The Wound Below
Lower ag smelled like wet soil over a grave. The lift doors opened on heat, green light, and the kind of silence that only followed something dying. Orla Quinn understood, in one brutal breath, that Halo Nine had not brought her down here to garden.
The freight lift shuddered to a stop and unlatched with a hydraulic gasp. Beyond it, the agricultural ring stretched out in a long curved corridor of glass, steel, and wounded green. Grow lamps burned in staggered strips overhead, some bright, some dim, some dead entirely. Moisture beaded on the interior panels and ran in slow silver lines down patched seams. To the left, tiered hydro walls climbed toward the arc of the ceiling, half lush and half withered. To the right, nursery bays stood under emergency sheeting, their transparent doors fogged from failed climate controls.
A smell rose beneath the damp warmth — not only soil, not only algae, but rot trying to hide under steriliser.
Yasmin stepped off the lift beside her and made a face. “Right. So this is less miracle of the future and more haunted salad.”
“Keep moving,” Soren said, though there was no heat in it.
Commander Rusk stood at the threshold with a slate in one hand and the sort of posture that suggested she had been born mid-crisis and found ordinary life vaguely insulting. Cargo drones rolled off the lift around them bearing the seed stock from Carrick — sealed trays of starter greens, medicinal cultures, dwarf fruit rootstock, spore packs, algae starter lines. The future, neatly stacked in white polymer crates.
“Acting ag lead is waiting in Bay Four,” Rusk said. “You get one orientation sentence from me, because that’s all the station can afford. Lower ag doesn’t just feed Halo Nine. It stabilises the oxygen exchange load when life-support cycling lags. If this ring fails, breathing gets expensive.”
Yasmin blinked. “Breathing wasn’t already expensive?”
Rusk gave her a flat look. “More expensive.”
That shut the question down neatly.
Soren keyed the cargo drones into line and looked at Orla. “Stay with the pallets.”
“As opposed to wandering into the lettuce wilderness?”
“Yes.”
“You do know repetition is not the same as authority.”
His mouth nearly moved. “It is when you’re concussed.”
Orla opened her mouth to answer and then shut it again, mostly because he was right and she hated the shape of that.
They moved.
The lower ring was nothing like the investor renders that had cycled through intake briefings on Earth. No sleek utopian elegance. No shining green paradise rotating serenely against the black. This place was labour with the skin peeled back. Catwalks slick with condensation. Manual pipe braces welded over older, rougher repairs. Emergency tape over cracks in glass partitions. Damp heat pressing against the skin with the intimate misery of an overcrowded boiler room. Everywhere, evidence of people trying to make life grow in a place that resented the attempt.
And still — still — beauty kept breaking through.
Vines trained over wire lattices in impossible emerald spirals. Dwarf citrus under grow globes, tiny green fruit hanging like lit beads. Towers of basil and mint sending up bright clean scent through the damaged air. Rows of lettuce in floating trays silvered at the roots. One whole wall of tomatoes, half the plants collapsed from stress, the other half stubbornly flowering as though disaster were merely weather.
Orla slowed without meaning to.
Soren noticed. “What?”
She stared through the glass into the rows of struggling growth. “It’s mad.”
“That narrows it down very little.”
“This,” she said softly. “Growing all this up here. Feeding people in orbit. Building a garden inside a wound.”
His gaze shifted from her face to the ring beyond the glass. Something unreadable darkened in it. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Halo Nine does like impossible jobs.”
An older woman in station greens came striding out of Bay Four before Orla could answer. She was broad-shouldered, silver-haired, and carried a tablet under one arm like a weapon she’d used before. One side of her coveralls was stained nutrient-blue from hip to cuff. Her name patch read VARGA.
She took one look at the cargo drones and swore with genuine feeling. “Those are my trays?”
“They are if you want them,” Rusk said.
“I wanted them six hours ago.”
“You were getting them six hours ago until berth four decided it had theatrical aspirations.”
Varga ignored that. Her eyes landed on Orla and Yasmin. “Botanical systems?”
