Boarding Party

The sound came before the warning.

A deep, structural groan that Vera felt in her molars before it registered as sound—the station's outer hull complaining under sudden asymmetric stress. Then the alarm, shrill and stuttering, painting the maintenance bay in strobing amber.

Chen's hands froze over her terminal. "That's not an interior bulkhead. That's the docking ring."

Vera was already moving, pulling the data crystal from the upload rig and slipping it into her jacket pocket before the second impact came—a metallic screech that set every cable in the bay vibrating. The lights flickered, died, and returned at half output, the emergency spectrum washing them in the color of old bruises.

"They're not hailing," Chen said, her voice thin and rapid. "Standard docking protocol requires—they're not hailing."

Forty minutes. Elara's ICC vessel was forty minutes out, and whoever this was had no intention of waiting.

Vera crossed to the bay's single porthole—a fifteen-centimeter circle of impact-resistant composite that looked out onto the docking collar. The ship attached there was wrong. No ICC markings, no independent contractor registry. Matte black hull plating, military-grade thrusters still glowing cherry-red from a hard deceleration burn, and along the fuselage in clean white lettering: HELIOS CORPORATION—SECURITY AND RESOURCE PROTECTION DIVISION.

"Courier class," Vera said. "Fast. Small crew. This isn't a patrol—it's a boarding party."

Her right hand was shaking. She pressed it flat against her thigh and willed it still. Forty-three hours without sleep and the world had taken on a gauzy, underwater quality, edges softening, sounds arriving a half-second delayed. She could feel her heartbeat in her scarred left palm, a rhythmic pulling in the old tissue.

The upload terminal chirped. Sixty-three percent. Still parsing.

"Chen. How long until—"

"I can't speed it up. The ICC enforcement servers run sequential authentication on each file segment. It's—it's designed to prevent exactly this kind of evidence bombing. Each packet has to clear a cryptographic handshake before the next one loads. I told you this. I told you six hours was optimistic."

"You didn't tell me we'd have company."

The inner airlock cycled with a pneumatic hiss. Vera grabbed Chen's arm and pulled her behind a rack of decommissioned drilling couplings, the space barely wide enough for both of them. Through the gap between the equipment, Vera watched the maintenance bay door slide open.

Four figures in tactical exosuits moved in with the fluid precision of people who trained in spin-gravity. Compact slugthrowers, not stunners. Helmets with integrated comms. Behind them, unhurried, a fifth figure stepped through the doorway.

Desmond Yu wore a charcoal suit cut from something that probably cost more air than a miner breathed in a month. His cybernetic eyes cast faint blue light across the bay's walls, scanning, cataloguing. His expression was calm—not the calm of someone controlling fear, but the calm of someone who had never felt any.

"Dr. Chen," he said. His voice carried without effort. "I know you're here. Your terminal is still active."

Chen's fingers tightened on Vera's sleeve. Her hands were trembling badly now, the tremor of someone who understood precisely what was coming.

"The ICC transmission is already in progress," Yu continued, stepping further into the bay. He moved like a man walking through his own office. "I want to be clear that this changes nothing. Under Emergency Corporate Code Seven, I am authorized to detain any resident deemed an active threat to station integrity. The transmission itself constitutes an act of industrial sabotage against Helios Corporation's licensed operations. Dr. Chen, you are complicit in that act."

He paused, letting the silence do its work.

"Surrender now, and I will ensure your detention review occurs within the standard ninety-day window. Continue to resist, and I will classify you as a hostile asset. You understand what that means."

Vera could feel Chen wavering—the slight forward lean, the held breath. The woman was fifty-eight years old and had spent decades navigating corporate compromises, and there was a part of her that still believed cooperation meant survival.

"Don't," Vera breathed, barely audible.

Chen stayed. But her eyes were wet.

Yu waited another seven seconds—Vera counted—then spoke a command into his suit's comm. The security team fanned out with practiced efficiency. Two went left toward the equipment racks. Chen squeezed her eyes shut.

"Go," Vera whispered. "Out the service hatch. Now."

Chen looked at her. "The upload—"

"Is running. It doesn't need us. Go."

But they were too slow. The first officer rounded the rack with his weapon raised and found Chen first, then Vera crouching behind her. His visor tilted fractionally—an instinctive check of their faces against whatever biometric database fed his display.

"Got them," he said.

Yu appeared behind the officer like he'd materialized there. His ice-blue eyes found Vera's and held.

"Counselor Okafor." The thin smile appeared, precise as a scalpel cut. "I admire your commitment. I genuinely do. But you've placed yourself and quite a lot of other people in a very difficult position."

"Emergency Code Seven requires an active threat to station safety," Vera said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "A legal filing doesn't constitute a threat. You know that."

