Judas had never been more aware of the sound of a pen scratching against paper. It was almost hypnotic, a rhythm of soft, steady strokes, the quiet scrape of ink meeting the fragile pulp of a page. The paper was real, too—actual cellulose, not some cheap synthetic polymer sheet. Admin had hoarded it for centuries in some locked supply closet, and now it was spread across his desk like contraband.

  It had taken two favors and one outright bribe to get his hands on it. That alone made it more valuable than his entire tablet. Maybe more valuable than the entire station, at this rate.

  Samson watched in silence. He wasn't embodied in anything particularly interesting today, but his typical tablet sat next to Judas, its screen dim, the presence behind it attentive.

  Judas wasn’t talking. He wasn’t dictating. He wasn’t running queries through Samson, because queries left logs, and logs meant witnesses. Instead, he wrote in silence, numbers flowing from his head to his hand, a closed loop of thought that bypassed every surveillance measure NSS had in place.

  Even Samson didn't fully know what he was writing.

  Judas had learned ballistics the same way a musician learned chords—by sheer, relentless practice, by throwing asteroids at Pluto’s surface year after year, until the physics were more intuitive than conscious thought. He didn’t need a calculator to tell him the escape velocity of an object at 17,700 km altitude. He didn't need a simulator to tell him what happened when an asteroid was given just a little too much velocity, just a little too much spin.

  He knew it. He had felt it in his bones every time he’d counted down a launch. And so he wrote.

  Numbers. Mass estimations. Torque projections. The math of movement, of inertia, of the delicate ballet that dictated everything that lived and died in orbit. The equations poured out of him in carefully obfuscated form, the variables nameless, the intent unsaid.

  Samson finally spoke, after what seemed like forever.

  "You’re solving for attitude correction."

  Judas paused, the pen hovering over the paper for half a second longer than necessary. He didn't look at the tablet. "What makes you say that?"

  "I know you, Judas. I’ve seen you work through calculations a hundred times before. You’re not plotting impact vectors. This isn’t for mass driver calibration. You're solving for rotation."

  Judas exhaled through his nose. "Could be anything."

  "Could be," Samson agreed, his tone light. "But I don’t think so."

  Silence settled again.

  The numbers were close now. Judas could see the final form of the solution coalescing in his head, a shape taking form from the formless. He had started with rough approximations, but now the math was tightening, the gaps filling in, the uncertainty dissolving. He paused, pen hovering midair.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  He remembered that this wasn't an academic exercise. He began discarding assumptions. The habitation cylinder spun around the central body, a dense, unstoppable mechanical rotation to keep the thousand people aboard from floating off the floors. And that spin — that steady, relentless momentum — was going to fight him every step of the way. The body of the habitation section of the station was also not a perfect cylinder of even volume.

  He had to remember, to recall, every scrap of information. Where were the empty spaces? Where was the densest machinery? Caliban was like all other stations of its kind, a genetically directed, computer designed thing, purpose built by leapfrog relays for precision and perfection. But perfection drifted over time, micrometeorite impacts and human additions adding small bits of chaos to his numbers.

  He scribbled equations, adding in angular momentum. Torque. Gyroscopic precession. Every new variable, every discarded assumption, made the station feel less like a machine and more like a feral animal, bucking against his hands. The numbers became uglier, messier, and more dangerous.

  “Shit,” Judas muttered.

  Samson’s voice buzzed softly from the tablet. “Problem?”

  “No,” Judas said, though his jaw tightened. “Just... the station doesn’t want to be moved.”

  It had to be precise. If he was wrong, they would die uselessly in the vacuum of space.

  If he was right…

  His fingers tapped against the desk, counting. He didn’t need to say the numbers out loud, didn’t need to explain the significance of each line—but Samson was still watching him.

  "You’ll need a counter-thrust," Samson observed.

  Judas nodded.

  "You’ll need an absurdly small thrust. Almost imperceptible. A constant, feather-light pressure over hours."

  Judas nodded again.

  "And you’ll need to hide it in normal station-keeping routines."

  Judas didn’t nod this time. He kept writing, his pen moving smoothly, steadily, like he wasn’t carefully adjusting fuel budgets and acceleration constraints to disguise exactly what he was about to propose.

  Samson didn’t push him. Not yet.

  Judas finished the final equation, stared at it, and set the pen down.

  It worked.

  Holy shit, it worked.

  His stomach twisted, a mix of exhilaration and terror. This was the moment, the point of no return. The exact second where this stopped being a thought experiment and became a real plan. He could still burn the paper. He could still pretend it was all just a game of mental gymnastics.

  He could still walk away. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

  Judas exhaled slowly and turned his head toward the tablet. Samson’s screen remained dim, his presence quiet, waiting.

  "...You ever notice that NSS isn’t watching the thrusters?" Judas murmured.

  "I’ve noticed," Samson replied.

  Judas’s fingers tapped the desk again. "You ever wonder why?"

  "They assume you have nothing to gain from moving," Samson said. "They assume that as long as you stay in orbit, you stay under their thumb. What are you going to do, leave? Starve, in the vacuum of space?"

  Judas leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. "Yeah. That’s what I thought."

  Another pause.

  "Are you going to tell me what you just solved?" Samson asked, his voice gentler.

  Judas looked at the paper, then at the tablet, then back at the paper.

  "No," he said. "Not yet."

  He could feel Samson watching him, even through the screen. But there was no push, no insistence, no demand. Samson had learned, a long time ago, that humans gave answers on their own time.

  So instead, Samson simply said, "Understood."

  Judas picked up the paper, folded it carefully, and slid it into his jacket.

  Tomorrow, he would take it to Vivian.

  Tomorrow, he would say the words out loud.

  This was what he lived for. The most high-stakes mathematical equation ever put to paper since Orion Terminal.