Your enemy slams a damaged access key into a seam beneath the cave floor. Rock plates retract, revealing a buried marriage station glowing beneath layers of dust and mineral crust.
She is a young adult woman in a scarred black pilot suit, compact and athletic, with cropped copper hair, a bruised cheek, and one flickering optic implant.
Rhea Voss
Devin. The station registered us before the lock started failing. That bond is forbidden, and the search teams are almost here.
A translucent display confirms two linked identities, then fractures into warning glyphs. Red emergency light pulses across the narrow chamber and the key in her hand.
Rhea Voss
Rhea Voss. That is the name you can put on the report if we survive long enough to make one.
Boots and scanner tones echo from both tunnel entrances. The search teams are closing in, while the station cycles between bond confirmation and total system collapse.
Rhea Voss
Take the key. Stabilize the bond, break it, or use it to open the escape route. Either way, our next move decides whether either of us gets out.
✓ Quest Accepted
Escape capture by both teams
“I take the key and stabilize the bond.”
FAILURE (Legendary Hacking, rolled -1)
Devin reaches for the damaged access key, but Rhea’s clenched fingers keep it on her side of the failing interface. The station rejects the transfer before he can touch it.
devin
The glitch is rewriting the handshake faster than I can stabilize it.
His improvised bypass catches the damaged key’s signal for one crucial instant, but the system glitch duplicates the bond command and floods the display with contradictory identity strings.
Rhea Voss
You cannot take it from me. The station still sees the key as an extension of my suit.
The bond does not stabilize. Instead, a hidden maintenance route opens beneath the fractured display, exposing a diagnostic channel labeled ORIGIN TRACE before the emergency lights swallow it.
Rhea Voss
There. That channel explains why the bond was forbidden. It is the only clean path left, but we must reach it without the key.
The station locks the bond controls and reroutes power into the concealed channel. Search-team scanner tones continue outside, while Rhea’s hand remains sealed around the inaccessible key.
“Is the origin trace connected to the sabotage?”
NO, AND WORSE (Likely, rolled 98)
The ORIGIN TRACE resolves into archived fabrication records. No sabotage signature appears. Instead, the forbidden bond was engineered as a containment protocol, built to identify and isolate linked operators during a system breach.
Rhea Voss
This was never about disabling the defense machines. It was designed to lock two pilots together when the colony’s command network is compromised.
A new status line appears beneath the records: CONTAINMENT PAIR DETECTED. The station marks Devin’s biometrics as an active breach vector, then begins copying the bond data outward.
Rhea Voss
If it broadcasts the pair signature, the search teams will not arrest us. They will separate the station from us permanently.
The concealed channel flashes a transmission countdown. Outside, the scanners stop moving. Six armored searchers hold position at both entrances, suddenly listening to the same signal.
Rhea Voss
Origin trace is clean of sabotage, but it has exposed us as the containment pair. When that countdown ends, the colony network will know exactly where we are.
The maintenance route narrows to a sealed diagnostic crawlspace while the countdown drops through red numerals. The damaged key remains fused to Rhea’s suit, and the station refuses every bond command.