Read Chapter 8: An Unlikely Alliance

The recycler room smelled of ozone and stale coffee. Callum O’Brien had chosen it for their meeting, twenty minutes after her hack, because it was one of the few places on the base with no cameras and no scheduled foot traffic for the next hour. He stood with his back to the filtration unit, arms crossed, his wide miner’s face unreadable beneath the salt-and-pepper stubble.

Élise closed the hatch behind her and engaged the manual lock. She counted three strides to close the distance between them. Not too close. Not yet.

“You accessed the admin server,” he said. Not a question.

“I did.”

“And you found something worth finding.”

Élise studied him. Callum O’Brien had been on Luna Secunda for eleven years, longer than almost anyone except the lifers who never went back. He’d been union delegate for the last three, which meant he was either a troublemaker or a mediator, depending on who you asked. Corporate called him obstinate. The crew called him fair. Both could be true.

“I found structural records that don’t match the base,” she said. “A21 alloy where the paperwork says durasteel. Six sections. Hidden behind clean certification signatures.”

Callum’s jaw tightened. For a moment, something flickered behind his eyes—not surprise, but confirmation. He reached into his coverall pocket and pulled out a worn tablet, scratched and dented from years of hard use. He tapped it awake and held it up for her to see.

The screen showed a series of delivery manifests. Cargo codes, weights, origin points. She recognized the format immediately—the same anomalous cargo schedule that had been on the chip she found in the antenna mast.

“Two years of supply shipments,” he said. “Every third one, the payload doesn’t match what’s declared. Steel that should weigh twelve tons comes in at nine. Cryo units that should be sealed arrive with broken seals and fresh tape. And every one of those discrepancies gets signed off by the same logistics officer.”

He zoomed in on the signature line. Fournier.

“You’ve been tracking this for a while,” Élise said.

“Two years, give or take. I keep filing grievances. Keeps getting ‘resolved’ with no action taken.” He lowered the tablet. “Then three weeks ago, one of my lads in maintenance noticed the new plating in the hab module didn’t have the right stamp. I pulled his report. Started digging.”

She weighed her next words carefully. Trust was a currency she’d spent poorly before, in a disaster that still woke her at three in the morning with her heart pounding against her ribs. But she had the evidence, and she had the timeline, and she had seventy-two hours before something unknown docked with their base.

“I found more,” she said. “The original structural survey—six months old—shows the anomaly flag was raised and then manually overridden. Fournier’s signature is on the override. But I couldn’t get the system to tell me whether he did it voluntarily or under duress.”

Callum’s eyes narrowed. “Duress.”

“There’s a ship coming. Not registered with anything we have. Docking sequence already loaded into the cargo bay systems.” She watched his face as she said it. “Seventy-two hours out. Maybe less.”

The silence stretched. The filtration unit hummed, sputtering on a loose bearing she’d flagged for replacement months ago and never saw parts for.

“A ship,” Callum repeated slowly. “Not one of ours.”

“Not one of ours. And the emergency beacon’s transmitter has been severed. Deliberately. Which means whoever owns that ship doesn’t want anyone else to know they’re here.”

Callum’s expression shifted—not to alarm, but to something harder and colder. He looked down at his tablet, then back at her. “I’ve been cataloguing their neglect for two years. Missing parts. Substandard materials. Crew that don’t come back. I thought it was just corporate greed.” He shook his head. “This is different.”

“It’s connected,” Élise said. “The cheap alloy. The falsified records. The ship. They’re planning something, and they don’t want us to survive it.”

“Or they want the base empty.”

The idea hung between them like cold metal. An empty base meant no witnesses. No crew to report what had been found in the structural supports. No one to ask why the materials didn’t match the certification.

“What do you have that I don’t?” she asked.

Callum pocketed his tablet and looked at her with an intensity she hadn’t expected. “Personnel files. Those three lads who were crossed off the rotation board—the cargo team. I ran their assignment history. All of them were scheduled for rotation home in the next eight weeks. All of them filed complaints about the cargo discrepancies.”

He paused, letting the implications settle.

“All of them were transferred to the monthly supply run detail,” he finished.

Élise felt the muscles in her neck tighten. The supply run. The one that would have carried them back to Earth. Except three of them had been replaced, and the people who knew about the cargo discrepancies were being kept on the base.

“Sébastien’s brother was one of them,” she said.

“I know. And I know Sébastien’s been helping you scan the base. He’s a good lad. Union steward for his shift. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.”

The warning was unspoken but unmistakable. If they were wrong, if they acted too slowly, the cover-up wouldn’t just cost evidence. It would cost lives.

“We pool information,” Élise said. “But we don’t share everything. Not yet. I need to verify what you’ve given me, and you need to verify mine. Deal?”

Callum considered her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Deal. But I need to know one thing first.”

“Name it.”

“The antenna. You were up there two days ago, fixing the relay. I pulled the maintenance log—said you repaired a power surge.” His eyes locked onto hers. “We both know what actually happened. You found the beacon line cut and you made it look like a fault.”

The air went out of her. He’d known. He’d watched the logs, checked the timing, put together what she’d done with engineering precision. For a moment, she felt exposed, caught in the beam of his scrutiny. Then she reminded herself: he’d kept it to himself. He hadn’t reported her. Which meant he was either an ally or a better threat than she’d calculated.

“I found it cut,” she said carefully. “Someone had already been there before me. I’m still trying to figure out who.”

Callum’s face flickered with something she couldn’t name. “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We know what’s happening, and we don’t know who’s doing it.” He moved toward the hatch, pausing with his hand on the lock. “I’ll send you the personnel archive tomorrow, encrypted. You review it, and I’ll review yours. If we both come out the other side still trusting each other, we might stand a chance.”

He opened the hatch a crack, then looked back at her. “One more thing. The structural engineer who was supposed to certify the bay repairs two weeks ago—Dr. Vasseur. He’s still listed as ‘en route’ in the system. Never arrived.” He smiled thinly. “Thought you’d want to know.”

The hatch closed behind him. Élise stood alone in the recycler room, the hum of the filtration unit filling her ears while the implications settled into her chest.

Vasseur. The engineer who should have caught the A21 alloy. Who never landed. Who was still listed as delayed, in a system that flagged everything else.

She brought up her hidden drive and opened a new search field, reaching for the comms server through her encrypted partition. If Vasseur had checked in from Earth, there would be a record. A time stamp. A location.

Sixty-nine hours left. And now a missing engineer who had known exactly what the base was supposed to contain.

She had the evidence. She had an alliance, fragile as it was. What she didn’t have was time.