“Yes,” Orla said.
“Good. You’re with me.” Varga turned before they could ask where and started walking. “And if either of you faints, do it somewhere I can hose down.”
Yasmin leaned toward Orla. “I like her.”
“I knew you would.”
Bay Four opened out into what had once been a central nursery hub. The scale of it hit Orla hard enough to stop her at the threshold. Tiered benches curved away under the arc of the ring, some packed with living green, some emptied and stripped clean, some holding only trays of blackened stems. Overhead rails carried mobile lamp arrays. Nutrient lines snaked under grated floors. Along the far wall, a bank of algae cylinders rose floor to ceiling, half lit from within with cloudy green light.
The other half were dark.
Personnel moved everywhere — techs, growers, medics, maintenance crew drafted into ag work by the look of them. The air pulsed with fans, pumps, shouted orders, and the tired mechanical heartbeat of a system running too close to failure.
Varga clapped once, loud enough to carry. “Listen up. Fresh intake’s here. That means if anybody kills the new girls before I’ve had them six hours, I’ll space you myself.”
Several heads turned. Nobody looked surprised enough to suggest she was joking.
Varga jabbed a finger at the nearest bench bank. “Nursery Three depressurised during the ring cascade two weeks ago. Nursery Two cooked itself trying to compensate during today’s dock hit. We have one viable starter lane left, a half-stable algae array, and exactly enough temper to make this work if no one gets sentimental. We need the new seed stock unpacked, acclimated, and transferred into emergency beds before the ring cycle drops again. If the algae fails, oxygen supplementation goes with it. If oxygen supplementation goes with it, the whole station gets twitchy.”
“Define twitchy,” Yasmin said.
Varga didn’t even blink. “Light-headed children. Mandatory ration reduction. Ops fights in corridors. A queue at med longer than prayer. The usual.”
Orla stepped closer to the nearest dark cylinder bank. “What happened to the algae?”
Varga followed her gaze. “Cascade contamination.”
“That isn’t a diagnosis.”
“No,” Varga said. “It’s the explanation I had time for.”
Orla crouched near the base feed and studied the residue ring around the coupling. Green-black staining. A sharp chemical tang under the algae smell. Not right.
Behind her, Soren was giving some quiet logistical order to the cargo drones. She could hear his voice under the ring noise even when she couldn’t make out the words. Annoying talent. Worse was the way her body kept noticing where he was in a room before her mind permitted it.
Varga thrust a slate into her hands. “Earthside records say you worked urban hydro grids in Belfast.”
Orla looked up. “Among other things.”
“Can you transplant under reduced pressure timing?”
“Yes.”
“Can you save stressed root stock from courier shock?”
“Yes.”
Varga tipped her chin toward Yasmin. “And you?”
Yasmin took the second slate. “Martian research domes. Root disease, algae balance, emergency grow-bed conversion, four years of telling engineers they were killing plants with optimism.”
Varga’s mouth twitched. “Good. You two can stay.”
“That’s kind of you,” Yasmin said.
“It wasn’t an invitation to charm me.”
“Pity. I’m excellent under fluorescent lighting.”
Varga turned on her heel and started barking assignments. Orla flicked through the slate in her hand. It was worse than she’d expected. Temperature drift across three bays. Nutrient imbalance in the emergency beds. Light loss in the east tier. Algae output unstable enough to make the oxygen graph look like a dying heartbeat.
“Where do we start?” Yasmin asked.
Orla stared at the numbers. “We don’t start. We triage.”
“That sounds sexier than gardening.”
“It rarely is.”
She raised her voice. “Nobody open those travel crates yet.”
A maintenance tech already halfway through unclamping one looked up, offended. “We were told to unload.”
“If you dump temperature-shocked starter trays straight into beds running three degrees hot and wrong on salinity, you won’t be unloading,” Orla said. “You’ll be staging a funeral with root rot.”
The tech stared. “All right, then.”
