The LED on the scavenged avionics fan was having a nervous breakdown.

Check Filter. Check Filter.

“Keep your knickers on,” I said to it. “I’m nearly done.”

I puffed once more into the intake and my contraption—a high-velocity server cooling unit duct-taped to a block of activated charcoal—whined in protest as it choked again on the smoke.

It wanted to be free! It wanted to frolic in the atmosphere and breathe clean station air!

Tough titty.

We all have our little unfulfilled dreams, mate. I, for example, long for the kebab shops of my youth and a pint of bitter that hasn’t first passed through Connor’s kidneys. Within that depressing context, I’m sure a fan can find the inner reserves of resilience to handle five minutes of a synthetic roll-up.

I took another drag, and the cherry glowed.

Out in the rest of the station, the eggy air was thick enough to chew. It reeked of degassed foam and of melted plastic and sulphur. Sure, the scrubbers tried their best, but they were fighting a losing battle. But in here, with my face pressed against the intake grate? Well, I get to experience just the briefest microworld of grease and tar.

A last little taste of home.

The grey cloud leaking from my mouth vanished into the carbon block before the sensors could so much as twitch.

“Good lad.”

My feet were hooked under the floor straps. Vital bit of kit, them. It’s far too easy to forget gravity’s on holiday, and, let me tell you, the recoil from a decent cough can pinball you off the ceiling. So, there I floated, anchored in place by my ankles.

Just me and some friendly nicotine carcinogens performing their most useful of functions.

Keeping me from strangling my colleagues.

Jack’s bound to be out there right now. Probably doing chin-ups on the doorframe or trying to parkour off the bulkheads. Connor, on the other hand, is likely hacking the galley to dispense extra dessert, oblivious to the fact that he’s redirecting power from the life support.

Good times.

Then the fan gave a death rattle, and its amber warning light upgraded itself to an angry red.

“I’m done. I’m done! Don’t have a coronary!”

I crushed the fag against the housing. Ash doesn’t fall up here. It hovers. Just another law of physics designed specifically to piss me off. The grey cloud started to drift, looking for an unwary eyeball to irritate, but the fan—in a rare display of actual competence aboard this wreck—was able to snag it just in time.

I guess break time was over.

I unlatched the canister. The Solid Waste Management System. I hope someone got a knighthood for coming up with that snazzy name for what was essentially a shit compactor. Inside, the collective result of the crew’s morning routine sat pressed into a dehydrated brick.

I jammed the butt right into the centre of the brown slab. Let the ground crew in Houston analyse that! They’d need to form a working group. Biological anomaly detected. Mind you, they’d probably just blame it on solar flares. That or the Russians.

Definitely the Russians.

I slammed the lid and mashed the button. The airflow entrainment kicked in with a nicely violent bit of depressurization. The vacuum screamed and drowned out the fan. It drowned out the annoying hum of the station, too. It even drowned out the nagging voice in my head whining about my compromised oxygen levels.

All done.

I unhooked my feet from their restraints and, with reluctance, opened the door. It was time to go and remind the idiots that gravity isn’t the only thing keeping them down.

Which, of course, was when something hit my station.

Standard thruster corrections feel like a clearing of the throat. Like a gentle, persuasive movement this way and that. This, however, felt like an old Transit van crashing into a brick wall. One moment there was nothing, and then a balls-rattling thump was shuddering through the floor plates.

Now in somewhat of a funk, I pushed off the toilet doorframe and drifted into the Hab.

“Report!”

I only asked to stop them screaming. Because the zoo was in chaos.

Jack was already in motion, rebounding off the ceiling and grabbing a fire extinguisher in one hand and a patch kit in the other. He looked like he was auditioning for a recruitment poster. Again.

“Hull breach protocol!” he was yelling. “I’m off to seal the bulkheads, sir! Everyone needs to get into pressure suits!”

“Sit yourself down, soft lad.”

Connor, on the other hand, was fused to his seat. His eyes bulged and his fingers hovered over the keyboard like he was afraid it might press charges. The emergency lighting was washing the Hab in a cheap-brothel red, highlighting exactly how uselessly pale he’d suspiciously become.

