The increased enforcer presence in the worker levels did not endear them among station residents, but it might have dampened some of the enmity that had been building since Honey’s murder. Workers blamed the immortals, the immortals blamed the workers, different worker factions blamed each other, and it all felt like a fire that was going to get out of control really fast.

Harry kept his ass out of the precinct. He didn’t want to see Sarge’s face or run afoul of Cerberus’s Internal Affairs Division. They could track him by his slate; let the spook squad come to him if they wanted. He wasn’t going to do their work for them.

He thought about that day in the maintenance level, and knew he’d get in trouble for not reporting it to their superiors as soon as it happened. He wished he could talk to Maddox, find out what the hell he was entangled in.

There was a mandatory curfew between shifts, which pissed off the bartenders and shopkeepers something fierce, but probably kept the lights on for the ones paying the bills a little longer.

Armed guards were placed at all the airlocks. Whenever a maintenance team had to walk around on the skin of the station to repair the solar array or check for micrometeorite scarring, their IDs were scrutinized, the backgrounds triple-checked. It took twice as long to get anything done, and everyone was brimming with mistrust. The workers resented the enforcers, and the enforcers hated having to ride herd on the workers. Harry just hated himself. For the first time in his career he was ashamed of his job, and he was angry at himself for feeling ashamed.

Harry was in his apartment watching Honey do her thing when the first blackout happened. A tiny blip at first, chalked up to some minute fluctuation somewhere. It happened. But there were redundant systems, backups for the backups, and when it did happen it didn’t stay that way for very long. Then everything shut down and stayed that way. Harry sat in the dark, listening to the sound of his own breathing. The air handler stopped its methodical hissing as well.

Not good.

He reached for his slate in the dark. It had a full charge, and there was an emergency feed that carried info about what was going on. What he saw instead made his stomach sink into his shoes.

A dimly-lit video showed a trio of masked figures. “We have taken the power station,” one of them said. “We will restore power only if the following conditions are met.”

What followed was a text list of around twenty or so demands covering everything from better pay to sabbatical time. Harry sighed. It had started. He wasn’t sure if these guys were Whisper Guild or some other group, but they would only be the first. This wouldn’t stop until someone got their skull caved in.

His slate flashed at him, and Harry swiped away the video. It was work.

“We’ve got some morons holed up in the power station,” said Sarge, her face resembling an angry phantasm from an old movie in the precinct’s emergency lights.

“So I gathered.”

“I want you to lead a breach team. Get our power back on.”

“Why me?”

“Because we’re spread thin. I got my best breach guys babysitting fucking airlocks. Now get your ass down there. Your team will meet you there.”

“Copy that.”

“And Harry, I know I don’t have to tell you what happens if we don’t get the power back on.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Harry nodded and signed off. He had been briefed. Everyone aboard Valhalla knew.

Everyone who lived and died down a gravity well thought that without the powered heat inside a spaceship, asteroid dome or space station habitat, everyone would freeze to death. After all, it’s cold as hell in space. But what many don’t realize is that vacuum is a perfect insulator, and heat generated by an object as big as Valhalla will remain inside it, building up unless it is expelled. With the station’s power down that was no longer being done. They weren’t going to freeze to death, but die of heatstroke. Boil to death inside a metal tube surrounded by vacuum a few degrees above absolute zero.

Harry tugged on his collar. It was already visibly warmer. He’d better get going.

He went to a storage locker, pressing his thumb against it to unlock it. He took out his riot armor, extra magazines for his pistol, and his rail rifle. They were beyond the need for baton rounds at this point. In cases like this lethal force was authorized.

No power also meant there was no electricity to lift up and down the spine, but the residential ring was close enough to the power station to make use of a few shortcuts he had picked up during his tenure aboard Valhalla. A few access ladders later, he arrived, huffing and sweating at the enforcement barricade his fellow boys in black had made outside the power station’s entrance.

“They haven’t fiddled with the reactor, have they?” Harry said by way of greeting.

Lieutenant Tomlin scowled at him, having obviously never considered this possibility. “We don’t think so. They want their demands met, not to kill us all.”

Harry nodded, but he had to consider it as an option, even an accidental one. He imagined Valhalla’s fusion reactor going critical and the entire station becoming as bright and as hot as Earth’s sun for a few seconds. It would be painless, immediate, and a hell of a show for any passing ships.

“All right,” Harry said, taking point. “Do we know who’s in there?”

“No. They’ve all got masks, and they disabled the security cams.” Enforcer Anika Fulbright stared up at him grimly. She wore a gauntlet fitted with a slate that commanded a cloud of drones she had used to create a defensive perimeter.

“Any hostages?”

“Just two nuke techs,” said Enforcer Newton Strangeway, a large, brawny figure who looked like he would burst from his riot gear.

“All right,” said Harry. “Let’s breach it.”

“Sir?” said Fulbright.

“You heard me. Our orders are to breach, get that power back on. Or do you like it hot?”

“No, sir.”

Everyone exchanged worried glances and fell in.

There were five of them on the breach team. Harry hoped it was enough. The sealed pressure door wasn’t being guarded, so it was the work of a few minutes to slap some shaped charges on the hinges and get ready. Harry got everyone into position as he counted down from five. At the count of one, the bomb tech blew the charges with his slate and the heavy door fell to the decking, Harry and his team already on the move.

What little violence occurred had been surgical and brief. Harry entered first, taking fire from a kid of no more than eighteen standard hefting a rail pistol. The cloud of tiny ceramic flechettes bounced harmlessly off his armor as Harry returned fire, a perfect kill shot. The kid went down. One of the saboteurs fired a shotgun, hitting Fulbright square in the left shoulder as she entered behind Harry.

But by then it was all over. The tally, one wounded enforcer and one dead saboteur. Everything happened so fast, and seeing their comrade lying dead beside them took the wind out of them. The remaining two insurgents went to their knees and stuck their hands in the air.

Fresh nuke techs entered the facility as soon as Harry’s guys hauled out the troublemakers, and a few moments later the lights came back up and the air handlers began their steady rumbling back to life. A few onlookers cheered, while a few more shouted obscenities and made rude gestures with their hands.

“That’s the trouble with terrorists,” one of the bomb techs walking beside him said. “Killing one just makes more of them.”

Harry thought of that dead terrorist, killed by his own hand. He had meant to wound, hadn’t he? It didn’t matter. A life was gone, and he was the one who took it. He was just a kid, damn it.

Harry watched as the perpetrators were shoved in the back of a security cart and taken away. He wondered what would happen to them. They’d certainly be fined and kicked off the station. He figured the immortals would gladly pay for passage for two such troublemakers. Although an equally likely possibility was that they’d both take an unplanned walk out of an airlock when nobody was looking.

But what Harry wondered most as he headed for the spine and a working elevator, was if this show of strength had been enough. They had now demonstrated that they were willing to disrupt the entire station to get their point across. He wondered if the people in charge were even listening.