“Bring me the bed readouts for rows C through H. Yasmin, check humidity integrity on the sealed crates and get me a live count. If any tray broke seal during docking, I want it isolated. Somebody find me the manual access to the nutrient mixer because the automated settings are lying.”
Soren had gone very still by the drones.
Rusk, still by the bay entrance, looked from Orla to Varga. “Useful.”
Varga snorted. “Of course she’s useful. She’d better be, we imported her.”
Orla should have flinched at that. Instead something fiercer came up. Maybe anger. Maybe the simple practical relief of being given a thing to do that she actually knew how to do.
Work had always been kinder than waiting.
Within minutes the bay changed shape around her. Cargo seals hissed. Data slates arrived. Yasmin moved like elegant trouble through the rows, unbothered by the limp now except when she forgot and then swore at it with artistry. Soren ended up carrying half the crate load himself after one drone glitched out and drove into a lamp rail. He handled the seed stock with infuriating gentleness for a man built like a riot.
Orla caught him lowering a tray of basil starts onto the acclimation bench as if it contained crown jewels.
She stopped beside him. “You know those are leaves, not explosives.”
His hands stayed braced on either side of the tray. “I’m aware.”
“You look offended by their fragility.”
“I’m offended by most fragility.”
Her gaze lifted. His had already dropped to her mouth.
The air between them did that dangerous tightening thing again.
A tech shouted from the far bench that Row G’s salinity sensor had flatlined. The moment broke before either of them could embarrass themselves or the station.
Orla exhaled and reached for the bench monitor. “Go help Varga with the west crates.”
“You ordering me now?”
“No. You’re merely in my way.”
“Charming.”
“I try.”
He leaned in just enough that only she could hear him. “You’re better when you forget to.”
Then he was gone, leaving heat behind like vandalism.
By the time the first forty minutes had passed, sweat had dried at the small of Orla’s back and dampened again. They’d stabilised four bench lanes, scrapped two, isolated a burst seal on a medicinal culture crate, and salvaged nearly all of the courier-shocked lettuce stock by lowering the lamp intensity and slowing the nutrient feed. Yasmin had bullied a maintenance pair into rewiring one of the emergency lamp arrays. Varga had personally threatened someone with a spanner and appeared calmer afterward.
It might almost have felt like progress if the oxygen graph over the algae bank hadn’t kept twitching downward.
Orla stepped away from the grow benches and went back to the cylinders.
The live ones glowed cloudy green from within. Fine bubbles climbed their interiors in uneven strings. The dead ones were darker than before, a murky swamp colour that made her stomach turn. At the base manifold, a thin sheen of residue had collected in the tray lip.
She dipped two fingers, rubbed, smelled.
Coolant.
Not enough to identify by brand, but enough to identify by wrongness.
Yasmin joined her, limping just enough to reveal the pain she’d been hiding out of spite. “Tell me you’ve found a sensor tantrum and not another catastrophe.”
Orla held up her stained fingers.
Yasmin’s expression sharpened. “That’s not nutrient medium.”
“No.”
“Coolant?”
“Yes.”
Yasmin stared at the manifold. “How in God’s name does coolant get into a sealed algae feed?”
“Not by prayer.”
They traced the line with their eyes. It ran from the cylinder base into a control box halfway up the wall, then disappeared under a plated access panel. The panel had fresh scoring around one corner.
Orla crouched. “Was this opened recently?”
“It shouldn’t have been,” Varga said from behind them.
Both women turned.
Varga had materialised carrying a replacement pump assembly on one shoulder. She set it down with a clang and came closer. “That panel is hard-sealed unless engineering or ag lead override it.”
Orla pointed to the scratches. “Then someone with override opened it.”
Varga’s face hardened. “Or someone with tools.”
Soren came over at the tone in her voice. “What?”
Yasmin nodded at the panel. “Your miracle station’s leaking coolant into the oxygen algae.”
His gaze dropped at once to the residue, then to the scored panel, and the whole set of his shoulders changed. Tighter. Colder.
“How old are those marks?” he asked.
