The tribunal was convened at 0600, before the station’s artificial dawn had finished its pale imitation of morning. Brekke had ordered the mess hall cleared of tables and chairs, leaving only a single metal desk at the front of the room and rows of salvaged crates for seating. A portable heater hummed in the corner, barely taking the edge off the cold that seeped through the walls. The crew filed in silently, their breath misting in the air, their faces gaunt with hunger and exhaustion. Runa took a seat at the back, as far from Brekke’s desk as possible. Hagan sat two rows ahead, his shoulders hunched, his fingers picking at a loose thread on his sleeve.
Brekke entered last, carrying his metal clipboard and a leather-bound logbook that Runa had never seen before. He set them down on the desk with ceremonial precision, then turned to face the assembled crew. His expression was grave, paternal, the face of a man burdened by duty but resolved to carry it out.
“We are here,” he began, “to address the catastrophe that has befallen this station. The supply ship Ice Maiden is missing. Our communications are destroyed. One of our colleagues, Dr. Mikkel Voss, is dead. These are not random misfortunes. These are the results of deliberate, malicious action.”
A murmur rippled through the crew. Ove leaned forward, his heavy brow furrowed. Elin clutched her parka tighter around her thin shoulders. Mara the cook stared at the floor, her lips pressed into a bloodless line.
“I have completed my investigation,” Brekke continued. “The evidence is conclusive. Technician Joren Hagan, a Thalassian national, intentionally sabotaged the primary antenna array and the emergency beacon, then transmitted false coordinates to the Ice Maiden, causing it to divert into a known ice reef where it almost certainly foundered. When Dr. Voss discovered evidence of this sabotage, Hagan confronted him in the auxiliary storage room and caused his death, either through direct violence or by forcing him into a position that resulted in fatal hypothermia.”
The mess hall erupted. Ove was on his feet, his face reddening. “Hagan! I worked beside you for six months! Is this true?”
Hagan rose unsteadily, his mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air. “No. No, I never—I would never—Commander, you have no proof. You can’t just—”
Brekke held up a hand, and the room fell silent. He opened the leather logbook and began to read. “November 12th, 2300 hours: Technician Hagan accessed the communications vault using his personal keycard. The access log shows a fifteen-minute session during which the antenna calibration was manually altered. November 13th, 0100 hours: The emergency beacon’s diagnostic system recorded an unauthorized maintenance login. The login credentials match Hagan’s security clearance. November 14th, 0400 hours: Dr. Voss filed a confidential report with the station commander, expressing concern that certain communications equipment had been tampered with. He requested a formal investigation. He was dead within forty-eight hours.”
Each accusation landed like a hammer blow. Runa watched the crew’s faces shift—from shock to doubt, from doubt to a terrible, creeping certainty. Brekke’s evidence was circumstantial at best, a chain of coincidences strung together with the thinnest thread of implication. But it was also clean, linear, and perfectly tailored to the exhausted minds of people who desperately needed someone to blame. The lie was smoother than the truth. It had no jagged edges, no unanswered questions, no inconvenient loose ends.
“I have logs,” Hagan stammered. “I have backups. I can prove I didn’t alter anything. The access records must have been tampered with. Someone is framing me.”
Brekke’s expression softened into something that resembled compassion. “Technician Hagan, I understand your desperation. But the logs you refer to are stored on a private drive that you yourself admitted to keeping hidden in your quarters. A drive that no one else can verify. A drive that could easily have been altered to create a false alibi.”
“You’re twisting everything!” Hagan’s voice cracked. “Runa—Dr. Linde—she saw the beacon wires. They were cut by someone. Ask her. She’ll tell you.”
Every head in the room turned toward Runa. She felt the weight of their collective gaze, the silent demand for an answer that would make sense of the chaos. Brekke’s ice-colored eyes settled on her, and in their depths, she saw the unspoken threat: step out of line, and you will share his fate.
She stood. The silence was absolute, broken only by the distant groan of shifting ice.
