The Dyson Swarm's Last Lightkeepers

• Chapter 1 The Fading Grid
• Chapter 2 Shadows on Segment Seven
• Chapter 3 Phantom Signals
• Chapter 4 Corporate Silence
• Chapter 5 Spanner and Solar Wind
• Chapter 6 The Drift Wardens
• Chapter 7 Rust in the Megastructure
• Chapter 8 Whispers from the Inner Worlds
• Chapter 9 Blind Spots in the Swarm
• Chapter 10 Flare Protocol
• Chapter 11 Abandoned Relay
• Chapter 12 Ghost Ships of Sol-Prime
• Chapter 13 The Cost of Kilowatts
• Chapter 14 Static and Scraps
• Chapter 15 Diverted Power
• Chapter 16 The Blackout Threshold
• Chapter 17 Mutiny at Module Nine
• Chapter 18 Cold Fusion Engine
• Chapter 19 Echoes in the Canopy
• Chapter 20 Rogue Collector
• Chapter 21 The Executive Mandate
• Chapter 22 Siphoning the Core
• Chapter 23 The Dying Array
• Chapter 24 Last Stand at the Zenith
• Chapter 25 Unbroken Beam
• Chapter 26 The Spark That Remains

The warning klaxon on Node 44-Delta didn’t ring so much as it rattled, a wheezing cough of air through corroded copper tubes that sounded like a dying lung.

Captain Vane didn’t bother looking up from his lukewarm mug of chicory-blend coffee. He sat in the center of the Aethelgard’s cramped bridge, surrounded by the amber glow of cathode-ray telemetry monitors that were twice as old as he was. Outside the reinforced quartz viewport, the yellow furnace of Sol-Prime filled half the sky, crisscrossed by the blackened silhouette of tens of thousands of orbital mirrors, collectors, and habitat rings—the Dyson Swarm. Once, it had been the crown jewel of trans-stellar engineering, an unbroken shell of gold and glass capturing the full output of a star. Now, it looked like a moth-eaten coat draped over a dying fire.

"Talk to me, Silas," Vane said, taking a cautious sip. It tasted like burnt beans and ozone.

Silas, the ship’s chief systems technician, was currently jammed waist-deep into the main console’s wiring duct. His voice vibrated through the steel deckplates. "Segment Three just dropped another two gigawatts. Thermal dissipation on collector sub-array 412 is redlining. If the cooling pumps don't catch, the mirror array is going to warp into a pretzel within the hour."

"And the automated failover?"

Silas crawled backward out of the duct, wiping a smear of conductive grease from his forehead with a ragged sleeve. "Automated failover was sold off for scrap three quarters ago, Captain. Helios Energy Holdings replaced the optic relays with solid-state relays made out of recycled pop cans. The whole grid is held together with baling wire, prayer, and my bad temper."

Vane sighed and set his coffee down on a flat spot between two cracked readouts. "Plot a course to Sub-Array 412. Let's go manual on the cooling pumps."

"We're running low on reaction mass, Vane," warned Mara, the pilot, from her station at the helm. She was a gaunt woman with silver-threaded braids and fingers that moved over the thruster controls with practiced, economical precision. "Every RCS burn to nudge these floating junk heaps back into alignment eats into our reserves. Corporate hasn't sent an automated tanker out to Sector Nine in six months."

"If we don't fix 412, the microwave beam targeting the agricultural habitats on Titan goes dark," Vane said plainly. "Titan goes dark, fifty million people eat frozen algae for a year. Or starve. Options are light on the ground."

Mara grunted, her eyes fixed on the vector display. "Option three: Helios could answer our distress pings and send a repair cutter with fresh parts."

"Helios's stock dipped four points yesterday," Vane remarked, leaning back in his creaking leather harness. "They aren't spending credits on maintenance ships for a sector that's thirty percent behind on its yield quotas. We're on our own. We've been on our own since the Sol-Prime regional office downsized to a automated chatbot."

The Aethelgard, a two-hundred-meter lightkeeper vessel that had seen three overhauls and twice as many captains, groaned as Mara brought the main thrusters online. The ship unlatched from the central umbilical of Node 44-Delta, drifting out into the vacuum between two massive solar collectors.

