When Routine Turns Into Something Else

“If we broadcast it, they lock the station down before anyone can act on it,” Yolanda says. “We need it to go out. Off the station. To someone who can’t be locked down.”
Nexil pulls the drive free. “The supply freighter Ardenne Koss docks in four hours. I know the comms officer. She is not under a Palloren contract.”
There is a beat of silence.
“You planned this,” Ezequiel says, looking at Nexil.
“I suspected,” Nexil says. “For some time. I did not know what I would find. But I thought it wise to know where the doors were.”
They get the drive to the Ardenne Koss. It costs them the rest of Nexil’s personal credit reserve — eleven years of carefully saved station scrip, gone in one transaction to a comms officer who asks no questions and expects to be paid not to. The data goes out on the freighter’s tightbeam to three separate independent regulatory bodies operating beyond Palloren’s jurisdictional reach. It goes with documentation, timestamps, and the personnel file of a man named Kovash who worked cargo for twenty-two years and was walked off a station with nothing.
The four of them stand in the docking corridor and watch the Ardenne Koss undock through a scratched porthole window. The station hum is the same as always. The copper-smell air is the same as always. Nothing looks different yet.
Nexil stands with their arms folded, the empty drive in one long-fingered hand, their iridescent scales catching the cold light of the docking bay. They look, Yolanda thinks, exactly the same as they do every day on Deck Nine. Patient. Precise. Quietly, completely resolved.
“What happens to us now?” Jhevon asks.
“We go back to work,” Yolanda says. “We do our jobs. We wait.”
She does not say: and we hope it was enough. She does not say: and Nexil has nothing left. She does not say: and we still do not know what they have already built with what they took from us, or whether any authority out there will move fast enough to matter.
She says: we wait. Because that is the only true thing she has left to offer.
And the recycled air hums around them, warm and copper-bright, the same as it has always been.

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About the Author

Fred Marlowe — an interstellar economist tracing corporate warfare and sabotage across whole colonies. His emprie is so powerfull he ones sold Jupiters moon by mistake and his accountant even did not notice.

— Fred Marlowe

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Categories: SCI-FI, Spacepunk

Tags: 10min stories, alien characters, corporate dystopia, debt, ensemble cast, sci-fi, short story, slow burn, space station, spacepunk, workers rights

August 5, 2026

10min-stories