The auditor’s quarters faced the storm wall. Not by choice—the Crown assigned rooms by clearance level, and hers put her on the eastern rim where the glass was thickest and the view was all gray turbulence. She’d stopped opening the blinds after the second week. The constant motion made her nauseous, and there was work to do.
The report was due in fourteen days, when the next supply barge docked. She had most of it drafted: production metrics, safety incident rates, morale indicators extrapolated from commissary purchases and medical visits. The numbers told a clean story. Extraction costs were down. Efficiency was up. The workforce remained stable within acceptable turnover parameters.
But there was a problem in Section Seven.
She’d noticed it first in the maintenance logs. A cluster of equipment failures, each one minor, each one repaired within the prescribed window. The failures themselves weren’t unusual—everything wore down faster here, the dust got into seals, the temperature swings cracked housings—but the pattern bothered her. Three incidents in eight weeks, all on the same shift rotation, all signed off by the same supervisor.
She pulled the personnel files. The supervisor had been here eighteen months, which made him practically senior staff. His previous reviews were unremarkable. No disciplinary flags. He’d even received a commendation six months back for improvising a repair that kept a drill operational through a parts shortage.
Then she checked the medical records, cross-referencing against the dates.
Two of the equipment failures had resulted in injuries. One worker lost three fingers when a safety guard failed to engage. Another suffered severe frostbite after his suit heater shorted during a canyon run. Both incidents were logged as equipment malfunction, cause: material fatigue. Both workers had been reassigned to lighter duties. Their debt balances had increased to cover the medical costs and lost productivity.
She sat back in her chair, watching the storm through the crack in the blinds.
The supervisor’s commendation had come from the Crown. Specifically, from the envoy’s office.
The envoy arrived at the outpost nine months before she did. She’d read his file during her own orientation. Decorated career, rapid advancement, three successful postings on frontier installations. The kind of record that suggested someone who understood how to make difficult places work, who could hold the gap between what the charter promised and what physics allowed.
She’d met him twice in person. Once at the arrival briefing, where he’d welcomed her with crisp efficiency and outlined the audit scope. Once at a Crown reception, where he’d moved through the crowd like he was checking items off a list. Both times, he’d been polite, focused, and entirely inaccessible.
His directives came through the system: updated shift requirements, revised safety protocols, new efficiency targets. Each one arrived in her inbox with the Crown’s seal and a terse explanatory note. She forwarded them to the supervisors, who forwarded them to the crew leads, who implemented them without comment.
The most recent directive had come three weeks ago. It adjusted the criteria for mandatory suit inspections, extending the interval between checks from every shift to every three shifts. The attached justification cited improved equipment reliability and the need to reduce bottlenecks at shift change.
She’d filed it with the others and thought nothing of it until she started looking at the maintenance logs.
The bar was called the Lock, because it sat in the connector tunnel between the crew quarters and the main concourse. Technically off-limits during shifts, but the charter didn’t enforce it as long as people showed up on time and nobody got loud enough to require intervention. She went there most evenings, not to drink—the prices were calculated to keep consumption moderate—but to listen.
The workers talked differently here than they did in the official interviews she conducted. Less careful. More true.
She found a seat at the corner table and ordered coffee, the synthetic kind that tasted like burnt plastic and cost half what the real stuff did. Two tables over, a group of drill operators were playing cards. She recognized one of them: Voss, the worker who’d lost his fingers. His right hand was wrapped in a gray regeneration sleeve. He held his cards in his left, awkward but functional.
“Three shifts,” one of the other players was saying. “That’s the new rule. You check your suit every three shifts now.”
“Saves time,” another said. The tone was neutral, but something in the way he laid down his cards suggested otherwise.
Voss didn’t say anything. He studied his hand, then folded.
She sipped her coffee and opened her tablet, pulling up the incident reports again. The first injury—the fingers—had happened on the second shift after the new inspection protocol went into effect. The second injury—the frostbite—had happened on a crew’s third shift.
She made a note.
The Crown’s administrative offices were quiet in the morning, before the shift briefings started. She liked coming here early, when the halls were empty and the light from the central concourse made everything look clean and purposeful. It was easier to believe in the mission when you couldn’t see the grime.
The envoy’s office was on the upper ring, behind a clear door that showed an interior more austere than she’d expected. No decorations. No personal items. Just a desk, a wall screen displaying production metrics, and a single chair.
She didn’t have an appointment, but his calendar showed an open slot and she had clearance to walk in.
He looked up when she entered. “Auditor.”
“I need to discuss the Section Seven maintenance pattern.”
He gestured to the chair. She remained standing.
“I’ve been reviewing the incident reports,” she said. “There’s a correlation between the extended inspection interval and equipment failure rates.”
“I’ve seen the numbers.” He pulled up a display, flicking through screens with economical gestures. “Failure rates are within normal variance. Well below critical thresholds.”
“Two serious injuries in eight weeks.”
“Regrettable. We’ve already updated the training materials and flagged the equipment models for replacement when the next supply shipment arrives.”
She watched him. His face was calm, almost blank. Not defensive. Not dismissive. Just… absent of concern.
“The supervisor who signed off on those repairs received a commendation from this office,” she said.
“Correct. He kept the equipment operational under difficult conditions.”
“The equipment that later failed.”
“Which is why we’re replacing it.”
She set her tablet on his desk, turning it so he could see the screen. “These injuries were preventable. If the inspection interval hadn’t been extended, both failures would have been caught before workers were put at risk.”
He looked at the data for three seconds, then back at her. “The extended interval reduces shift-change congestion by seventeen percent. That prevents other injuries—crush hazards, rush errors, fatigue accidents. We’re trading known risks for unknown ones and coming out ahead.”
“The workers who got hurt don’t see it that way.”
