Chapter 3: “Whispers of Conspiracy”

A Minor Job, a Major Gut Feeling

The designation was all it had: CL-9A. A mining platform clinging to a dead rock, orbiting a sun no one remembered. The air hung dense and unmoving, a gritty soup of pulverized ore, stale recycled oxygen, and the artificial sweetness of hydroponics straining to survive in a bay that hadn’t seen maintenance in decades. The platform felt exhausted, a monument to a forgotten future. The station’s power grid throbbed with a low hum, struggling against the high-pitched scream of overworked drills and the constant crackle of static from failing comms. Outside, the harsh sunlight scorched the cracked surface and heated the viewports, turning the scene into a mirage that shimmered with heat and silence, a deceptive calm before the storm. It made me want to get back to the accustomed, predictable hum of an engine.

Guards patrolled in staggered intervals, their stunners gleaming far too bright against the dust-choked backdrop. Their expressions were blank, yet their eyes flicked constantly between the workers—nervous, alert, anticipating something violent. The whole atmosphere hummed with strain, dense and heavy like the dust that coated every surface. This wasn’t a mining operation. It was a prison, a silent, suffocating trap.

A subtle quiver resonated through my boots, a vibration that mirrored the disquiet twisting in my stomach. Dust swirled at my ankles, clinging to my clothes, abrasive and ever-present. And behind it all: Mik’s loader drone, already spinning up. Its rhythmic whine pulsed like a second heartbeat in the oppressive silence.

We docked hard. Indira shuddered as the clamps engaged, its engines offering a final, reluctant groan. Jaime muttered something about the alignment thrusters, his usual sarcasm subdued, the edges worn dull. The ship didn’t like this place. Neither did we, I sensed, a shared apprehension binding us together.

Vos’s voice snapped through the comm like a whip.

“Unload the crates. No questions. No contact. We’ve got thirty-two to drop and zero margin for complications. I want this done in under an hour.”

His gaze swept the crew, pausing a breath longer on me. His hand, tightening around his stunner, sent a silent, chilling message. His tone lacked its usual veneer of irony—just clipped orders, surgical and cold, like a surgeon preparing for a difficult, painful procedure.

I nodded, even as something in me bristled at the command. Not here. The moment the ramp dropped, the heat punched into me, a physical blow. I flinched and pulled my gloves tighter. The air shimmered. Dust immediately crept into the folds of my clothes and settled on my skin like a second, suffocating layer, a grim embrace.

Before focusing on the crew or the delivery, I took in the broader scene. The station wasn’t much—a half-ring of prefab units clinging to the edge of a crater, sun-bleached. A derelict plastic shuttle lay half-buried near a leaning comms tower—its cracked canopy and broken wing mirroring our ship’s fragile optimism. The drone’s motors cut through the oppressive quiet, a sound too alive in a place so close to collapse.

Beyond the loading dock stretched an endless landscape of scorched rock and rust-colored dust, dotted with skeletal husks of mining rigs long since abandoned. Nothing moved. Nothing grew. This place didn’t just resist life—it crushed it.

My chest tightened. The weight of Midreach, Lena, the kids—all of it pressed against me, a crushing burden I thought I’d escaped. And here I was again, drawn back into the very heart of the darkness I’d fled.

Vos descended from the upper deck, his flight jacket half-zipped, engine grease smudged across his collarbone like a badge of inevitability. The datapad in his hand looked heavier than it should have, his fingers drumming against it with barely restrained agitation. His face was all strain—no wry smile, no muttered commentary. Just quiet calculation. He scanned the horizon. Then me. Then away again. His jaw clenched. This is a bad idea, his eyes seemed to say. But we don’t have a choice. This is a trap. He gripped his stunner tighter, the knuckles white.

The drone’s hum deepened, now sounding more like a warning than a function.