The scale of the Swarm was hard to grasp, even for those who spent their lives inside it. Billions of structures, from kilometer-wide parabolic mirrors to tiny relay satellites, spun in precise, chaotic choreography around the star. But close up, the grandeur gave way to decay. Flaking radiation paint, micrometeorite pockmarks, and dead, unpowered habitats drifted like tombstones through the golden glare.

As the ship drew near Sub-Array 412, the visual display showed the problem immediately. One of the primary collector mirrors—a three-kilometer disk of ultra-thin foil held in tension by carbon-fiber struts—was twisting out of phase. Instead of focusing its beam into the central collector node, the mirror was casting a jagged beam of concentrated sunlight into empty space, missing its mark by several degrees. The off-target thermal load was heating up the array's frame, threatening a structural collapse.

"Cooling loop isn't just dry," Silas muttered, reading his secondary screen. "The main fluid lines are seized. Pressure's building. We've got maybe twenty minutes before the focal frame melts into slag."

"Suit up, Silas," Vane said, unbuckling his harness. "We’re going EVA. Mara, keep us tethered to the array's main gantry. If the wind from the solar flare picks up, don't let us get dragged into the beam."

"I'll keep the leash tight," Mara said, not looking away from the controls. "Try not to get cooked out there. I just cleaned the airlock."

Ten minutes later, Vane and Silas stepped out onto the exterior hull of Sub-Array 412. The glare of Sol-Prime was blinding, even through the silvered visors of their heavy EVA suits. Below them, the vast, shimmering surface of the collector mirror reflected the star like an endless sea of fire. The silence of space was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic sound of their own breathing and the raspy comms link between their helmets.

They picked their way along the structural truss toward the pump housing, using magnetic boots to keep anchored against the microgravity. The metal beneath their feet was vibrating violently, hummed through by the strain of overheating mechanical components.

"Look at this," Silas growled, pointing his torch at the coolant valve assembly. "The pressure release valve is fused shut. It’s an old copper-alloy fitting. Helios hasn't used titanium fittings on these arrays since the turn of the century."

"Can you bypass it?" Vane asked, leaning over the housing to inspect the pressure gauge. The needle was pinned far into the red.

"With what? A hammer and a bad attitude?" Silas unclipped a heavy pneumatic wrench from his utility harness. "I can vent the line manually, but it’s going to spray superheated glycol everywhere. If it hits your suit joints, it’ll eat right through the seals."

"Then stand downwind," Vane said. "Or as close to downwind as you get in orbital mechanics. Do it, Silas. The light is dropping on the Titan beam."

Silas grunted, set the wrench against the corroded valve stem, and leaned into it with his full weight. For a long moment, nothing happened. The metal groaned under the force, rusted threads biting into rusted housing. Then, with a sudden, silent pop of escaping gas, the valve cracked open.

A plume of pressurized, boiling coolant erupted from the fitting, flashing instantly into frozen white crystals as it hit the vacuum. The spray whished past Vane’s shoulder, dusting his suit sleeve in silver frost.

The vibration under their boots began to subside. On Vane's wrist display, the thermal monitor for the array's focal frame began its slow descent out of the danger zone.

"Pump's cycling," Silas said, breathing heavily into his comms. "Coolant flow restored. Array realignment in progress."

Across the truss, the massive servomotors groaned into life, slowly pivoting the three-kilometer mirror back into position. The beam of raw sunlight shifted, swinging away from open space and striking the central receiver with a sudden burst of brilliant light on the telemetric instruments.

Vane looked out across the sector. Sub-Array 412 was stable again, sending its tiny fraction of power back into the great collector grid. But as he looked further down the orbital ring, he saw three other nodes flickering, their light dim and irregular—tiny sparks of life fading out in the vast, indifferent dark of the decaying megastructure.

"Good work," Vane said quietly, turning back toward the Aethelgard. "Let's get back inside. We have five more warning lights on Sector Nine before the end of the shift."

The airlock cycle was always the longest five minutes of Silas’s day. It gave him time to think about how thin the steel was, how old the gaskets were, and how deeply he resented Helios Energy Holdings. As the chamber pressurized, the sour tang of scrubbed air filled his suit, replacing the flat, metallic taste of his recycled oxygen mix.

He pulled off his helmet, exposing a mop of sweat-matted gray hair, and dumped it onto the airlock gear rack. Vane followed him in, his expression as unreadable as a blank telemetry screen.