“The workers aren’t optimizing for system stability.” His tone hadn’t changed. “That’s what we’re here to do.”
She picked up her tablet. “I’m including this in the report.”
“Of course. That’s your function.” He returned to his screen. “Anything else?”
She left without answering.
Back in her quarters, she pulled up the footage archive. The Crown’s media office maintained a rolling library of approved clips, updated after each supply run and transmitted to the home worlds on the outbound ships. She’d watched a few during her first week, mostly out of curiosity.
Now she opened the most recent batch.
There: a classroom scene, children sitting in a circle, learning to read in low gravity. The teacher was patient, the children attentive. One boy raised his hand and asked a question. The teacher smiled.
Cut to: a hydroponic garden, green shoots pushing through the growth medium. A worker in clean coveralls explained the nutrient cycle, gesturing at the pipes with pride.
Cut to: the central concourse during a festival day, makeshift decorations hanging from the overhead beams, people dancing badly to music from a portable speaker.
She recognized some of the faces. Voss wasn’t in any of the clips.
The clips were real. She’d been to the classroom. She’d walked through the hydroponics section. She’d seen the festival decorations come down the next morning, torn and wadded in the recycling bins. None of it was fake.
But the story they told—that story was something else.
She opened a new document and started writing. The opening paragraph outlined the Crown’s successful implementation of efficiency protocols. The second paragraph noted the reduction in shift-change incidents. The third paragraph acknowledged two equipment failures that had resulted in workplace injuries, contextualized within the broader safety record.
She wrote for two hours. When she finished, the report read like something that would satisfy the inspection committee. It had all the required data points. It acknowledged the problems without dwelling on them. It suggested minor improvements—faster equipment replacement cycles, additional training modules—that sounded responsive without requiring structural changes.
It was, she realized, exactly what the envoy would have written if he’d been the one filing the report.
She saved it and closed the file.
The next supply barge arrived on schedule. She transmitted her report during the narrow upload window, watching the progress bar creep across her screen. When it finished, she felt nothing.
The workers offloaded the cargo in shifts, moving crates from the pad to the storage bunkers. New equipment, she noticed. Replacement parts for the drill assemblies. They’d be installed over the next rotation, probably by the same supervisor who’d signed off on the failures.
The envoy was on the pad when she arrived, clipboard in hand, checking manifests. He nodded when he saw her. “Report submitted?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The committee will be pleased. Production metrics are strong this cycle.”
She watched a crew maneuver a heavy crate down the ramp. “What happens to the workers who got injured?”
“They’re on modified duty until their treatments complete. Standard protocol.”
“And after that?”
“They return to full duty. Or request transfer, if they prefer.”
“With their debt balances?”
He looked at her. “Is there something specific you’re concerned about?”
She wanted to say: You used to care about this. But she didn’t know if that was true. Maybe he’d never cared. Maybe caring wasn’t compatible with keeping a place like this running. Maybe the choice wasn’t between caring and not caring, but between functioning and breaking.
“No,” she said. “Nothing specific.”
He returned to his clipboard.
That evening, she went back to the Lock. Voss was there again, sitting alone this time, the regeneration sleeve off. His hand looked strange—new skin grafted over old, the fingers shorter than they should be but functional. He was eating soup, slowly, with his left hand.
She bought two coffees and brought one to his table. “Mind if I sit?”
He looked at her, then at the coffee, then shrugged.
She sat. “How’s the hand?”
“Works.” He flexed the fingers. “Weird feeling. Like it’s not mine.”
“You going back on full duty?”
“Next rotation. They’re putting me on a different crew. New supervisor.”
“Good.”
He picked up the coffee, sipped it, made a face. “You wrote the report, right? About the equipment?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you say?”
She thought about lying. Then she thought about what the lie would accomplish and decided honesty was cheaper. “I said the failures were within acceptable variance. I recommended equipment upgrades and additional training.”
He nodded slowly. “So nothing changes.”
“The equipment will be replaced.”
“Right.” He set the coffee down. “You know what I thought when I first got here? I thought, this is temporary. Couple years, pay down the debt, get a transfer to somewhere better. Somewhere with real air.”
“That’s still possible.”
“Is it?” He flexed the hand again. “Because my debt balance went up after the accident. Medical costs. Lost productivity. By the time I pay that off, I’ll be old enough that nobody’s going to approve a transfer application.”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
“You seem like a decent person,” he said. “But you’re part of it, same as the rest of us. You just don’t have to live in the trench.”
He stood, leaving the coffee untouched, and walked back toward the crew quarters.
She returned to her quarters and opened the report one more time. Read through it, section by section, looking for the place where she could have written something different. Some sentence that would have made it clear what was actually happening here.
But every sentence was true. The production metrics were strong. The safety record was better than industry average. The efficiency protocols had reduced certain categories of incidents. The equipment was being replaced.
The report wasn’t a lie. It was just incomplete. And the parts it left out were the parts that would have required someone reading it to believe that workers like Voss mattered more than the system they served.
She thought about the envoy, sitting in his austere office, reviewing the same data she’d reviewed. Making the same calculations. Arriving at the same conclusions. Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped asking whether the system was just. He only asked whether it was stable.
She was, she realized, writing herself into the same place.
Outside, the storm wall churned. Inside, the lights stayed bright. The filters hummed. The drills kept turning in the canyon. And somewhere in the datastream heading back to the home worlds, her report would arrive, be reviewed, be filed. The inspection committee would note the strong performance. The envoy would get his renewal. The charter would continue.
And in six months, she’d write another report. And six months after that, another. Each one true. Each one incomplete. Each one helping to maintain something that worked perfectly, as long as you didn’t ask who it worked for.
She closed the file.
The storm wall kept churning.
She opened her calendar and marked the date of the next supply run.
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