Six Minutes

"I'm not new. I've been on Pallas for two years." Kai's voice had changed. The elaborate metaphors were gone. The playful flirtation, the code-switching between corporate polish and belt slang—all of it stripped away like paint under flame. What remained was quiet. Careful. Frighteningly precise. "My name is Kai Novak. That part is real. But I'm not bonded labor. I never was."

Vera felt something cold settle into her chest. "Kai—"

"I'm a Threshold Group operative. I was embedded on Pallas Station twenty-three months ago. My assignment was to monitor Helios operations and report." The words came out flat, rehearsed, as though they'd practiced this speech a hundred times in the privacy of their own head. "Threshold Group has been watching Pallas for years. We've been waiting for a scenario exactly like this one."

Tomás moved. Not toward the door—toward Kai. Two steps, closing the distance, his thick callused hands closing into fists at his sides. "What scenario."

"Catastrophic failure." Kai didn't flinch. They met Tomás's eyes with a steadiness that Vera recognized—the steadiness of someone who had already accepted what came next. "Threshold Group's legal department has been building an asset-seizure framework for months. When Pallas Station enters catastrophic failure—when the reactor goes, when the life support dies—Helios's insurance liabilities collapse. Their stock price craters. And Threshold acquires the station's infrastructure, mining rights, and bonded labor contracts at approximately twelve percent of current market value."

The silence that followed was the loudest sound Vera had ever heard.

Then Tomás moved, and it was only Vera's hand on his arm—her trembling, scarred, exhausted hand—that stopped him. He was shaking too. Not from fear. From something older and hotter.

"You knew," he said. His voice was barely a whisper, but it filled the room. "You knew this was coming."

"We anticipated it. We didn't cause it. There's a difference—"

"Three hundred people." Tomás's voice cracked like stone. "There are children at Junction Nine-C. Children, Kai."

"I know." And there it was—the sincerity. The quiet, careful sincerity that Kai only used when they meant something so deeply it scared them. Their hair pulsed a deep, wounded red. "I know, Tomás. That's why I'm telling you now. Threshold Group expected me to let it happen. To document the failure, transmit the data, and wait for extraction."

"But?" Vera said.

"But I've been living on this station for two years. I've been drinking the same recycled air. Eating the same protein paste. I've been—" Kai stopped. Their jaw worked. "I've been watching you people fight for scraps of dignity in a system designed to crush you, and I—" Another stop. The red in their hair flickered, unstable. "I'm not going to let eleven thousand people die for a corporate acquisition. That's not why I—I didn't sign up for—"

They trailed off. Their hand went to the tattoo at their throat—the heartbeat line, inked in permanent black against pale skin. It was still. Heartbeats should move. Vera realized with a sick lurch that the tattoo was a memorial. Someone's heartbeat, frozen at the moment of death. She'd never asked whose.

"Five minutes," Chen said from the doorway. Her voice was barely audible.

Vera's mind was doing what it always did in crisis—sorting, categorizing, filing. Threshold Group. A rival corporation. Embedded operative. Asset seizure. She'd been building a legal case against Helios for weeks, and the whole time there had been another player on the board, moving pieces she couldn't see, using people she—

She thought of Kai's hands on her shoulders in the dark corridor. The warmth of their breath against her neck. The way they'd said her name—Vera, just Vera—with a tenderness that had cracked something open in her chest that she'd spent years welding shut.

Had any of it been real? Or had it all been operational?

She couldn't think about that now. She couldn't think about that and also think about reactor sequences and thirty-second windows and the eleven thousand lives hanging in the balance like dust motes in failing light.

"Go," Vera said. Her voice didn't waver. It couldn't. "All of you. Go. We deal with this—Kai, we deal with this—after."

"Vera—"

"After."

Kai held her gaze for one long, terrible moment. Then they turned and followed Chen into the corridor.

Tomás was already gone.

Vera ran.

