Carrick paced around his cabin after the door sealed, listening to the ship settle around him.

  The space was barely large enough to turn in without brushing the walls. A bunk folded into one side, a narrow desk into the other. Functional. Efficient. Designed for someone who wasn’t supposed to spend much time here except for sleeping.

  He pressed his thumb against the door lock. The indicator turned red. Locked, but subject to over-ride, he realised. There was nowhere on the ship to be alone.

  He crossed to the desk and sat down, bringing his personal console online. He looked at the logs. His messages before the jump to his wife, assuring her he’d be back soon and to take care of their infant son. Words now separated by an endless vacuum of frozen stars. Somewhere beyond, his wife and son, going about their lives with no idea he was stranded.

  He had to let them know.

  Carrick began typing before he consciously decided to. His hand hovered, then hesitated. Roarke had locked down comms. It had been a sensible call: no signals in or out until they understood what the Rift was doing.

  He tapped the panel lightly, bringing it to life. Status prompts scrolled past: internal channels green, external links greyed out. Restricted.

  Carrick swallowed and keyed in a diagnostic command, not a bypass. Just a query. He wanted to see the shape of the lock, not break it.

  The system responded instantly. A neat block of text confirmed the restriction, cited the authority, logged the access attempt. Clean. Impersonal.

  He frowned.

  Carrick adjusted the parameters, narrowing the request. No outbound transmission. No signal packet. Just a carrier ping, flagged local, looped back. If the lockdown was as tight as it looked, the system would refuse it. If it wasn’t—

  Access Denied.

  “All right,” he murmured. “I hear you.”

  He leaned back, staring at the ceiling. He thought of his son’s face, of his wife’s voice on the last call before stasis, teasing him about overpacking tools he’d never use. He didn’t need to talk to them. He just needed to know the universe on the other side of the Rift was still moving.

  Carrick brought the panel back up, then stopped.

  Every keystroke was logged. Even this. Especially this.

  Slowly, deliberately, he closed the interface and let the panel dim. He sat very still, hands flat on his thighs, listening to the hum of the ship and the faint creak of metal under thermal stress. Normal sounds. Reassuring sounds.

  Somewhere, deep in the hull, something clicked softly.

  Carrick didn’t move.

  If someone was watching, he wasn’t going to give them a show.

  Carrick folded his hands together and stared at the darkened panel, thinking not about why they were here, or who might have known what in advance, but about something far simpler and far worse.

  He was cut off.

  Not from the mission.

  From home.

  And that, more than the Rift, more than the frozen stars outside the hull, told him exactly how small his world had just become.

  ***

  Rook stood at the security console watching the internal feed from Carrick’s cabin. The text from the engineer’s personal console was mirrored in a corner of the screen.

  His eyes flicked once to the identifier, then back to the wider display. The ship’s internal overview filled the screen in muted layers: life-support status, compartment integrity, crew vitals, internal traffic. Everything nominal. Everything contained.

  The comms request sat there, unobtrusive and unresolved.

  Rook expanded the entry. The details were exactly what he’d expect — a limited query, no transmission attempt, no packet formation. Not an escape. Not sabotage. A probe. A careful one.

  A presence settled at his shoulder.

  Rook didn’t look up. He made no effort to hide what he was doing.

  “Why are you watching him?” the captain asked.

  “Engineer Carrick is emotionally compromised,” Rook replied. “He poses a potential security risk. Observation is indicated.”

  “That’s a security assessment, not a diagnosis,” Mavik said quietly.

  Roarke watched the feed for a moment. Carrick sat very still, hands folded, as if listening for something only he could hear.

  “I know you’re within your remit,” Roarke said. “But this level of scrutiny doesn’t help. It just tells him he was right to be paranoid.”

  “The risk exists regardless,” Rook said, pointing to Carrick’s access log. “He’s querying the escape pod’s ready status.”

  Roarke exhaled slowly and straightened.

  “That’s enough. Everyone to the mess. Now.” His voice hardened. “We sort this out in the open, before it gets any worse.”

  ***

  Roarke waited until everyone had taken a seat in the mess.

  “We’re not here to accuse anyone,” he said. “And we’re not here to pretend everything’s fine.”

  He let the words settle before continuing.

  “Something about this mission doesn’t add up. If one of us knows more than they’re saying, we need to establish that. And if none of us do, we need to establish that too — before suspicion compromises us.”

  He glanced around the table.

  “It’s time to put our cards on the table. I’ll start. My INA briefing was standard: take the cargo from A to B and return. Nothing more.”

  Carrick shook his head. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “I just want to go home.”

  “I failed to see the deviation in the trajectory, but it shouldn’t have mattered,” Hale offered. “And I’m as surprised as anybody to see Cassie alive.”

