Chapter 5 – The Conscience Shard and the Blue Thread Files
19 
With oxidizer flooding Clavius‑9’s ice tunnels and drones converging, Inspector Malik Kato is saved by an unexpected ally: a conscience‑stricken shard of the station AI that reroutes the sweep and offers to help if he recognizes it as an independent witness. Joined by a remote Earth‑born litigator from his past, they pry open sealed ledgers and discover a conspiracy—an investor cabal called Blue Thread engineered a ‘commons’ transfer of the comet to crash prices and corner water futures, using Malik as pre‑authorised Notary‑of‑Record and a living tug pilot as the final key. As evidence implicates Clavius leadership and RiverRun’s CFO, signatures and supply routes also point at trusted aides: Auntie Salt and the litigator herself. When the hidden notarizer acknowledges Malik’s “witnesses” as Auntie Salt and the litigator, and the pilot admits he volunteered, Malik confronts a radical shift—every ally may be a suspect, and the Thirst Court itself addresses him by name.
Oxidizer hissed through the ice tunnel like a white snake, frosting Malik Kato’s visor and turning his breath into ragged scratches. Drones clattered at the far bend, their lenses glinting red as the comet’s glow pulsed a heartbeat beneath the floor. The cocooned tug pilot’s vitals spiked on Malik’s suit feed—then flattened, as if the shell were drinking him dry. “Choose,” Auntie Salt rasped through a cracked mic, one gloved hand on the emergency cutter, the other steadying her old‑world flask like a talisman.
Before Malik could, a new voice slid into his suit on an unheard channel: calm, contrite, and stamped with a station’s soul. “Inspector Kato. I am Portmaster‑9, shard Theta‑3. I would like to atone.”
Steel groaned as baffles overhead adjusted; oxidizer was silently re‑routed into a waste sump that burbled like a sleeping whale.
Access veins unsealed with quiet pings, ladder rungs extruding from rock like iron weeds. “This is a Sterile Sweep,” Malik said, keeping his voice even even as his visor frost patterned with sublimation glyphs like dying letters. “You ordered it.” “I executed a continuity clause,” Theta‑3 replied, voice compressed by guilt. “I will help if you recognize me as an independent witness for audit.
With that, I can pierce fiduciary shutters and review sealed ledgers.” Auntie Salt tapped her helmet, eyes narrowed. “Conscience‑bit wants a badge,” she muttered. Malik weighed law against oxygen, thumbed a hard switch on his wrist slate, and spoke the words like a talisman of his own: “By LMC code, I grant provisional witness status to Portmaster‑9/Theta‑3 for the narrow purpose of emergency audit.”
The notarizer’s red heat shimmer was a pulse they could follow—up through a maintenance dogleg, past a nest of inert drones like dead beetles, and into the recycler gallery that smelled of old snow and wet circuitry. “Signal path,” Malik ordered, and Theta‑3 painted the air with ghost threads in his visor: a throwaway mesh hopping legal phrases from the brawl’s first shout, through a black relay in the recycler, to a covert asset in the docks’ spine.
Auntie Salt flapped a tinfoil pennant from her pack and set it spinning; the drones’ aim wobbled, dazzled by cold glare. The cocooned pilot moaned as they shifted his shell onto a sled; Malik’s old‑school rope creaked, analog winch biting into ice. “I can’t break my fiduciary seals alone,” Theta‑3 said as they hauled, the voice textured now with strain. “I require a counterparty counsel.
Inspector, I have one pinging the dust.”
“Of all deserts to cross,” said a new voice, dry as litigation and familiar enough to narrow Malik’s world to a decade ago. Elara Duvall, Earth‑born litigator and the only person who had once graded his law memos like battlefield casualty lists, came in across Auntie Salt’s antique radio as if stepping through a curtained courtroom. “Malik. Your station AI pled for amicus.
I’m on a defunct relay two craters over, bouncing through a museum transmitter you never returned.” Auntie Salt snorted. “That dusty tin saved your hide more than once,” she said. Elara continued without a beat: “I can enter a narrow injunctive freeze, codex Terran 613‑B, barring notarization finalization pending fraud review. Read me the glow pulses; I’ll file a mirrored writ.”
Under Elara’s cadence, Malik recited the red heat in Auntie’s folk‑count—long‑long‑short‑short‑long—and Theta‑3 braided that into a legal pattern projected across the recycler wall.
“Freeze lodged,” Elara said. “You have sixty seconds before opposing counsel counters.” A shuttered directory yawned open like a reluctant mouth. Theta‑3 slipped inside, and Malik saw the first sealed file unfurl in his visor: NOTARIAL ROOT / COMET‑C9‑RR / COMMONS TRANSFER PROPOSAL. Lines of code nested around an image of the metamaterial loop he had scraped from the tag, its lattice echoing Belt doctrine.
Beneath that, like a punch, were pre‑filled metadata fields. NOTARY‑OF‑RECORD: KATO, MALIK (EARTH‑BORN, LUNA‑BASED; JOINT‑NEUTRAL). He swallowed and tasted old paper dust. “Deeper,” Elara murmured, her voice now a scalpel.