The workers moved with slow, practiced resignation. Dust and grime stained their uniforms. Shoulders slumped. Faces hollowed by fatigue and sun exposure. Eyes that had long since stopped hoping flicked toward the guards, then quickly back to their tasks. Every motion was calculated, careful. Too careful. As if they feared what might happen if they moved too fast—or too slow. Their very movements were a silent scream of despair. This wasn’t just oppression. It was trauma, calcified into routine.

A deeper reverberation rose through the soles of my boots, more insistent. And then I noticed it—not a sound or a shape, yet a shift. A faint change in rhythm. The workers slowed. Their eyes darted. Their shoulders tensed. It was collective and unspoken. A silent alert. The guards noticed it too. Their hands hovered a little closer to their weapons. Something was wrong, a silent alarm echoing through the dust-choked air.

The drone’s hum intensified, no longer ambient. Urgent.

Then I saw them.

A woman—late thirties, maybe. Lines of exhaustion carved into her face. She clutched something close to her chest, half-hidden behind a stack of crates. Her clothes were threadbare, sun-bleached, patched with care and desperation. Her body showed strain, yet also fierce protectiveness, a primal instinct.

A younger figure, too still, was partially obscured by her side. Her limbs too thin, her gaze too tired, too quickly averted. In her hand, a jagged scrap of metal—a weapon or maybe just something solid to hold in a world where nothing felt safe. I felt the memory of my children like a punch to the chest—her hollow eyes, her too-thin frame, that strange intelligence in her stare. She'd seen too much. More than I had, perhaps. Still almost a child. So terribly vulnerable. So tragically accustomed.

They weren’t part of the crew. They weren’t supposed to be seen. But I saw them.

And their eyes flicked toward me. Desperate. Defiant. A plea buried beneath layers of practiced weariness, a silent scream for help. Their jaws clenched, yet their gazes never wavered.

Mik wiped sweat from his brow, revealing the faded glint of a ring worn almost to smoothness. He adjusted his grip on his datapad, jaw tight, and glanced at me. There was a flicker of something in his eyes—a dawning understanding, as if he, too, recognized the fragility of the moment, a silent acknowledgment of the danger. This wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t just a delivery. It was a scene. And I was part of it. Whether I wanted to be or not. My gut twisted. Dread settled low in my spine, a cold, heavy stone.

The woman’s eyes flicked toward the guards. Then back to me. The message was clear:

“Don’t look away.”

The guards were watching now. Not casually scanning. Watching her. Watching me. Their grips on their stunners tightened, their eyes narrowing with suspicion. They were waiting. For a signal. For an excuse. The shudder underfoot intensified again. It wasn't the ground moving; it felt human, emotional. The drone continued to hum, its presence now almost unbearable in the charged silence. And in the center of it all: the woman, the small figure. Their vulnerability, their exposure, felt like a silent accusation against the universe’s indifference.

* * *

Vos's Warning

Back on Indira, the recycled air tasted faintly metallic, a familiar tang that clung to the back of my throat. The low hum of the engines vibrated through the floorplates, an insistent, physical presence in the quiet of the engine room. Mik was still muttering about his schedule, meticulously polishing a wrench with obsessive precision. Yet the sarcasm he usually wielded like armor was gone, replaced by a strained, jittering stillness, a silent scream of frustration. The flickering fluorescent lights cast long shadows across the bulkheads, amplifying the disquiet. The faint scent of burnt coolant—ghost of our near-catastrophe—still hung in the air, an unsettling reminder of how close we’d come to disaster.

I pulled out the encrypted chip I’d found in the engine room, its cool metal a stark divergence from the heat building in my chest. This wasn’t just unstable. It was sabotage. And the initial logs had hinted at something far beyond a simple misdirection. I didn't use the ship’s systems. I didn’t trust them. Instead, I wired into the mainframe with my modified ISAC unit—a decommissioned console salvaged from an old research vessel. The cold surface of the metal casing felt almost soothing beneath my fingers. The smell of aged circuitry and melted insulation lingered, grounding me in the moment. The encryption was sophisticated. Not corporate. Custom. Dense layers of protection, designed by someone who understood both security and plausible deniability. Each keystroke echoed like a warning. The rhythmic clack of keys joined the deep drone of the ship, creating a dissonant accompaniment to the growing stress. The first few decrypt attempts failed.

