Chapter 3
ELLA
Commander Vris’s office smells like copper and ozone. Probably from all the exposed wiring. Or maybe just from him. He stands stiff behind his desk, arms crossed so tight his uniform strains against his biceps. His eyes, sharp and sunken, pin me like a bug to a display case.
My mouth opens, but I don’t even have a good lie ready. My brain scrambles like a dropped datapad. “I was doing diagnostics on the food processing grid,” I say. My voice is too fast.
His eyebrows twitch. “Is that so.”
He knows. Not what I was doing exactly, but enough to smell the rot. His jaw works slowly, like he’s chewing on all the ways I’m not worth his time. But then he exhales through his nose and waves me off like a gnat.
“Stay in your lane, Technician Corleone.”
“Yes, sir,” I chirp like a good little gearhead.
I walk out with my back straight, but it’s a miracle I don’t set the damn corridor on fire with how hot my ears are.
I’m pissed. At him. At myself. At this entire floating mess of politics and secrecy.
They’re hiding something. The Black Box drive is unstable, and instead of shutting it down or fixing it, they’re just pretending everything’s peachy so command doesn’t pull funding.
Idiots.
By the time I reach Maintenance, my hands are trembling. Marla glances up from her terminal. Her purple curls are piled up in a messy bun and there’s grease smudged across her cheek. She takes one look at my face and raises an eyebrow.
“So,” she drawls, “how’d your little side quest go?”
“Don’t,” I mutter, sliding under the half-disassembled gravity stabilizer. The metal’s cool against my back, grounding me. “He knows I was snooping. Just don't know what.”
“Yet,” she adds helpfully.
I grab my spanner and start reconnecting the tension lines. “Containment’s off. Not just a blip. I think it’s degrading.”
Marla goes quiet. That’s how I know she believes me. When she doesn’t, she won’t shut up.
“They’ll bury it,” I say, twisting hard on a stripped bolt. “Until it kills us all. And then they’ll say it was sabotage or some rogue signal. And we’ll just be pretty little smears on their damage reports.”
“You sound paranoid,” she says softly.
“I’m not paranoid if they’re actually covering it up.”
She sighs. “You’re going to get yourself court-martialed.”
“I’m a civilian contractor.”
“You’re going to get yourself airlocked.”
I slam the panel shut and slide out from under the stabilizer, my hands slick with machine oil and nerves. “They should be listening to me. I’ve run the numbers. I’ve seen the flickers. The telemetry is lying.”
Marla bites her lip. “You should stop. Just... for a little while.”
I look at her. And I see what she’s not saying. She’s scared. Not just for me. For all of us.
But I can’t stop. Not when I’m this close to figuring out what’s wrong.
The rest of my shift is a haze of misaligned power couplings and endless diagnostics, all while the ache in my chest builds like a stormcloud.
When the Holonet pings ship-wide—something about a new Alliance treaty with the Trident sector—I know everyone’s going to be glued to the feed.
No better time to sneak into places I’m not supposed to be.
Auxiliary Storage is two decks down and always smells like burnt plastic and coolant. I know the access codes. Hell, I probably wrote half of them. I duck inside and hit the console, fingers flying. I’m in. Locked schematics flood the screen in a tide of data.
There it is.
The singularity drive’s diagnostics.
I pull the most recent field stability report. The containment parameters have shifted—again. Worse than last time. But something else grabs me by the throat.
A patch code. Hidden deep in the root logs. It’s not from Engineering. Not from Command. It’s handwritten. Messy. Sloppy in a way that screams cover-up.
“What the hell is this…” I whisper, leaning in.
The code reroutes safety protocols—makes the containment failure look like operator error. It’s a goddamn smear job built before anything’s even gone wrong.
Which means they know it’s going to.
My breath turns to ice in my lungs. I back out of the console and kill the power to the terminal before anyone notices it pinged live. My reflection stares back at me from the blank screen—pale, wide-eyed, slick with sweat.
Someone is tampering with the drive. Someone who doesn’t give a single shit about the lives on this ship.
I walk out of the storage room on autopilot. My hands are cold, but I can feel my heartbeat thudding in my palms. If I go to Vris, he’ll shut me down. If I go to anyone else, they’ll just report me.
I need a plan.
I need proof.
And more than that... I need to survive long enough to use it.