Six Hours

"Don't much care about deniability when people are passing out," Tomás said flatly. "What do I do?"

Vera closed her eyes. Behind her lids, the flickering of the overhead fluorescent painted orange afterimages. When she opened them, Chen was watching her with an expression she recognized from depositions—the look of someone who already knew the answer and was waiting to see if you'd admit it.

"Get the unconscious ones upright. Conservation of oxygen works better with less exertion, so tell everyone to sit down, stop talking, and breathe shallow. Anyone with a portable O2 canister—"

"Already distributed them. We've got maybe six hours' worth between thirty people."

Six hours. Everything came back to six hours. The universe had developed a cruel sense of symmetry.

"Then we hold," Vera said. "We hold for six hours."

Tomás was silent for a beat. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to that low, careful register he used when he was concealing the full scope of what he faced. "Understood. Herrera out."

The comms went dead, and Vera turned to the station schematic glowing on Chen's auxiliary screen. Sections Eight through Twenty-two, all low-gravity, all lower-tier—the guts of Pallas Station where the mining happened and the miners lived. Adesanya had cut the artificial gravity, and now he was choking the air supply, and these acts together formed a picture so clear that even her exhausted mind could read it: he wasn't trying to win a legal battle. He was trying to ensure there was no one left to testify.

"Chen," Vera said. "If a Helios fast courier arrives before the ICC enforcement team—"

"Then under Article Twelve, Section Nine, of the Corporate Emergency Protocols, any Helios-flagged vessel can declare a station-wide emergency and assume operational authority." Chen's voice was mechanical, reciting. She'd clearly already run this calculation. "They would retroactively classify your transmission as an unauthorized data breach. The ICC would accept it because the protocol is binding. Everything we sent becomes inadmissible. Inadmissible evidence doesn't exist in the eyes of arbitration law, Vera. It would be as if we'd never—"

"I know what inadmissible means."

"I know you know. I'm saying—" Chen pulled off her glasses and pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. Her hands were shaking. They were always shaking now. "I'm saying the timing isn't accidental. Adesanya didn't cut gravity to trap us. He cut it to slow us down while he waits for retrieval."

Vera stared at the schematic. The docking beacon pulsed on the station's exterior like a heartbeat, broadcasting Pallas's position to every vessel within range. The ICC team was en route from Ceres. But so, potentially, was Helios. And the question of who arrived first was a question of distance, engine output, and the cold physics of orbital mechanics—none of which she could argue in a courtroom.

"There's another option."

Kai's voice came from the maintenance bay's entrance, where they'd been floating in the doorway with the practiced ease of someone raised in low-g. Their hair cycled through a muted spectrum—blue-grey, the color of resignation, shot through with threads of anxious amber. The heartbeat tattoo at their throat seemed to pulse independently, a trick of the flickering light.

"The docking beacon," Kai said. "We disable it, neither ship can find us easily. Buys time. Removes the variable."

"It also leaves this station blind to rescue vessels," Vera said. "If the atmosphere situation in the lower levels gets worse—"

"I know what it does."

"People are already losing consciousness, Kai."

"And in six hours, when a Helios cruiser docks and declares this an emergency corporate zone, everyone who testified loses consciousness permanently. Legally, metaphorically, and—" They paused. Their hair flickered to something dark and unreadable. "—possibly literally, depending on how thorough Desmond Yu decides to be."

Vera hated that they weren't wrong. She hated more that she was genuinely considering it.

"How would you even reach the beacon?" Chen asked. "The exterior access ports are in Section Three, and Sections Three through Seven still have gravity, still have security patrols—"

"I designed the patrol routing algorithm," Kai said, with a thin smile that didn't match the worry in their amber eyes. "Three years ago. I know where the gaps are. I know where they've always been, because I'm the one who put them there."

"You put gaps in security deliberately?" Chen sounded scandalized in the way only someone who'd never had to survive corporate politics could sound.

"I put them in because I was already planning for a day when someone would need to move through Pallas without being seen." Kai pushed off the doorframe, drifting closer. "I just didn't know it would be me."

Vera looked at them. Thirty-one hours ago, she'd confronted Kai about the five-second gap in the Adesanya memory recording, the surgical deletion made with Threshold Group's editing suite. She still didn't have a satisfactory answer. Kai's deflection had been too smooth, their distress too convenient. And now they were volunteering for a solo mission through hostile territory, which was either brave or a convenient way to remove themselves from scrutiny.

But they were also right. The calculus was merciless. If the Helios courier arrived first, everything was lost. If neither ship arrived, they had six hours of breathable air and a prayer. If the ICC arrived first—

If. If. If.

"Go," Vera said. "But you take a comms unit and you check in every twenty minutes. If I don't hear from you, I assume you're compromised and I proceed accordingly."

Kai's hair flushed a brief, startled pink—surprise, maybe gratitude—before settling back into determined grey. They caught the comms unit Vera tossed to them, tucked it into their jacket, and pushed off toward the maintenance ladder without another word. Within seconds, they'd disappeared into the vertical shaft, angular limbs navigating the rungs with fluid precision.

Vera turned back to Chen's terminal. Sixty-seven percent.

Five hours and forty-three minutes remaining.