“Fresh enough to still have metal dust in them,” Orla said.
Varga swore. “I told ops the cascade damage read wrong.”
“You told everyone everything,” Soren said. “Half the station survives by ignoring you until you become impossible.”
“Then here I am, impossible.”
An alarm chirped overhead.
Not the broad bay klaxon. Something smaller, sharper. Localised.
All four of them looked up as the oxygen graph over the algae bank dropped a full two points in front of their eyes.
Then another.
The entire bay seemed to notice at once. Conversations cut off. A tech at the far bench shouted for a reading check. One of the cylinder lights flickered, went out, came back weaker.
Soren’s comm lit. He answered without looking away from the bank. “Vale.”
Static, then a frantic voice. “Section H partial pressure dropping. We’ve got spread.”
“How fast?”
“Too fast.”
That was enough.
Soren turned toward the bay. “Everyone not on vital transfer, clear the central floor. Rebreathers on. If the shutters drop, you move to the inner corridor and you do not stop for equipment.”
Panic changed the sound of a room very quickly. Orla felt it happen around her like a tide trying to come in.
Varga barked louder. “No one runs. You run and I will break your knee myself.”
Oddly, that helped.
People moved.
Not calmly, but with purpose. Emergency masks came out of wall lockers. Techs started disconnecting non-essential benches. Yasmin grabbed a rebreather pack from the nearest hook and shoved it at Orla.
“You first.”
“Shared gallantry doesn’t suit you.”
“Take the bloody mask.”
Orla got it over her head just as the warning strips switched from amber to hard blue-white. Somewhere deeper in the ring, shutters began dropping one section at a time with blunt metallic bangs.
Soren strode to the algae control wall. “Can we stop the contamination spread?”
Orla joined him at the panel. “Maybe. But not from out here.”
Varga slammed her hand against the manual screen. Nothing. “Override locked.”
“By failure?” Soren asked.
Orla looked at the dead touch surface. Then at the coolant residue. Then at the scored access edge.
“No,” she said. “By intention.”
Yasmin made a furious sound. “Of course it is.”
The oxygen graph dropped another point.
Varga’s head snapped toward the west tier where two younger growers were fumbling with a crate clamp in open panic. “Out. Everybody not essential, out now.”
The room began to thin.
Soren keyed his comm again. “Ops, I need section H held open for manual intervention.”
A clipped reply came back. “Negative. Lockdown in thirty seconds.”
“If you seal the bank now, you kill the remaining live cylinders.”
“Orders stand.”
Soren’s expression became murderous in a way Orla suspected station policy formally discouraged. “You can tell whoever made that order to come breathe my apologies personally.”
He cut the channel before the answer came.
Orla was already pulling off the scored access cover with a salvage hook. Beneath it sat a manual valve wheel and a maintenance latch wired into the emergency cutoff. The wire had been neatly severed.
Not torn. Cut.
“We can bypass,” she said.
“How long?” Soren asked.
“Don’t ask stupid questions while I’m trying to save your atmosphere.”
One side of his mouth kicked despite everything. “There she is.”
Varga ripped open a tool locker and threw Orla a compact field driver. Yasmin caught the replacement line kit and crouched by the manifold. Across the bay, the last of the evac crew cleared the central floor. Shutters descended over the glass partitions one by one with brutal finality.
Section H began to seal.
“Ten seconds,” Soren said.
“Then stop counting and help,” Orla snapped.
He did.
Together they got the panel fully open. The inside was a mess of feed lines, manual purge levers, and one small blinking override display trying to look innocent. Orla tore into the casing, fingers moving on instinct now — strip wire, reroute signal, isolate coolant backflow, bypass auto-cut with manual priority.
Yasmin leaned in at her shoulder. “Your left feed line’s wrong.”
“It’s not.”
“It is if you’d like us not to explode.”
“That’s an unnecessarily persuasive point.”