"The seal on your left wrist cuff is weeping grease, Silas," Vane said, peeling his gauntlets off with a heavy grunt. "Get it re-seated before we dock at the next station. I don't want you losing pressure because a rubber ring gave up the ghost."

"That rubber ring was rated for five hundred thermal cycles, Captain," Silas muttered, unclipping his utility harness and hanging it on a bulk-head peg. "It’s currently on cycle seven hundred and forty-two. Everything on this ship is living on borrowed time and spite."

"Spite gets us through the shift," Vane replied smoothly. He pushed through the inner hatch onto the narrow catwalk that led to the Aethelgard’s galley. "Mara, what’s our status?"

Mara’s voice came back through the ship’s overhead speakers, muffled by static. "We’re cleared off 412. Titan beam is steady at ninety-two percent nominal. It’s a miracle, don't celebrate yet. Main board just lit up like a festival display. We’ve got a localized power dip across Segment Seven."

Vane paused, his hand on the frame of the hatchway. "Segment Seven? That’s four hundred kilometers sunward. What dropped?"

"Not a drop," Mara said. "A blackout. Whole sector’s telemetry went red six minutes ago. Nodes 70 through 78 aren't responding to ping requests. Not even an error code. Just total silence."

Silas poked his head out of the airlock, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. "A full sector drop doesn't happen because a valve seized, Vane. You don't lose eight nodes at once unless a high-tension feeder cable snaps or a rogue rock tore through the backbone."

"Or Helios pulled the plug on the segment to starve out the local habitat," Vane said softly.

He walked down the corridor toward the bridge, his magnetic boots clicking rhythmically against the ribbed deck. Silas trailed behind him, grabbing a greasy rag from a side locker to wipe down his wrench.

When they stepped onto the bridge, the scene on Mara’s primary display was far worse than a simple equipment failure. Segment Seven was one of the older, high-density zones of the Swarm. It was a dense swarm within the Swarm, a nested web of heavy industrial collector rings and low-income residential habitats that housed roughly forty thousand contract laborers and their families. They were the people who swept the solar arrays, patched the radiator fins, and lived off the thermal exhaust of the megastructure.

On the main tactical map, Segment Seven looked like a vast dark crescent against the golden glare of Sol-Prime.

"No microwave output," Mara said, highlighting the dead zone with her light-pen. "No secondary telemetry. The bus bars that route power from Sector Seven to the outer system relays are completely de-energized. If the power isn't flowing through Seven, Sector Nine’s input is going to drop another fifteen percent by midnight."

"Are the habitats running on emergency reserves?" Vane asked, leaning over her seat.

"Standard corporate spec," Mara said grimly. "Which means forty-eight hours of battery backup if they turn off the environmental secondary systems, thirty minutes if they don't. And Vane? Seven went dark from the inside out."

"Show me," Vane said.

Mara tapped the keyboard, cycling through the regional sensor logs recorded by Node 44-Delta before it went blind. A series of thermal snapshots appeared on the cathode ray monitor. The first frame showed Segment Seven functioning normally, its massive collector mirrors glowing bright yellow in the infrared spectrum.

In the second frame, a cold wave spread through the center of the segment. It wasn't a sudden explosion or the bright flare of a structural shear. It was a precise, controlled shutdown. One node after another dropped its thermal signature, dimming from orange to dark red, then to black.

"That wasn't a meteor strike," Silas said, stepping up to the console and squinting through his thick-lensed glasses. "Look at the sequencing. Node 72 went first, then 73, then the sub-relays. That’s an automated isolation protocol. Someone pulled the bus breakers at the trunk line."

"Corporate?" Mara asked.

"Helios doesn't do things that fast," Vane said. "If Corporate wanted to decommission Segment Seven, they’d send three months of notices, cut the maintenance budget by half, and wait for the crew to abandon the stations before locking the doors. They don't just dump forty thousand people into the dark without a paper trail."

"So who pulled the breakers?" Silas asked.

"That’s what we’re going to find out," Vane said. "Mara, alter course. Vector us toward Segment Seven, Node 74. It’s the central switching hub for that entire arc."

Mara winced. "Vane, if we burn the reaction mass to get sunward into Seven, we won't have enough fuel to make our scheduled rendezvous with the supply depot at Ceres next week."