"Invalid key."

"Corrupted data."

"Decryption failed."

Frustration rose like bile. I changed algorithms. Recalibrated the parser. Then—something strange. The corrupted strings weren’t random. Repeated sequences emerged, buried inside what should’ve been noise. I recognized the pattern. Military obfuscation protocol—meant to mislead, to exhaust any casual probe. This wasn’t accidental. It was buried on purpose. The floorplates shuddered more intensely. I gritted my teeth and kept working. Then—finally—a flicker of success. A cascading stream of data unfolded across the display: five shipping manifests, each stamped with humanitarian aid routing tags. Medivac shipments. Unity relief. Food aid. Yet cross-referencing them against our route logs made the truth impossible to ignore. None of the colony destinations existed. On paper, the shipments were rerouted to holding stations. Ghost stations. Then reassigned. Sold. Washed through a web of corporate shells designed to disappear them. Someone had built a pipeline of theft and hidden it behind the illusion of charity. This wasn’t just greed. This was organized, systemic exploitation, a cold, calculated act of evil.

My pulse thundered in my ears. I kept scrolling. A single name jumped out from the metadata—a customs officer on Midreach. I knew the name. I knew the face. I had worked beside them in the drydock, years ago. Their betrayal hit like a punch to the gut. I tasted acid at the back of my throat. Then another layer—deeper. A hidden metadata stream. Different encryption. I switched tactics. The unit's cooling fans spun faster, their pitch rising, mirroring the frantic beat of my heart. My fingers flew. My breath came short. And what emerged was worse than I imagined. An AI. Or something like one. A black-ops program designed not just for surveillance, yet for destabilization. Planting false data, engineering resource crises, creating manufactured dependencies. The aid theft was part of a larger network, not just to profit, yet to control. To break down planetary infrastructure, making them ripe for corporate acquisition. This was no longer smuggling. This was a slow-motion coup, a silent war being waged against the vulnerable.

The sickly-sweet floral scent, identical to the one on the crates and the platform, intensified, confirming its role as a marker, an unsettling signature of the conspiracy. The console sputtered, froze. I cursed, hard and sharp, rebooted the sequence, and pushed through. This wasn’t just about catching someone in the act. This was about saving lives. And stopping whatever came next. This is bigger than I imagined. It’s a network. And I’m going to bring it down, even if it costs me everything.

A sudden power flicker cut through the engine room. The lights dimmed for half a second. The console blinked. The quiet that followed felt loud. Then, stabilization. The data stream smoothed out. I sat back, jaw tight, heart pounding. The holographic readout faded slowly, node by node, dissolving into the gloom. The truth was heavier than I expected. Yet it was mine now. I pulled the chip, wiped the console, encrypted everything—triple-layered and buried. The only access point was in a private archive known only to me. I had the proof. Now I had to decide what to do with it. Before I could move, a hand touched my shoulder—cold, steady. I turned. Tala stood behind me, silent. Her gaze was not on the screen, yet on my face, reading the stress in my jaw, the rapid pulse at my throat. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. Her eyes held something more than sympathy. They held understanding, a quiet promise of solidarity. This time, I wouldn’t bury the truth. The fans kept spinning, loud in the quiet, like the ticking of a clock counting down to whatever came next.

