The bathroom wasn’t built for meetings. It was built for precisely what one would expect—a place to take a piss, wash your hands, and, in more desperate cases, re-evaluate life choices while staring at the cracked paint of the ceiling.
It was not, under any circumstances, intended to be the clandestine headquarters of a growing resistance movement.
And yet, here they were.
Judas-12 stood wedged between Ibrahim and Dara, his back pressed against a poorly insulated bulkhead that leached the last remnants of body heat out of him. Caleb was perched on the closed lid of a maintenance access hatch, hunched over like someone about to receive a life-altering diagnosis. Tariq sat cross-legged on the floor, chewing the inside of his cheek in the way that meant he was trying very hard not to say something immediately stupid. Reya hovered near the door, arms crossed, shifting her weight just slightly—one ear trained toward the hallway for approaching footsteps.
None of them had their Buddies. That was the most important part.
It wasn’t unusual for people to leave their Buddies behind when they wanted privacy, but this many people, at the same time, in the same place? If NSS noticed this pattern, they’d start asking questions.
For now, they were safe. This was the one place the Buddies couldn't follow. Station regs had been explicit about that: No cameras, no surveillance, not even audio logs. Call it respect for dignity, or just the fear of lawsuits, but as far as modern technological spaces went, this was the last place where people could talk without an AI filing away every syllable.
Judas exhaled, running a hand down his face. “We can’t do this forever.”
“No shit,” Dara muttered.
Tariq smirked. “Hey, I don’t know, I’m getting kind of attached to these little meetings. Real sense of camaraderie.”
Reya made a noise that was either amusement or exasperation. “Yeah, well, let’s see how much camaraderie you have left when they notice the same group of people keep conveniently wandering into a bathroom at the same time.”
Judas ignored them, rubbing his temples. His head was still a mess from everything. The message from Lyra. The mass driver being set up to rip them all in half. The lockouts. The slow-motion suffocation of their entire station.
“We need a move,” Ibrahim said, arms crossed. His voice was steady, but there was a current of unease under it. “Right now we’re just watching the walls close in. If we don’t start pushing back, they’re going to squeeze until there’s nothing left.”
“Yeah?” Dara tilted her head. “And what do you suggest? Because last I checked, we don’t have weapons. We don’t have access to anything critical. Hell, we don’t even have access to our own goddamn shipping requests.”
“Doesn’t mean we don’t have options.”
Judas let out a slow breath. “We’re not picking a fight.”
Ibrahim snorted. “We’re already in one.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“No,” Judas said, shaking his head. “I mean a fight we’d actually lose. One where NSS would stop playing this slow, bureaucratic stranglehold and just kill us outright. Right now, we’re a non-issue to them. A rounding error. They don’t care about us, they don’t care about our Buddies, and they sure as hell don’t care about Caliban as anything more than a glorified chunk of rock. They win by doing nothing, and we lose by waiting.”
Reya exhaled sharply. “So what, you’re saying we make them care?”
Judas didn’t answer immediately. He was still turning the pieces over in his mind. What do we still have?
Tariq leaned against the sink, frowning. “I mean… we could just leave.”
The entire room turned to look at him.
“What?” Tariq shrugged. “If we can fire up the thrusters, why not just go? Break orbit, set a course, try to make it somewhere else?”
Dara sighed. “Yeah, great idea. The only reason we get food shipments at all is because the shuttles all know exactly where we'll be up to twenty years out. Even if we escape orbit, which is not that hard, we'll starve before we can do anything interesting.”
Ibrahim chuckled darkly. “We could always head toward Uranus, turn the station into a bomb, just to fuck with everyone. Detonate its atmosphere.”
“Okay,” Reya cut in, rubbing her temples. “Let’s only suggest plans that don’t end in us dying for no reason.”
“Uranus doesn't have enough free oxygen to detonate. It would never work anyway,” Judas pointed out.
“Well,” Ibrahim said, still smirking. “If we’re talking final acts of defiance, we could always fire the asteroid at Earth. One last ‘fuck you’ before we get spaced.”
Caleb, looking horrified, was the first to break the ensuing silence. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” Tariq admitted, chuckling.
Dara shook her head. “First of all, it wouldn’t even make it to Earth. We’d never get the velocity and the angle right. Second of all, even if we did somehow manage to lob it toward them, it’d burn up before it even hit the surface.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Ibrahim said, still grinning faintly. “But admit it—you thought about it for a second.”
Judas let his head hit the wall behind him, exhaling. “Can we please focus?”
Reya’s gaze flicked to him. “Then focus us. What’s the actual play?”
Judas hesitated. The pieces weren’t quite there yet, but they were close. He could feel it—the same way he’d feel an equation resolving in his head, the way numbers clicked into place right before the answer became clear.
They couldn’t leave Pluto’s orbit. That was impossible logistically. They couldn’t take back control of the station—not entirely. NSS had locked them out of everything vital, and the buddies all had guns bolted onto their arms, impossible to remove. The only things security officers had were tasers, and those weren't exactly a viable option for robot-on-person combat. They couldn’t sabotage their own systems without ensuring they’d die in the process. The only thing they could do was move.
His fingers drummed against his knee. “We have the thrusters,” he repeated.
The group stilled again.
“...Yeah?” Dara said, skeptical. “We've well established that. What exactly do you plan to do with them?”
Judas didn’t answer immediately. He could see the pieces of the problem shifting, rearranging. The numbers weren’t adding up yet, but they were starting to. The margins were clicking into place.
“You’re thinking about something,” Reya observed.
Judas exhaled through his nose. “Yeah.”
A pause. Then: “Well?”
“I don’t know yet,” Judas admitted. “But I think I know where to start.”
Dara gave him a look. “That’s very helpful, thank you.”
Judas ignored her, straightening. “We need numbers. Real numbers. I need to run math by hand. Which means we need—”
Reya, immediately understanding, groaned. “—Paper.”
Tariq blinked. “Paper? Like, paper paper?”
“You know, thin little slices of tree pulp?” Judas deadpanned. “Yes. Paper. I could ask Samson to perform all the calculations in half an hour, but then it'd get logged, and I need this to not be logged until the last possible second.”
“Good luck,” Ibrahim muttered. “Where the hell are you going to get that?”
Reya was already rubbing her temples. “You do realize the only physical paper on this station is locked up in admin storage, right? Because nobody uses it? Because this is a space station? You’re asking for a miracle.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Judas challenged.
A pause.
Then, finally, Reya sighed. “Goddammit. Fine. I’ll go bother Vivian.”