"The depot at Ceres hasn't had fresh fuel stocks since April, Mara," Vane said quietly. "We’re flying on ambient solar collection and whatever RCS gas we can siphon off dead nodes. We go to Seven."

Mara didn't argue. Her hands flew across the thruster board, setting up the orbital insertion burn. The Aethelgard groaned as her main thrusters fired, a low, resonant thrum that shook the loose tools on Silas’s workbench. The ship veered out of its stable orbit around Sector Nine, dipping lower into the gravity well of Sol-Prime, angling toward the shadow hanging over Segment Seven.

As the Aethelgard crossed the threshold into Segment Seven three hours later, the change in atmosphere was immediate.

Usually, flying through the Swarm was like navigating a vast, sunlit ocean of gold foil and silver struts. The glare was constant, requiring heavy polarized filters on all external views. But inside the shadow of Segment Seven, the light was dead.

The massive collector arrays here were unaligned. Instead of facing the sun, thousands of kilometer-wide mirrors had been rotated ninety degrees, presenting their thin edges to Sol-Prime. They looked like giant razor blades floating in the void, casting no reflections, gathering no light. Without the heat of the star, the metal structures had already begun to freeze, contracting with loud, low-frequency groans that traveled through the vacuum as micro-seismic vibrations.

"I'm picking up audio on the short-range band," Mara said, adjusting her headset. "It’s coming from Habitat Array 74-B. Local distress beacon. It’s automated, running on a hand-crank loop."

"Play it," Vane said.

Static filled the bridge, followed by a dry, synthetic voice repeating a standardized loop: "Attention all approaching vessels. Segment Seven power distribution is offline by executive order of the Regional Grid Controller. Structural integrity is nominal. Atmospheric systems operating on local battery reserve. Stand by for instructions. Do not attempt to re-engage trunk line breakers."

"Regional Grid Controller?" Silas snorted. "There hasn't been a human Grid Controller in this sector since the corporate merger five years ago. That order is coming from an automated script."

"Look at the external radar," Mara interrupted, her voice suddenly tight. "We’ve got contact. Two miles out, sitting right on Node 74’s primary docking spindle."

Vane leaned closer to the main window. In the dim spill of light from Sol-Prime’s edge, a long, needle-shaped vessel was visible, lashed to the side of the massive switching station. It wasn't an engine company vessel, nor was it one of Helios’s standard yellow-and-black maintenance tugs.

It was painted a matte, light-absorbing gray, stripped of all corporate livery and registry markings. A pair of heavy, armored umbilical hoses extended from its belly, clamped directly into Node 74’s main power trunk.

"That’s not a lightkeeper ship," Silas growled, his eyes narrowing. "That’s a siphon rig. Look at those hoses. They aren't fixing the grid, Vane. They’re sucking it dry."

"Power siphons," Vane murmured. "They’re bypassing the distribution network and dumping raw current directly into high-capacity capacitor banks onboard that ship."

"Is that even legal?" Mara asked.

"In this sector? Legality is whatever the guy with the biggest generator says it is," Vane said. "They rotated the mirrors off-sun so the grid wouldn't trip their siphons with a surge. They turned off the power to the whole segment just to fill their own batteries."

"Forty thousand people live down in those habitat rings, Vane," Silas said, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the back of Mara’s chair. "Without power to the scrubbers, those rings are going to turn into iceboxes filled with carbon dioxide."

"Hail them," Vane said.

Mara flipped a switch on the comms board. "Unknown vessel at Node 74, this is lightkeeper cutter Aethelgard. You are attached to a critical infrastructure junction. You are causing a system-wide blackout on Segment Seven. Disconnect your umbilicals immediately and identify yourselves."

Silence was the only response. The matte-gray ship remained motionless, its heavy hoses vibrating subtly as gigawatts of stored energy rushed through them.

"They're ignoring us," Mara said.

"They aren't ignoring us," Vane said, pointing at the radar scope. "They’re powering up their thrusters."

A sudden burst of cold gas flared from the sides of the unidentified ship. The vessel detached its docking clamps with a sharp mechanical thud, its heavy power lines snapping back into automated retention reels on its hull. It didn't turn to flee deeper into the Swarm. Instead, it slowly pivoted its sharp bow directly toward the Aethelgard.

"Vane," Mara said, her hands freezing over the controls. "They're locking target tracking radar on us."