Soren braced one hand above the panel and the other around the lower casing to hold it steady while the deck gave a small queasy shift under them. Up close, in rebreather gear and emergency light, he looked like the sort of sin survival stories warned women about. Sweat dampened the edge of his collar. The cut at his temple had reopened and tracked darkly along his cheekbone.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
Orla looked at the latching pins. “Hold that valve at a quarter turn when I say. Not before.”
“Done.”
“Varga, I need live output from the far bank.”
“On it.”
“Yasmin, if the manifold backspits, duck.”
Yasmin looked offended. “I’m very elegant in danger.”
“Duck elegantly.”
The shutter slammed down at the bay entrance.
They were sealed in.
Silence hit differently with the masks on — close, breath-loud, intimate in the worst possible way. Through the glass shutters beyond the bay, blurred figures gathered in the corridor, watching.
Orla finished the bypass, jammed the last line into place, and slapped the manual engage tab.
Nothing.
Her heart dropped.
Then one of the dark cylinders coughed weakly to life.
“Again,” Varga said.
Orla forced the purge lever down. This time something under the panel shrieked. Coolant spat from a feed seam in a foul green ribbon. Yasmin swore and threw herself sideways to clamp the breach with a pressure patch.
The oxygen graph hesitated.
Rose a fraction.
Then crashed harder than before.
“Damn it,” Orla hissed.
Varga checked the readout. “The far array’s choking.”
Soren’s head turned. “Where?”
Varga pointed to the overhead catwalk running above the cylinder bank. “Secondary vent stack. If it’s blocked, the live tanks are flooding on their own gas.”
Orla was already moving for the ladder.
Soren caught her harness. “No.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have line clearance.”
“I have legs.”
“You have a concussion.”
She yanked free. “Then it’ll be an exciting climb.”
He reached for her again. She was faster this time, boot on the ladder rung, one hand on the rail.
“Orla.”
She looked down through the mask visor.
Under the emergency light, his face had gone from hard to dangerous. “If you fall up there—”
“You catch me,” she said. “You’re getting repetitive.”
There was a beat where he seemed to consider physically dragging her back down and letting the whole ring suffocate on principle.
Then he climbed after her.
The catwalk ran above the algae bank in a narrow grate two storeys up, slick with condensation and vibrating faintly from the struggling pumps below. The ring curved away on either side, green and silver and failing. Orla’s shoulder screamed in protest at every pull. She ignored it.
Halfway up, the rebreather hissed louder.
Oxygen feed compensation.
Not a good sign.
She reached the top rail, hauled herself onto the catwalk, and felt the station spin once beneath her boots. Soren came up right behind, one hand flattening briefly against the small of her back to steady her before he could seem to stop himself.
“Still think this was clever?” he asked.
“No,” she said honestly. “But I’m here now.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“Nothing about me has been reassuring to you.”
His eyes flashed through the clear faceplate. “You have no idea.”
She turned before that could land properly.
The vent stack sat at the far end of the catwalk, a ribbed pressure throat with a manual wheel and sensor cluster. Vapour poured from one side seam in hot wet gusts. The readout beside it was dead. Below them, Varga and Yasmin looked small and sharp as tools, both staring up through the green glow.
Orla knelt by the wheel and touched the housing. It was hot enough to bite through the glove.
“Blocked?” Soren asked.
“No.” She peered at the seam. “Forced shut.”
He crouched beside her. “Can you open it?”
“With leverage.”
“I have that.”
She should not have looked at him then. But she did.
Even through visors and mask gear and fatigue and the whole ugly station roaring around them, there it was again — the impossible certainty that every time she got too close to him, something in the air lost its manners.
She broke the look first. “On three.”
Together they heaved the wheel.
Nothing.
“Again,” he said.
They pulled harder. Metal shrieked. The catwalk trembled under them. Sweat slid down Orla’s spine.
On the third effort the wheel gave all at once.
So did the latch under Soren’s hand.
The vent stack blew open in a violent gout of pressure. Vapour burst over them. The catwalk went slick. One of Orla’s boots lost purchase on the wet grate and skidded sideways into empty air.
For one split impossible second, she was falling.
