut, its records falsified, its crew unwitting and compliant.

The door to the records room cycled shut behind her. She walked back through the dim corridors, past the hum of the recyclers, past the sleeping quarters where hundreds of people dreamed in recycled air.

Twenty minutes.

She had twenty minutes to decide whether Callum O'Brien was part of the problem or part of the solution.

And if he was the latter, she had less than seventy-two hours to turn a collection of evidence into a plan that would save them all.