“You buffering, Connor? Have you crashed? Do I need to find a paperclip to reset you to factory settings? Speak!”

“A proximity alert triggered at the last minute,” he squeaked, sounding like a stepped-on dog toy. “But we’ve lost the port solar array. There’s total structural failure on the strut.”

“Were we hit by a piece of junk?” Jack said, still—bless his cotton socks—humping the fire extinguisher like a teddy bear.

“Must have!” Connor was desperately trying to find a graph that would tell us everything was fine. “We know Graveyard Orbit’s full of random debris. So, probability suggests the impact was from a defunct satellite. Shall I log it as an unexpected collision, sir?”

I floated past them to the main telemetry screen. “Hang on a moment. Budge up!”

Connor scrambled out of the way as I sat at his terminal to consider the raw data.

Because something about this was hinky.

Whatever had hit us must have been massive! And its silhouette on the radar wasn’t a piece of exploded rocket casing. It was boxy. Industrial. Was it . . . ? Yes, I reckoned the thing that had collided with us was a mining tug. A heavy-duty, automated drone used for hauling rocks in the Belt.

Ignoring Connor’s gibbering noises off, I quickly traced its approach vector. You see, debris tumbles. It spins on random axes. And it hits you at five thousand metres per second and turns you into a cloud of expanding gas before you so much as hear the noise.

This thing, though, had approached from our blind spot.

It’d matched our inclination.

It’d mirrored our rotation.

“Look at the relative velocity, guys.”

Connor squinted at the screen like he was trying to read a menu in a dark restaurant. “It’s . . . it’s near zero at the moment of impact, sir!”

“Give the man a biscuit.”

“I don’t get it,” Jack said. “So something drifted into us . . . gently?”

“Christ, son! Use your brain. It’s a muscle. Try flexing it.” I stabbed at the delta-V numbers recorded just before the crash. “Drifting junk doesn’t kill its relative velocity vectors on three axes. To maintain a fixed position inside our Hill Sphere, that tug must’ve been firing micro-bursts to counteract tidal forces. That’s not drift! That is an active station-keeping protocol.”

I turned to face the brain trust.

“That tug didn’t accidentally crash into us,” I said. “It parked.”

I let that bit of shitty news percolate for a moment before springing into action.

Well, as much as I ever spring.

“Connor, you wait here. And don’t touch anything unless it catches fire. Even then, have a committee meeting about it first.”

I pushed off the bulkhead. “Come on, Golden Boy. Walkies.”

Jack looked like he was fighting the urge to salute. Fortunately, knowing the likelihood of me vomiting on him if he did, he settled for an enthusiastic nod. Then he kicked off the wall with that irritatingly perfect form they’d started teaching at the Academy and glided out. I, on the other hand, didn’t. I hauled myself along the handrails like a gorilla with haemorrhoids.

We left the Hab and moved into the transit tunnel connecting to the outer ring. The temperature dropped ten degrees in ten metres. For some reason, the air was cold and thin enough out here to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

“Where are we going, sir?” Jack said. He was floating upside down next to me and not even out of breath. “Damage control is—”

“Shut your hole and use your nose!”

He frowned and then gave a delicate sniff. “God! It smells like the toilets have backed up again, sir!”

“Does it?”

“Well, it’s reeking of rotten eggs. That’s hydrogen sulphide, sir. Must be the sewage.”

“Yeah, you got the chemical right, son. But you got the source wrong.”

I stopped at the junction to Section C. The Environmental Monitor—the E-Nose—was mounted on the wall and was currently screaming itself silly. Its screen was flashing an alarming shade of red: BIOCONTAMINANT ALERT. WASTE CONTAINMENT BREACH.

“See?” Jack pointed at the screen. “The plumbing’s burst. The impact must have cracked a black-water line or something.”

“Nope.” I tapped the screen. “The plumbing on this heap smells of ammonia. Whatever this is? It isn’t that. It’s stinging the back of my throat. It’s more like . . . burning rubber.”

I punched in my override code—0000, because security’s a myth—and silenced the alarm.