Soren caught her hard.
Not by the hand. By the whole of her, one arm around her waist, the other braced to the rail so violently the impact rang through the metal. Orla slammed against his chest, boots scraping for purchase over nothing. Below them the algae bank blurred green and depth and death.
Her breath tore raggedly against the mask.
“Look at me,” he said.
She did.
Always the same command. Always the same terrible effect.
“Get your feet under you.”
“I’m trying.”
“No.” His voice sharpened, lower now, intimate even through the comm filters. “You’re panicking. There’s a difference.”
The truth of it embarrassed her in the very second she least needed embarrassment.
The catwalk shuddered.
His hand tightened at her waist.
“Orla,” he said again, calmer. “Breathe with me.”
The memory of ascent hit her like a second body colliding with this one — the shuttle shaking apart around them, his sleeve in her fist, his voice teaching her lungs how to behave.
In. Hold. Out.
His eyes never left hers.
She matched him. Once. Again.
The edges of the world stopped tilting.
“That’s it,” he said.
Slowly, humiliatingly, wonderfully, she found the rail with one boot, then the grate with the other. He did not let go until both feet were planted and even then only by degrees, as if his body had missed the message his hands were sending.
“You can say I was right,” he said at last.
“Don’t ruin this by becoming smug.”
He gave a rough breath that might have been a laugh or might have been the aftershock of almost losing her.
Through the visor, his gaze dropped to her mouth.
The air between them changed shape again.
It would have been incredibly easy, Orla thought with sudden stupid clarity, to kiss a man in a crisis and mistake it for gravity. Worse — it might not have been a mistake.
Below them, Yasmin’s voice cracked over the local comm. “I hate to interrupt what I assume is a very tense and beautiful near-death experience, but the oxygen graph is climbing only if someone down here actually purges the secondary feed.”
Reality, rude as ever.
Soren tore his gaze from Orla’s face and keyed his collar mic. “Purge it.”
“Already doing that,” Yasmin said. “Try to keep up.”
Orla forced herself back to the vent stack. The release had worked; pressure was equalising. She reached into the housing, fingers finding the secondary purge pin jammed half-closed by a small twist of metal lodged in the hinge.
Not damage. Deliberate obstruction.
“Found something,” she called.
“What?” Varga shouted.
Orla yanked the metal free and held it up.
A trimmed wedge from a tool blade.
The moment it came loose, the vent stack cleared with a thunderous hiss.
Below them, cylinder lights stabilised one by one in a rising wash of green. The oxygen graph climbed back above the emergency floor. Not good. But no longer death.
A cheer went up from the corridor outside the shutters.
Yasmin, leaning over the manifold with both hands slimed dark green, looked up and shouted, “You’re welcome, civilisation.”
Orla sat back on the catwalk grate before her knees could decide to collapse without consulting her.
Soren stayed crouched beside her, close enough that she could still feel the memory of his grip at her waist in places no one should have had permission to touch after one day.
“You all right?” he asked.
It was the same question from the terminal.
It landed differently now.
“No,” she said, because lying to his face felt impossible in this light. “But I’m vertical.”
The ghost of that first almost-smile touched his mouth. “That’s becoming a habit.”
“It’s all I have.”
He looked as though he might say something devastatingly careful.
Instead the local comm sparked again with Varga’s voice. “If the two of you are done dramatising the laws of physics, get down here. I want that vent housing opened before someone else in this ring decides to get imaginative.”
Soren closed his eyes once. “There goes the romance.”
“Was there romance?” Orla asked.
His gaze slid back to her. “You tell me.”
The descent was worse than the climb because her legs had remembered fear by then. At the bottom, Varga stripped off one glove and held out her hand for the metal wedge. Orla passed it over.
The older woman turned it in her fingers. One end had been filed flat to jam neatly in the hinge track. The other still showed the machine polish of a station tool.
“This didn’t shear off in an accident,” Varga said.
“No,” Soren said. “It didn’t.”
