Ghosts in the Underworks: A Sci-Fi Noir Detective Novella

Ashfall Station has routes no map admits exist.

After the Sector Twelve case, Detective Ruff Kale wants routine work. On Ashfall, routine usually means petty theft, domestic disputes, missing tools, bad reports, and systems that fail just long enough for everyone to stop asking questions.

Then the reports begin to line up.

Small items vanish from Lower Mid-Ring housing blocks and return before anyone can hold the complaint open. Access logs remain clean. Maintenance panels show signs of use. Hidden spaces appear inside the station walls. Someone is moving through Ashfall without being seen, using old service lines, dead zones, and forgotten infrastructure that should have been sealed years ago.

Ruff and Lena Marik follow the pattern into the Underworks, where the station's hidden routes are not just shortcuts. They are a system of movement, secrecy, and control. A runner knows the paths. Someone else keeps them open. And one of those routes may connect back to the dead girl from Sector Twelve.

As Ashfall Security Force pressure mounts and Fleet Command moves to take control, Ruff begins to understand that the case is larger than stolen tools or unlogged access. Something is travelling through the station beneath official notice.

And once Fleet arrives, the question is no longer who used the hidden routes.

It is who was never meant to find them.

Ghosts in the Underworks is Book 2 in Ashfall Files, a connected series of sci-fi noir detective novellas set aboard a failing orbital station where crime, corruption, surveillance, and political pressure reveal a conspiracy buried inside the system itself.