3. Burning Bridges at Callisto

Kira had forty minutes to decide. That was how long it would take for the shift supervisor to arrive for the morning handoff, and from that point forward, every movement she made inside the station would be logged, timestamped, and reviewed. She knew this not because she was paranoid, but because she had helped design the logging system herself, three years ago, as part of a station-wide security upgrade she had considered a point of professional pride. She sat in the monitoring bay and read the message again. I know about the signal. You need to leave the station. Tonight. No sender ID. The message had arrived through the station's general anonymous tip channel — a system nominally meant for safety reports and equipment malfunctions, which almost no one used and which she had forgotten existed. Whoever sent it knew the signal was real. Whoever sent it had apparently anticipated that she would find it, or had known she'd already found it, which was a different and much more unsettling possibility. She thought about the three drives in her jumpsuit pocket. They pressed against her ribs like small, warm stones. She could go to her supervisor. That was the obvious, sanctioned, career-safe choice. Hand over the data. File a formal anomaly report. Let the institution handle it. Trust the process. The process, a quiet voice in the back of her mind noted, was run by the same institution that would receive the report. And institutions, in her experience, had a particular talent for deciding that certain truths were inconvenient. Kira was not an especially suspicious person by nature. She believed in evidence and logic and the careful, unglamorous work of science. She did not tend toward conspiracy thinking. But she was also very good at her job, and her job had trained her to recognize patterns, and the pattern she was looking at right now suggested that a message warning her to run, arriving within hours of her discovery, from someone who already knew about it, was not a coincidence she could afford to ignore. She made her decision at the forty-two second mark — the same interval as the signal, which she found grimly poetic. She would go. But first, she had to be smart about it. Over the next twenty-seven minutes, Kira moved through the station with the careful unhurried pace of someone doing nothing unusual. She swung by the equipment room and checked out a portable analysis kit — legitimate, logged, entirely normal for a senior engineer running field diagnostics. She stopped in the break room and made herself a cup of coffee she didn't drink. She smiled at a junior analyst heading to his bunk and asked him something forgettable about the weather report for the outer ring. She returned to her locker, retrieved her travel bag — she always kept a packed bag in her locker, a habit from years of emergency deployment rotations — and added the analysis kit and three fresh power cells. Then she walked to the station's secondary docking bay, the one used for maintenance and supply shuttles rather than the main passenger terminal, because the secondary bay's check-out logs had a known twelve-minute sync delay that her team had flagged for repair eighteen months ago and which facilities had never gotten around to fixing. A supply hauler named the Riven Nail was scheduled to depart at 06:15 for Ganymede Station. The cargo manifest listed machine parts, filtered water containers, and two cases of maintenance tools. Kira had cross-referenced the ship's registration that morning: independent freight operator, license number GL-4477, captain listed as one Torin Avery. She had looked up Torin Avery too. The search had been illuminating. Four years ago, Avery had been a decorated pilot for the Jovian Transport Authority — commendations for difficult maneuvers in high-debris fields, a perfect safety record, a rising career. Two years ago, he'd been stripped of his JTA license following an incident that the official record described vaguely as a "breach of operational protocol" and that the unofficial forums described, in rather more colorful terms, as him refusing a direct order to alter a passenger manifest under suspicious circumstances. He now operated independent freight runs on the Jupiter-Saturn corridor, which was a polite way of saying he flew cargo nobody else wanted to touch, for clients nobody else wanted to ask questions about, through routes that weren't always the ones listed on his documentation. In other words: a man who knew how to move without being tracked. Kira found the Riven Nail in berth nine and knocked on the cargo door. It took a long time for the door to open. When it did, the man standing inside was tall and angular, with the kind of face that looked like it had been designed for expressing skepticism. He had grease on his left forearm and a mug of something in his right hand, and he looked at Kira with the slow, assessing look of someone who made fast decisions for a living. "You're not a machine part," he said. "No," Kira agreed. "I'm not." "Or a filtered water container." "Also correct." He looked at her travel bag. He looked at the equipment kit over her shoulder. He looked at her face, reading something there — she wasn't sure what she looked like in that moment, but she suspected it was the precise face of someone in significant trouble trying very hard not to show it. "Ganymede?" "To start with," she said. "I have payment." "I don't know you." "You don't need to." Another long look. The ventilation fans cycled somewhere in the ship's belly. Distantly, a cargo loader beeped its warning signal in another part of the bay. "I charge extra," Avery said finally, "for passengers who make my manifest complicated." "I can pay extra," Kira said. He stepped back from the door. "You get the seat behind the cargo crates. No questions while I'm flying. We talk after we've cleared Callisto's traffic corridor. Agreed?" "Agreed." She stepped aboard the Riven Nail. Behind her, the cargo door sealed shut with a low metallic thud that felt, to her racing heart, like the closing of one chapter and the uncertain opening of another. On her personal comm, pushed to silent in her bag, a notification was already loading: a summons from the station's head of security, requesting her immediate presence in the main office. The Riven Nail's engines began to cycle up. Kira sat down behind the cargo crates, pressed her back to the cool metal wall, and breathed.