Orbital Decay
Maren Voss has spent her life inside the Citadel, an aging orbital station whose corridors breathe recycled air and rust. She knows the beat of its systems the way most people know their own pulse , the cooling of stale tea, the warmth of a biometric panel, the soft copper tang of conduits that thread through walls no one is meant to see. So when a door opens onto a level that doesn't appear on any official schematic, she knows immediately that the map she's lived by has been a lie. The deeper levels are not empty. They hum with activity the Citadel's command has denied for a generation , quiet projects, hidden personnel, machinery running in parallel to the station everyone thinks they know. As Maren follows the trail inward, the discovery pulls at the seams of her own family. Her brother Tobias holds rank in the station's security corps. Her relative Ruan occupies a seat on the council that decides what the citizens are allowed to learn. To expose what she's found would betray her bloodline. To walk away is to let the lies calcify a little deeper. With the Citadel's orbit already slipping and dissent brewing in the lower decks, Maren faces a choice with no clean edge: drag the buried levels into the light and risk the station tearing itself apart, or seal the secret and watch the whole structure fall in silence. Either way, nothing in her carefully mapped life will survive the descent.