Earnest Whitlow paced the well of the communications shack, long legs tracing a worn path along the sealed laminate floor.
Signals flowed in and out across rows of color monitors.
He rerouted, consolidated, tagged, cleared. His feet and fingers moved with muscle memory.
Green lights flickered to yellow, then back again. Red never lasted long. Earnest made sure of that.
He was good at this. Good enough that his mind could wander.
It wandered to Earth sometimes, the weight of real gravity, the feel of rain on his upturned face.
Other times, without quite meaning to, his attention drifted toward Miranda. He would be halfway through a Colony Operations Bulletin before realizing he’d stopped reading three paragraphs ago and was staring at the accompanying photo of her instead.
She did her job the same way Earnest liked to think he did his: quietly, efficiently, without ever appearing rushed. Too far above his pay grade to even think about.
A new request chimed in. Hydros — or, more formally, hydroponics farms.
Earnest frowned. The yellow-coded packet was clean, but a routing field referenced a destination that didn’t exist.
He opened a direct video channel to the originating sector.
Two farmers looked up from a sorting table, gloved hands moving steadily through a crate of bell peppers.
“Comms,” one said. “About time.”
“Your routing tag’s pointing at a dead node,” Earnest replied. “Where are you trying to send this actuator?”
“Rack C-seven,” the other said. He shoved another pepper down the line with the side of his wrist. “Sorter’s down again. We’re hand-running half this damn section.”
“What’s the status on the part?”
“Waiting on supply from Earth. Last we heard, you’d gotten a shipment in.”
“No such luck. Let me check options.”
Earnest went deep into inventory records. “Meridian’s holding a couple in reserve. I’ll route this to logistics—see if they can release one or find a workaround.”
“Appreciate it,” the first farmer said. “Any word on inbound?”
Earnest hesitated half a beat. “Nothing new.”
They nodded, already back to work.
He closed the channel, made the correction to the node, and forwarded the request to logistics.
Earnest sighed softly and flagged the request for follow-up. Hydros had been limping for weeks. Had Earth said anything?
He reread Earth’s most recent reply — careful language, scripted acknowledgments.
What used to lag by minutes now slipped by hours.
Everything’s fine, Earth kept saying—with vague timelines, bland reassurances.
“Tell that to Hydros,” he muttered.
People didn’t like hearing when supplies ran thin, but it was his job to say it anyway.
Orders were orders. Old habits from the Navy died hard.
The kitchen pinged next. New menu uploads. Meatloaf.
He smirked. They used to get close—beans with something that tasted just enough like ham hock to remind him of home, of beans cooked low and slow till the whole house smelled like supper. Now it was white beans, stripped down.
He was about to clear the queue when a data packet caught his eye.
Miranda. Meridian Group. Board meeting.
He slowed slightly.
Officially, it was Miranda’s domain. A few quick keystrokes accessed the packet. Deuterium led the agenda again. Following regulations, Earnest gave any packet related to fusion fuel top priority, automatically cleared ahead of food, and personnel traffic — everything except water.
Earnest slowed, leaning closer to the screen, and frowned.
The numbers didn’t look right. But they had to be. Meridian had already scrubbed and approved them before they entered the system. The small royal-blue MERIDIAN VERIFIED marker glowed in the corner. The tag had been there for years. Taken for granted. Used in environmental metrics, allocation tables, system status reports.
Earnest barely noticed the tag anymore, but this was Miranda’s data. He found himself glued to the screen, checking the numbers again.
Same result. Close—but the numbers didn’t foot. The numbers were close enough to pass. Earnest checked them anyway.
Starting with the bad data, he worked backward through the calcs that had flagged it. His fingers picked up speed as the chain unfolded.
Deuterium output projections.
Not the extractor itself—the inputs feeding it.
Deuterium came off the water farm as a byproduct, spun out of the Mars Regolith Water Extractor. The MRWE was the colony’s oversized brute of a system that pulled yield from ice, water, regolith—whatever it could get its hands on.
He chased the traces all the way out there.
Nothing wrong with the machine’s numbers. Nothing flagged. Production telemetry was clean.
But the projections didn’t track.
He stepped back a layer.
Upstream—Fabrication data, routed through an odd relay. Clean on the surface. Subtle drift. Just enough to bend the projections without tripping an alarm.
He leaned in, already digging deeper than he needed to.
Miranda would catch it.
He let the thought sit and spun once in his chair, slow and easy.
It settled. He flipped through a few more screens.
Just a small correction. Local. Nothing that would ripple upstream.
His fingers twitched over the keyboard, then he made the numbers reconcile by smoothing the readings from telemetry just enough to match the ground reports. He pushed the cleaned packet back into circulation. Quietly. No flag. No note.
A projection column snapped into alignment. The variance band narrowed back within limits and stayed there. He eased back, gave a quick nod of his head, and let out a big exhale.
Earnest was about to resume his pacing when another alert blinked. Two clicks revealed the problem: a humidity variance over in Residential East. Yellow and red lights flashing for a smattering of units. Not for the first time.
He frowned and dispatched maintenance. He’d told Miranda before. She’d acknowledged it.
Things did get fixed.
Just never permanently.
He wandered over to the Earth comms panel and gave it another look. Still nothing.
The board’s lights shifted back as maintenance did their thing — green, green, yellow sliding toward green. Earnest exhaled and let himself relax. Another system check, just to be safe. In the solitude of the Comms Shack, he allowed himself a tight grin and head nod.
That was when the executive access door hissed.
