Read Chapter 15: The Broadcaster

The access tunnel to Communication Deck ran hot and tight, one of those ancient service arteries the founders had never bothered to widen because only maintenance rats ever used it. Kaelen crawled on his elbows, tool kit clanking against his hip, Maris a shadow just ahead. The air smelled of ozone and recycled sweat. Somewhere above them, the Broadcaster hummed through the ship’s bones like a second heartbeat.

“Thirty meters,” Maris whispered, voice bouncing off the conduit walls. “Then a service hatch into the relay junction. From there, we’re inside the broadcast studio’s subfloor.”

“And the guards?”

“Two on rotation at the main entrance. The studio itself is automated—no one’s touched a physical console in decades.” She paused, craning her neck to look back at him. In the dim red emergency light, her face was all sharp angles. “You’re the one who knows this ship’s guts better than anyone. Tell me there’s a reason you trusted me enough to come here.”

Kaelen’s jaw tightened. He thought of the Log fragment in his chest pocket, the weight of it pressing against his sternum. Of Jena’s chip, still unopened. Of the black glass cylinder now in Cassian’s possession. “You freed me from a death sentence,” he said. “That buys a lot of trust.”

“But not all of it.”

“No,” he admitted. “Not all of it.”

Maris held his gaze for a moment longer, then nodded and resumed crawling. Kaelen followed, the silence between them filled with the distant groan of the ship’s water recyclers. He’d spent his whole life in these tubes, learning every weld, every patch, every failing system the Circle refused to fix. Now those same tubes were his army.

The service hatch opened into a dark crawlspace beneath the studio floor. Dust motes hung motionless in the slats of light from above. Kaelen pressed his eye to a gap and saw the Broadcaster terminal—a sleek console from another era, its screen dark, its interface keyed to the Heartstone of whoever held authority over this deck.

“Shit,” he breathed.

“What?”

“The console’s locked. Not physically—biometrically. The founders didn’t want just anyone seizing the airwaves.” He pulled back, thinking. “We need a bypass. The relay junction has hardline access to the ship’s internal comms. If I can bridge the signal from there, we don’t need the console at all.”

Maris’s eyes narrowed. “Can you do it?”

“I can jury-rig a tap. But it’ll only hold for a broadcast window of about three minutes before the system flags the anomaly and cuts us off.” He met her gaze. “We’ll get one shot. Say it all in under three minutes, or we lose it.”

“Then we make every word count.” She checked her pistol, a sleek guard-issue sidearm she’d taken off a loyalist during the cryo bay mutiny. “I’ll cover the main entrance. You get us on the air.”

Kaelen nodded, already crawling toward the junction box. He worked fast, fingers finding familiar grooves as he pried open the panel. Wires spilled out like tangled guttersnake. He clipped, spliced, and patched, creating a bridge between the relay’s signal routing and the Broadcaster’s transmitter. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His hands shook, not from fear but from the sheer weight of what he was about to do.

“How long?” Maris called from her position near the studio door.

“Thirty seconds.” He finished the last splice and pressed the transmit patch against his throat, feeling the small vibration as it synced with the ship’s internal frequency. Then he thumbed the relay’s switch to active.

The studio console flickered to life, its screen glowing with a cold blue light. Somewhere deep in the ship, alarms would be blaring by now. Someone would notice the unauthorized signal. He had minutes, not hours.

Kaelen cleared his throat, and spoke to every deck of the generation ship.

“This is Kaelen Voss. Maintenance tech, lower decks. I’m addressing you from a stolen frequency, so I’ll keep this brief.” He swallowed. “The ship arrived at our destination over a century ago. Two hundred years, some of the archives suggest. The Log confirms it. Our ancestors intended the first generation to land on a new world, but the founding families—the ones who still call themselves the Circle—chose to keep us in the dark. They engineered a plague to justify abandoning the mission. They killed billions in cryo to preserve their own power.”

He paused, letting the words sink in. In the silence of the studio, he heard Maris’s sharp intake of breath.