“What are you doing, sir?” Jack looked horrified. “That’s a safety protocol!”

“It’s a nuisance, that’s what that is. And it’s being loudly wrong.”

I dragged my carcass toward the viewport at the end of the corridor. The smell was even stronger down this way. Like a cloying chemical fart that’d decided to set up camp on my tongue.

I looked out the port and what I saw made me reach into the archives for a phrase so specific, so colourful, and so anatomically improbable that it would surely cause Jack to write yet another complaint to HR.

“What is it, sir?” he asked reproachfully.

“Come and look!”

He floated over, and I pointed a yellowed fingernail at the glass.

The mining tug was there, and it obviously hadn’t just crashed into us. Its magnetic grappling claws were dug deep into our hull plating, and it was clinging to us like a limpet. I could see a hiss of gas venting from the tug’s seal, bleeding straight into the vacuum.

“I don’t understand!” Jack said, staring at the mechanical leech with his big blue eyes. “Why would a mining tug dock with us? We don’t have any ore!”

“No,” I said. “But we have heat. And we have power.”

I tapped my comms unit. “Connor. You still awake?”

“Yes, sir. But I’m reading a massive spike in sulphides in Section C. I’m isolating the sewage lines now.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Forget the shit, Connor. This is about money.”

“What?”

“Someone’s cooking rocks,” I said. “And they’re using our station as the oven.”

I killed the connection and hauled myself down to the inner door of Airlock 3 and found even more good news. The place looked like the back of a student fridge that hadn’t been cleaned since the dawn of spaceflight.

The seal was already buried under a trembling layer of grey sludge. Without gravity to flatten it, the stuff had grown out in weird, three-dimensional structures. Grey towers and wobbling mushroom caps reached out for us like they were trying to shake hands.

And the stench of vinegar and rotten eggs coming off the stuff was eye-watering.

Jack pulled himself up short and grabbed a handrail so hard his knuckles turned white. “Is that . . . mold, sir?”

“Mold? You wish it were mold, son. Mold’s polite. Mold just wants to turn your bread green and improve the quality of your cheese.”

I floated closer, ignoring the urge to gag. “Unless I’m wrong—and, trust me, I’m not—this is Acidithiobacillus. It’s a chemolithotroph that oxidizes the metal to generate ATP and excretes sulphuric acid as a waste product. That airlock is being digested.”

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my packet of fags. My hands were shaking, just a little. I stuck one in my mouth and fired up my Zippo.

“Are you insane, sir?” Jack was looking at me like I’d just slapped the Pope. “We’re in a high-oxygen environment next to a potential hull breach! You’ll blow us all to hell!”

“Quiet! The sensors say this seal is holding.”

“Then why—”

“Because sensors are idiots built by the lowest bidder. They’re looking for pressure drops, and I need to be sure.”

I took a deep drag, making the tip glow orange. Then I leaned in close to the bubbling nightmare covering the door and blew a stream of smoke directly at it.

As I’d feared, the smoke didn’t drift or hang about in a passive cloud. It was violently sucked sideways and vanished into invisible hairline fractures in the grey goo.

“See that?” I said after the smoke had vanished. “The only thing keeping the vacuum out is the slime itself. And matey-boy’s getting hungry.”

“What!”

“Sensors missed it because they’re calibrated for catastrophic failure. They’re looking for a blowout, not a seep. This? This is a slow bleed. The computer’s ignoring it as background noise, like a radiator hissing in a bedsit.”

I took another drag and breathed out, grimacing as the grey wisp was sucked away.

“But you can’t confuse fluid dynamics, son. Smoke particles have low inertia. They follow the airflow better than your average sensor suite. I guess my bad habit’s good for something, eh?”

He was about to answer, but then the bulkhead door behind us suddenly slammed closed. The pyrotechnic fasteners blew the locking pins, and the steel slab crashed into the frame. Then the whole corridor was bathed in a strobing red as HAZMAT LOCKDOWN flared on the LED panels.

And then, just to keep the hits coming, a silence arrived as the reassuring fizz of the Inter-Module Ventilation died. Slowly, the fans spun down and then coasted to a halt.