“I did inspect the beacon’s internal panel,” she said, choosing each word with the care of someone walking through a minefield. “The wires were indeed severed. But I cannot say with certainty who cut them or when. I am not a forensic investigator. Technician Hagan may be telling the truth, or he may not. I don’t have enough information to draw a conclusion.”
It was a tactical retreat, a strategic ambiguity. She had defied Brekke just enough to plant a seed of doubt without giving him grounds to brand her as Hagan’s accomplice. The crew absorbed her words with visible unease. Ove’s brow furrowed deeper. Mara shifted in her seat. But no one spoke up in Hagan’s defense. The momentum of Brekke’s narrative was too powerful, too seductive in its simplicity.
Brekke nodded, as if Runa’s statement had confirmed his own conclusions. “Dr. Linde’s caution is understandable. But the preponderance of evidence speaks for itself. Under the authority granted to me by Protocol Valkyrie, I hereby find Technician Joren Hagan guilty of sabotage, manslaughter, and attempted mass murder. His punishment will be determined by the severity of our circumstances.”
Hagan lunged forward, his face contorted with terror and rage. Ove intercepted him, wrapping his thick arms around the smaller man’s torso and pinning him in place. “Easy, Joren. Easy. If you’re innocent, it’ll come out. The Commander knows what he’s doing.”
Runa watched the betrayal unfold with a sickening clarity. Ove was not evil. He was not cruel. He was simply a man who had spent his entire life believing in authority, in hierarchy, in the idea that the people in charge had earned their place through competence and merit. To question Brekke would be to question the entire architecture of his worldview. It was easier, infinitely easier, to believe that Hagan was a traitor.
“Take him to the storage container,” Brekke ordered. “The one adjacent to the cold storage unit. It’s insulated but unheated. He will remain there under guard until we determine a final course of action.”
As Ove and two other Kelvian crew members dragged Hagan from the room, Runa caught his eyes for a fleeting second. They were wide, wet, and filled with a desperate plea that she felt like a knife in her chest. She had failed him. She had chosen self-preservation over solidarity, and now an innocent man was being locked in a freezing metal box while the real saboteur stood at the front of the room, arranging papers on his desk with the calm satisfaction of a bureaucrat completing a routine filing.
The mess hall emptied slowly, the crew dispersing to their duties with the subdued, shell-shocked gait of people who had witnessed something terrible and were already beginning to rationalize it. Runa lingered, pretending to adjust the heater, until only she and Brekke remained.
“A difficult morning,” Brekke said, not looking up from his clipboard. “But necessary. Order must be maintained. You understand that, don’t you, Dr. Linde?”
“I understand that you’ve just condemned a man based on evidence that any competent tribunal would tear apart in five minutes,” she replied, her voice low and hard.
Brekke looked up, and for the first time, his mask slipped. The paternal concern vanished, replaced by something colder, sharper, infinitely more dangerous. “You think I don’t know what you did last night? The beacon panel. The photographs on your wrist unit. The little conversation in the mess hall with Hagan before I interrupted. I have been watching you, Dr. Linde, with great interest.”
Runa’s blood turned to ice, but she held his gaze. “Then why not accuse me alongside Hagan? Why not throw me in the container too?”
“Because you’re useful,” Brekke said, a thin smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “You’re the skeptic. The one who asks questions. If I silence you now, the crew will wonder why. But if I keep you here, and you gradually, publicly come to accept my version of events, your conversion will be the final seal on Hagan’s guilt. You will be my unwitting validator.”
“And if I refuse?”
Brekke closed his clipboard and tucked it under his arm. “Then you will have an accident. Like Dr. Voss. Like the young biologist who’s been asking too many questions about the coordinates Technician Hagan received. Her name is Elin, isn’t it? She’s been very curious. Very persistent. I would hate for her curiosity to lead her into danger.”
