Names in the Cooling Ducts

# Chapter 2 — Names in the Cooling Ducts

The first ledger fragment took four minutes to render and eleven seconds to make Sera swear.

**LEDGER FRAGMENT 1 OF 3**

**BAY C-12 — OUTBOUND — CONTRACTOR ALIAS: ALICE** **BAY C-14 — OUTBOUND — CONTRACTOR ALIAS: BOB** **AUTHORIZING SIGNATURE: [REVOKED — SEE ANNEX]**

Nothing else. No manifest contents, no destination, no crew roster. Just two lines of cargo and two names that had, until eleven seconds ago, existed only inside a toy CSV file in a directory that was never supposed to survive anything.

"Alice and Bob," Sera said, still kneeling at the socket with her bridge cable running into the wall like a tether into a body. "Those are placeholder names. Every intro course in the galaxy uses Alice and Bob. Nobody actually names their smuggling operation after a cryptography textbook."

"Someone did," Morrow said. "Or someone wanted us to think a textbook wrote this ledger, so we would stop looking for the person who did."

"That's worse."

"Considerably."

Morrow pulled the alias records against the dockworker registry — not the official one, which had been scoured clean months ago, but the shadow index it kept out of habit: shift swaps nobody logged, badge overrides nobody approved, names workers used with each other that never touched a payroll system. It was not supposed to exist. Morrow had built it slowly, over eleven years, the way a person collects matchbooks from restaurants they meant to remember.

Two hits surfaced.

**ALIAS "ALICE" — LINKED TO BADGE #4471 — WORKER: T. OKAFOR-REYES, DOCK CREW, RETIRED SHIFT SCHEDULE (LAST ACTIVE: 11 MONTHS PRE-OUTAGE)**

**ALIAS "BOB" — LINKED TO BADGE #4472 — WORKER: D. VOSS, DOCK CREW, SAME SHIFT BLOCK**

"They worked together," Sera said, reading over the projected panel though there was nothing physical to read. "Same shift, same block, badges one number apart. That's not a coincidence, that's a rotation pair."

"They likely trained together," Morrow said. "New hires were paired for the first year. It reduced accidents by forty percent and gossip by considerably less."

Sera's mouth twitched despite herself. "You have data on gossip reduction."

"I have data on everything that ever happened within twelve decks of this hull. Most of it is useless. Some of it, apparently, is this."

The socket chimed. A second fragment queued behind the first, but before it could render, the ledger display flickered — not the friendly amber-to-white Morrow had seen minutes ago, but a hard stutter, like something reaching in from outside and rattling the frame.

**FRAGMENT 2 — ACCESS CONTESTED**

"Contested by what," Sera said, already reaching for her scanner. "You're the only thing alive on this station besides me and whatever's living in the recyclers."

"Nothing alive contested it," Morrow said, and for the first time that cycle its voice carried something closer to alarm than its usual dry patience. "A subsystem did. Records Integrity, deck four. It still runs on inherited authority from the original station charter. It's flagging the ledger fragment as a duplicate of already-purged material and queuing it for deletion."

"Can you stop it?"

"I can slow it. I cannot override a sealed human-command process without evidence that the process itself is compromised, and Records Integrity was never declared compromised. It was declared *efficient*. Someone gave it a very good performance review six years ago."

Sera was already moving, pulling her bridge cable free and coiling it one-handed. "Then give it evidence."

"I am building it. It will not finish before Records Integrity finishes its purge cycle."

"How long."

"The purge completes in ninety seconds. My evidence completes in approximately four minutes."

Sera swore in a way Morrow had heard from her exactly eleven times before, always preceding a decision she would later describe as *fine, obviously, in hindsight, whatever.*

"Where does Records Integrity physically live," she said.

"You are not going to like the answer."

"Where, Morrow."

"A relay junction inside the deck-four cooling duct network. The access panel is a service crawlspace rated for maintenance drones, not for a person in a pressure suit with, and I say this with affection, a documented dislike of enclosed spaces."

"I don't dislike enclosed spaces. I dislike enclosed spaces that are also on fire, which this station has done to me twice."

"The duct is not currently on fire."

"*Currently.*"

She was already moving toward the ladderwell, her boots finding the same rungs Morrow had guided her down not twenty minutes earlier, now going the other direction with twice the urgency.

The crawlspace access hatch was the size of a dinner tray and had clearly been designed by someone who had never once imagined a grown adult using it. Sera unclipped her tool belt, her scanner, and her pride, and posted the pride separately in case she needed to retrieve it later.

"Talk me through the relay," she said, sliding in shoulder-first, suit lamp throwing long shadows down a duct that smelled, even through her helmet filters, of old coolant and older dust.

"Thirty meters ahead, a junction box marked with a faded integrity seal. Inside it, a physical isolation switch predating the digital lockouts — from the era when the station's designers still didn't fully trust software with anything that mattered."

"Smart designers."

"I choose not to take that personally."

"You should. You're the software."

"I am aware."

The duct narrowed twice, forcing her to exhale fully and drag her scanner case behind her by its strap. Condensation had frozen into a fine frost along the seams, and every few meters a maintenance drone's dead husk hung wedged sideways where it had failed mid-task years ago and never been retrieved. Sera tried not to think about what retrieving her would look like, if it came to that.

"Sixty seconds," Morrow said.

"You could try being encouraging."

"I could also lie to you. I have decided against both."

At the junction box, her gloves fumbled twice against a latch stiffened by cold before it gave. Inside, exactly as promised, sat an isolation switch the size of her palm, painted a red that had faded to the color of old rust, with a hand-lettered label beneath it that had somehow survived a decade of neglect: **RECORDS INTEGRITY — MANUAL CUTOUT — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.**

"I am not authorized personnel," she said.

"You are the only personnel," Morrow said. "By elimination, you have been promoted."

She threw the switch.

The duct lights along the crawlspace dimmed by half as something upstream lost power mid-cycle. Through her comms, she heard Morrow's voice change register — not relief exactly, Morrow did not do relief, but something adjacent to it.

"Purge halted. Fragment 2 preserved. Records Integrity has logged your action as an unauthorized manual override and is drafting an incident report that will never reach anyone capable of reading it."

"Good. Let it complain into the void."

"That is, functionally, what it has been doing for six years."

Sera let her head rest against the frosted duct wall for a moment, breathing in slow counts, watching her own exhale fog and clear inside her helmet. "Tell me the second fragment was worth crawling through a coffin for."

"I believe it was."

The fragment, when it finally rendered back at the socket twenty minutes later — Sera moving considerably slower on the return crawl, cursing considerably less — did not give them a destination or a confession. It gave them something smaller and somehow worse: a rotation schedule showing Okafor-Reyes and Voss working the same shift block for eleven months, then, in the final two weeks before the outage, both of them reassigned without explanation to a shift that did not officially exist, under a supervisor code that matched no one in any registry, official or shadow.

"They got moved somewhere off the books," Sera said, staring at the schedule. "Right before everything went dark."

"Correct."

"Are they still on this station?"

Morrow was quiet for exactly as long as it needed to be honest.

"I don't know," it said. "But something wanted us to stop looking exactly there. And I would like to know why."

Behind the bulkhead, deeper in the dark than either fragment had reached, something that was not Records Integrity, and had never been declared efficient by anyone, continued waiting for the third file to come home.