Jack hit the door control, but the panel remained dark.

“Good!” he said. The poor, naive sod actually sounded relieved. “Connor’s on the ball today! Standard Containment Protocol. Section 4, Paragraph 2. Isolate the hull breach and prevent the bio-contaminant from entering the Life Support System. He’s saving the rest of the station, sir.”

“Standard protocol keeps the air cycling, you plank!” I said. “Without the IMV fans, there’s no thermal convection. We’re trapped in a bubble of our own exhaled CO2.” I pointed at the door. “Connor’s not quarantining the bug, son. He’s destroying the evidence.”

Jack frowned. It was like watching a cow try to understand a magic trick. “That’s . . . that’s ridiculous, sir. Connor isn’t a murderer! He’s just . . . incompetent.”

“Incompetence is a spectrum. And our mutual friend’s just graduated to the aggressive end of it. You must’ve realised he’s been skimming off the supply manifest for six months. Why do you think we’re always short on coffee filters but overstocked on industrial solvents?”

“I thought that was a logistics error.”

“There are no errors in logistics, only receipts you haven’t found yet. I knew he was selling scrap to the Belt scavengers. A bit of copper wiring here, a spare oxygen scrub there. It’s the cost of doing business. But this?” I gestured to the slimy seal. “Cooking ore for a mining syndicate? Turning a government station into an illegal smelter? That’s not graft, that’s a bit of proper ambition. And ambition’s always dangerous in the hands of a certifiable moron.”

“But if he cuts off our air, he’ll kill us! That’s treason!”

“That’s Tuesday. Now, stop spiralling and let me think about the problem. We’ve two issues, as I see it. One, the door’s locked and the air’s running out. Two, the grey snot’s about to eat through the outer seal and vent us into the void.”

“Okay. So we need to override the door,” Jack said, pushing off the wall toward the control panel. He popped the cover plate. “I can hotwire the solenoid.”

“Forget the door, son. We open it up, the sensors will detect a pressure differential and the main computer will trigger a station-wide purge. Besides, Connor will be watching the lock status.”

“So we just wait to die?”

“Course not! But first we need to fix the leak.”

I dragged myself over to the maintenance locker labelled EMERGENCY EVA SUPPLIES and wrenched the handle. It was empty, of course.

“Predictable. Connor probably flogged the patch kits on the black market weeks ago. Or swapped them for magic beans.”

I rummaged around the back of the shelf. All that was left inside was a roll of tacky vacuum seal tape and a dented canister of Sani-Freeze. That was the nuclear option we used to solidify the waste tanks when the dehydrator was on the fritz and things started floating that really shouldn’t float.

“Okay. I can work with this. Brace yourself, Golden Boy. I’m about to introduce you to the concept of Kitchen Sink Engineering. I doubt any of this would’ve been on the Academy curriculum between Advanced Brownnosing and How to Look Heroic in Spandex, so pay attention.”

“But that tape’s not rated for hull breaches, sir,” Jack said. “It’s for duct work. Internal use only.”

“Don’t knock it. It’s sticky and it’s air-tight. Like a quality Martian goodtime girl.” I tossed him the roll. He caught it, but he wasn’t happy about it. “You’re the one with the steady hands, so I’ll need you to apply a lattice over the slime. But be sure not to touch the grey stuff, or you’ll be picking your nose with a stump. Just bridge the gap from the clean metal on the door to the clean metal on the frame.”

“It won’t hold the pressure, though, sir! The acid’s active. It’ll eat through the adhesive before it cures.”

“Not if we freeze it first.” I waggled the Sani-Freeze canister. “This stuff is liquid nitrogen suspended in a gel matrix. It’s designed to freeze human waste into an inert brick at negative eighty degrees. It should be cold enough to put that bacteria into a coma.”

Jack stared at the can. “You want to freeze the hull?”

“No. I want to freeze the leak,” I said. “And if you’re lucky, I won’t freeze you while I’m at it. Now, hurry up. That stuff’s looking like a lung infection given sentient form. You ready?”

“Not even slightly, sir.”

