Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Elena
The mortification hit me in waves.
I'd actually said it out loud. To Vaxon.
That stunning piece of emotional honesty, at least I'd have been useful, had spilled out of my mouth like I'd forgotten how to function as a rational human being.
Which, apparently, I had. Because normal people didn't have complete emotional breakdowns in front of their former supervisors while standing in the wreckage of a power relay they'd just accidentally exploded.
I pressed my forehead against the cool metal wall of my quarters, trying to make my brain work properly again.
The problem was that my brain seemed to have taken early retirement, leaving only a loop of that moment on repeat: me trembling against Vaxon's chest, the weight of his arms around me, the rumble of his voice when he'd said you could have died like it would've mattered to him.
Like I would've mattered.
"Stop it," I told myself. "Stop thinking about it."
My quarters didn't respond, which was probably for the best. The space felt cavernous now that Dana, Jalina, and Bea had all moved out to be with their bonded partners.
Four beds reduced to one. Four personalities compressed into my single mess of cables, circuit boards, and half-finished projects scattered across every available surface.
I'd told myself I preferred it this way. Preferred the solitude, the ability to work without interruption, the freedom to obsess over my secret scanning project at three in the morning without anyone asking uncomfortable questions.
The lie tasted bitter.
I shoved away from the wall and stalked to my workstation, where three monitors displayed the data I'd been collecting for months.
The Liberty signature pulsed on the screen, faint but unmistakable, a ghost of the ship that had carried us through a wormhole and spat us out in the wrong galaxy entirely.
My fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the enhanced scans I'd run over the past seventy-two hours. Every time I looked at the data, my stomach did this complicated twist that felt like hope and dread having a knife fight in my intestines.
The signature was real. Not a sensor glitch, not wishful thinking, not some bizarre cosmic echo.
A genuine piece of Liberty technology, broadcasting a power signature I'd helped design back when I was a twenty-three-year-old prodigy who thought she could engineer her way out of her family's low expectations.
I'd been so proud of those modifications to the escape pod power systems. So certain that my improvements would save lives if anything went wrong.
And then everything had gone catastrophically wrong, and I'd spent six months wondering if anyone else had survived. If my modifications had actually worked. If I'd done enough.
The data said maybe. The data said there was something out there in the debris field near the wormhole remnants, something that was still generating power signatures consistent with Liberty's emergency systems.
The data also said I was running out of time to decide what to do about it.
I pulled up the positional coordinates, cross-referencing them with Mothership's current trajectory.
We were close, relatively speaking. In the vast emptiness of space, close meant a two-day journey at standard warp.
But Captain Tor'van would need a compelling reason to authorize a mission into what everyone called the Dead Zone.
The region where the wormhole had appeared was contested space.
Three different factions claimed territorial rights, none of them friendly to Mothership's mission of rescuing stranded vessels.
Pirates used the debris fields as hunting grounds.
The wormhole's residual energy created sensor interference that made navigation treacherous.
And I wanted to fly straight into it because my scans maybe showed signs of life.
"You need more data," I muttered, opening another analysis window. "You need something irrefutable."
The problem was that irrefutable data required better sensors than I had access to through standard channels. The kind of sensors that were restricted to senior Operations staff and Security personnel. The kind of sensors that required authorization codes I definitely didn't have.
I chewed my lip, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
Hacking into Mothership's long-range sensor array was illegal.
Not just against regulations—actively illegal, the kind of thing that could get me confined to quarters or worse.
Captain Tor'van ran a tight ship, and he didn't appreciate crew members who circumvented security protocols, even for potentially good reasons.
But if there were survivors in that derelict, if Will or any of the others from Section Seven had made it out alive, then every hour I delayed was another hour they spent drifting in the dark, hoping for rescue that might never come.
I thought about Will pushing me toward an escape pod during the chaos. Thought about his voice cutting through the alarms and screaming: Go, Elena! Don't wait for me!
I'd made it out. I'd survived. I'd spent six months building a new life on Mothership, making friends, learning Zandovian technology, carving out a place for myself among beings who'd rescued us despite having no obligation to do so.
And Will had maybe been out there the whole time, clinging to life in some damaged pod, waiting for someone to find him.
The guilt was a physical weight in my chest, pressing down until it was hard to breathe.
My fingers dropped to the keyboard. Started typing.
The first security layer was surprisingly easy to bypass, a simple encryption algorithm that I'd cracked weeks ago while mapping Mothership's network architecture.
The second layer required more finesse, a carefully constructed back door that let me slip past the authentication protocols without triggering alerts.
By the third layer, I was sweating. My fingers flew across the keys, muscle memory and mathematical intuition guiding me through security measures that would've taken most people days to breach. I'd always been good with systems, good with seeing the logical patterns that other people missed.
It was why Liberty had recruited me fresh out of university. Why my family had simultaneously been proud and terrified when I'd announced I was leaving Earth to help build colonies among the stars.
"Just data," I whispered as the final security layer fell away. "Just gathering data to make an informed decision."
The long-range sensor array opened before me like a flower, its full capabilities suddenly at my fingertips.
I immediately directed it toward the coordinates I'd been tracking, cranking the resolution up to maximum, filtering out background radiation and debris signatures to focus on that single, stubborn power reading.
The enhanced scan ran for thirty-seven minutes. I spent every second of it convinced that someone would notice, that Security would come bursting through my door, that Vaxon would materialize like some kind of protective ghost to demand what the hell I thought I was doing.
No one came.
The scan completed, and my breath caught in my throat.
There. Right there in the data, clear as crystal: a Liberty escape pod cluster, heavily damaged but structurally intact in at least three sections. And the power signatures—
"Oh my god," I breathed.
Active life support. Not just emergency backups, but fully functional life support systems drawing power from jury-rigged connections that would've made any engineer weep with admiration.
Someone had managed to keep those systems running for months, cannibalizing other pods to maintain critical functions.
Someone was alive.
Or had been alive recently enough that the systems were still running.
My hands shook as I pulled up more detailed scans, zooming in on the pod cluster, analyzing every bit of data the sensors could provide. Three compartments with active power. Fifteen other pods showing no signs of function. A makeshift power distribution network that spoke to desperate ingenuity.
And a data transmission beacon, cycling through a distress call on frequencies I recognized.
Liberty frequencies. Section Seven frequencies.
Will's frequencies.
The sob came out before I could stop it, sharp and painful and relieved all at once. I pressed my hand over my mouth, forcing myself to stay quiet even though my quarters were empty, even though no one could hear me fall apart.
He'd made it. He'd survived the wormhole disaster. He'd kept himself and possibly others alive for months while I'd been, what? Making friends? Learning alien technology? Laughing at Dana's terrible jokes and letting Jalina drag me to bonding ceremonies?
Living my life like the past didn't matter.
The guilt crashed over me fresh and sharp, followed immediately by a surge of determination so fierce it made my teeth ache.
I had the data now. I had proof. Not just sensor echoes or maybes, concrete evidence that Liberty survivors were drifting in that debris field, that someone had survived long enough to build a distress beacon and pray someone would find them.
I would find them. I would bring them home.
But first, I had to convince Captain Tor'van to authorize a rescue mission into the Dead Zone.
The report took me three hours to compile. I pulled together every scrap of data, organized it into a coherent presentation, anticipated every possible objection and prepared counterarguments. By the time I finished, it was 0600 hours and I hadn't slept, but the document was solid.
Undeniable.
I submitted my request for a formal meeting with Captain Tor'van through official channels, attached the report, and waited.
The response came back in forty-seven minutes: Meeting authorized for 1400 hours, senior staff attendance required.
Senior staff. Which meant Vaxon would be there.