* * *

The Hidden Numbers

Indira's engines droned on, a steady backdrop to the frantic whir of my decryption unit. The raw data from the chip, still burning in my mind, revealed the vast humanitarian fraud and the disquieting outline of the AI destabilization program. Yet one piece remained stubbornly disconnected: the thermal signature of the child I’d tracked through the vents in the dead of night, and the sabotage I'd found in the engine room. My gut screamed they were linked, a quiet, insistent alarm. Sweat slicked my palms. My fingers ached. An accustomed weariness settled in my bones. It wasn't just physical; it was the constant thrum of my body adjusting, the quiet hum of the estrogen implant beneath my skin, the constant awareness of the small, private routines that kept me whole. Sometimes, the sheer daily grind of it all felt absurd.

"We can fly faster than light," I thought, an accustomed, bitter mantra, "but they can't find a better way for this than shoving a plastic dilator up there to keep everything from closing up after surgery?"

I shook my head, clearing the thought. No time for such pointless frustrations. There was a child to find. This wasn't just data—it was a puzzle box with a ticking clock strapped to its side, and I had to solve it before time ran out. It was a familiar feeling, this intense focus, this drive to fix what was broken. It was the same drive that had propelled me through the toughest parts of my life, the same will that had seen me through the long, painful road to becoming myself. Every new challenge, every solved problem, was another affirmation. I was here. I was real. And I was capable.

I keyed in a new sequence, re-running analysis on the obscured metadata stream I’d glimpsed within the fraud files. My fingers danced over the keyboard, every movement a deliberate gamble. The decryption unit growled in protest. Error messages flashed across the screen.

"Invalid key."

"Corrupted data."

"Decryption failed."

Each failure sent a fresh spike of adrenaline through my chest. I switched tactics—brute-force, then known plaintext attacks, frequency analysis. Nothing held. Until it did. In the corrupted mess, I saw it: a repeated numerical sequence. At first glance, noise. Yet buried beneath the surface, it formed a watermark. A pattern disguised as entropy. It wasn’t random. It was intentional. A hidden key. I adjusted the parameters. The steady clack of keys filled the room, a frantic opposition to the constant internal resonance of the ship. A deeper vibration resonated through the deck, growing stronger. The floral scent hanging in the air—faint, sweet, sickly—intensified until it curled in the back of my throat. This wasn’t an oversight. This was a delay tactic. Someone was buying time. And I was running out of it. What if I was wrong? What if I was chasing shadows? What if it was just my grief whispering in the dark? My grief, always a dull ache, sharpened into a desperate resolve. No. This wasn’t about guilt anymore. This was about responsibility, a burden I willingly embraced, just as I’d embraced myself. My family might be gone, but their loss had forged something unbreakable in me. I wouldn't let another innocent be lost. Then—breakthrough. The screen shivered, and a cascade of data spilled free. Not manifests. Not cargo routes. Images. Blurry, grainy, low-resolution stills pulled from deep within the ship’s ventilation system. Each photo was timestamped. Each aligned perfectly with the power fluctuations they’d logged earlier. The heat signature matched the bleed in the conduit housing. This wasn’t background interference. This was evidence. I leaned in. The photos showed a figure—small, slight, accustomed from my earlier thermal scans—working near the main power conduit. The face was hidden by angle and shadow, but the posture, the strain in their hands, the ill-fitting uniform… it wasn’t just sabotage. It was intentional. Calculated. The figure manipulated a series of wires with practiced efficiency, then paused to retrieve something. A comms unit. Compact. Corporate-issue. The encryption signature matched a known format: Union Central Aid Group. But these weren’t their official protocols. They were off-book. Unauthorized. Hidden in plain sight. My stomach dropped. A cold sweat broke across my back. This wasn’t just sabotage. It was a conspiracy. Worse—this small, hidden person onboard was coordinating it. And I was standing in the middle of it, a pawn in a game I was only just beginning to understand.

The engine's thrum deepened around me, like Indira itself had sensed the shift. My voice was low. Steady. Firm.

"This is a threat. A direct one. To the ship. To us. And I’m going to stop it, no matter what it takes."

© 2025 by Grace Ann Hansen