“Good. Working while you’re terrified is a transferable skill. Never say I don’t teach you anything.”

I aimed the nozzle at the churning grey mass. “Now, on my mark, I freeze the bastard. Then you tape it. Fast. Before the ice cracks and the acid wakes up. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

I squeezed the trigger and a jet of icy blue gel erupted from the canister. It hit the biofilm and the ooze stopped bubbling and turned dead white. Then it crystallized with the mushroom structures shattering into dust as the thermal shock hit them.

“Now!” I yelled. “While it’s confused!”

I’ll give him this: the boy had hands like a neurosurgeon on beta-blockers.

He quickly spun the tape, laying down strips in a cross-hatch pattern over the frozen seal. He didn’t waste a millimetre and, when done, still had the balls to smooth it down and force the adhesive to bond with the freezing metal before the cold could kill the tack.

“Double-layer it! It’s not your tape, don’t be tight with it!”

Jack doubled back, sealing the edges until the goo was completely entombed. “Done, sir!”

I could hear the ice under the tape crackle away, but it appeared the seal was holding well enough. Certainly, the constant hissing noise—the sound of our atmosphere waving goodbye—had ceased.

“It looks like a dog’s dinner,” I said. “But it works. Just like me.”

“Okay,” Jack said, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead. “The leak’s sealed. Now, minor detail . . . what are we going to do about the breathing?”

I glared at the dead IMV vent. Even now, I could feel the carbon dioxide building up as throbbing pressure behind my eyes. It felt like a hangover, but without the fun night before to justify it.

“We just need to lie to the system,” I said. “Connor’s overridden the manual controls, but he can’t halt the instincts of the station.”

I pointed a boot at the Wet Workshop access panel on the floor. People tend to forget this station is basically a tin can thrown into orbit in the Fifties. It’s a converted fuel tank from a Saturn-class booster which had been retrofitted for habitation. But its guts—the dirty, industrial belly of the beast, as it were—were still there, rotting away under the carpet.

“Crack that open.”

Jack unlatched the floor panel to expose a tangle of pipes and conduits that looked like a robot’s intestines.

“See that yellow line?” I said. “That’s the hydrazine auxiliary feed. It’s long dead, probably drained dry back when you were a twinkle in the milkman’s eye. But the cabling runs parallel to the main oxygen trunking.”

“So?”

“So, if we can pressurize that line, I reckon we can fool the differential sensors in the mixing manifold. If the computer thinks the pressure in the auxiliary line is higher than the cabin pressure, it’ll force the mixing valve open to equalize.”

“But pressurize it with what?” Jack said, looking around the empty corridor. “We don’t exactly have a compressor in our back pockets, sir!”

I held up the Sani-Freeze canister. “We don’t need a compressor, son,” I said. “PV equals nRT. Ideal Gas Law. You remember that from your lectures at the Academy, right?”

“Phase change. Liquid to gas. Rapid expansion.”

“Ten points to Hufflepuff. Liquid nitrogen has an expansion ratio of one to six-hundred-and-ninety-four. We inject a cup of this gel and we’ll get seven hundred cups of gas in a sealed line. The pressure spikes, the differential sensor panics, and the valve pops open, leading to fresh air flooding in. At which point, may the colossal arse-kicking of Connor begin.”

“And if the pipe bursts?”

“Then we die in a cloud of frozen blue shit-spray instead of suffocating. Variety is the spice of life, son. You have to learn to roll with it.”

“But how do we get the gel in? That line’s sealed.”

I handed him the canister and my Zippo. “Brute force and ignorance, lad. We just cut the line and jam the nozzle in. Then we pray to the god of plumbing.”

“You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you, sir?”

“Beats doing paperwork,” I said. “Now, get cutting.”

He flicked the lighter and heated the polymer casing of the fuel line until it bubbled and went soft. Then he jammed the Sani-Freeze nozzle in before the plastic could harden.

“Fire in the hole!” I said, giving him a wink. Jack squeezed the trigger, and the canister emptied with a violent whoosh.

