Deeper Into Darkness

The corridor lights flickered and faded, plunging the guest deck into artificial dusk. Serena Myles was on the move, boots soundless against the plush flooring as she closed the distance to Director Helena Cross’s private office. All around her, Celestial Haven felt on the edge of something raw—a luxury habitat whose glamour could not keep out human desperation.

A security droid bristled at her approach. Serena flashed her credentials with a practiced flick of her wrist. The droid yielded, doors whispering open on a wave of ozone. She stepped into the cool, sterile hush of the director’s sanctum.

Helena was waiting, tension carved into the rigid lines of her frame as she reviewed streams of code on her console. Serena didn’t bother with pleasantries.

“Someone’s tried to access your terminal, Director. Not from my team.”

Cross’s mouth drew thin, eyes flashing annoyance and something close to fear. “Nothing’s missing.”

Serena arched a brow. “Yet. You keep anything sensitive off the main system?”

A razor-thin pause. “Naturally. Only the station’s funding records, old contracts, and security backdoors.”

“Security backdoors.”

Helena bristled. “During emergencies only.”

She wanted to press further, but the sting of Serena’s comm snapped her attention aside. It was a security override—her code, triggered from the comms hub on D-deck.

A terse voice: “Emergency in communications. Sub-level two.”

Serena was already running, heart hammering as the corridors flashed an angry red. She shouldered through panicking guests and clustering staff, past a frightened concierge and, astonishingly, Alicia Verdugo in sharply tailored loungewear pacing by the viewport, pale and taut.

Down two flights, the air colder now, Serena reached the comms control chamber. A trio of med-bots hovered in a nervous orbit, red diagnostic lights strobing. On the deck, facedown amid spilled tools and a puddle of blood, was Emil Petrova, the station’s junior communications officer.

He was breathing, but shallowly—the side of his face slick, skin mottled with a violent wound behind the ear. A bloodied maintenance wrench lay discarded nearby.

Serena crouched, peering into Emil’s fevered eyes. “Emil. Do you recognize me?”

His lips twitched. He tried to speak, managed only a sound. Serena pressed a gentle hand against his shoulder, glancing up at the med-bots: “Full neural scan. Lock this room down.”

A med-bot’s monotone: “Cranial trauma. No immediate neural compromise. Transferring to medbay.”

Serena leaned closer. “Did you see who did it?” she whispered.

A single syllable scratched free: “Mask…”

“Describe.”

He trembled. “Black… Overalls… They wanted… files.” His eyes rolled; the med-bots swept him quickly away, the scent of metallic tang and panic lingering in his wake.

Serena’s gaze sharpened. On Emil’s console, evidence of a frantic data scrape—lines of code aborted, backup logs half-deleted. Serena’s stomach dropped as she traced the access chain: not just interference, but calculated sabotage. Someone wanted something Emil had—badly enough to commit open violence.

Whoever assaulted him feared he’d talk, Serena realized, noting the pattern: first Kade, now their best witness. The killer was losing patience.

A sweep of Emil’s work logs revealed another anomaly: a flagged entry, timestamped just half an hour before. Emil had been cross-referencing security access with guest accounts, specifically those tied to Haven’s funding and—curiously—the private logs of Dr. Alan Kade.

She pulled the directory. Hidden amid the tangle of Kade’s personal drive—a cryptographically sealed folder labeled Prometheus—tucked away, missed by the first forensic sweep. Stomach tightening, Serena transferred the files to her own encrypted deck, sending a silent request for the station's best decryption AI.

While she waited, she scanned the incident logs from the last twelve hours. The data was riddled with inconsistencies: access granted to service corridors in dead zones, priority overrides issued but not registered to staff. At least six pings from a single guest suite—Mr. DeLaney’s—coinciding with the comms blackout and Emil’s attack.

Helena Cross arrived on the heels of the med team, lips pursed in fury. “What the—Emil was attacked under our nose?”

