The station clocks had barely ticked past 0800 when the scream echoed through the corridors. It was a raw, jagged sound, torn from a throat unused to such exertions, and it cut through the mechanical drone of Valhalla like an ice axe through snow crust. Runa was already awake, still dressed, the photograph of the severed beacon wires burning in her wrist unit’s memory. She threw open her door and ran toward the source—the auxiliary storage room adjacent to the clinic.
Joren Hagan was on his knees in the doorway, his face drained of all color, his ink-stained hands pressed flat against the cold metal floor as if he had tried to catch himself and missed. His mouth worked soundlessly now, the scream spent, leaving only a thin, keening whimper that Runa felt in her molars. She pushed past him and stopped.
The station doctor, an elderly Thalassian named Mikkel Voss, lay sprawled face-down on the floor. His left arm was twisted beneath his body at an unnatural angle, and his right hand still clutched a small medical kit, its contents scattered across the grated floor—bandages, a bottle of iodine that had shattered and frozen into a dark amber starburst, a scalpel that glinted under the emergency lights. A thin trickle of blood had pooled beneath his temple and congealed into a dark, glassy patch. His eyes were open, fixed on something Runa could not see.
She had seen dead men before. On her first expedition to the Kelvian Shelf, a drilling accident had crushed a technician’s pelvis, and she had held his hand while the life drained out of him. But this was different. Voss had not fallen. The angle of his body, the position of the medical kit, the way his spectacles lay three feet away with one lens cracked—it all spoke of a sudden, violent motion.
Footsteps thundered down the corridor, and within seconds, the narrow space was crowded with bodies. Ove Dalen shouldered his way to the front, his mechanic’s frame blocking the doorway. Behind him, Elin, the young biologist, let out a choked sob and buried her face in her hands. Mara the cook crossed her arms over her chest as if warding off a blow. The remaining crew members clustered in a tight, murmuring knot, their breath steaming in the cold air.
Commander Arnulf Brekke arrived last, moving with the deliberate calm of a man who had expected the scene and was merely confirming its details. He knelt beside Voss’s body and pressed two fingers to the dead man’s carotid artery, a gesture Runa recognized as performative—the skin was already waxy, the extremities blue. Voss had been dead for hours.
“Hypothermic shock,” Brekke announced, straightening up. “He must have woken in the night, disoriented, and tried to reach the clinic for medication. The temperature in this corridor dropped below freezing after the heating unit malfunctioned. A tragic accident.”
The words settled over the crew like a blanket, warm and reassuring. Ove nodded sagely, as if this explanation confirmed something he had already suspected. Mara uncrossed her arms and let out a long, shaky breath. Elin sobbed once more and then fell silent. Hagan, still on his knees, stared up at Brekke with the glassy-eyed look of a man who desperately wanted to believe.
Runa did not believe. She looked past Brekke’s broad shoulders and saw what he had clearly hoped no one would notice. On the wall beside the storage room door, at knee height, was a faint scuff mark—the kind made by a boot toe scraping against metal. Beside it, on the floor, a single partial footprint, the tread pattern distinct and fresh. She knelt, pretending to tie her boot, and surreptitiously aligned her wrist unit to capture the image. The tread was a Kelvian military-issue pattern, standard for station personnel, but the wear marks on the heel suggested a specific gait, a right-footed drag.
“Commander,” Runa said, keeping her voice steady, “shouldn’t we examine the body more thoroughly? Determine the exact cause of death? There are protocols for unattended fatalities in isolated posts.”
Brekke turned to her with an expression that might have been mistaken for patience. “Dr. Linde, this is not one of your ice cores. The man slipped and struck his head. The autopsy protocols you refer to require a trained forensic officer, which we do not have. In the meantime, I am sealing the clinic and this storage room to preserve resources. The heating failure means we must consolidate our living quarters to the main module. Exposure to these cold corridors is now a lethal risk. I will not lose another crew member to curiosity.”
He said the last word with a subtle emphasis, and Runa felt the eyes of the crew shift toward her. Ove’s brow furrowed. Elin looked away. Even Hagan, still trembling, seemed to shrink from her.
“You’re right, Commander,” Runa said, lowering her gaze. “I only wanted to help.”
She had learned, in the toxic hierarchies of Kelvian academia, that survival sometimes required the performance of submission. Brekke accepted her retreat with a curt nod and began issuing orders. Hagan was to return to his quarters and rest. Ove would organize a detail to move Voss’s body to the cold storage unit behind the galley, where it would remain until spring thaw permitted proper burial. The remaining crew were to inventory their personal food caches and surrender any unauthorized supplies.
As the group dispersed, Runa caught Hagan’s arm and guided him into the empty mess hall. The room smelled of stale coffee and the faint, metallic tang of recycled air. She sat him down at a corner table, her back to the door so she could watch for approaching shadows.
“You found him,” she said quietly. “What did you see? Before the scream.”
Hagan rubbed his hands together as if trying to start a fire. His fingers were trembling so violently that the table vibrated. “Nothing. I saw nothing. I was going to the storage room to fetch a spare capacitor for the radio console. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and... he was just lying there. His eyes were open, Runa. They were still wet.”