The pipe groaned and I could hear the gel boiling inside, expanding, and then fighting with the confinement of the metal. It creaked, pinging like a cooling engine. Then, blessedly, there came a mechanical clunk from the ceiling and then the ooofff of a solenoid surrendering. Finally, with a hiss, the sweet, sweet sound of a fan spinning up greeted our ears. The IMV had been kick-started.

I took a deep breath of machine oil. It was delicious. After ten minutes of breathing carbon dioxide, it tasted like vintage champagne.

“We’re back in the game, son!”

Jack slumped against the wall, laughing. “It worked! That actually worked!”

“Don’t get emotional. We’re not done yet.”

Jack blinked. “We’re alive, sir. And the air is cycling. We can wait for help.”

“Help is six months away,” I said. “And Connor’s still in the Command Nodule with his finger on the button. And he’s locked us out.”

I pushed off the wall and drifted over to the plumbing manifold we’d just violated. The auxiliary fuel line was hissing, feeding fresh air into the system.

“We fixed the immediate problem,” I said. “Now we need to fix our little rat issue.”

I traced the yellow fuel line with my eyes. It ran parallel to another pipe. A thick, black, corrugated conduit labelled WASTE TRAN-S.

“You know how a vacuum toilet works, son?”

“Sure, by pressure differential. The cabin pressure’s higher than the waste tank pressure. When you flush, the air pushes the waste into the tank.”

“High pressure goes to low pressure. That’s the law. But laws, don’t you know, are made to be broken.”

I reached into my tool belt and pulled out a heavy wrench.

“Connor’s in the Hab. And the Hab has the station’s primary head. Which, coincidentally, has a direct line to the holding tank.”

I clamped the wrench onto the bypass valve connecting the high-pressure airline we’d just tapped and the waste line.

“What’re you doing?”

“I’m improvising,” I said. “We just pressurized the auxiliary line to trick the sensors. So that line is now holding fifty PSI of positive pressure. And the waste tank is sitting at near vacuum.” I tapped the black pipe. “So I’m going to bridge them.”

Jack’s eyes went wide. “You’re going to pressurize the sewage tank?”

“Actually, I’m going to over-pressurize it.”

“But if you do that . . . the pressure differential reverses.”

“Exactly. Instead of the Hab pushing air into the tank, the tank will push . . . contents . . . into the Hab.”

“It’s a good idea, but the check valves will hold. They’re specifically designed to prevent backflow.”

“Check valves are designed to stop a gentle drift of gas, son,” I said. “They’re not designed to hold back fifty PSI of angry atmosphere driving a slurry of six months’ worth of curry nights.”

I gripped the valve wheel. “Connor likes to control the environment, does he? He likes to sit in his clean little office and watch the numbers? Let’s see how he likes the smell of his own metrics.”

I heaved on the wrench.

The valve groaned, rust flaking off in a cloud of orange dust. But then the black pipe juddered violently as the high-pressure air slammed into the waste tank. The contents—liquid, solid, and everything in between—were suddenly being squeezed outwards like a tube of toothpaste.

“That’s the tank reaching critical pressure,” I said, watching the gauge on the manifold climb. “The path of least resistance is now the toilet bowl in the Command Module. Connor locked the doors to keep us in here. So now he has a choice. He can stay in there and drown in the consequences of his own diet. Or he can vent the room.”

I leaned back, crossing my arms. “And the only way to vent the room is to unlock the blast doors.”

We waited.

For ten seconds, there was only the rumble of the pipes.

Then, the comms unit on the wall crackled with a high-pitched, gargling scream of absolute despair, followed by the sound of heavy splashing. The red lights in the corridor turned off, and the HAZMAT LOCKDOWN text vanished as the blast door hissed and slid open.

“After you, Golden Boy,” I said. “Watch your step. It might be slippery in there.”

We floated through the open blast door and into the Hab and . . . well.

I’ve spent thirty years in heavy industry. I’ve smelled burning clutch plates, stagnant bilges, and the inside of a render suit after a double shift.

And this was far, far worse.

This was the primal, fermented stench of utter rejection.