"A coordinated disruption of station gravity systems does." Yu tilted his head. "Thirty miners barricading a critical access corridor does. Transmission of proprietary operational data to an outside authority during a declared security event certainly does. The statute is broad by design, Counselor. You of all people should appreciate that."

"The gravity shutdown was your people, not mine."

"The record will reflect otherwise." He extended his hand, palm up. "The data crystal, please."

Vera didn't move.

Yu's expression didn't change. He turned to the security officer. "Detach Dr. Chen. Process her with the others."

"Others?" Chen's voice cracked. "What others?"

Yu didn't answer. He was still looking at Vera.

"Seventeen," he said, almost gently. "Seventeen individuals from the Section Twelve group have already been taken into custody. Your Mr. Herrera managed to extract roughly half before we secured the corridor, but the ones who couldn't move quickly—Tanaka, for instance—are receiving appropriate medical attention. For now."

He let the last two words do their work.

Chen was led away. She looked back once, her wire-rimmed glasses catching the emergency lighting, her mouth opening as if to say something. Then the door closed behind her and she was gone.

"The crystal, Counselor."

"I don't have it."

Yu regarded her for a long moment. Then he nodded, as if confirming something to himself, and turned to the nearest wall panel. He keyed in a command code, and the station's PA system engaged with a soft, ominous click.

"Attention, all residents of Pallas Station." His voice filled the corridors, the crawlspaces, the ore processing bays, every corner of the hollow asteroid. "This is Executive Administrator Yu. Under the authority of Emergency Corporate Code Seven, I am declaring a station-wide security event effective immediately. All non-essential personnel are to return to their assigned quarters. Curfew is now in effect."

He paused.

"Additionally, until such time as a stolen data storage device is returned to Helios custody, oxygen rations for all detained persons will be reduced by ten percent each hour. This reduction will continue until the device is recovered. Let me be explicit: corporate arbitration protections are suspended during a declared security emergency. There is no appeal. There is no review. There is only the clock."

He released the comm and turned back to Vera.

"You should know that I take no pleasure in this. The system requires certain inputs to produce certain outputs. You understand inputs, Counselor. You've been providing them your entire career. The question is whether you'll provide the right one now."

Vera said nothing.

"One hour," Yu said. "Then another ten percent. And another. The mathematics are not complicated."

He left two officers at the maintenance bay door and walked out.

---

Vera found Tomás in Section Eleven, behind a collapsed conveyor frame, with six miners she didn't recognize and a woman named Suki Oshiro whose arm was bent at an angle arms weren't supposed to bend. Tomás had fashioned a splint from a drive shaft and electrical tape. His burn scar gleamed with sweat.

"Chen?" he asked.

His jaw tightened. He didn't ask about the upload percentage. He didn't ask about the crystal. He looked at the miners behind him—the walking wounded, the ones who hadn't made it to the barricade in time, the ones who'd crawled through service ducts while security swept the main corridors—and then back at Vera.

"Before the air gets thin enough to matter? Four hours, maybe five. These sections already run low. Ten percent off baseline puts us at—"

"Survivable," Tomás finished. "Barely. For a while."

"Yu knows that. He's not trying to kill anyone. He's trying to make me choose."

Surrender the crystal and lose the only original evidence. Keep it and watch seventeen people—plus Chen, plus whoever else they rounded up—slowly suffocate. The ICC copy sat at sixty-three percent, maybe sixty-eight by now, parsing through cryptographic layers at a pace that mocked urgency.

"We go deeper," Vera said.

Tomás stared at her.

"The old mining shafts," she continued. "Sections Fifteen through Twenty. Helios decommissioned them six years ago when the seam played out. There's no monitoring, no atmospheric controls tied into the current grid. If Yu wants to reduce oxygen, he can only do it through the active life support system. The old shafts run on passive pressure—sealed pockets of original asteroid atmosphere."

"I want to buy time."

Tomás looked at his people. Suki Oshiro's breathing was shallow and rapid. A man Vera didn't know was pressing a filthy rag against a head wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. A young woman—barely twenty, belt-born by her build—was crying silently, her arms wrapped around her knees.

"Move," Tomás said.

They moved.

---

The abandoned shafts smelled like iron and deep time. Vera's emergency lamp threw a cone of white light that caught ancient drill marks in the rock walls, the ghosts of bore holes, rusted rail tracks where ore carts once ran. The tunnel was narrow enough that they had to move single-file, the ceiling low enough that Tomás had to duck. Gravity was still off in these sections—the emergency shutdown from hours ago still in effect—and their footsteps came in long, drifting arcs, each contact with the stone floor tentative and soft.

Behind her, the miners moved in silence. There was nothing to say. The station PA had clicked on again twenty minutes ago, and Yu's voice had followed them into the deep, echoing off stone that had never heard human speech.

"One hour has elapsed. Oxygen reduction of ten percent is now in effect for all detained persons and affected sections. The data crystal has not been returned."

