The shift bell rang without fanfare. Just a triple pulse of tone through the intercom—low, steady, functional. Beneath Dome C7, deep inside Asteroid 13-VF, the miners of the VesperWorks outpost stirred to life.
Doros Vel, Sector Lead, opened his eyes at precisely 0300 local. He didn't need the bell; his internal chronometer was tuned to duty. He lay still for a moment, studying the gray condensation gathered on the dome above his bunk. The breath of ten thousand mornings like this one had carved tiny rivulets in the plastisteel. That, too, was a kind of poetry. Cold. Predictable. Beautiful in its refusal to change.
He dressed in silence, like most of them did. Utility fabric, boots with cracked sealant at the ankle joints. His undersuit had been patched three times, and the air recycler on his belt whined slightly louder than it used to. It didn't matter. It worked. Everything here worked, until it didn't.
Down in Corridor F, the others were assembling. They spoke little. Greetings, when they happened, were nods. Doros passed Myrren Thass, a wiry woman with dust-silvered skin and permanent starlight rings under her eyes. She was reading something on her datapad, one boot tapping faintly against the ferrocrete. Likely a transcript of old Core politics or some philosophy tract about the futility of time. She didn't look up. That was fine.
The team—eight of them this cycle—gathered at the lock. The same airlock as always. Its bulkhead, scarred from a microquake three standard years ago, bore the faint engraving of the VesperWorks emblem. No one had polished it in at least a decade. Why would they?
"Main shaft's stable," said Ral Vecht, the techie, running his fingers through the dust caught in the vent grooves of his drill. "Pressure holds. No seismic since 0300 yesterday. But Core 6 had a fluctuation."
Doros raised an eyebrow. "Significant?"
Ral shrugged. "Threshold margin. One more and we flag it."
They all nodded. That was enough talking.
The mine was older than most of them. Bored into the hollow of the asteroid centuries ago, it cut like a surgical wound into the mass of rock and ore, a scar of purpose. Polis Massan engineers had excavated the asteroid during the Outer Rim expansions, then abandoned it when the war came. VesperWorks had returned with new incentives, contracts buried in clauses, and promises made in credits no one expected to live long enough to spend.
The crew moved through the dark arteries of the tunnels, lights casting long beams that danced off dust motes like ghost signals in vacuum. No one whistled. No one told stories. That wasn't the culture. Joy was a private thing, if it was a thing at all.
Core 6 was quiet.
Until it wasn't.
The breach was sudden, a hiss that climbed into a scream of venting gas. Pressure alarms blared, yellow lights flaring along the tunnel like dying stars. Doros reacted instantly, pushing Myrren back behind a support strut as the wall near the stabilizer groaned and gave. Rock sprayed like shrapnel. The void tried to claim them. But they were Polis Massans. They sealed it.
Ral slammed the emergency bulkhead. No hesitation. No panic. The breach cut them off from three kilometers of the lower shaft. Six hours of data lost. One worker—Karell Ninn, age 34, no kin on-record—was in that shaft. He hadn't triggered his recall beacon.
They stood by the door for a moment longer, listening. Not because they expected to hear anything. It was just something humans did.
Doros marked the incident on his datapad. "Move to alternate grid."
No one asked about Karell. There was no vigil. No screams. They logged the death in the console with the same level of intensity used to log power usage. But each of them would remember him—in the way that Polis Massans remembered: by continuing the work he left behind.
By 0700, they were inside the new grid, extracting doonite veins from the wall with silent efficiency. The drills buzzed softly, drowning out the sound of wind between cracked seams. Myrren readjusted a support beam. Ral muttered to himself about a voltage variance. Doros logged his third stress fracture this month.
They took a break at 1100. Not because they were tired—tired was irrelevant—but because the system required it. Standard ten-minute pause. Nutrient rations. Hydration packets.
They didn't sit together. They never did. Each found a place to lean, to exist alone. Solitude wasn't loneliness here—it was preservation. Emotional distance was just another form of pressure sealing, just another barrier that kept the void out.
Doros looked at a crack in the far wall. Probably harmless. Maybe not. He logged it anyway.
"Think he screamed?" Myrren asked quietly. Her voice barely broke the hum of the tunnel.
"Does it matter?" Ral replied. He wasn't cruel. Just Polis Massan.
Myrren didn't answer. Neither did Doros. The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable.
Work resumed. The day passed in hours, but time had little meaning. Only quotas and safety margins counted. They cleared the grid by 1600. Ten containers of refined doonite. Six drill-heads worn down. One confirmed fatality. Two probable faults in adjacent tunnels flagged for review. The system ticked on.
As the shift ended, Doros returned to the dome. The showers were communal, but most used them one at a time. The recycled water came out lukewarm, mineral-heavy, never quite clean. He scrubbed until his skin burned, then dried off with the same towel he'd used for the past three months.
In his quarters, he opened his pad. Not to check messages—there never were any—but to reread a short document he'd copied years ago. A treatise on entropy by a long-dead philosopher. It ended with a line he knew by heart:
"The purpose of systems is not to endure, but to delay collapse as long as possible."
He didn't know why it comforted him.
In the next room, Myrren was building something. A mechanical beetle, maybe. It twitched its legs when she wasn't looking.
Across the dome, someone played a recording of static over old orchestral files, letting the signal degradation make its own composition.
Outside, the stars burned in silence. No one celebrated the end of the shift. There were no congratulations. Just the slow, steady hum of life-support and the low glow of dome lights against asteroid rock. The dome didn't fail today. That was enough.
Tomorrow, they would do it again.
Because hope wasn't a concept on Polis Massa.
Only function. Only duty. Only survival.
