Read Chapter 23: Planning the Heist

The room stank of ozone and recycled air. Grendel had cleared out a storage bay beneath Arsia’s market district, and now it held a folding table, a cracked holoscreen, and six of the most dangerous-looking people Caleb had ever shared a space with.

Grendel stood at the head of the table, arms crossed. “This is the crew. You don’t need their names. You need their skills.”

A wiry woman with a shaved head and augmetic eyes—the hacker. A hulking man in a pressure suit that looked older than Caleb—demolitions. A pair of twins, lean and quiet, both with Helix military tattoos half-lasered off their necks—close-quarters. And a pilot who hadn’t looked up from his handheld since sitting down.

Caleb nodded once. He didn’t need names either. He needed bodies. And trust was a luxury he’d stopped affording three chapters of his life ago.

Grendel gestured to the holoscreen. “Show them what you showed me.”

Caleb pulled the data chip from his pocket—Okafor’s contribution, and Okafor himself sat against the far wall, wrists bound, jaw set, watching. Caleb ignored him and slotted the chip. A wireframe of AF-7 bloomed in the air, rotating slowly. The facility sprawled through the Valles Marineris canyon wall like a concrete tumor, seven levels visible, three more buried deeper in the rock.

“Helix calls it a research outpost,” Caleb said. “It’s a prison. Cryo-bay’s on level six. Detention cells are level four.” He highlighted both sections in red. “Two objectives. My mother and Grendel’s daughter. We hit both simultaneously.”

The hacker—Mira, he’d decided—leaned forward, squinting. “Simultaneous on different levels means we split. That doubles the guard response.”

“That’s why we’re not going in through the front,” Caleb said. He zoomed the wireframe to the facility’s southern flank, where a cluster of service tunnels fed into a maintenance shaft. “Helix runs regular shuttle deliveries through this corridor. We take one. We ride it inside.”

The pilot finally looked up. “You want to steal a Helix shuttle.”

“I want to borrow one,” Caleb said. “We give it back. Probably.”

The pilot’s mouth twitched—not a smile, but close. “I’ll need the approach codes.”

Caleb glanced at Okafor. “He’ll provide them.”

Okafor said nothing. His eyes were flat, unreadable. Grendel had searched him twice, found nothing—no transmitter, no panic button. But Caleb knew the man was still calculating. Okafor’s daughter was out there. That made him useful. It also made him desperate. Desperate men did stupid things.

“The real edge is the power grid,” Caleb continued, pulling up a schematic of the facility’s electrical system. “AF-7 runs on a fusion core with redundant backup. But the backups link through a single substation on the canyon rim. If we cut the main line and short the substation’s failsafe at the same time, the whole facility goes dark for ninety seconds.”

“Ninety seconds isn’t a lot,” one of the twins said.

“It’s enough for a lockout,” Caleb said. “Security doors drop into manual override. We’ll have ten minutes of unguarded access between levels. Guards will reroute, but they’ll be slow—they’ll assume it’s a systems failure, not an attack. By the time they realize it’s a breach, we’ll be at our objectives.”

Mira traced the power line with her finger. “The failsafe is mechanical. I can’t hack a physical junction.”

“That’s why I’m bringing explosives,” the demolitions man said, cracking his knuckles.

Grendel nodded. “Jax handles the substation. The twins guard the shaft and cut off any response that comes back up. Mira rides with me and Caleb to the cryo-bay. The pilot stays with the shuttle for extraction.”

“And me?” Okafor asked from the corner.

Caleb turned. “You ride with us. If the codes are wrong, you’re the first one I throw at the guards.”

Okafor’s mouth pressed into a thin line. He didn’t argue. That worried Caleb more than if he had.

For the next hour, they drilled. Caleb walked them through the blueprints level by level, memorized the guard rotations from Okafor’s data, highlighted the choke points and the blind spots. The plan was simple enough. The execution would be chaos.

He kept coming back to the same detail, though. There was a flaw in the grid. A vulnerability Helix had overlooked for years—probably because no one had ever tried to plan an assault on AF-7 before. But Caleb had a nagging feeling that the flaw wasn’t an accident. It was too convenient. Too clean.