“The lower decks are starving because the Circle diverted our water to the upper decks,” he continued. “They stockpile food while our children go hungry. They’ve lied about our destination, about our history, about everything. And they’ll keep lying until they die.”

The studio door hissed open, and Captain Bel stepped through with two guards flanking him. He was a tall man, silver-haired, with a face that had once seemed kind to Kaelen. Now it looked like a mask stretched over fear.

“That’s quite a speech, Voss.” Bel’s voice was calm, but his eyes darted to Maris, to the spliced junction, to the live console. “You’ve made your point. The lower decks are angry. But this—this is not the way.”

Kaelen kept his hand on the transmitter. “It’s the only way you’ve left us.”

Bel took a step forward, hands raised in a placating gesture. “I’m not Cassian. I never wanted the lies. I was a child when the Arrival happened—my grandfather was on the Circle then. He told me stories about the world below, about what we were supposed to build here.” He paused, wetting his lips. “If you let this broadcast finish, you’ll have chaos. Riots. Civil war. The ship will tear itself apart before anyone sets foot on that planet.”

“Better to tear apart than to rot in your lies,” Maris spat.

Bel ignored her, focusing on Kaelen. “I can offer you a compromise. We acknowledge the Arrival publicly. We open the upper decks. We share the resources equally and establish a new charter—one that seats lower-deck representatives on the Circle.”

“And Cassian? What happens to him?”

Bel’s mouth tightened. “Cassian is a problem. But he’s a problem we can solve together. You have influence now, Voss. You can be the voice of reason. Show the people that not all the Circle are tyrants.”

Kaelen looked at him, this man who had grown up in silk while the lower decks learned to ration water. Who had watched families starve and never said a word. Who now approached them with smiles and offers only when the blade was at his throat.

“The compromise,” Kaelen said slowly, “ends with your family still in power. With the Circle still holding the Heartstones. With Cassian still breathing.”

“I’m offering you a seat at the table.”

“You’re offering me a chair in a burning room.” Kaelen killed the transmitter and stepped back from the console. “That’s not good enough.”

Bel’s face hardened. His hand moved to his belt, and suddenly there was a pistol in it. The guards raised theirs too.

“Then I’ll have to take back the room,” Bel said.

Maris fired first. Her shot caught the guard on the left in the shoulder, sending him spinning. Kaelen dove for cover behind the console as the studio erupted in gunfire. Plaster rained down. The Broadcaster’s screen shattered, glass spraying across the floor.

“Go!” Maris shouted, laying down suppressive fire. “Get to the hatch!”

Kaelen scrambled toward the subfloor opening, but Bel was faster. The captain sidestepped Maris’s line of fire and lunged, grabbing Kaelen by the collar and shoving him against the wall. The muzzle of Bel’s pistol pressed into Kaelen’s throat.

“You little—” Bel’s face twisted with rage. “I offered you everything. You should have taken it.”

Kaelen’s hand shot to his tool belt. He gripped a hydrospanner and slammed it into Bel’s wrist. The captain grunted, his grip loosening just enough for Kaelen to twist free and slam an elbow into Bel’s gut. Bel staggered back, raising the pistol again.

Maris’s shot went wide as Bel dove through the studio’s back exit. Two more guards poured in, covering his retreat. By the time they drove Maris and Kaelen back into the crawlspace, the room was silent except for the hiss of the shattered console and the distant wail of alarm klaxons.

“He got away,” Kaelen said, breathing hard. The transmitted note in his pocket felt heavy. “And the Broadcaster is out.”

Maris holstered her pistol, eyes dark. “The splice is still live—for now. Even if the signal’s dead, the system recorded our transmission. But Bel will have techs on it within minutes to purge the logs.”

Kaelen stared at the ruined console. He’d had his three minutes. He’d used them all. Whether they had been enough was another question entirely.

“Get back to the annex,” he said. “We need to see what happens now.”

Maris nodded. But as they crawled back through the access tunnel, Kaelen couldn’t shake the feeling that Bel’s escape was more dangerous than ten of Cassian’s guards. A tyrant with nothing to lose was one thing. A tyrant with a compromise offer and a grudge was something else entirely.