The cargo spokes were dark—fully dark now, the emergency lighting having abandoned this section entirely. She moved by memory and by feel, her hands finding handholds on the corridor walls, her body navigating the low-g with a miner's instinct she'd borrowed from years of watching Tomás. The station groaned around her, a deep structural sound that wasn't metaphor—actual metal warping under actual stress as the systems that maintained Pallas Station's integrity began to fail.

She counted junctions. Seven. Eight. The cargo bay, its massive doors sealed. Nine. A fork—left toward the maintenance shafts, right toward the reactor control junctions. She went right.

Her comm crackled. "Vera." Chen's voice, thin and compressed by distance and failing systems. "I'm at Seven-A. The junction is... modified."

"Modified how?"

"There's a secondary housing attached to the analog switch. It looks like—it's a detonation charge. Thermite-based, wired to the switch mechanism. If I throw this cutoff..."

"If you throw it?"

"It blows."

Vera stopped running. Her hand gripped a support strut so hard her knuckles screamed. The cold in her chest had spread to her limbs, her fingers, the scar on her palm.

"Tomás," she said into the comm. "Nine-F. Status."

A pause. Then his voice, flat and hard: "Same. Detonation charge. Someone rigged all three."

Three junctions. Three charges. Any attempt to manually abort the shutdown would trigger an explosion—localized, maybe, but enough to destroy the junction, kill whoever was standing there, and ensure the shutdown continued uninterrupted.

It was elegant. It was monstrous. It was exactly the kind of solution a corporate mind would design—a failsafe that turned the escape route into a death trap.

"Then we can't override it," Vera said. She didn't realize she'd sunk to her knees until the deck plating pressed cold against her shins. "The manual abort is compromised. The only way to stop the shutdown is the abort device. Sato. We need to find Sato."

Her comm crackled again. Not Chen. Not Tomás.

Kai.

"Vera." Their voice was barely a whisper. "There's something else."

She waited. She had nothing left. No legal argument, no clever strategy, no deflection sharp enough to cut through what she was about to hear.

"Threshold Group's sensor network detected a thermal signature leaving Pallas Station through maintenance airlock Twelve-Charlie approximately twenty minutes ago. An EVA transition—someone in a pressure suit, heading for a vessel in the belt. Approximately two hundred meters from the station."

The cold was complete now. It filled her entirely.

"Sato," Vera said. Not a question.

"We can't confirm identity from the thermal signature alone, but the timing, the trajectory, the airlock she used—it all fits. She has the abort device. She's off the station."

Twenty minutes ago. While Vera was organizing civilians at Junction Nine-C. While children were sobbing against sealed bulkheads. While Tomás was carrying injured miners through darkened corridors and Chen was calculating the mathematics of catastrophe—Administrator Sato had walked out an airlock and left them all to die.

And Kai had known. Had been standing in that ICC office, had watched Vera split them into teams, had listened to the countdown, and had waited until this exact moment to say it.

"You knew," Vera said. Her voice was very quiet. "You knew she was gone. You knew before I sent the teams. Before you told us—before you told me—"

"I didn't know about the detonation charges. I swear that, Vera. I swear on—Threshold's intelligence said Sato had the abort device and might try to remove it from the station. We didn't know she'd rigged the junctions. That wasn't in any of our models."

"Your models."

The word tasted like ash.

Four minutes. Maybe less now. Vera knelt in the dark of the cargo spoke with her hand on a support strut and her comm pressed against her ear, and she understood—with perfect, crystalline clarity—that she was going to have to decide.

Not whether to trust Kai. That question was already a wound, already bleeding, already a thing she would carry through whatever came next. The real decision was simpler and more terrible: Sato was out there. Somewhere in the belt, in the black, on a ship or in a suit, carrying the one device that could stop the shutdown. And the only person who had the sensor data to find her—the only person who could locate that thermal signature in the vast indifferent dark—was the man who had just confessed to spending two years lying to everyone Vera cared about.

The station groaned. Metal screamed somewhere distant.

"Vera." Kai's voice in her ear. Careful. Sincere. The voice they used when they meant it. "Let me help you find her."

She closed her eyes.

Three minutes.