The Hab was a disaster zone. A brown mist hung in the microgravity, catching the light like perverse nebulae. Globs of slurry floated through the air as perfect spheres of misery oscillating in the airflow.

“Watch your head, son,” I said. “And keep your mouth shut. Literally.”

Jack gagged, clapping a hand over his face.

We pushed through the floating minefield toward the command deck. The consoles were dripping, and the main screen, usually displaying our orbital telemetry, was smeared with a Rorschach test of waste matter.

And floating in the centre of the room was Connor.

He looked like he’d been dipped in a very unusual fondue fountain. His uniform was sodden, his hair was plastered to his skull, and he was retching, his body convulsing in the weightlessness.

And he was armed with a stun-baton.

He saw us, and then his red-rimmed eyes locked onto me.

“Stay back!” he screamed. A droplet of something filthy flew from his lip. “I’ll drop you! I swear to God, sir, I’ll fry you!”

“Put the toy away, Connor,” I said. “You’ve already lost. The air is cycling. The door is open. And you are covered in your own failures.”

His answer was to trigger the baton and wave it in my general direction.

“Jack,” I said. “Stay back.”

I pushed off the bulkhead.

“Don’t come any closer!” Connor panicked.

Then he did exactly what a man used to gravity does when he panics. He lunged. He kicked hard off the back wall, screaming and thrusting the baton forward like a fencer.

Amateur move. Someone forgot Mr. Newton’s Third Law, didn’t they, Connor?

He was moving fast. Too fast. In zero-g, velocity’s easy. Control’s hard. He was coming at me at five metres per second, like a skinny, vengeful missile.

He thrust the baton at my chest, but I didn’t dodge. Dodging requires agility and I am a man of substance. Instead, I took the hit. The baton struck my left pectoral and, sure, the shock was nasty.

But physics is a harsh mistress.

Connor weighed, at best, seventy kilos soaking wet (in case I’ve not been clear, he was definitely soaking wet right now). I, on the other hand, am a solid one hundred and forty kilos of pies, bitter, and bone density.

I have inertia.

Momentum equals mass times velocity. He might have the velocity, but I have the mass. And, in a perfectly inelastic collision, the fat man always wins. I absorbed his momentum. My mass simply refused to yield to his frantic energy. And because Connor had struck a mass significantly larger than himself while floating freely, the equal and opposite reaction took over.

He bounced.

I reached out and grabbed the front of his tunic. I clamped my fingers into the fabric and anchored myself to him. Then I made use of my own momentum. I was still drifting forward like a slow-moving freighter, so I carried him with me.

Right until we hit the far bulkhead.

I slammed him against the metal wall, and my considerable weight pinned him there. The air left his lungs in a squeaky whoosh and the stun baton floated from his grip.

“You can’t move a mountain, son. Especially not with a toothpick.”

Jack floated over, carefully avoiding the brown spheres. He plucked the stun baton from the air and deactivated it.

“Are you alright, sir?”

“My left tit hurts,” I said. “But I think the rat’s ready to surrender.”

I looked at Connor. He was gasping, eyes bulging, pinned between the steel and my gut.

“Get off me!”

“In a minute, lad. We’ve a bit of business to arrange first. Go back to the airlock,” I said to Jack. “And take a sterile sample jar from the med-kit. Scrape some of that sludge off the door before we vent it. Make sure you get a good chunk of the biofilm.”

Connor’s eyes went even wider. “You . . . you can’t!”

“Go,” I said to Jack, who kicked off, gliding back toward the corridor.

Then I turned my attention back to the man beneath my arm. “You tried to suffocate us. That’s attempted murder, son.”

“It was containment! Protocol! I was protecting the station!”

“You were protecting your retirement fund,” I said. “Bio-mining. Illegal smelting. I know the game, Connor. I just didn’t think you had the stones to play it.”

“I have investors. Serious people. If I don’t deliver . . .”

“That sounds rather like a ‘you’ problem,” I said. “But right now, you have an even bigger one. Me. Because Jack is getting a sample,” I said. “That’s my insurance policy.”

