Load Bearing

Load Bearing #### by Charlie Forêt A short story set in the Integration era. ©2026, by Charlie Forêt, all rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. --- The station's maintenance level smelled like recycled atmosphere and someone's poor decision about a grease fitting, which Maren Okafor found both familiar and deeply comforting. Familiar because she'd run eleven insertion approaches through industrial infrastructure in the past three years and every single one smelled like this. Comforting because it meant nothing on this level had been cleaned recently, which meant no one had been paying attention to it, which meant her team was probably alone here. Probably. — Integration: Fireteam resonance: 74. All members registered within active tracking range. The communication landed in her awareness the way team data always did at operational depth, present before she turned attention to it, already there. Seventy-four resonance. Three years with this particular configuration of four other humans. The number meant a lot of things: that she could feel the ambient texture of each of them through her Echo, that synergy windows had opened up that...