The debrief took eleven hours. The formal CRA investigation that followed took seven months. Helios-Kaur’s executive compliance division was restructured twice before the final report was published, and the subsidiary responsible for the cold-run vessels was dissolved into a holding company that was itself dissolved six weeks later. The numbers, as always, found a way to disappear.
But Vethara kept running. The ore came up from the deep shafts, went into the processing chain, moved through the transport network, and arrived at Jura-9 on schedule. Nineteen thousand people went to work and came home and ate in the cafeterias and argued over shift rotations and lived the compressed, ordinary life of a working colony.
The last thing I remember from that docking collar is the light. Vethara’s interior lighting was tuned warm — a deliberate design choice, I later learned, that Sofia Ferreira had fought the facilities budget for in the station’s second year. Something to offset the permanent dark of deep space outside the viewports. Something to make the place feel like it was worth staying in.
It was a small thing. It cost almost nothing in the ledger.
It was the only thing in eleven years of reports that had ever made me think someone up there understood what they were actually managing.
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