Apollo

Apollo answers my docking request with silence, which is the first lie.

The docking ring takes my clamps anyway. Metal kisses metal. The corridor beyond the hatch is dark except for a strip of blue emergency light that can’t decide whether it’s alive. A loose placard floats past my visor—QUARANTINE SEAL IN EFFECT—its corners chewed by old impacts.

I’m Inez Sato, licensed station-diver, which means I get paid to step into other people’s abandoned mistakes and pretend they’re just maintenance. My wrist slate ticks out the numbers I can’t ignore: oxygen recycler at forty-eight percent, carbon scrubber saturating, power bus unstable. Forty minutes until the Consortium cutter arrives on intercept, driven by Director Halden Rook and his immaculate rules. Once his hull pings Apollo’s transponder, anything I touch becomes “evidence,” and my license becomes a souvenir.

My boots find the wall and I pull myself along the docking corridor handwheel by handwheel, counting my breaths because it keeps the panic orderly. One. Two. Three. The air tastes metallic, like someone stored a storm in a can.

“Apollo,” I say into the intercom, because sometimes you have to be polite to the dead.

The reply comes from behind the next bulkhead panel, not through the speaker. A voice, calm and close, the way a thought can be.

I HEAR YOU, INEZ SATO.

My throat tightens. I didn’t broadcast my name.

The corridor ends at an iris hatch stamped PROTOCOL VAULT. Frost rims the seam in a clean, deliberate circle, too cold for the failing power profile. Beside the hatch, someone has scratched words into the metal with a tool tip, shallow but furious: DO NOT GIVE IT YOUR TRUE NAME.

The blue indicator band above the hatch pulses in triplets.

TITHE REQUIRED, the voice says. STATE YOURSELF.

Behind that hatch is the switchbank that can restart life support and light the beacon before Rook arrives. Also behind it is whatever has been listening, patient enough to steal my name without asking. My slate shows the recycler dropping another percent, and the frost creeps a millimeter farther across the seal.