He turned left at junction C-7, ducked under a low-hanging coolant pipe, and ran hard toward the docking spoke. The corridor here was narrower, a maintenance artery rather than a public throughway, and the lighting was entirely absent except for the green bioluminescent strips at floor level that guided emergency egress. His boots rang against the grating. His breath came in short, controlled bursts — he was fit, he had always been fit, even after the accident, especially after the accident, because the SVL-7 required regular load-bearing exercise to maintain its calibration and Meridian’s health protocols were very clear on this point, and wasn’t that a specific kind of cruelty, that they had built his recovery into a maintenance schedule for their own equipment. He felt the lattice now in a way he never usually did, a faint warmth along the length of his lower back, the ghost of a hum that he had always attributed to muscle memory or phantom sensation but which he now understood was the device cycling through its hourly status check, transmitting its location and operational data to a server he had never known existed.
Three years ago he had been on the cargo floor when a stabilizer arm failed. The arm weighed six hundred kilograms. He had not been directly under it — if he had been directly under it there would have been nothing to recover — but the concussive impact of the fall had sent a shockwave through the deck plating that had cracked two vertebrae and herniated three discs and left him lying face-down in a spreading pool of hydraulic fluid, unable to feel his legs, staring at the amber glow of Veth-4 through the porthole three meters away. The medical team had been efficient. The surgery had been fast. He had woken up in the recovery bay with a clean white dressing on his lower back and a feeling of such profound relief that he had wept quietly into the pillow, and the nurse — a young man with kind eyes whose name he had never learned — had patted his shoulder and said that the procedure had gone perfectly. No one had said the word lease. No one had handed him a document. They had handed him, six weeks later, a return-to-work form, and he had signed it, and he had gone back to the cargo floor, and he had been grateful.
He was not grateful now.
The docking spoke was a long, straight access tube, forty meters, with the shuttle’s boarding collar at the far end and a pressure door that would seal automatically at T-minus ninety seconds. Emeka could see the door. It was still open. Beyond it, through the boarding collar’s small porthole window, he could see the shuttle’s interior lighting — warm amber, the colour of Veth-4, a colour he had always found soothing and which now felt like a taunt. He ran. His footsteps changed pitch as the deck shifted from grating to the smoother composite of the docking spoke, and the sound of the station fell away behind him, the hum of the recyclers and the distant clang of the cargo bays replaced by the tight, pressurized silence of the access tube.
He was twenty meters from the door when he heard the second set of footsteps.
Not behind him. Ahead.
Nuala Voss stepped through the pressure door from the boarding collar side, and she was not alone. Beside her stood a man Emeka didn’t recognize — tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the unmarked grey coveralls of a Meridian technical contractor, carrying a small hardcase of the kind used for medical equipment. The compliance officer looked at Emeka with the same expression she had worn on the comm screen: not unkind, not cruel, simply certain.
“Mr. Solis,” she said. Her voice carried easily in the narrow tube. “I want you to understand that this doesn’t have to be adversarial. The SVL-7 is a Meridian asset, and we have a legal right to recover it. But we also have a standard transitional package — temporary mobility support, a renegotiated payment schedule, the option to purchase the device outright at a reduced rate. There are options.” She paused. “I’ve seen your work record. Six years, no citations. That carries weight with the recovery board.”
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply