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TWO

Stavian

Stavian stood in the central command center. It was on the surface level, where transport ships came and went. He gripped the edges of his console as he watched the diagnostic report glitch once, then blink green across the mine schematics. It was too fast. Scan incomplete. He knew the timing. Knew the mines.

Telren Tok’ca, a short Grakian female and an Axis-issued medic, tapped her own wrist panel and announced, “Sweep’s done. No critical destabilization. Reopen tunnels and resume standard rotation.”

“Don’t reopen them,” Stavian said. He pointed to the flashing data feed. “The sweep only covered sectors A through D. You skipped the lower shafts. We had tremors across E levels.”

Telren shrugged without looking at him. “They’re not registering on critical sensors.”

“Because you’re not running a full sweep.”

“We don’t have time for another one. Your directives say to maintain output. You want to keep your rank or flag the entire lot for replacement?”

Stavian narrowed his eyes. “I want the truth before I send people back underground.”

“They’re not people,” Telren said, turning toward the main lift. Her white uniform fluttered over her slim frame, the Axis emblem sharp against her collar. “They’re convicts conscripted to mine as part of their sentences. Replaceable. We have fresh units scheduled for intake—ten cycles out. You’ll barely feel the gap.”

Stavian’s chest pulled tight. “That’s your solution? Let them die off and send the next batch in, then the next? We will run out of Axis convicts.”

“No, we won’t,” she replied without a pause. “If you’re this worried about miner health, maybe you took the wrong position.” Telren’s voice had the bored edge of someone who’d been stationed too long. “Suit diagnostics are mostly clear. Breathers reset. They’ll be fine.”

“They aren’t fine,” Stavian snapped. “Half of them can barely remain upright. You didn’t even run a secondary toxin check on the EP valves. I watched a prisoner called Stelrak collapse out of rotation last shift and be taken offline. His mask was leaking for cycles, and he wasn’t flagged. How much equipment will fail before the next order of suits arrive?”

Telren finally turned to face him. For a second, something possibly real passed through the older female’s eyes. But then it vanished, replaced by that same tired detachment. “You know the miners by their names and not their designations?”

“Some,” Stavian explained. “It’s my job as the controller of this facility to know who is here.”

Telren shook her head. “Orders to commence work as soon as possible came from Axis Central. You’re welcome to file a review if you want to wait two dozen cycles for a reply.”

Stavian slammed the side of the diagnostic terminal with his bare hand. “All I want is for the miners I have to remain alive,” he said. “Breathing. Standing upright. Not rotting in a tunnel while some bureaucrat checks boxes three systems away.”

Telren folded her arms. “You’re coddling these miners. If they hadn’t committed felonies in Axis-controlled systems, they wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s no excuse.” Stavian took a step forward. “You cut the diagnostics short and now you want to dump these workers into a shaft without a clearance sweep because you don’t want to fall behind schedule.”

Telren raised both brows. “It’s not my job to care. It’s not yours, either, Controller. And you’re making this harder than it needs to be.”

Stavian stared at her. “I’m not interested in easy. I’m interested in keeping this facility stable, which doesn’t happen if half the workforce dies.”

“You made quota last cycle,” Telren said. “By Axis standards, that’s a success.”

“By Axis standards, it’s also legal to harvest credit from corpses.”

Telren snorted. “What exactly do you want, Stavian?” she asked, switching to his name. “A cease rotation order? For what? A handful of wheezes and some low oxygen alarms? They’ve lasted longer in worse air and you know it.”

“I want a toxin panel run on every suit that came out of tunnel set E within the last cycle,” Stavian said. “I want a med review of all flagged miners.”

“We’re not equipped to—”

“Then get equipped.” Stavian turned his back and stalked toward the secondary control pad. “Or I’ll file it myself. Direct to High Emissary Bendahn at Central Axis.”

Telren didn’t follow. She just muttered something Stavian didn’t catch and turned toward the med station.

He cursed under his breath.

He was supposed to manage a system, not wage a war over every damn health protocol. He glanced up at a nearby security cam blinking above the tunnel door. The feed was live. Recording everything.

And if anyone back at Central bothered to watch it, including Bendahn, the female high emissary who took him as an orphan infant in and trained him, they’d see what really went on in this place. Not that they would care.

Stavian scrolled down the live suit logs on the terminal. Five miners from tunnel set E had biofeedback inconsistencies. Three more had flagged radiation spikes. The system had auto-cleared them all. Just green boxes on a screen. Green didn’t mean safe. It meant overlooked.

He inputted one miner he wanted to check in on—Inmate 630-I, commonly called Cerani.

Yes, he knew their names. But he especially knew hers.

Her file expanded across the screen as it had countless times before. Stavian didn’t want to think about how many times he’d looked at her file. No known planetary origin listed outside of “Settled Territory – Axis Registered. TP-112-1.” But that wasn’t a settlement—it was a prison disguised as a colony. Probably the most disturbing part of it—the inmates didn’t know they were prisoners. Desperation and survival were what kept them in line.

He pulled up Cerani’s biometric logs. Instead of the same string of slow decline he saw in everyone else, her records told a different story.

Respiration rate: stable. Heart function: above average. Blood oxygen: optimal. Cellular turnover spiked well above standard miner range. No strain markers. No signs of long-term damage from radiation exposure. In fact, unbelievably, her biological systems had improved since she’d arrived.

Stavian leaned closer. “How?” he murmured to himself.

He tapped the interactive feed to match her data with mine exposure levels. Her first ten cycles showed moderate contamination. The same as everyone else. But then something shifted. Her body adapted at a rate that didn’t match other species’ baselines. Not even his. The psiak radiation was nourishing her body, not destroying it.

He pulled up the visual profile next—not for the specs, just to see her. The most recent image of her was captured in the barracks, the previous wake cycle, as she stood in line to receive her rations.

She was beautiful. Unsettlingly so. Not in the delicate, artificial way he was used to seeing in Axis circles, polished and measured. There was nothing cautious about her beauty. It was raw. Defiant. Like her body didn’t know it stood in a prison.

Nothing at the DeLink 22K Mine looked like her. In the still, her body was caught mid-motion, lean and strong, shaped by labor but not weighed down by it. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back, but strands had come loose, catching the overhead lighting and turning it molten at the edges—gold, copper, crimson, fire. The file said her hair was brown. It was wrong.

He zoomed in.

She wasn’t directly facing the lens, but even in profile, the lines were striking. High cheekbones, a straight nose, full mouth, her face drawn into a look of focus that made it hard to look away. Her skin held a soft olive tone under the grime layered from long shifts below surface, but it was her eyes that rooted him. Even blurred in the capture, they gleamed—light gold, like polished amber under glass. He remembered them clearer in person. Sharp, unwavering, and bright in a way nothing on this moon should’ve been. Bright in a way that felt…dangerous.

Her face was smooth, although there was a maturity to her features, indicating she was far from childhood. Large, gold freckles on her forehead reflected the light, undimmed by the dust. His gaze moved over the curve of her neck. The way her chin was lifted, confident and sure. She looked tired, yes, but not cracked or pale like the others. Not breaking. There was something whole about her. Unshaken. She should’ve looked like everyone else—drained, empty, nearly broken. But this picture betrayed none of that. Cerani looked like someone you could not crush. And that truth scraped at something under his skin.

He hadn’t meant to study her image like this, hadn’t planned to stare too long or wonder what her voice would sound like if she weren’t always half-filtered through a respirator. But something about her unsettled all that control he’d spent a lifetime perfecting.

Stavian pinched the bridge of his nose, not sure whether it was fascination or warning rattling in his chest. But the truth was what it was—he couldn’t stop watching her. And he didn’t want to believe that was dangerous.

Even though it was.

“Why you?” he muttered.

He pulled up health data from his own log on a separate screen. His readings were similar—resilient, no decay markers, stable under prolonged exposure to the psiak radiation. He had been sent here to run the mine because he was unaffected by the radiation. It was, he was told, a trait of Zaruxians, his species.

But Cerani wasn’t Zaruxian. She wasn’t anything defined, if her file was to be believed. No species tag. No medical flags. No genetic match found in the Axis database, and that was anomalous. Everything had a match. Everything had a place.

He scanned through her work records. Over quota for the last eleven shifts. Zero med alerts. No behavioral incidents. Only internal observation flags—those came from him.

Stavian sat back, his eyes still locked on the screen. He’d extended her shift. It hadn’t been reported. He had slid the override through quietly, given five failing miners temporary hold tags for recovery, then shifted her onto Rotation T-7L, solo, for the extra time. She could take it. The others could not.

He locked the file and keyed in a blackout tag for her medical logs. It wouldn’t erase the data, just shuffle it under his name and list it as inactive within default reports. This was a trick he’d learned after too many dealings with auditing teams. They looked for flags. They didn’t dig deeper if something looked like laziness. And despite the Axis’ reputation of being this huge, powerful entity, there was plenty of laziness among the ranks.

He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his hands over his face.

Cerani was a different sort of prisoner. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d done to land herself in the Axis penal system. Some of those “settled territories” had been around for mig-cycles. For all he knew, she’d been born into one. Her records were missing. That, in itself, wasn’t odd. Plenty of Axis prisoners had incomplete files.

He sighed and stared at the flickering requisition board across from the console. Rations were late in arriving. Power routing in tunnel D still dropped below standard levels. Another tremor and those supports would have to be shored up with materials they didn’t have.

Stavian cracked his neck. Something needed to give.

But not her . She couldn’t break. He simply wouldn’t allow it.

He turned to the console behind him and entered a quick command, making the terminal doors slide shut and locking everyone else out. No one needed to know Cerani was now classified under his personal watch.

He pulled his wrist comm out from under his sleeve and keyed a direct channel to Mech Control.

“Prioritize recalibration sweeps to the suits from E-level. Full toxicology check,” he said.

“Orders came from Med Command yesterday,” the comm replied. “We’re not flagged for override.”

“You are now,” Stavian said. “Route the sweep through my clearance. I’ll handle the report fallout.”

“Understood.”