She spent the next two hours in a state of brittle focus, cycling between the comms and the station schematic, coordinating with Tomás on defensive positions while monitoring the oxygen levels in the lower sections. Tomás had organized the miners into rotating shifts behind barricades of overturned ore carts, storage lockers, and—on Section Fourteen's main corridor—a massive industrial smelter that had been offline for months and now served as a wall of rusted iron. The miners had repurposed cutting torches, pneumatic drills, and anything heavy enough to serve as a projectile in zero-g. They were not soldiers. They were exhausted, oxygen-deprived people with callused hands and nothing left to lose.

Kai checked in every twenty minutes. Section Five. Section Four. Section Three. Each report was briefer than the last, their voice tighter.

"Patrol on the main spine. Two officers. I can go around through the ventilation ducts."

"Go," Vera said, and they were gone again.

At hour three, the oxygen levels in Section Twelve dropped below sixteen percent. Three more miners lost consciousness. Tomás reported it in the flat, affectless tone of a man who had learned long ago that panic was a luxury he couldn't afford.

"They're sleeping," he said. "That's what I'm telling the ones who are still awake. That they're sleeping."

"Tomás—"

"Don't." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the single syllable. "Don't say something kind right now, Vera. I can't—just give me something useful."

Vera swallowed. "ICC transmission is at seventy-nine percent. ETA four hours. The relay hasn't dropped."

"Good. That's good." A pause. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. "I'm moving the barricade on Fourteen forward. If security comes through the main junction, I want them bottlenecked at the smelter."

"Copy."

She set the comms down and pressed both palms against her face. Her skin felt paper-thin. The scar on her left palm—a faded ridge of tissue she'd carried for years, old habit, older pain—throbbed with her pulse. Somewhere in this station, sealed in a file she'd never released, was proof that Helios had sacrificed three hundred colonists to test a new mining technique. She'd sat on it for years, paralyzed by the certainty that releasing it would mean her death and the deaths of everyone she told. And now she was asking forty-three miners to risk exactly that, on evidence far weaker, because she'd been too afraid to use what she already had.

The hypocrisy sat in her chest like a stone.

At hour four, Kai missed a check-in.

Vera counted to sixty. Called again. Static.

She was reaching for the comms to try a third time when the explosion shook the station.

It came from below—Section Fifteen, maybe Sixteen—and the deck plating bucked upward with a sound like a giant tearing sheet metal. Vera slammed into the terminal, her shoulder taking the impact, and Chen's equipment went weightless in a cascade of floating debris. The lights flickered, died, flickered again, and stabilized into an anemic amber emergency glow.

"Chen!"

"I'm here." Chen was clutching the terminal, her lab coat billowing around her. The authentication data was still scrolling. "The upload—it's still running. Backup power."

Vera grabbed the comms. "Tomás! Tomás, what happened?"

The channel was pure static for four seconds. Then Tomás's voice, ragged, overlaid with the percussive rhythm of something hammering against metal: "Cutting charges. They came through the floor, Section Fourteen, main corridor. Two—no, three breach points. Security's coming up through the holes in EVA suits, zero-g trained, they're—"

A sound that might have been a gunshot, amplified and distorted by the comms.

"They're firing," Tomás said. "We're returning fire. The smelter's holding but they're flanking through the—Vera, I need—"

The transmission cut to static.

Vera was already moving. She pushed off the terminal, caught the doorframe, and launched herself into the corridor. The maintenance ladder stretched below her, a vertical tunnel of dim emergency lighting and exposed conduit. She descended four rungs at a time, her body operating on some reserve her mind couldn't access, the decades-old instinct of a woman who had spent her life in courtrooms learning to run toward danger because the alternative was letting danger win by default.

Section Fourteen was chaos.

The emergency lighting painted everything in shades of amber and shadow. The corridor was filled with floating debris—fragments of deck plating, insulation material, a spinning wrench that Vera narrowly avoided. Through the smoke and dust, she could see the breaches: three ragged holes in the floor, edges still glowing orange from the cutting charges, each roughly a meter in diameter. Security personnel in black EVA suits were pulling themselves through, and the miners were fighting back with everything they had.

A pneumatic drill screamed to life and a suited figure tumbled backward into the breach. Someone was shouting. The gunfire was erratic, amplified strangely by the enclosed space, and Vera saw tracers ricocheting off the smelter's iron surface in bright, deadly pinwheels.

She found Tomás behind an overturned storage locker near the main junction, exactly where she'd expected him. He was firing a jury-rigged projectile launcher down the corridor, his thick callused hands steady on the grip, his body braced against the locker with the practiced ease of a man who'd spent years in low-g. His burn-scarred forearm gleamed in the emergency light.

"Tomás!"

He turned, and the projectile launcher drifted from his hands. His face was pale beneath the grime, his warm brown eyes wide with something that wasn't fear but was adjacent to it—the look of a man whose body had just informed him of something his mind hadn't processed yet.

"Vera." His voice was strange. Thin. "I think—"

He looked down at his right side. Vera followed his gaze and saw the wound: a ragged tear in his jumpsuit just above his hip, dark with blood that was already forming spheres in the zero-gravity, a constellation of red droplets floating upward like something beautiful. A ricochet. The round had likely fragmented off the smelter and caught him at an angle that was, in the cold mathematics of injury, both survivable and catastrophic.

"You're hit." The words were absurd in their obviousness. Vera was already pulling off her jacket, wadding it against the wound. Tomás hissed through his teeth but didn't pull away.