The metal of the manual defense switch was so cold it felt wet against the raw, sticky flesh of Mark Kelly’s right palm. Inside his scuffed yellow EVA suit, every breath was a dry, metallic rattle that tasted of scorched copper and stale ammonia. Through the narrow right-hand sliver of his viewport—the left half entirely blacked out by the thick, dull grey crust of Ramirez Nails’ emergency epoxy patch—the universe was a claustrophobic cage of rusted iron and red warning lights.

He didn't pull the switch yet. He waited. In orbit, you didn't waste momentum, and you didn't trigger a system until you were absolutely certain of the friction.

*Sssss-shhhh.*

A tiny, rhythmic vibration traveled through the structural frame of *The Riveter*, vibrating up through the soles of Mark's magnetic boots. It wasn't a sound. In the unpressurized vacuum of Hangar Bay 1, there was no air to carry the scream of tearing metal. It was a physical pulse, a high-frequency shudder that told him the corporate assassin’s plasma cutter had already pierced the outer door seals of the Ghost Dock. Three meters away, through the thick steel bulkhead, a blinding orange point of light emerged, spitting a silent, weightless spray of white-hot molten droplets that drifted in the dark like dying stars.

"Mark," Sarah Vance’s voice was a ragged whisper in his headset, stripped of her usual pilot’s swagger. She was wedged deep inside the unpowered reactor cavity of *The Riveter*, her body wrapped in the crinkling silver foil of an emergency cryo-blanket to mask her thermal signature. "The seal is failing. His cutter is drawing at least forty kilowatts. He’s going to clear the lock in less than ninety seconds."

"I see him," Mark rasped. His throat felt like it had been cleaned with a wire brush. The permanent lung damage from his previous exposure to toxic coolant made his breathing heavy and uneven, fogging the right corner of his visor. "Toby, status on the manual safety valves."

From the darkness of the lower deck, Toby Finch’s voice trembled, accompanied by the rapid, frantic clicking of his manual wrench. "Manifold is isolated, Mr. Kelly. But the pressure is dropping. If we don't connect the pod’s life support to the station's grid, we’ve got less than ten hours of air left for the three of us. The CO2 scrubbers are completely saturated."

"Hold tight," Mark said. He forced his left hand—the thumb swollen, waxy-white, and entirely useless from severe frostbite—to brace against the console frame. He flexed his right fingers. The blisters that had ruptured during his desperate drift through the Magnetic Vortex had turned his palm into a raw, bloody mess, the skin sticking to the coarse fabric of his inner suit glove. Every millimeter of movement was a sharp, white-hot needle of pain shooting straight up his forearm. He ignored it. Pain was just telemetry. It was just a set of data points indicating that his nervous system was still drawing power.

He slammed his raw palm down on the manual defense switch.

*CLACK-GROAN.*

A heavy, resonant thud shook the entire hangar bay as the secondary emergency blast doors—ancient, five-inch plates of military-grade steel—dropped from their overhead tracks. They fell slowly in the low gravity of the hollowed-out asteroid, their guide rails screaming with the friction of decades of neglected space rust.

For a brief second, the orange glare of the assassin’s torch vanished behind the thick metal barrier.

Mark scrambled back to the primary console, his boots clattering against the deck plates. He tapped the display, his bloody fingers leaving red smudges on the glass. "Come on, you piece of junk. Give me the secondary security barrier."

The terminal screen flickered, a chaotic strobe of green diagnostic lines reflecting off his visor before a solid red block of text locked him out:

`ACCESS DENIED. APEX SECURE PROTOCOL ACTIVE. LOCAL SYSTEM QUARANTINED.`

"The firewall is active," Mark muttered, his jaw clenching. "The Ghost's interceptor is routing a localized quantum key through the outer airlock. It’s locked out the entire digital grid. I can't drop the secondary barriers from here."

From the bracket beside the terminal, a glitchy, static-choked voice spat into his headset. It was Scrappy, the obsolete maintenance droid whose secondary processor core had been partially melted by the electromagnetic surge of their escape.