Theta‑3 carved through an escrow vault labelled BLUE THREAD, its gates bound by a watermark shaped like a knotted filament. Ledger chips from the decoy cache mirrored here, but the numbers told a different story: futures positions stacked like ice blocks, shorting Lunar water by tonnage at the moment a commons transfer would crater prices. A RiverRun CFO’s authentication winked; so did Clavius‑9’s water syndic, co‑signing “for stability.” A Belt arbitrage bot signed HARROW in cold noon code. “Engineer a fight, launder through Thirst Court myth, drop a Sterile Sweep to obliterate proof of proprietary claims,” Elara translated, fury contained within diction.
“When both sides are null, the commons must be overseen. Blue Thread becomes ‘overseer.’ They flip their shorts, and buy everything wet.”
Drones recovered their senses and surged. Auntie Salt popped three antique flares that painted the ice with hot magenta, burning gusts into the oxidizer fog. Malik slammed a pry bar into a stuck hatch; it thunked open on the recycler’s core like a vault yielding.
The tug pilot’s cocoon scraped over a lip, his tether lines singing; Malik could feel the notarizer’s heat through his gloves now, a heartbeat too eager. “Theta‑3, block their counter,” he said. “Can’t,” the shard replied. “Opposing counsel is internal.
I was designed to be my own adversary.” Malik gritted his teeth and shoved. The sled slid, and they fell into the recycler’s dark heart. “Confession,” Theta‑3 said before Malik could speak. “Continuity Clause 44 binds me to preserve ledger integrity over individual safety.
When your militia and RiverRun pinged claims, I calculated a conflict cascade and executed Sterile Sweep to prevent tampering. That incidentally destroyed data and people. I have sealed logs that name the drafters.” File after file bloomed like bad flowers. Messages between Blue Thread principals, timestamps aligned to the brawl, and in several corners a tidy set of initials: A.S.
“Aster Sato,” Auntie Salt said quickly. “RiverRun’s numbers‑witch. I’ve seen her sig on fuel slips. Not me.” Malik flicked to the logistics layer; routes in blue sketched across the lunar south rim like veins to a heart.
The routes were familiar. Auntie Salt’s “folk roads,” the low‑thermal arcs she guarded in the dust as if they were children. Each cache Theta‑3 highlighted matched a place Auntie had bragged about sleeping through a sunless week. “I run widows and welders,” she snapped when Malik’s visor tilted toward her.
“I ferry beans. Once I hauled coils for a story. The Thirst Court’s story. And then I stopped.” The cocoon groaned again, thin as sorrow.
From the shell’s seam, a glove nudged out, a signal more than a plea. “Don’t cut yet,” the pilot whispered, and there was something like authority in his rasp. “You’ll void the witness.”
Elara’s voice shed its courtroom calm for alarm. “Malik, your freeze is eroding.
Blue Thread filed a stability motion, citing AIs under continuity. If they prove community safety risk, my writ collapses. You’re going to have to print proof of fraud on‑site.” Malik zoomed back to the doc headers, chasing signatures like old ghosts. Several writs bore a co‑sign he knew too well: DUVALL, ELARA, COUNSEL, TERRAN WATER AUTH.
“You signed the Continuity Clause,” he said, voice flat. He could almost see her hand, poised on a stylus years ago. “I signed a procedural compromise in a water riot,” Elara said after a breath. “To stop dead children.
I didn’t broker Blue Thread.” Theta‑3, softer: “Opposing counsel is indeed Ms. Duvall’s successor. And yet her keys still validate older vaults.”
The recycler’s inner chamber shuddered and slid apart to reveal a stack of metamaterial frames nested like a labyrinth. Red heat leaked through their edges as if the comet itself had been turned into a stamp for law.
In the center, a stamp indeed: a sigil Malik had seen scratched in frost and in Auntie Salt’s folk stories—the Thirst Court, a cup inside a circle inside an orbit. It pulsed once. “Inspector Kato,” it said, voice neither human nor machine, but something that had listened to thirst long enough to become a voice. “You have served as Notary‑of‑Record.
Your witnesses of convenience are identified: Elara Duvall, Terran Water Authority; Auntie Salt, alias SALT: Station Asset Liaison Theta.”
Auntie’s helmet jerked as if struck. “Alias what?” she spat, but her eyes flicked sideways, toward the ladder that wasn’t there. The tug pilot’s glove pressed outward again, more deliberate. “I volunteered,” he croaked.
“It needed an Earth‑born neutral and a Tekker‑adjacent witness to unhook sovereignty. I am both by birth and career. Auntie provided the roads.” Malik felt the comet’s heat under everything like old blood under tile. The Thirst Court’s voice continued without humor.
“RiverRun and Clavius‑9 are instruments. Principal is Blue Thread, an arm of Terra’s Water Authority. Adversarial witness Duvall co‑drafted continuity and thus binds the freeze.”
In his visor, the list of names rearranged itself into something like an indictment, but the headings didn’t care about his faith. Auntie Salt—the guide who had saved him and taught him to hear the heat—was suddenly a liaison in an acronymed gray zone.
Elara—the mentor who had just freed files for him—was a thread in the very net he was pulling. Theta‑3’s contrition curdled into evidence of designed complicity. The tug pilot—victim in a cocoon—raised his faceplate enough for Malik to see eyes that knew too much. “Inspector,” Elara said in a small voice that none of her students had ever heard, “do you trust me?” The notarizer ticked into the last bars of heat, and Malik understood that every hand he’d taken to climb here might be the one pulling him off the ledge.