He took the wedge, inspected the cut edge, then looked at the access panel marks again. The whole bay had quieted now that the immediate danger had passed. Workers moved back in carefully, glancing more than once at the cylinder bank as if it might betray them again for sport.
Yasmin peeled off her gloves and flexed cramped fingers. “So. To summarise. Someone cut the panel, fed coolant into the algae line, severed the emergency wire, jammed the vent, and waited for the station to call it a systems tantrum.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds bad,” Orla said.
Yasmin stared at her. “I am going to assume the head knock has affected your standards.”
Varga looked at Soren. “You hearing sabotage yet, or must I set something on fire to help you?”
“I was hearing sabotage at the coolant.”
“Good.”
Rusk’s voice came over Soren’s comm sharp and immediate. “Report.”
“Lower ag stabilised for now,” Soren said. “Contamination and vent block are manual. Repeat, manual.”
A pause.
Then: “You’re sure?”
His face went cold. “I am not in the habit of inventing crimes for entertainment.”
Another pause. Longer.
“Lock the bay down,” Rusk said. “Nobody in or out without my authorisation. I’m sending security.”
“Send engineering first.”
“I’m sending both.”
The channel cut.
Varga let out a tired, vicious breath. “Took her long enough.”
Soren looked around the bay. “No one leaves. Anyone who touched the panel, the manifold, or the vent stack gives a statement. Varga, I need your full maintenance log for the last seventy-two hours. Yasmin, Orla — if you’re steady enough, I want you to walk me through exactly what you saw before we disturb anything.”
Orla nodded. “Fine.”
Yasmin pointed at her own chest. “I would like it noted that despite almost dying twice, I remain cooperative and stunning.”
“Duly recorded,” Soren said dryly.
He followed Orla back to the control wall while Varga started shouting for bay closure. Up close, with the emergency over and the adrenaline ebb beginning to bite, the whole scene looked uglier. The coolant stain. The precise cut wire. The scored cover corners. Deliberate. Patient. Someone had wanted this system dead.
Soren crouched beside the open panel while Orla pointed out the severed line, the residue tray, the unusual scratch pattern around the latch screws. His attention was exact, furious, intelligent in a way that made her trust him despite the fact that trust after one day should have felt foolish.
Yasmin leaned against the cylinder frame, pale under the grow lights now that the crisis had loosened its grip. “I’d like a reward for this.”
“What kind?” Orla asked.
“A bath. A sedative. A person with broad shoulders making me tea.”
Soren glanced up. “You’ll get water rations and a corridor argument.”
“See?” Yasmin said to Orla. “This is why he needs improvement.”
“I’m sure he’s devastated.”
“Not yet,” Soren said.
He reached into the panel housing with gloved fingers and found something tucked behind the override unit.
At first Orla thought it was another metal shaving.
Then he drew it fully into the light.
A slim data key. Station issue. Marked with a yellow security stripe.
Yasmin straightened. “Well. That seems pointed.”
Soren turned it over. No visible name. Just serial etching and dried coolant residue at one end. He looked at the override screen, then at the dead touch surface.
“Can the local log still be accessed?” Orla asked.
“Maybe.” He stood, crossed to the secondary console, and thumbed power into the manual maintenance screen. The display sputtered twice, then came alive in ugly monochrome.
Varga returned at his shoulder. “Security’s outside.”
“They can wait.” Soren slotted the data key into the emergency port.
The console processed.
Once. Twice.
Then a maintenance log bloomed onto the screen in clean block text.
MANUAL OVERRIDE REGISTER SECTION H ALGAE ARRAY ACCESS LEVEL 4
Below it scrolled timestamps — vent cycle, purge lock, feed shut, emergency bypass disabled.
And beside each command, one authorisation stamp.
Orla read the line once and felt the whole room tilt in a way that had nothing to do with concussion.
Soren read it too.
Nobody breathed for a second.
Because every sabotage command in the system — every cut, every lockout, every poisoned feed that had nearly suffocated the ring — had been authorised under the same station credentials.
VALE S.