The air was already different. Not thin—not yet—but lighter, thinner, carrying less. Each breath arrived slightly incomplete, like a sentence cut off before its final word. Vera's lungs pulled harder, compensating, and she could feel the others doing the same: the quickened pace, the slightly parted lips, the animal body recognizing deprivation before the conscious mind caught up.

Forty-three hours without sleep. The tunnel walls had begun to breathe. Not literally—Vera knew the distinction, barely—but the stone seemed to flex and settle around her, the asteroid's mass pressing in from every direction. She could feel Pallas above her, below her, on every side: rock and metal and the frozen vacuum of space, and somewhere in that immensity, a few hundred desperate humans sucking at air that a man in a tailored suit was slowly squeezing away.

"Vera." Tomás's voice, low and close. "You're listing left."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're about to walk into a wall."

She adjusted her trajectory. The tunnel curved ahead, branching into two passages. The left fork descended further into the asteroid. The right fork angled upward, toward what the old station maps—half-remembered, fragmentary—suggested was the boundary between the current mining infrastructure and something older.

"Right," she said.

"There's nothing right. Decommissioned shaft dead-ends forty meters up."

"Trust me."

Tomás made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Yeah. Because that's worked out great so far."

But he followed.

The right fork narrowed further. The drill marks on the walls disappeared, replaced by rough-hewn stone that had been cut with something cruder—plasma torches, maybe, or the primitive mining lasers of the first colonization wave. The rail tracks vanished. The walls drew in until Vera could press both palms against them simultaneously, the rock cool and slightly damp under her hands.

The air changed.

Not thinner. Warmer. The temperature rose by degrees as they moved deeper, until Vera realized she was sweating beneath her suit jacket—a sensation that felt foreign after hours in the station's climate-controlled chill. The air had weight here, substance. It tasted different, too: less metallic, more organic, carrying traces of something that might have been soil or fabric or the accumulated exhalation of enclosed human spaces.

The tunnel ended at a hatch.

Not a modern airlock. Not Helios manufacturing. This was old—hand-welded steel with rivets the size of Vera's thumbnail, a manual pressure wheel tarnished dark with age but intact. A stencil across the metal, faded almost to invisibility, read: PALLAS COLONIAL AUTHORITY—HABITAT MODULE 7.

"That's not corporate," the young woman said, her first words in an hour. She was staring at the hatch with wide eyes. "That's—original. That's first-wave."

Vera wrapped her hands around the pressure wheel. The mechanism resisted, decades of corrosion gripping the internal seals. She braced her feet against the tunnel floor and pushed. Her right hand screamed, the tremor translating into a vibration that ran up her forearm. Her scarred left palm burned against the metal.

The wheel moved.

It turned with a grinding shriek that echoed back down the tunnel, and the hatch swung inward on hinges that had been engineered to last longer than the civilization that built them.

Warm air rolled over them. Not recycled. Not processed through Helios filtration. Real air, the kind that carried moisture and warmth and the faint, indescribable scent of a space that had been lived in.

Vera stepped through.

The chamber beyond was roughly ten meters by eight, carved directly into the asteroid's rock and lined with panels of composite material that predated anything currently manufactured on Pallas. The walls were insulated with what looked like layers of compressed regolith fabric—primitive, effective. Lighting strips along the ceiling glowed a soft amber, running on a power source Vera couldn't immediately identify. Heat radiated from floor panels beneath a layer of worn carpeting that might once have been blue.

And on the far wall, painted by hand in strokes that ranged from careful to desperate, in colors that had been mixed from mineral pigments and printer ink and something that looked suspiciously like blood:

THE BELT WILL BE FREE.

The letters were large—each one half a meter tall—and they had been painted over other words, older words, layers of text and retext that Vera could see in the pigment's geological strata. Slogans, names, dates. A record of human presence that predated Helios Corporation's claim by decades.

Below the painted words, bolted to a workbench that had been welded from scavenged hull plating, sat a transmitter.

Vera crossed the room in three drifting steps. The device was bulky, analog, its casing dented and scratched but intact. Dials and vacuum tubes. A frequency selector with physical stops. No digital interface. No network connection. No Helios oversight. A short-range unit that operated on pre-corporate frequencies, using encryption protocols that had been old when Yu was still a bonded laborer's son in the low-g sections.

It predated everything. It predated the debt contracts, the social credit system, the arbitration courts, the memory recording technology, the spin sections, the rationing. It predated the world that had made Pallas Station what it was.

It still worked. The power indicator—a simple analog needle—twitched when Vera touched the activation switch. The filament inside the primary vacuum tube glowed a faint, warm orange.

Behind her, Tomás lowered Suki Oshiro onto the carpeting. The young woman stood in the doorway, staring at the painted words. The others filtered in slowly, touching the walls, the bench, the insulated panels, as if they needed tactile confirmation that this was real.

"Eighty years,"