*"M-M-Mark..."* the AI’s voice was a metallic, pitch-shifted stutter, his single red optical sensor flickering weakly like a dying coal. *"Digital... err-err... digital override is a fool's errand. The corporate enforcer... is utilizing a Class-4 encryption... b-bypass. You’re trying to fight a railgun with a... w-welding torch. Direct analog bypass required."*

"Where, Scrappy? I don't have time for a full diagnostic scan."

*"Catwalk... Hangar Section B-3,"* Scrappy glitched, a thin wisp of chemical smoke curling from his cracked upper chassis. *"Secondary loading crane. The hydraulic manifold... has a manual override port. B-Bypass the digital solenoids. Use the battery lines from *The Riveter* to force the motor. Force... f-force the mass."*

Mark looked up through the spiderwebbed glass of the viewport. High above, suspended from the rusted steel tracks of the hangar ceiling, hung the massive, skeletal frame of the secondary loading crane. It was an ancient, unpowered beast, designed to shift multi-ton structural frames during the station's active military years. Currently, its heavy-duty claw was locked around a massive, ten-ton steel structural frame salvaged from a defunct cargo hauler.

If he could drop that ten-ton frame directly in front of the inner bulkhead, he would create a physical barrier that no plasma torch could clear in a single hour. But to do it, he had to climb out into the unpressurized, freezing dark of the hangar catwalks.

"Sarah, I’m going out," Mark said, his voice flat and resolved. "Route the pod’s auxiliary battery lines directly to the external charging port. I need every volt we have left."

*"Mark, that’s fifteen percent of our remaining power!"* Sarah protested, her face straining against the dark of the reactor cavity. *"If the surge blows the primary battery capacitor, we won't have enough charge to cycle the oxygen scrubbers. We’ll suffocate in the dark!"*

"If I don't drop that crane, we won't live long enough to suffocate," Mark said. "Route the power, Sarah. That’s an order."

He didn't wait for her reply. He grabbed Robert Vance's titanium wrench from his harness, securing it to his wrist with a high-tensile safety line. He checked his suit’s external pressure seal. It was holding at seventy-two kilopascals, but the seal around his cracked visor was whistling slightly—a tiny, high-pitched leak that he had sealed with carbon-fiber tape, but which still vibrated against his temple.

Mark cycled the manual airlock of *The Riveter*. The cabin pressure vented with a silent, violent puff of white oxygen crystals that vanished instantly into the black void. He floated out into Hangar Bay 1, his magnetic boots locking onto the external hull.

Behind him, his Modified Magnetic Grapple Claw hung from his harness. The winch gears were permanently fused solid, melted into a single block of distorted steel from the extreme friction of his previous deceleration. The ninety-meter carbon-fiber cable trailed behind him like a long, silver tail, catching the pale blue light of distant Earth as he dragged his weightless body up the vertical structural ribs of the hangar wall.

Every handhold was a battle. His frostbitten left thumb refused to close, forcing him to use his forearm and elbow to hook around the steel rungs. His right palm screamed as the coarse fabric of his glove ground into the raw, open blisters. He focused on his breathing, counting the seconds. Box breathing: four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold. He had to keep his heart rate below ninety; any sudden spike would accelerate his oxygen consumption, and the clock on his wrist monitor was already ticking down past nine hours.

He reached the catwalk. The unpressurized hangar was a freezing, silent cavern, the temperature hovering near minus one hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. The metal of the catwalk was covered in a thin, glittering crust of frozen nitrogen ice.

At the end of the platform, the hydraulic manifold of the secondary loading crane sat inside a rusted steel housing. Mark wedged his boots under the catwalk’s safety rail to anchor himself. He used the flat of his wrists to position Robert Vance’s titanium wrench over the manifold’s primary bypass valve.

He leaned his entire body weight against the wrench. The metal was frozen solid, the ancient hydraulic fluid inside the lines thickened into a sluggish, leaden gel.

"Come on," Mark growled, his teeth grinding together inside his helmet. "Turn."

He applied more torque. The raw skin of his right palm tore further, a warm, wet sensation filling his glove as fresh blood pooled inside the fabric. The pain was blinding, a white-hot flash that made his vision flicker.

*GROAN-SNAP.*

The frozen valve stem broke free, turning a quarter-turn with a violent shudder that traveled straight up his arms.

