Read Chapter 9: The Missing Engineer

Élise found Callum where she’d left him, wedged between the recycler’s humming intake and a rack of spent coolant filters. The air still smelled of ozone and stale coffee. He didn’t look up when she dropped the access tablet on the bench beside him.

“Vasseur,” she said. “Dr. Arnaud Vasseur. Structural engineer. He was supposed to certify the bay repairs two weeks ago.”

Callum’s fingers paused over his own tablet. “I told you. Never landed.”

“That’s what I need to check. Officially.”

She pulled up the administrative portal on her screen, the same one she’d cracked open the night before. The search field blinked at her. She typed the name and hit enter.

What came back was a single file. Travel manifest, Earth-side. Departure from Toulouse—Blagnac, corporate shuttle, standard passenger class. Date matched the inspection window. A check-in stamp from the orbital transfer station at Lagrange Point 2. She traced the chain with her finger. Departure confirmed. Orbital check-in confirmed. Then nothing.

The record ended like a severed cable.

“He got on the shuttle,” Élise said slowly. “He made it to L2. There’s no landing record on Luna Secunda.”

Callum leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the screen. His breath fogged the display. “Maybe he took a different route. Some of the corporate flights come in through the far-side dock.”

“No. I ran the search. All docking ports, all vessels, last sixty days. No Arnaud Vasseur.”

“Shuttle transfers don’t always log passengers by name. Could be a cargo code.”

“I thought of that too.” She pulled up a second window—the raw dock telemetry she’d learned to read years ago, when she’d been a junior tech and had to count every crate that came through her bay. “I cross-referenced every landing by weight signature against the passenger manifest from L2. There are two vessels that could have carried him. One cargo hauler from Mars, one private courier. Both arrived empty of passengers.”

Callum was quiet for a moment. The recycler behind them coughed and resumed its grinding.

“So he vanished,” he said.

“Or he never left Earth.”

Élise flipped back to the travel manifest and expanded the metadata. She highlighted the check-in stamp from L2. “This is time-coded and signed. It’s genuine. But look at the station ID.”

Callum squinted. “T-14. That’s the old docking ring.”

“The old ring that was decommissioned for passenger transfer six months ago. All civilian shuttles route through T-9. T-14 only gets maintenance drones and emergency overrides.”

“So whoever filed this either didn’t know the station’s layout,” Callum said slowly, “or they wanted the record to look like a transfer that never happened.”

“Either way, someone fabricated a trail for a man who never set foot on Luna Secunda.”

She pulled up the query form. The system demanded a reason for personnel inquiry. She typed: *Structural integrity re-certification follows-up. Missing inspection documentation.*

The system swallowed her words and returned an auto-response within seconds.

*Your request has been received. Dr. Vasseur’s travel schedule is subject to delay due to orbital traffic and resource prioritization. A revised itinerary will be provided when available.*

She stared at the screen. “Revised itinerary.”

“Let me guess. No date.”

“No date. No reference number. No escalation contact.” She highlighted the text. “It’s a generated response. Look at the formatting—same template they send when someone requests a coffee refill in the mess.”

Callum pulled his own tablet out and started typing. “Let me try from the union side. We have a liaison channel that bypasses the administrative portal. If there’s a human on the other end, they might actually know something.”

Élise waited while he navigated a series of authorization screens. She watched his fingers move—steady, practiced. A man who’d spent years learning where to push and where to wait.

“Got something,” he said after a moment. “Not much. But there’s a flag on Vasseur’s file.”

He turned his tablet toward her. The screen showed a worker profile photo. Vasseur was younger than she’d expected, mid-thirties, glasses, the kind of face that belonged in a university lecture hall rather than a lunar mining station. Below the photograph were his certifications, his employment history, and a single red annotation:

*SECURITY RESTRICTION: Full records require clearance class O-3.*

“O-3,” Élise repeated. “That’s Fournier’s level.”

“Or someone above him.” Callum’s jaw tightened. “The company sent a structural engineer to certify repairs, then buried his file under a security restriction, then generated a fake travel record showing he never arrived.”

“And the structural survey,” Élise added, “was doctored to show certified durasteel where there’s actually A21 alloy. With Fournier’s signature overriding the anomaly flag.”

Callum set his tablet down. “So either Fournier is in on it, or he was ordered to look the other way and paid well enough to make it someone else’s problem.”

“I’ve been going back and forth on that for two days. I still don’t know which.” She released a slow breath. “But I know someone who might.”

