What First Call Buys (The Cairn)
Three thousand six hundred people live on Ring Six. The contract controlling its air records every one of them as spare capacity.
The error is not hidden. It is not even technically an error.
The instrument was written before the ring was built. Industry holds first claim on its berths, power and environmental reserves. The housing register knows families live there, but the allocation schedule cannot see them. When capacity runs out, lawful applications are refused in the order they reached the counter.
Claims advocate Doran Corrigan has challenged the arrangement five times. He has lost five times, because everyone applying it is following the rules.
Then a struggle over first call stops the station's working berths. Infrastructure already carrying more people than it was designed to support begins to fail, and an argument about contracts becomes a count of the dead.
The industrial houses have real obligations. The workers have real leverage. The station cannot survive without either of them. Corrigan's new panel cannot spend money, compel testimony or order a metre of pipe laid. It has only a room, a minute-book and the power to make anyone who wants the station's patience ask for it in public.
That may have to be enough.
What First Call Buys is character-driven political hard science fiction about scarcity, labour and the damage a lawful system can inflict without anyone choosing to be cruel.
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