"They don't have weapons," Silas said, though his voice lacked conviction. "Nobody carries heavy ordnance inside the Swarm. One stray shot hits a collector mirror and you create a debris field that wipes out three sectors."

"They don't need missiles," Vane said smoothly. "Mara, hard port. Full counter-burn now."

Before Mara could hit the thruster controls, the nose of the gray vessel flickered. A high-intensity industrial laser—the kind used to cut through rusted steel trusses during heavy repair work—lanced through the dark between the two ships.

The beam missed the Aethelgard’s bridge by less than twenty meters, striking the forward sensor boom. A shower of white-hot spark flakes erupted into the void as the quartz-optic array vaporized instantly. Inside the bridge, three warning monitors flashed red and died with a high-pitched whine.

"Sensor boom is gone!" Silas yelled, thrown off balance as Mara slammed the directional RCS thrusters open.

The Aethelgard lurched sideways, rolling on her longitudinal axis as the industrial laser swept back across empty space, searching for their hull. The ship’s frame groaned in protest, the old riveted plates squeaking like rusted hinges under the sudden gravitational load.

"Return fire?" Mara shouted over the blare of the secondary alarms.

"With what?" Silas barked. "We have two signal flares, an arc-welder, and a grease gun!"

"We have the sun," Vane said, his voice dropping into a dangerously calm register. "Mara, vector us behind Collector Mirror 74-Alpha. Get us into the shade of the frame."

"That mirror is dead, Vane! It’s tilted off-angle!"

"I know it’s dead. Just put it between us and that laser."

Mara pulled the flight yokes back, tucking the Aethelgard into a tight, sickening spiral that brought them within fifty yards of the structural truss of Mirror 74-Alpha. The massive frame, a three-kilometer web of black carbon fiber, loomed over them like a geometric mountain range.

The siphon ship followed, its long, sleek hull cutting through the darkness with effortless precision. Its cutting laser fired again, striking the carbon-fiber truss behind the Aethelgard. The ancient material didn't melt; it shattered under the extreme heat, sending a cloud of razor-sharp graphite splinters spinning out into the path of the pursuer.

"Silas," Vane said, standing up from his seat and stepping toward the manual override panel on the bulkhead. "The pitch control on Mirror 74-Alpha. Can you reach it through the local maintenance loop?"

"I can reach the local motor board if I bypass the safety interlocks," Silas said, his fingers flying across his portable diagnostic tablet. "Why? What are you planning?"

"They turned this mirror off-sun so they could steal the power quietly," Vane said, unlocking the manual override housing. "Let's turn it back on."

"Vane, if that mirror rotates into full sun while we’re in the focus path, it’ll cook us along with them!" Mara warned, her eyes darting between her collision display and the dark shape of the siphon ship closing in behind them.

"Then don't be in the focus path," Vane said. "Silas, lock the pitch drive to manual. Override the tilt limiters. Give me full rotation speed on the mirror face."

"Limiters overridden!" Silas yelled. "Motor’s going to burn out in twenty seconds!"

"Twenty seconds is plenty," Vane said, pulling a heavy red handle down with all his weight.

High above the Aethelgard, deep within the mechanical heart of Collector Mirror 74-Alpha, ancient gearboxes that hadn't moved in a decade screamed as high-voltage current was dumped directly into their windings.

The three-kilometer wide sea of polished foil began to turn.

It swung out of its edge-on position, sweeping through the dark like a giant hand. As its reflective surface crossed the threshold into Sol-Prime’s direct sunlight, it caught the full, terrifying glare of the star.

A million gigawatts of solar energy, unfiltered by atmosphere and concentrated by three thousand meters of parabolic curvature, struck the mirror’s surface. Instead of scatter-focusing into a diffuse receiver beam, the unaligned mirror acted like a massive magnifying glass. A wall of blinding, yellow-white light swept across the sector.

The gray siphon ship was mid-turn, its cutting laser aimed directly at the Aethelgard’s engine housing, when the beam caught it.

The light was so intense that even through the bridge’s auto-dimming quartz viewport, Vane had to throw his arm over his face. On the visual sensors that were still functioning, the gray ship didn't explode. It simply began to glow.

Its light-absorbing paint vaporized instantly into a cloud of white gas. The thin cooling fins along its hull melted into liquid metal, droplets flying off into vacuum like silver rain. Its tracking sensors blinded, its outer hull blistering under thousands of degrees of raw solar radiation, the siphon ship aborted its attack.