“Who?”

“Vasseur’s office. On Earth. If he was genuinely contracted and never arrived, someone there would have flagged it.”

Callum raised an eyebrow. “You have a way to contact them?”

“I have a way to read their mail.” She tapped the edge of her tablet. “The administrative server I broke into? It has a relay to Earth. All the certification paperwork comes through it. If Vasseur’s office sent any follow-ups, there might be a copy in the outbox.”

“You’d be reading corporate mail. Not just administrative files.”

“I’m already in a hole, Callum. The question is whether I dig sideways or out.”

He studied her for a moment, then gave a short nod. “Do it. But use my uplink. If they trace it, it won’t lead back to your workstation.”

She followed him through the recycler’s maintenance corridor to a cramped storage alcove where Callum had stashed a portable uplink three years ago, for emergencies, he said, that management never needed to know about. The device was dusty but functional. He keyed in his authorization code and she connected through a shielded channel.

The relay opened. She navigated to the outbox—the records of every message the base had sent to Earth in the last month. She filtered for the engineering office that had contracted Vasseur.

Three messages. She opened the oldest.

*Re: Arnaud Vasseur. Inspection certification remains outstanding. Requesting status update.*

Two days later:

*Re: Vasseur. Certification overdue. Client expecting delivery. Please confirm.*

Then, four days ago:

*Re: Vasseur. Further correspondence on this matter will be directed to legal. Consider our contract complete.*

Élise read the final message twice. “They closed the file. Four days ago. They didn’t want a status update anymore.”

“Because they got paid,” Callum said. “Or they were told not to ask.”

She scrolled to the response logs. The base had replied to the first two messages with the same generic delay template they’d given her. The third message—the legal one—received no reply at all. But there was a forward attached to it.

The forward was addressed to Fournier’s office.

The subject line read: *Do not engage. Pending resolution.*

She clicked on the attachment. It was a partial personnel file, redacted to bare essentials. Name. Certification number. A photo. And a single line of maintenance history:

*Authorized bioprosthetic interface. Retinal implant registered under alternative identifier.*

Her hand froze over the touchscreen.

“What is it?” Callum asked.

“His retinal implant,” she said slowly. “It’s registered under an alternative identifier.”

“That’s not unusual. Corporate implants sometimes use internal codes.”

“Not like this.” She rotated the tablet toward him. The identifier was a long string of alphanumeric characters. She’d seen the format before, in a different context entirely—buried deep in the docking command sequence she’d found on the severed antenna.

The same fourteen characters that appeared at the start of the anomalous cargo schedule.

“Vasseur wasn’t just here to inspect the bay,” she said. “His implant identifier matches the registry for the unregistered vessel that’s coming in.”

Callum went very still.

“You mean he was meant to be on it.”

Élise looked at the screen, then back at the maintenance corridor, then at the image of the missing engineer. “I mean whoever sent that ship was expecting to meet him here. And when he didn’t arrive, they filed the traveling documentation themselves to make it look like he’d never planned to come at all.”

She closed the relay and wiped the session log clean—a habit she’d perfected years ago, in a disaster she never spoke about. “Seventy-one hours until that ship docks,” she said quietly. “And they think we don’t know it exists.”

Callum looked toward the main corridor, where the base hummed with its oblivious routines. The dinner shift would be starting soon. The mess hall would fill with crew members who believed the maintenance logs, who believed the structural surveys, who believed the company had their best interests in mind.

“Élise,” he said. “If the ship is mapping to Vasseur’s implant registration, does that mean it’s coming for him?”

“Or for something he was supposed to do.” She met his eyes. “An inspection that never happened leaves a bay uncertified. An uncertified bay doesn’t have to pass structural review.”

She pulled up the schematic of the hollow sections—the false A21 alloy that shouldn’t have passed any inspection. “If the bay fails during an emergency evacuation, the certification file blames it. And if that file blames it, everyone on this base becomes a casualty that was never supposed to have tested the repairs.”

Callum’s face went pale. “They’re not just covering up a bad alloy. They’re laying groundwork for a structural failure.”

“And when it happens,” she said. “The only people who know it wasn’t an accident will be the ones inside the base at the time.”

The recycler ground on in the silence that followed. Seventy-one hours. A missing engineer. And a ship, coming closer, that no record acknowledged.

Élise looked at the wall panel beside her—one of the hollow sections, she realized, her own hand crossing the cold A21 metal. For the first time in fifteen years, she wished she’d stayed on Earth.