He ended the feed. As he walked the hallway toward the lift, a figure stepped out from the wall. Lieutenant Darven was his second-in-command. The Etoki male was tall, pale-skinned, with eyes dark as coal. He was one hundred percent loyal to the Axis. He and Stavian tolerated each other, barely.

“You’re overscheduling 630-I,” Darven said.

“Am I?”

“You extended her shift without reporting it to Central. Is she being punished? Has she committed an infraction?”

Eh, the last thing Stavian wanted was Darven thinking Cerani was a disciplinary problem. “No. She’s an efficient miner. Keeps the quotas clean,” Stavian said.

“You care about quotas now?”

Stavian paused, biting back an unnecessary insult. “I care about keeping miners alive in a place designed to kill them. 630-I can take the extra work. The others can’t.”

Darven said nothing.

Stavian stepped onto the lift and hit the button for the lower-level command bay. As the platform dropped, he closed his eyes for just a second and let everything narrow down—the whine of the lift, the metal walls around him, the flickering panel overhead. It was quiet here. Nowhere else in this facility gave him that.

Darven hadn’t said so, but Stavian knew the male would report it. Probably not now, probably not directly, but someone would hear about Cerani being flagged for extra shifts under his authorization. That wasn’t the kind of thing that got ignored forever. Nothing here ever stayed quiet for long.

The lift slowed, then locked into place with a mechanical thud. The doors split open, revealing Lower Command—bare steel walls, three monitoring stations, and one mech stationed for coordination scans. Everything down here pulsed at a different rhythm, heavy with power cycles and bleed-off heat from the surface converters.

He stepped off, scanned his wrist panel at the terminal, and kicked on an encrypted interface.

The sector map pulled up again. He zoomed into tunnel set E. Five suit sweeps were already running. All five units populated: weak radiation leaks at the clavicle seals, pressure faults on two knee joints, and one was marked with a ruptured respirator membrane that hadn’t been caught on entry.

Half a unit from the last shift had been exposed.

He didn’t swear. Didn’t blink. He added those logs directly to the Axis queue with a red flag under General Systems Notice. If he could prove that the medic team failed protocol, it would give him just enough leverage to pause future rotations without Central pulling him from his post. It was a narrow window. Risky. But better than digging another mass grave next to air lock 3.

He exited the suit scan, tapped into Cerani’s imaging feed again, but paused before it opened. He tapped out.

No. Stars, he needed to get a hold of himself. He’d already spent too long staring at her metrics, trying to make them make sense.

Instead, he opened his secure ledger, created a new file, labeled it “Anomaly 630-I,” and keyed in a manual entry: No Axis flags, No visible code. Just the word “Pending.” He rubbed his temples and stared at the screen. If the stimulant injections that kept most supervisors and prisoners upright on FK-22R helped with pressure headaches, he’d consider taking them. But Cerani—she had none of those standard support boosts. There wasn’t a single dose logged for her. No immuno-boosts. No cell-repair stimulants. Nothing to explain how she was thriving here.

He rubbed his thumb against his jaw, thinking. Could it be environmental mutation? Some genetic quirk that let her reprocess psiak the way his body did? No. There were protocols for that kind of screening—nothing in her intake file showed up flagged. Not even in the fine print.

Unless someone buried the data or missed it completely.

Stavian didn’t like not knowing. His job was to control variables, monitor risk, anticipate failure. He leaned back in his chair, positioning his wings to minimize them scraping on the floor. Cerani hadn’t cracked under the pressure, and she hadn’t complained once during any of her extended shifts. She hadn’t even logged an exhaustion flag. Most miners begged for stim breaks after cycle seven. She was on cycle thirty-three and still pulled over quota. Maybe she knew that her extra shifts helped them make quota, and therefore allowed her fellow, sick prisoners the rest they needed.

He thought of her steady gaze when he spoken with her in the tunnel. Her quiet defiance. She did not know her place, and if she did, she didn’t give a fek .

He should report her. Push the anomaly to Central, let them sort it out. That was the right move. The safe one.

But if they pulled her, he’d never see her again. That just wasn’t acceptable to him.

“Controller?” A voice crackled over the comm line. “Suit sweep complete. Rotations authorized to resume. Shall we reengage mining teams?”

He looked at the status lights blinking bright green across tunnel rows A through E.

“Yes,” he said with a sick gut. He didn’t want anyone in those mines with that equipment, but it was always a careful dance with Central, who saw any compassion toward there prisoners as traitorous. “And download a copy of the sweep report before it gets purged. Send it to my terminal.”

“Understood.” The line cut.

Stavian drummed his fingers once against the console. The data wasn’t helping anymore. Numbers didn’t explain her. Records could be forged, sensors could glitch. Charts lied all the time. If he wanted answers, data wouldn’t be enough. He’d already pulled what he could—med logs, vitals, imaging feeds. None of it gave him what he needed. But what did he need from her? He was afraid to answer that question.

But she’d looked right at him—unflinching, grounded, sharp as a blade. She wasn’t waiting for someone to save her. Cerani knew who she was. If he wanted the truth, he was going to have to ask her himself.

Stavian shut down the terminal, stood, and keyed into the security paging system. “Inmate hold on 630-I. Escort her to Central Intake,” he said. “Bring her to me.”