His mother had worked on AF-7’s original infrastructure. She’d helped design the power systems before the Helix takeover. If she’d left a backdoor, she’d left it deliberately. For someone to find. For him to find.

He didn’t share that thought with the crew. It was thin, speculative. But it sat in his chest like a second heartbeat.

“One more thing,” Grendel said, as the meeting wound down. He pulled a small case from beneath the table and flipped it open. Inside: a stack of ID badges, each stamped with Helix’s corporate logo—a stylized H wrapped in a chain. “These are for the shuttle’s passenger manifest. They’re forged. They’ll pass a casual scan, but not a deep check. We need to hit the landing cycle when the docking crews are switching shifts.”

Caleb picked up one of the badges. His face stared back from the embedded screen. “How many people know we’re coming?”

Grendel’s jaw tightened. “None. But Helix doesn’t move ships without reason. If anyone reviews the flight logs after the fact, they’ll see a stolen shuttle and trace it back to Arsia. That’s acceptable. Arsia doesn’t exist on their official maps anyway.”

“And if they review it before?”

“Then we’re already dead.” Grendel closed the case. “Everyone here accepted that risk when they walked in.”

The room went quiet. Caleb felt it—the weight settling over each of them like a dust cloud, heavy and suffocating. The twins exchanged a glance. Mira flexed her augmetic fingers. Jax stared at the floor. The pilot tapped his handheld.

They were pros. Each of them had walked into worse odds. But pro didn’t mean unafraid. It meant knowing exactly how thin the margin was and going anyway.

Caleb let the silence stretch. Then he said, “My father left me a message before he died. He said that on Mars, you don’t get to choose what you inherit. You only get to choose what you do with it. My mother’s been frozen for ten years because she chose to fight. I’m not leaving her there. And I’m not leaving anyone else’s family behind either.”

Grendel met his gaze. For a moment, the hard edge in the older man’s eyes softened. “We go at dawn.”

The crew dispersed. The twins left first, melting into the shadowed corridors. Jax followed, a duffel bag heavy on his shoulder. Mira lingered, studying the blueprint one last time before nodding and slipping out.

The pilot paused at the door. “The shuttle we’re stealing,” he said. “It needs to be Helix-registered. I know a dock two klicks outside Arsia that services their courier routes.”

“That’s not in the plan,” Caleb said.

“The plan has us flying a stolen ship into a Helix facility with forged badges and a ninety-second windows of darkness. Adding a fifteen-minute detour is the least risky thing we’ve discussed all day.”

Caleb almost smiled. “Fine.”

The pilot left. Grendel started gathering the remaining data chips, and Caleb moved to Okafor, crouching in front of him.

“You’re quiet,” Caleb said.

“You’ve decided I’m a liability.” Okafor’s voice was low, tired. “Nothing I say will change that.”

“You’re right.”

“Then let me offer something anyway.” Okafor met his eyes. “The cryo-bay on level six has a secondary entrance—a service hatch behind the coolant tanks. It’s too small for a guard to use. But a single person could slip through undetected.”

Caleb frowned. “Why do you know that?”

“Because I helped design the facility’s security protocol. Before Helix repurposed it for detention.” Okafor’s gaze didn’t waver. “If your mother is alive in there, she’s in the high-security row. The primary door will be locked. The service hatch bypasses the lock entirely.”

Grendel stepped closer. “Why give us this now?”

“Because if the assault fails, Helix will kill my daughter,” Okafor said. “I need you to win. And I need you to know that everything I have left is in that facility.” He looked at Caleb. “Just like you.”

The room fell silent again. Caleb studied Okafor’s face, searching for the lie. He didn’t find one. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“We’ll use the hatch,” Caleb said. “If it works, you get a window to see your daughter. If it doesn’t…” He let the sentence hang.

Okafor nodded. There was nothing else to say.

Caleb turned back to the wireframe, his eyes tracing the path to level six. His mother was there—had been there for a decade, suspended in cold and silence, waiting. He thought about her voice. Her words. The burden she’d left him.

Dawn was hours away. The plan was set. The crew was waiting.

And somewhere in the Valles Marineris, behind a decade of lies and walls of ice and steel, his mother’s face was waiting too.