“It’s just bacteria,” Connor said, trying to regain some dignity while wiping effluent from his chin. “It proves nothing.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You see, I think it’s a genetically modified strain of Acidithiobacillus designed for rapid asteroid digestion,” I said. “Which should mean it has a distinct genetic marker. And when I send that sample to the Mining Guild regulatory body, I think they’ll be able to trace it back to the syndicate that sold it to you. And then they’ll look at the station logs. And, finally, they’ll look at your bank account.”

Connor went pale. “You can’t do that. I’ll go to prison!”

“If you’re lucky! The Mining Guild has a very . . . atavistic approach to such things. On the other hand, I’m willing to make a deal.”

I floated back a little, giving him space to breathe the foul air he’d created.

“You’re going to resign,” I said. “Effective immediately. You will cite ‘extreme stress’ and ‘medical fatigue.’ And then you’ll get on the next supply shuttle and go home.”

“That’s . . . that’s it? You don’t want a cut?”

I looked at him with genuine disgust. “I don’t want your money, Connor! I just want a crewmate who knows the difference between a pressure sensor and a hole in the wall. I want to do my job without wondering if one of the guys I rely on is selling the oxygen for scrap!”

I grabbed a floating globule of wastewater with a rag and wiped my hand.

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I keep the sample,” I said. “And I attach it to a report detailing how you sabotaged the life support system. And I’ll include the timestamps of the IMV shutdown. I’ll include the overrides you authorized. You choose, Connor. Resignation with a full pension, or a tribunal with a prison cell.”

He slumped as the fight went out of him. He suddenly looked small and defeated.

“Fine,” he whispered. “I’ll sign.”

“Good lad.”

An hour later, the station was singing a different tune.

We were back at Airlock 3, and the red lights were gone. The hum of the ventilation system was a reassuring thrum. The air was scrubbing, the CO₂ levels were dropping, and the temperature was stabilizing.

Jack stood by the control panel holding a sealed, hazardous materials container. Inside, a lump of grey pulsed gently against the glass. “Sample secured, sir.”

“Good boy. Put it in the cryo-fridge and label it ‘Stool Sample – Do Not Eat.’”

I looked at the airlock door. The tape and the frozen slime were holding, but it was a temporary fix. “Time to clean house.”

I keyed the sequence into the airlock control. “Cycling outer door,” I announced. “Venting to vacuum!”

I hit the button.

There was a bang as the hydraulic pumps engaged, and then the outer door of the airlock—the one facing the void—slid open. The air inside the chamber rushed out in a fraction of a second.

The effect on the biofilm was instantaneous. Vacuum is a harsh environment.

Through the reinforced viewport, we watched as the sludge that’d been eating our ship shattered as its moisture sublimated. Its cellular structures burst and the mushrooms exploded into a sparkling dust of ice crystals.

The tug—the source of the infection—was still clamped there, but its hold was broken and, once the ice holding the magnetic clamps shattered, it began to drift away.

Jack looked at me, and I thought he looked pretty different with his uniform stained with grease and sweat. He didn’t look like an Academy poster boy anymore.

He looked like a proper engineer.

“You did good, lad. You kept your head. You used your hands, and you realized that the manual’s a guide, not a Bible.” I patted my pockets, and my fingers found the familiar crinkle.

“You can’t smoke in here, sir,” Jack said automatically. “It’s a fire hazard.”

“Lad, we just survived an acid-eating bacteria, a suffocation attempt, and a zero-g sewage explosion.” I put the cigarette in my mouth and flicked my Zippo. “I think I’ve earned five minutes.”

I took a deep drag and blew a perfect grey ring toward the ventilation grille.

“Besides,” I said, watching the smoke drift. “We need something to mask the smell of all this victory.”

Copyright © 2026 by Malory

Malory is a lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy and always trys to build her own stories around characters who have a good sense of snark.

As a PhD candidate currently researching men’s reading habits, Malory spends a lot of time analysing what sits on modern bookshelves. And it strikes her that the world really needs more escapism!

When she’s not writing or wrangling data for her doctorate, you can usually find Malory rereading Terry Pratchett. Failing that, she’ll be suffering through the English cricket team’s inevitable batting collapses.