The door swung open.
Alex had approximately half a second to make a decision. He could hide—impossible, the quarters were too small. He could confront Voss directly—dangerous, given what he'd just discovered. Or he could do what engineers did best: improvise.
He dropped to his knees beside the desk, yanked a multi-tool from his belt, and began unscrewing the access panel on the floor's cable conduit.
The door opened fully. Voss stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim corridor light. He was still fully dressed, his beard neatly trimmed, his eyes sharp and alert despite the hour.
"Mercer." His voice was calm, but there was an edge to it. "What are you doing in my quarters?"
Alex looked up, forcing his expression into something resembling professional irritation. "The main data trunk runs through the floor conduits in this section. The network has been dropping packets all evening. I've been tracing the fault." He gestured at the open panel. "Your room is node seven. The coupling is corroded."
Voss stared at him. The silence stretched for three seconds. Five. Seven.
"You couldn't have waited until morning?"
"The network runs life support telemetry. If it fails completely, we lose automated monitoring on the CO2 scrubbers." Alex shrugged. "I don't sleep much anyway."
Another pause. Then Voss smiled, a thin expression that didn't reach his eyes. "Your dedication is commendable. But in the future, I'd appreciate a heads-up before you enter my private quarters."
"Understood." Alex stood, pocketing his multi-tool. "The coupling's fine, by the way. The problem's further down the line. I'll trace it tomorrow."
He walked past Voss, keeping his gait steady and unhurried. His heart was hammering against his ribs. The laptop. The blinking light. The encrypted transmission. Every instinct told him to run, but he forced himself to walk, to nod goodnight, to close the door behind him with a soft click.
He made it exactly fifteen meters down the corridor before his legs started shaking.
Jo was still in the comms alcove when Alex burst in. She took one look at his face and straightened in her chair.
"What happened?"
"Voss." Alex dropped into the secondary seat, his voice low. "His satellite phone is gone. Hidden or destroyed. And his laptop was running an encrypted transmission protocol. The same protocol you detected on the shortwave band."
"Voss is the one transmitting." Jo's expression hardened. "He's the source."
"He's something. I don't know what yet. But he almost caught me in his quarters. I had to pretend I was fixing a network fault."
"Did he buy it?"
"I don't know." Alex rubbed his face with both hands. "He's hard to read. He's always been hard to read. But if he suspects I know something..." He trailed off.
"If he suspects, then we're in danger." Jo turned back to her console. "I've been monitoring the signal. It's been transmitting in regular bursts, every ninety minutes. The next burst is due in about forty."
"What's in the transmission?"
"It's heavily encrypted. Military-grade. I can't crack it with the station's hardware." She paused. "But I don't need to crack it to know what it's saying."
"What do you mean?"
"The transmission pattern. Burst mode, fixed intervals, low bandwidth. It's not a conversation. It's a beacon. A homing signal."
Alex felt his stomach drop. "He's telling someone where we are."
"Someone who's already on the ice shelf." Jo pulled up a map on her screen. "I've been triangulating the signal's destination. It's bouncing off a relay somewhere in this sector." She pointed to a spot on the map, roughly sixty kilometers east of the station. "There's nothing there. No research stations, no geological survey sites. Just ice."
"And someone is there. Receiving Voss's signal."
"Receiving it, and possibly transmitting back. I can't confirm without better equipment, but the signal strength modulation suggests a two-way handshake."
They sat in silence, absorbing the implications. Voss was in contact with someone off-station. Someone who had no official presence on the ice shelf. Someone who had arrived in secret, before the quake, and was now waiting somewhere in the endless polar night.
"Why?" Alex finally asked. "Why go through all this trouble? The quake, the exposed body, the secret transmissions. What's the endgame?"
Jo didn't answer immediately. She was staring at her screen, her brow furrowed. "There's something else. When I was analyzing the seismic data from the icequake, I found an anomaly I couldn't explain. A secondary signature, buried in the primary wave."
"An explosive."
"More than that. The explosive wasn't just designed to fracture the ice. It was shaped. Directional. Almost like..." She hesitated. "Almost like it was designed to expose something specific. Something someone knew was there."
"The body of Mikhail Orlov."
"Yes. But why? Why would Voss want to expose a body he helped bury?"
"Unless he didn't help bury it." Alex leaned forward. "Unless he's not the killer. Unless he's someone else entirely."
"Someone hunting the killer?"
"Someone hunting Karst."
The name landed like a stone in still water. Jo's eyes widened slightly. "You think Voss is... what? An investigator? A vigilante?"
"I think we don't know who Voss really is. We don't know who anyone really is." Alex stood up abruptly. "We need to talk to Ida. Now."
They found Ida in the medical bay, still hunched over her computer. The Tribunal database was open on her screen, a maze of legal documents and witness testimonies. She looked exhausted, but her eyes were sharp.
"Voss is transmitting an encrypted signal," Alex said without preamble. "He has a receiver somewhere on the ice shelf. Someone is out there."
Ida absorbed this information in silence. Then she turned back to her screen. "I've been digging deeper into the Tribunal records. There's something you need to see."
She pulled up a document. It was a witness deposition, dated eleven years ago, from a survivor of the Kestria massacre. The text was heavily redacted, but certain phrases stood out: covert extraction, deep-cover operative, identity reconstruction.