“Did you touch anything? Move anything?”
“No. I dropped my toolkit and screamed. That’s all. Brekke arrived within a minute, maybe less.” Hagan paused, a flicker of confusion crossing his face. “He was already awake. Already dressed. How did he get there so fast?”
Runa had been wondering the same thing. The commander’s quarters were at the far end of the station, a full two-minute walk from the storage room. Yet Brekke had appeared almost immediately, as if he had been waiting nearby.
“Listen to me, Joren,” Runa said, lowering her voice to barely a whisper. “Last night, I checked the emergency beacon. The wires were cut. Deliberately. It wasn’t a solar flare. Someone sabotaged it.”
Hagan’s eyes widened, and for a moment, she saw a glimmer of the sharp, meticulous radio operator beneath the fear. “That’s why the signal was so cleanly gone. I told you it felt like a switch being thrown.”
“And Brekke invoked Protocol Valkyrie within hours of the blackout. He’s consolidating power. He’s controlling the narrative. And now Voss is dead.”
“You think Brekke killed him?” Hagan’s voice cracked on the question. “Why? Voss was harmless. An old man who dispensed aspirin and frostbite salve.”
“I don’t know yet. But Voss was also the only person on this station with the medical training to perform an autopsy or detect poison. If you wanted to ensure that no one could examine a body, you’d remove the doctor first.”
Hagan was silent for a long moment, processing. Outside the mess hall, the station hummed its eternal, indifferent rhythm. Somewhere down the corridor, Ove’s voice boomed instructions to the burial detail.
“There’s something else,” Hagan said finally, his voice so low Runa had to lean closer to hear. “Three days ago, before the blackout, I intercepted a fragment of a transmission on the secured military band. It wasn’t meant for us. It was a looped signal, repeating a set of coordinates. I wrote them down, but when I went to log them in the official communications record, the entry had already been erased. The logbook was clean.”
“Who has access to the logs?”
“Only me. And Brekke, as commander. But I never erase anything. I keep backups on a private drive, hidden in my quarters. The coordinates point to a location about twenty kilometers southeast of here, on the Thalassian side of the border. An old military outpost, decommissioned after the war.”
Runa felt the pieces beginning to align, forming a picture that chilled her more than the polar cold. A secret transmitter. A hidden outpost. A man with the authority to veto any investigation, any question, any truth that threatened his control.
“I need to see those coordinates,” she said. “And I need you to show me the comms room. Tonight, after lights-out.”
Hagan hesitated. The fear was back, swimming behind his eyes. “If Brekke catches us—”
“He won’t. But even if he does, what’s the alternative? Sit in our bunks and wait for him to decide which of us is the next victim? Voss is dead, Joren. The beacon is dead. The supply ship isn’t coming. We are already in his trap. The only way out is through.”
Before Hagan could respond, the mess hall door slid open. Brekke stood in the doorway, his large frame silhouetted against the corridor light. He held a metal clipboard in one gloved hand, and his ice-colored eyes moved from Runa to Hagan and back again with the slow, deliberate assessment of a predator sizing up prey.
“Dr. Linde. Technician Hagan. I trust you’re not spreading rumors. Morale is fragile. Fear is a contagion more dangerous than any physical ailment.”
Runa rose smoothly, her face arranged in an expression of cooperative concern. “We were just discussing the heating situation, Commander. Technician Hagan was explaining the power distribution grid to me. I thought I might assist with the rationing calculations.”
Brekke studied her for a beat too long, as if he could hear the lie vibrating beneath her words. Then he smiled, a thin, mirthless stretching of the lips. “Excellent. In that case, Technician Hagan, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve completed the initial assessment of the communications failure. Your name appears in the preliminary report.”
Hagan stiffened. “My name?”
“Routine. The investigation must account for every variable, including operator error. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Brekke made a notation on his clipboard and turned to leave. At the threshold, he paused. “One more thing. Effective tonight, all access to the communications room is restricted to authorized personnel only. That means myself and no one else. Any attempt to enter will be considered a breach of Protocol Valkyrie and will be dealt with accordingly. Is that understood?”
“Understood, Commander,” Runa said, before Hagan could stammer out a response.
Brekke nodded and departed, the door sliding shut behind him with a final, pneumatic hiss. Hagan slumped forward, his head in his hands. “He knows. He knows I saw something.”
“No,” Runa said, though she was not entirely certain. “He suspects. There’s a difference. If he knew for sure, you’d already be in the cold storage unit next to Voss.”
She helped Hagan to his feet and sent him to his quarters with instructions to rest and to speak to no one. Then she made her way to the equipment vestibule, intending to retrieve the photograph of the severed wires and cross-reference the boot print she had found. But when she reached the locker where she had stored her EVA suit, she found the latch hanging loose, the door slightly ajar.
Her suit was still there, but someone had been inside. A small, deliberate tear had been cut into the outer thermal layer, just below the left shoulder. It was clean, surgical, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. If she had worn the suit on a surface expedition, the tear would have widened under pressure, and the cold would have killed her within minutes.
Brekke was no longer just controlling the narrative. He was eliminating anyone who might threaten it. And Runa had just placed herself squarely in his sights.
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