Everything Rin Wu Owes

Forty-seven minutes.
That is how long I have before the Meridian Compliance Drone reaches my position in Sublevel Nine of the Cordata Basin Survey Station. I know this because the station’s own network told me, in the flat, courteous tone that Cordata Extraction Solutions programs into all of its automated systems—a tone designed to sound helpful while delivering the worst possible news. The drone is not coming to arrest me. Arrest implies a legal system outside the corporation. There is no legal system outside Cordata, not down here, not on a world that exists entirely within the company’s territorial charter. The drone is coming to repossess.
I have forty-seven minutes to find what I came here to find, or I lose everything. Not metaphorically. Literally everything.
Let me go back.
My name is Rin Wu. I am—was—a Tier-Three Survey Specialist employed by Cordata Extraction Solutions, stationed on Pellucid-4, a mid-gravity world in the outer Vestan Reach that smells permanently of iron and cold rain. Pellucid-4 is beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful: the sky runs in bands of amber and deep violet during the long twilights, the rock formations along the basin ridges look like frozen waves caught mid-crash, and the soil is so rich in rare-earth compounds that Cordata’s extraction teams work in three rotating shifts around the clock, never stopping, the drilling rigs burning orange against the dark like small angry suns. I have spent four years walking this world with a scanner in my hand and a company-issued atmospheric suit on my back, cataloguing geological anomalies, mapping subsurface structures, filing reports that feed directly into Cordata’s extraction priority queue. I was good at the job. I genuinely loved the job. That was my first mistake.
The debt started small, the way these things always do. My induction contract included a standard Cordata Employee Advancement Loan—a line of credit extended to cover the cost of my scanner certification, my atmospheric suit, my bunk assignment in the residential block, my meal plan, and my access to the station’s transit network. I signed it at twenty-two years old, new to the Reach, excited, not reading carefully enough. The interest rate was listed in a subsection of a subsection of the appendix. By the time I understood what I’d agreed to, the loan had grown by thirty percent. By the time I filed my first formal query, I was informed that the query itself—routed through Cordata’s internal Legal Resolution Service—had incurred an administrative processing fee, which was automatically added to my balance. I laughed the first time. I stopped laughing quickly.
But that is not the thing that brought me here, to Sublevel Nine, at forty-seven minutes to repossession.
Thirty-six minutes now. I move through the corridor and the walls breathe around me.
Sublevel Nine is the oldest part of Cordata Basin Station, a section that predates the company’s arrival on Pellucid-4 by what the geological record suggests is somewhere between two hundred and four hundred years. I discovered it eight months ago during a routine subsurface scan—a resonance anomaly that my equipment flagged as a hollow structure of non-natural origin, buried under forty meters of sediment and then further concealed beneath the station’s own foundation pours. I filed the report. Cordata’s response came back in six hours: the anomaly was reclassified as a geological artifact, the data was sealed under a Proprietary Discovery Clause, and I was quietly reassigned to surface cataloguing. No explanation. No discussion.
I kept a copy of the original scan data. That was my second mistake, or possibly the best decision I have ever made. I have not yet decided.

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About the Author

James Calder — a xenogeologist chasing forgotten civilizations and worlds no one has mapped yet. Legend says he was the only human entering "The Cube" and obtained galaxy map encrypted in quantum technology.

— James Calder

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Categories: Corporate Control, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, alien ruins, ancient civilization, corporate dystopia, corporate-control, countdown, debt, first person, James Calder, Pellucid-4, sci-fi, science fiction, short story, space exploration, xenoarchaeology

August 30, 2026

10min-stories