The mass driver control station was a place built for utility, not comfort. It stretched across the outermost edge of Caliban Station, its narrow corridors surrounded by kilometers of reinforced coil segments that ran in a near-perfect line away from the station. The station’s designers had clearly prioritized "functional" over "welcoming," and Judas-12 felt every inch of that decision as he floated alone in the control room, glaring at an error-filled diagnostic screen that refused to give him answers.

Judas liked to think of himself as a man of patience, but the station seemed intent on testing just how elastic that patience could be. The magnetic flux variance was still climbing, up another 0.03% since yesterday. Nothing in the telemetry logs made sense. The power was fine. The coils were fine. The alignment was fine. Except none of it was fine.

It was lonely here without Samson.

"Okay," Judas muttered, tapping at the console with more force than necessary. "If nothing’s broken, why are you acting like you’re about to fall apart? Talk to me, you stupid overengineered slinky."

He stared at the schematic on the main display: the mass driver in all its terrifying, beautiful scale, stretching kilometers into the black void. It wasn’t just the lifeblood of Caliban Station; it was the station. Without it, there was no asteroid mining, no exports to Earth, no reason for anyone to be out here in Pluto’s frozen shadow. And right now, it was a ticking time bomb.

Judas’s thoughts were interrupted by the sharp ping of an incoming intranet message. He groaned and opened the terminal, already expecting bad news. It was from Dara-6.

Talking with Victor. Do you have better footage of the lampreys?

Judas frowned, his irritation flickering into curiosity. He typed back with one hand.

Nope. Just the bodycam footage. Why?

Dara’s reply came quickly: Just confirming. These, right? Attached was a screenshot from the footage he’d sent her days ago. It showed the six unmarked lamprey stations docked neatly in a row, their spindly frames clinging to the outer edge of the station like unwanted barnacles.

Judas leaned closer to the screen, his mind turning over the image like a puzzle. The lampreys weren’t new information. He had been thinking about them, but not enough to lose sleep over it, especially since just getting out of the brig was taking up more of his brainspace.

Now, though, staring at the image, something about their alignment nagged at him. He minimized the intranet terminal and pulled up the mass driver schematic again. The lampreys were docked laterally along the bay closest to E13, the segment showing the most flux instability. Judas frowned and began opening up sections of the terminal he really wasn't supposed to be in. You know. Stuff for the computer eggheads, not the machine eggheads like him.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Wait a second," he muttered, eyes skimming past flowing numbers like a wall of whitewater.

Judas opened the raw telemetry logs, scanning for anything unusual. At first glance, everything looked fine: the packets were clean, the timestamps consistent. The system was reporting exactly what it should. But the longer he looked, the more the numbers started to itch at the back of his mind.

Telemetry was supposed to have noise—just a little. The last few digits of each timestamp would always vary slightly because of things like network latency, tiny cosmic disturbances, or the station’s normal mechanical vibrations. But this... this had too much noise. The numbers weren’t random enough.

Too many threes. Too many nines.

Someone—or something—was injecting garbage data into the telemetry stream.

Judas leaned back, letting himself drift for a moment. “Okay, why? What’s the point of spamming fake data?”

The system was supposed to monitor itself, based on a billion and one factors. Solar wind, trace cosmic particles, micrometeorites, someone on the station breathing too hard. Constantly wobbling and breathing like a suspension bridge. But here were these extra junk entries, each one a fake butterfly's wingflap. And if the mass driver was convinced there was a lepidopterarium onboard...

Judas opened a simulation, plugging in the current telemetry anomalies and letting it run forward to the next scheduled launch. His stomach sank as the results unfolded. The garbage data wasn’t just random noise—it was nudging the coils ever so slightly out of alignment. By the time the asteroid reached the final segment, it would drift just far enough to clip the inner edge of the last ring.

And once that happened, physics would do the rest. The asteroid, unfathomably heavy, hurtling forward at tens of kilometers per second, would slam into the final ring with catastrophic force. The impact would tear through the driver like a sledgehammer through aluminum foil, shredding the station’s structural supports and leaving Caliban in several very distinct pieces. The kind of pieces you’d bury in a mass grave if there were anyone left to do the burying.

Judas leaned back, his boots still magnetized to the floor, and let out a long, shaky breath. "Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me."

He ran the simulation again, just to be sure, but the outcome didn’t change. The lampreys weren’t just watching. They weren’t surveillance drones, or harmless auxiliary units, or any of the other excuses he’d told himself to ignore them. They were saboteurs, feeding poison into the station’s veins and setting it up for one perfect kill shot.

The intranet pinged again. Dara’s name flashed on the screen.

Update?

Judas stared at the message for a long moment before typing back. They’re not for monitoring. They’re screwing with the telemetry. If we launch another asteroid, we’re dead.

Dara’s response came almost immediately. Define “dead.”

Judas’s hands hovered over the keyboard. He wasn’t sure how to answer that in a way that didn’t sound like a death sentence, so he settled for blunt honesty.

Station in two pieces. Us in more than two pieces. Tell Victor to figure out what the hell’s going on.

As he hit send, Judas glanced out the viewport, where Pluto’s icy surface shimmered faintly in the distant sunlight. The station felt impossibly small out here, a fragile speck against an endless void. And somewhere, deep in that void, someone had decided they could afford to lose it.

"They’re not watching us," Judas muttered to himself. "They’re choking us."

He turned back to the diagnostics, but the screen felt more like a countdown clock now. The flux variance ticked up another fraction of a percent, a slow, steady reminder that the next 108 days weren’t a deadline. They were an execution date.