The Overseer's Patrol

How long could three tons of dying yeast survive while the men running the station pretended the chill did not exist?

Levmir hauled himself through the ruptured hatch into the dark hollow of the primary radiator plenum. Weightlessness pulled at his boots the moment he cleared the rim. Above him, massive cooling fins vanished into the gloom like the iron ribs of a cathedral ship, silent and unpowered.

His lapel dosimeter clicked with dry, arrhythmic urgency. Thirty-four millisieverts per hour.

He clipped his safety tether to an anchor lug on the inner flange. His chest-pack display showed thirteen minutes of thermal capacity left in the paraffin block. After that, his suit would either bake him in his own metabolic heat or vent steam into the unshielded conduit, creating a bright thermal beacon for the station’s automated grid.

A dull metallic thud vibrated through the steel ribbing under his gloves.

Levmir went rigid. The vibration came again, rhythmic and heavy: magnetic soles clamping against the outer catwalk fifty meters above the plenum mouth.

Cooperative enforcers moved through zero-G with all the subtlety of ungreased turbine bearings. They never drifted; they marched with hydraulic assist, hammering iron against iron to remind everyone in the lower decks who held the air valves.

A harsh cone of sodium-yellow light slashed across the ceiling of the plenum.

Levmir had nowhere to drop. If he fired his cold-gas thruster to retreat down the hatch, the expanding carbon dioxide would scatter the frost on the bulkheads and leave an unmistakable acoustic ripple.

He looked at his wrist gauge. The patrol was sweeping the conduit with wide-spectrum infrared. In three seconds, the thermal bloom of his chest pack would light up their optics like a magnesium flare against the sub-zero bulkhead.

Levmir kicked off the flange, guiding his mass with two fingers toward the unheated glycol return line running along the lower frame. The bare iron pipe was thirty centimeters thick, encrusted in a brittle crust of frozen condensate at minus forty degrees.

He unlatched the suit’s secondary thermal coupling—a copper-mesh contact plate on his back—and slammed himself flat against the frosted conduit.

Cold bit through the suit’s rear insulation with violent speed. The contact plate seized the frost, melting a millimeter of ice before refreezing into a solid bond. Levmir pulled his arms and legs tight against his torso, letting the massive volume of frozen iron suck the thermal bleed directly out of his suit.

His core temperature readout dipped sharply, but the exterior infrared bloom vanished. To the sensors above, he was just another dead junction in an unheated pipe.

Light swept across him. The sodium beam caught the edges of his visor, scattering gold glare across his retinas. Levmir held his breath, jaw locked against the rising shiver as the sub-zero pipe drank heat straight from his spine.

The beam lingered, then dragged forward along the catwalk.

Above him, two heavy figures clamped their boots to the grated walkway. The unshielded conduit carried their voices down through the ironwork, tinny and resonant through the structural steel.

"Hatch seal shows ambient pressure," a younger voice said. Tech Grigori. The man sounded nervous, his breath rasping through an uncalibrated suit regulator. "Sensor telemetry is drifting, Overseer. Sector 4-North dropped another four-tenths of a degree. Mash Vat Seven is sludging up. If the yeast freezes, the second shift loses half their daily calorie paste."

"Let it sludge," Kordov replied.

The overseer’s voice was low, flat, and stripped of urgency. Kordov’s augmented bulk cast a broad shadow across the overhead struts.

"We cannot divert flow from the central spire," Kordov continued. "The founders' containment protocol from Year 12 remains absolute. That line stays sealed."

"The miners are already talking about sabotage in the distribution loops," Grigori muttered. "They think the cold is an equipment failure. If they learn the main radiator is choked—"

"They will learn nothing," Kordov cut in, his magnetic boots clanking once as he turned. "They eat gray mash at half-rations and keep the drills running, or we vent their barracks to balance the station's atmospheric reserve. The containment protocol holds until the core ore is stripped. Reset the sweep beacon to ninety-minute intervals. If anything registers above eighty Kelvin on this deck, burn the sector with clean steam."

"Understood, Overseer."

"Move out. We check the turbine couplings in Sector 3."

The heavy, rhythmic thumping resumed as the patrol marched along the upper catwalk, their boots ringing through the steel until the vibrations faded into the low, constant hum of the distant reactors.

Levmir remained pressed against the frozen glycol pipe for another thirty seconds, waiting until the structural resonance died entirely.

He reached behind his hip, engaged the heating elements in the copper-mesh coupling for half a second to break the ice bond, and pushed away from the conduit.

His chest-pack display blinked a warning: eight minutes of paraffin capacity remaining. His analog dosimeter needle hovered at forty-one millisieverts.

Kordov was not managing an industrial breakdown; he was enforcing a deliberate starvation to protect whatever lay sealed inside the radiator fins. And the overseer had left a ninety-minute blind spot between sensor sweeps.

Levmir unclipped his diagnostic kit and looked up into the dark labyrinth of the unshielded heat manifold. He had eight minutes to tap into the primary bypass line and rig a rogue thermal shunt before his suit cooked him alive, and eighty minutes before Kordov returned with steam torches.

He pulled his beryllium-copper spanner from his harness and set his boots toward the hot manifold.