It fired its main thrusters at full burst, a desperate, uncontrolled burn that pushed it out of the focus beam and back into the shadow of the surrounding structural frame.

"Target is disengaging," Mara panted, her forehead drenched in sweat as she leaned over her flight controls, keeping the Aethelgard tightly tucked within the safe zone behind the mirror’s shadow. "They’re running for the outer rim. Speed is four hundred meters per second and climbing."

"Let them go," Vane said, leaning against the bulkhead panel as his breathing slowly leveled out. "We don't have the fuel to chase them, and we don't have the teeth to finish them if we caught them."

"Look at the mirror motor," Silas called out from his station. The diagnostic screen was flashing yellow. "The pitch gear fused. Mirror 74-Alpha is locked in position now. Full sun."

"That’s fine," Vane said. He stepped back to the helm, looking down at the tactical map of Segment Seven.

Where Mirror 74-Alpha was now locked facing the star, energy was once again pouring into the local trunk line. On the display, the cold, black zone around Node 74 began to bleed back into light. Emergency telemetry signals began to ping back from Habitat Array 74-B—faint, low-bandwidth signals, but signals nonetheless. The scrubbers down in the residential rings were hummed back to life, drawing power from the single mirror that was now burning through its rusted mountings.

"Is the segment stable?" Mara asked softly.

"No," Silas said, running a hand through his hair. "One mirror isn't enough to power forty thousand people for more than a few days. The bus bars are severely degraded from that siphon job, and seven other nodes are still isolated. Segment Seven is dying, Vane. It’s just dying a little slower now."

Vane looked out the main viewport. The gray siphon ship was a tiny, diminishing spark on the edge of the visual range, vanishing into the maze of dead habitats and unpowered relays that made up the outer rim of the Swarm.

"That wasn't a gang of scavengers," Vane said plainly. "A scavenger uses a plasma torch and a rusted cutter. That ship had military-grade power capacitors and an industrial cutting rig integrated into its main bus. Someone spent a lot of credits outfitting that vessel."

"If Helios isn't maintaining this grid," Mara said, looking up from her screen, "why would someone spend millions of credits stealing power from a sector that's supposed to be worthless?"

"Because power isn't worthless out here," Vane said, walking back to his coffee mug and picking it up. It was cold now, covered in a thin skin of black oil. "It’s the only thing that keeps us breathing. Silas, fetch your gear. We’re docking at Node 74. We need to inspect those bus bars before the local habitat uses up the rest of that mirror's load."

"And the siphon ship?" Mara asked. "What if they come back with friends?"

"They won't come back to Seven," Vane said, taking a bitter sip of his dead coffee. "There’s nothing left here to steal. But there are twenty other segments on this ring, Mara. And we're the only ship within three hundred thousand kilometers that carries a spanner."

He set the mug down and tapped the communications console, opening a wide-band channel to the remaining lightkeeper nodes across the sector.

"Attention all stations," Vane said into the microphone, his voice echoing through the quiet, rusted interior of the Aethelgard. "This is Captain Vane, Aethelgard. Segment Seven has suffered an unauthorized power diversion. Keep your eyes open and your sensors manual. There are shadows on the grid."

There was no response from the dark expanse of the Dyson Swarm—only the eternal, background hiss of solar wind scraping across a billion miles of cold, turning glass.

The docking ring on Node 74 didn't so much engage as it collided.

The Aethelgard’s magnetic clamps locked onto the station’s outer frame with a heavy, metallic crunch that vibrated all the way down to the ship’s keel. The station was ancient, its outer hull covered in a thick layer of fine, grey micrometeorite dust that blew off in small clouds whenever the RCS thrusters puffed near it.

Silas stood in the staging area, his heavy tool bag slung over his shoulder. The bag was a patchwork of stitched canvas and thermal insulation tape, crammed with tools that looked like they belonged in a nineteenth-century railway yard rather than a space station: brass-handled voltmeters, pneumatic impact wrenches, and manual hydraulic jacks.

"Air check," Silas said, tapping the gauge on his suit neck-ring. "Station pressure is holding at point-seven atmospheres. Composition is ninety percent nitrogen, eight percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide and dust. It’s going to smell like an old attic."