Runa felt the threat like a physical blow. Elin, the shy, bird-boned girl who spent her days cataloging microbial samples and her nights reading romance novels in three languages. She was no threat to anyone. But she had asked questions, and in Brekke’s new order, questions were a capital offense.
“What do you want from me?” Runa asked, hating herself for the tremor in her voice.
“Simple compliance. Attend the ration distributions. Nod when I speak. When the crew asks you about Hagan, tell them you’ve reviewed the evidence and found it persuasive. Do this, and Elin lives. Do this, and you live. Defy me, and I will bury you both in the ice, and the official report will record two more tragic accidents.” Brekke moved toward the door, then paused. “Oh, and one more thing. The private drive that Hagan mentioned? The one with his precious backups? I’ve already found it. It’s been erased. There is no evidence to exonerate him now. There never was.”
He left, the door sliding shut with a soft pneumatic hiss. Runa stood alone in the empty mess hall, the portable heater rattling weakly in the corner, and felt the full weight of her isolation press down on her like the miles of ice above. Brekke had outmaneuvered her at every turn. He had the authority, the narrative, and now he had eliminated the only independent record that could challenge his version of events.
But Hagan had said the coordinates pointed to an old military outpost twenty kilometers southeast of the station. And Brekke had a secret shortwave set that he used when he thought no one was listening. If the private drive was destroyed, the outpost might hold the answers—the proof of who Brekke really was and what he was planning for the remaining crew.
She could not go herself. The sabotaged EVA suit had made that clear. But there was one other person on the station who had reason to doubt Brekke’s story, one person whose curiosity Brekke himself had identified as a threat.
She found Elin in the biology lab, hunched over a microscope, her blonde hair escaping from its regulation braid in wisps around her pale face. She looked up when Runa entered, her eyes red-rimmed and frightened.
“I know about the coordinates,” Runa said quietly, closing the door behind her. “And I know Brekke threatened you. He threatened me too. But I’m not going to let him win. I need your help.”
Elin’s hand trembled on the microscope’s adjustment knob. “He said he would kill me. He said no one would ever find my body.”
“He’s right,” Runa said. “If we do nothing, he will kill us all, one by one, until only the believers remain. But you’re a biologist. You know the terrain. You know how to navigate the ice. Hagan’s coordinates point to an old military outpost on the Thalassian side. I think Brekke was stationed there during the war. I think that outpost holds the truth about who he really is.”
Elin was silent for a long moment. Then she straightened, and something hard and bright flickered in her eyes—the flame of a person who has spent her whole life being underestimated and has finally found something worth fighting for. “There’s a maintenance sled in the equipment bay. It’s not designed for long-distance travel, but it can make twenty kilometers if the weather holds. I’ve used it before, on sample-collection runs.”
“The weather won’t hold forever,” Runa said. “But we have a few hours before the next storm front hits. If we leave now, we can reach the outpost and be back before Brekke realizes we’re gone.”
“And if he catches us?”
Runa thought of Voss, his open eyes frozen to the floor. She thought of Hagan, shivering in an unheated metal box. She thought of Brekke’s thin smile and the way he had said I will bury you both in the ice.
“Then we make sure he can’t hide the truth anymore. We broadcast everything we find on every frequency. Even if he kills us, the signal will be out there. Someone will hear it.”
Elin nodded, her jaw set. “Give me ten minutes to prep my gear.”
As the young biologist hurried down the corridor, Runa allowed herself a flicker of grim satisfaction. Brekke had made one mistake. He had assumed that fear would keep her in line, that the threat of death would be enough to silence her. But Runa had spent her career drilling ice cores from the harshest environments on the planet, extracting secrets from frozen stone that did not want to give them up. She knew how to be patient. She knew how to endure. And she knew that the truth, no matter how deeply buried, always left a trace.
Somewhere in the Thalassian wilderness, under twenty kilometers of darkness and drifting snow, a military outpost was waiting with the answers she needed. All she had to do was reach it before Brekke reached her.
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