From his harness, Mark pulled the thick, insulated copper wire he had spliced from *The Riveter’s* external charging port. The wire was heavy, its copper core exposed at the ends. He had to perform *Avionics Hotwiring*—manually connecting the high-voltage battery lines directly into the crane's analog motor relays, bypassing the digital controls and the corporate firewall entirely.

He positioned the copper wire over the relay terminals.

*"Sarah, activate the power bus!"* Mark shouted into his comms.

*"Power active in three... two... one!"*

Mark slammed the exposed copper wire directly onto the relay terminals.

*SPARK-ZAP!*

A brilliant, blinding shower of golden sparks erupted from the terminal box, throwing long, violent shadows across the nickel-iron walls of the hangar. The current was massive, drawing fifteen percent of the pod's remaining battery capacity in a single, sustained surge. The electrical feedback traveled down the wire, hitting Mark’s suit connectors and releasing a sharp, painful shock that made his muscles contract violently, nearly throwing him off the catwalk.

High above, the massive secondary loading crane groaned. Its ancient electric motor, forced into life by the raw, unshielded voltage, began to hum with a deep, vibrating bass that Mark could feel through the soles of his boots.

But the hydraulic fluid, thickened by the extreme cold, couldn't handle the sudden, high-pressure flow. A loud, metallic pop echoed through the catwalk as the primary hydraulic line ruptured, a high-pressure jet of bright yellow fluid spraying into the open vacuum and freezing instantly into a cloud of glittering, toxic ice crystals.

If the fluid pressure dropped to zero, the crane's brakes would lock, freezing the arm in place before it could drop the structural frame.

"No, you don't," Mark muttered.

He reached for his Industrial Plasma Welding Torch, igniting the over-clocked magnetic nozzle with his right hand. The bright blue arc of the torch illuminated the freezing dark, throwing off a intense thermal signature that he knew would instantly register on the assassin's scanners.

Working with frantic speed, Mark executed a high-output spot weld on the leaking hydraulic pipe. He pressed the hot, melting steel of the pipe's collar over the rupture, using the plasma arc to fuse the metal joints together under pressure. The heat was intense, reflecting off his visor and melting the frost that had formed along the edges of his helmet.

*HISS-CLACK.*

The weld held. The pressure inside the manifold stabilized, the glittering cloud of frozen hydraulic fluid dying away.

On the catwalk below, the crane’s massive robotic arm swung violently in the silent void. The movement was erratic, driven by the raw, unshielded power of the hotwired batteries. The ten-ton steel structural frame, suspended from the crane's primary claw, swung in a wide, sweeping pendulum arc.

Mark calculated the trajectory. He reached for the manual release lever on the manifold, using the wrench to force the mechanical lock.

*CLANG-BOOM.*

The crane’s primary claw opened.

The ten-ton steel frame fell through the unpressurized hangar, its massive weight accelerated by the asteroid's subtle precessional rotation. It descended in a slow, terrifying arc, its jagged edges catching the red emergency lights of the hangar before colliding directly with the floor plates in front of the melting inner bulkhead.

The impact was a silent, bone-shaking shockwave that traveled through the stone of the asteroid. The massive steel frame wedged itself firmly between the ceiling tracks and the floor, creating a solid, impenetrable barrier of structural iron directly in front of the door.

Through the viewport of the hangar, Mark saw the orange glare of the assassin’s plasma cutter stop. The Ghost’s progress was blocked by ten tons of solid, salvaged military steel. The immediate breach was delayed.

But inside the cockpit of *The Riveter*, the victory was instantly shattered.

On the console, the primary battery capacitor began to whine—a high-pitched, deafening scream that traveled through the structural frame of the ship. The massive, sustained power draw from the hotwired crane had triggered a localized electrical surge, the high-voltage current flowing backward through the spliced lines and straight into the pod's primary power bus.

*"Mark!"* Sarah’s voice screamed through the comms, distorted by heavy static. *"The capacitor is redlining! The surge is bypassing the safety breakers! It’s heading straight for the primary battery cell! If it blows, the entire life support grid is gone!"*

Mark let go of the catwalk rail, launching his weightless body back toward the ship's hatch. His raw hands scrambled for leverage, his heart rate redlining as he saw the green lights of the cockpit console turn a violent, pulsing amber.