"Don't breathe too deep," Vane said, adjusting his sidearm holster. It was an old propellant pistol, loaded with soft-lead slugs that wouldn't puncture a station hull if things went sideways. "Mara, stay at the helm. Keep the main engine warm. If the station’s orbit degrades while we’re inside, give us a five-minute warning before you cut us loose."

"I’m not dropping the tether," Mara said from the bridge speakers. "Just don't take all day. The solar wind is picking up, and Mirror 74-Alpha’s frame is making noises I don't like."

Vane unlocked the manual hatch wheel on the airlock floor. He braced his feet against the deck plates and slammed the lever over. The seals broke with a wet, sucking sound, and a gust of cold, stale air blew past them, carrying the smell of burnt plastic and copper dust.

They climbed down the narrow access ladder into Node 74’s primary switching vault.

The vault was a high-ceilinged cylinder lined with massive, oil-filled transformer tanks as big as houses. Most of them were dead, their cooling fans seized and their sight-glasses filled with blackened, scorched fluid. The only light came from the blue, flickering arc of a damaged bus bar near the ceiling, casting long, erratic shadows across the rusted catwalks.

"Look at this mess," Silas growled, shining his flash-torch along the main distribution trunk.

The heavy copper cables, thick as a man’s thigh, had been severed with clean, thermal cuts. The ends were fused into smooth, metallic buttons—the work of high-powered industrial cutters.

"They didn't just hook up their hoses," Silas continued, leaning over the cut line and sniffing the air. "They bypassed the safety breakers completely. They drew so much current through this trunk that they melted the insulation right off the secondary lines inside the deck."

"Can you bridge it?" Vane asked, looking around the cavernous vault.

At the far end of the catwalk, a set of emergency doors led toward the habitat access tube. A small red indicator light above the hatch was flickering feebly—the only sign that anyone was still alive in the residential section below.

"I can bridge it if I cannibalize the transformer from Node 74-C," Silas said, dropping his tool bag onto the steel deck with a loud metallic clatter. "But it’s going to be a patch job, Vane. A band-aid on an open artery. If the load from Habitat 74-B spikes during their morning cycle, the whole bridge is going to pop."

"Do what you can," Vane said. "I’m going to check the habitat hatch. I want to know who’s down there."

He walked down the catwalk, his boots ringing hollowly against the perforated deck plates. The air was colder here, close to freezing point. With every breath, a small cloud of vapor condensed in front of his face, drifting away toward the sluggish intake vents near the floor.

As he reached the emergency hatch, he noticed something strange about the control panel. The emergency lock handle wasn't down in its safe position. It had been chained to an structural beam with a heavy steel cable and a brass padlock.

Someone had locked the population inside the habitat from the outside.

Vane drew his pistol, using the heavy iron butt of the gun to strike the padlock. The brass was brittle from the cold; after three hard blows, the shackle snapped with a sharp clink, and the heavy chain slithered down the frame to land on the deck plates.

He grabbed the emergency handle and pulled it down.

The hydraulic system groaned, struggling against dry seals, then the heavy steel hatch slid sideways into the bulkhead with a harsh screech.

A wave of warm, foul air rushed out of the opening—smelling of unwashed bodies, stale soup, and the sharp, chemical tang of lithium-hydroxide scrubbers running at maximum capacity.

Standing on the other side of the hatch, illuminated by the beam of Vane’s flash-torch, was a gaunt man holding a heavy iron spanner over his head, his knuckles white and his eyes wide with fear. Behind him, packed into the narrow, dimly lit corridor of the habitat tube, were dozens of people—men, women, and children—wrapped in grey thermal blankets, huddled together against the cold.

"Lower the wrench, chief," Vane said quietly, lowering his flashlight so the beam pointed at the deck. "We’re the Lightkeepers."

The man with the wrench didn't move for a long moment. His chest rose and fell in ragged, shallow breaths. Then his eyes drifted down to the faded patch on Vane’s flight jacket—the ancient, embroidered crest of the Sol System Energy Grid Authority, showing a stylized sun burst held between two open hands.

The wrench slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the deck plates.

"You're late," the man said, his voice cracking with exhaustion. "The corporate ship came three days ago. They told us the sector was being liquidated."

"The sector isn't liquidated," Vane said, stepping through the hatch and offering the man a hand. "It’s just broken. Let’s get your power back on."