Dead Orbit

A body in a sealed maintenance shaft shouldn't be possible. Station Kethara-IV has been dead for three decades, its orbit around the stripped gas giant a frozen circle of silence. But the clamps threw this morning, the floor shifted a quarter-millimeter, and Mara Voss is staring at a corpse that should have been cold for thirty years. The man was Elias Varn. He died yesterday. Mara is a forensic specialist in the med bay, a crew of eleven that swore the shaft was empty. The anomaly: the clamps didn't throw on schedule. Someone cycled them manually, killed Varn in the dark, sealed the shaft. The question isn't whether murder happened, it's who had the codes, who had the motive, and why Admiral Cassius Wren's order to jettison the body arrived eleven minutes before Mara logged the cause of death. The crew makes for an uneasy investigation. Sana Okafor runs engineering and knows every fuse in the hull. Yuki Tanaka handles comms and has been deleting her own logs. Fenwick Hale and Petra Sulin share a bunk and a secret. Dorian Mace, the medic, is Mara's only ally until his questions imply he already knows what Varn was carrying. Rina Sandoval reports a second orbital signature matching nothing in the registry. Harlan Dray, legal counsel, has been dead six days but was found at his console, terminal open to a file that shouldn't exist. Mara can accept Wren's order and bury the case in a folder no one will open. Or she can spend one sixteen-hour orbit investigating before the next burn pushes Kethara-IV out of sensor range forever. The dead man in the shaft is still warm. The clamps are still hot. And whoever killed Elias Varn is still breathing the same air, waiting for her to look away first.