“We’re past the point where luck explains anything, Director. Someone’s moving with confidence—someone with knowledge of your systems.” Serena kept her voice flat. “How tight is your access roster, really?”

Cross hesitated. “It should be airtight. Only engineering, security, and myself have access, with triple redundancy.”

“Redundancies can be exploited.”

She left Helena to fume and wound upward toward Kade’s suite. Aloft in the grav-silenced lift, she reviewed the decrypted fragments from Prometheus. Blueprints of Celestial Haven’s shell corporation web, records of off-ledger fund transfers—hidden debts and unaccounted outflows looping back to shell accounts on Luna and Ganymede.

At the core, a scathing memo: Kade itemizing missing funds, suggesting someone aboard—staff or investor—had skimmed millions, laundering proceeds through the station. Kade had been days away from formal disclosure to the Federation. In his last audio log—voice rigid, brittle with determination—he said, “The numbers don’t lie. The thieves are here, and soon everyone will see.”

Serena slid the earpiece away, head buzzing. The murder wasn’t only about the mining patent: someone had killed to protect a financial empire.

In the atrium, she caught a glimpse of Rajiv Malhotra arguing in hushed tones with Alicia Verdugo by the bay windows. The two parted abruptly when Serena approached. But Alicia lingered, favoring her own reflection as much as Serena.

“You’re following me now?” Alicia smirked, but her bravado was a brittle shell. “Heard about Emil. Is he going to make it?”

“He’s alive. For now.”

Rajiv, lurking near, cut in: “You think the same person killed Kade and attacked Emil?”

Serena’s eyes narrowed. “If it’s the same party, they’re desperately cleaning up.”

There was a flicker between Alicia and Rajiv—a glance, too long, too tender for comrades in guilt. Serena filed it away. She waited, pretending to study the viewports.

Alicia turned, ghost-pale. “If you think someone’s coming after me—”

“Anyone with knowledge is at risk now. Especially those poking into the station’s money flows.”

Rajiv stepped closer to Alicia, his hand brushing her wrist. His voice, whispering hard: “We don’t talk about this, not now.”

Alicia snapped her hand away, eyes wild. “If we let them scapegoat us, it’s over. Everything.”

“Everything for us died when Kade turned up dead.” Rajiv’s grief was too raw for feigning.

Serena let the silence settle. “How long?” she asked quietly.

Rajiv flinched. Alicia’s shoulders dropped.

“Eighteen months,” Alicia answered, chin raised. “We kept it quiet—career suicide for both of us. But neither of us wanted Kade dead, detective. We…we just wanted a way off this station.”

Serena believed the panic, at least. But secrets had momentum—affairs became leverage, leverage became motive. She left them to their argument.

Back in her makeshift command post, Serena dove into the new access anomalies. The station’s security net, once daunting, now looked like a sieve: illicit logins routed through unregistered device IDs, near-simultaneous swipes from both engineering and admin panels. The digital signature was too clean, as if scrubbed by someone with intimate knowledge of internal audits.

A private ping from the lab: a bioprint off the wrench used in Emil’s attack, hastily wiped but with enough residual trace for a partial match—someone cleared for engineering access. Rajiv, but also three others. Among them: Helena Cross. Serena’s features tightened.

The conspiracy ran deeper than anyone cared to admit.

Night fell hard; the station’s lumin panels dimmed, throwing the sprawling habitat into a drowsy half-light. Serena stood alone at the primary viewport, Jupiter’s eye gazing coldly through the glass. Across the deck, Alicia and Rajiv sat together in tense silence, shoulders just touching.

Serena whispered into her recorder: “The net is tightening. The motive is bigger than a patent: fraud, theft, maybe worse. Kade was set to expose the rot. Now Emil—a liability—was silenced, almost permanently. There’s more love and hate binding this crew than they realize. They’re not just hiding secrets from me—they’re hiding from themselves.”

Outside, the Jovian storms coiled, echoing the rising chaos inside. Serena stared back, determined. Tomorrow, there would be no shadows left.