"The Tribunal didn't just prosecute war criminals," Ida said. "They also ran an investigative division. A covert unit tasked with tracking down fugitives who had gone underground. They recruited former intelligence officers, mercenaries, specialists in identity forensics. Their job was to find people like Karst and Orlov."
"And bring them to justice?"
"The documents are vague on that point. The unit operated outside normal legal channels. Some of its members were accused of overstepping their mandate. Extrajudicial actions. Summary justice." She paused. "One of the unit's operatives disappeared about eight years ago. His name was Elias."
Jo inhaled sharply. "Elias Voss?"
"The file doesn't give a full name. But the operative's background matches Voss's CV—geology training, field research experience in the Kestria region, fluent in Lysian dialects. The timing aligns with the gap in his academic record."
"Voss isn't just a geologist," Alex said slowly. "He's a hunter. He's been tracking Karst for years."
"And now he's found him." Ida looked at them both. "Or he thinks he has. Someone on this station is Viktor Karst. And Voss has lured them into a trap."
The pieces were falling into place now, clicking together with a terrible logic. The icequake. The exposed body. The secret transmissions. Voss hadn't been covering anything up. He'd been orchestrating an operation. He'd exposed Orlov's body to flush out Karst—to force the fugitive to react, to make a mistake, to reveal himself.
And it was working.
"We need to confront him," Jo said.
"No." Alex shook his head. "If Voss is who you think he is, he's been running this operation for years. He's not going to stop because we figured it out. And if Karst really is on this station, confronting Voss will force his hand. We'll have a war criminal with nothing to lose in an isolated station with no outside contact."
"So what do we do?"
"We watch. We gather evidence. We figure out who Karst is." Alex met Jo's eyes, then Ida's. "And we make sure that when the rescue team arrives, they find the truth, not another convenient lie."
The station's intercom crackled. Voss's voice filled the room, calm and measured.
"Attention all personnel. An emergency meeting will convene in the mess hall at oh-six-hundred hours. Attendance is mandatory. I have important information to share regarding our situation."
The transmission cut off.
Alex looked at the clock. It was nearly five in the morning. They had an hour.
"He's making his move," Jo said. "Whatever he's planning, it's happening now."
"What do you think he's going to announce?"
"I don't know." Alex stared at the intercom speaker as if it might offer answers. "But I have a bad feeling that someone on this station isn't going to survive the morning."
In the corridor outside, footsteps echoed in the darkness. Someone was walking, quickly and quietly, toward the crew quarters. Alex moved to the door and peered out.
Lena Hvald.
She was fully dressed in her cold-weather gear, carrying a small pack. She was heading toward the equipment bay—toward the snow vehicles. Toward escape.
Alex turned back to Jo and Ida. "Lena's running."
"After her," Ida said. "Now."
They moved through the darkened station like shadows, following Lena's footsteps through the maze of corridors. By the time they reached the equipment bay, she was already there, prepping one of the snow vehicles. She had the engine cover open and was checking the battery connections, her movements quick and efficient.
"Lena."
She spun around. Her face was pale, her eyes wild. "Stay away from me."
"Where are you going?" Alex took a careful step forward. "There's nowhere to go. We're stranded."
"There's a station. Sixty kilometers east. An old geological survey outpost. It was abandoned years ago, but the shelter is still intact. There are supplies there."
"Sixty kilometers across the ice shelf in the dark? You'll never make it."
"I have to try." Her voice cracked. "If I stay here, I'm dead."
"Why?"
She stared at him. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, very quietly, she spoke.
"Because Voss thinks I'm Viktor Karst."
The words hung in the cold air of the equipment bay.
"And he's going to tell everyone at the meeting. He's going to present his evidence. And they're going to believe him. Because the evidence is good. It's too good." Her hands were shaking. "Someone planted it. Someone made it look like I'm Karst. And I don't know who or why. I just know that if I'm still here when Voss finishes his presentation, I'm never leaving this station alive."
Alex exchanged a glance with Jo, then Ida.
"Why would someone frame you?" Jo asked.
"I don't know. I've been trying to figure it out. I've been going through my own records, my own files, looking for anything that might explain it. And I found something." She reached into her pack and pulled out a tablet. "My personnel file. Someone altered it. They added a fake background—Lysian ancestry, a fabricated connection to the Kestria region, a doctored photograph that matches Karst's bone structure. It's thorough. Professional. The kind of work that takes months to prepare."
"Someone planned this," Alex said. "Someone planned this long before we ever set foot on this station."
"Yes. And I think..." She swallowed hard. "I think the person who framed me is the real Viktor Karst. He needed a decoy. Someone to take the fall when Voss closed in. And he chose me."
A decoy. A scapegoat. A convenient lie, carefully constructed, designed to be believed because it fit the evidence so perfectly.
The same kind of lie that had sent innocent people to prison. The same kind of lie that had condemned Mikhail Orlov's victims. The same kind of lie that people embraced because it was easier than confronting the messy, complicated truth.
"We believe you," Alex said quietly.
Lena blinked. "What?"
"We believe you." He looked at Jo and Ida. Both nodded. "The evidence is too perfect. The timeline is too clean. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make you look guilty, and that's exactly what makes you innocent."
Lena's eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back fiercely. "Then you'll help me?"
"We'll help you." Alex took the tablet from her hands. "But we're not running. Running makes you look guilty. We need to stay. We need to fight. And we need to find out who the real Viktor Karst is before Voss's meeting begins."
He looked at the clock on the wall.
They had forty-five minutes.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!