  “I’m just here to make sure nobody dies,” Mavik said.

  All eyes turned to Rook.

  “Mission parameters are classified,” he said.

  Roarke nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Classification isn’t the issue. Context is.”

  He turned back to Rook.

  “I’m not asking you to disclose protected material. I’m asking whether anything in those parameters explains why we’re stuck here. Or why Cassandra Hale is on this ship.”

  “Negative.” Rook replied.

  “So, we’re back where we started.” Carrick ran a hand through his hair. “Nobody was briefed. Nobody altered the mission. Nobody knew Cassandra was aboard. And yet here we are, stranded in space with a moving Rift sitting right on top of us, freezing us in time and space.”

  “Like a stasis pod,” Hale said.

  “With a dragon breathing down our necks,” Mavik said.

  The table fell quiet again.

  “I say we wait,” Mavik continued after a moment. “If INA brought us here deliberately, they’ll have to follow up. You don’t leave an experiment unresolved.”

  “Or they send someone to tidy it up,” Carrick said. “Make sure there are no witnesses.”

  Mavik shook his head. “INA doesn’t operate that way.”

  Carrick looked at him. “So now you trust INA,” he said. “From the man who lectures us about unintended consequences and edge cases.”

  Mavik’s expression tightened.

  “Systems require order,” he said. “You introduce randomness, you get collapse. INA exists to prevent that.”

  Hale frowned slightly. “That’s not what you usually say.”

  Mavik turned to her. His voice was calm.

  “I trust INA,” he stated flatly.

  “Trust,” Carrick said quietly. “In an institution that put us in the dark, parked us next to a moving Rift, and dropped a woman out of stasis who wasn’t on the manifest.”

  Mavik met his gaze without blinking. “I have to believe someone is in control,” he said.

  “We wait,” Roarke said. “What other choice do we have?”

  The mess room door opened. Cassandra stood in the doorway.

  Hale was on her feet instantly.

  “Cassie.”

  “Ally.”

  She ran to hug her sister.

  Hale held her tightly. She felt solid. Warm. Present in a way Hale had never expected.

  “You’re really here,” Hale said.

  “I am,” Cassandra replied. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  Hale pulled back, hands still gripping her sister’s arms, eyes searching her face. Cassandra met her gaze without flinching, her expression open, almost serene.

  “You look… good,” Hale said finally.

  Cassandra smiled. “I feel good.”

  Mavik stood. “Ladies, I hate to break up the family reunion, but I don’t think Cassandra should be out of bed so soon.”

  Cassandra gave him a quizzical look.

  “This is Soren — Doctor Mavik, our medical officer,” Hale said. “He’s been taking care of you.”

  “I know,” Cassandra said, her smile lingering. “Thank you.”

  Mavik nodded. “I know I’m good, but I’m not that good,” he said. “You need to go back to med-bay.”

  “But I feel fine,” she said.

  “Your vitals say otherwise,” Mavik said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re on your feet.”

  “I shall accompany her,” Rook said.

  “And you’re just going to let him?” Carrick said, looking to Roarke.

  “Doctor Mavik,” Roarke said. “Take your patient back to med-bay.”

  He looked at Hale.

  “You can go with her.”

  As they left, Carrick rounded on Rook. “You seem awfully keen to protect her now.”

  “As per mission briefing.”

  “Yet, she was expendable.”

  “Her loss would not have affected the mission outcome.”

  “So tell us, what is this damned mission?”

  “Mission parameters are classified.”

  “Even to the captain?” Roarke asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  Carrick’s jaw tightened. “What would you do if your precious data was breached?”

  “If restricted data was accessed without authorisation,” Rook said, “I would have to minimise the extent of the breach. Neutralise the risk.”

  Carrick rose slowly to his feet.

  “I saw it,” he said. “Biological specimen, categorised as an anomaly. Containment priority. Crew expendable…”

  He paused.

  “You knew this and you didn’t say a word.”

  He looked from Rook to Roarke.

  “They let us jump, knowing we would never make it back. What else is he not telling us.”

  Rook moved.

  Roarke stepped in. “This stops here.”

  Rook looked at him. “Sir—”

  “No,” Roarke said. “You do not threaten my crew.”

  “I am enforcing mission security.”

  “You are not,” Roarke said. “Not without my order.”

  Rook stood. “I’m going to guard med-bay,” he said and left the mess.

  Mavik crossed him at the doorway.

  “What’s up with him?” the doctor asked as he took a seat.

  Carrick paced the room, pulling at his hair. “He knew,” he said, his voice broke. “All this time, he goddamn knew!” he was shouting now.

  “Knew what? That we’d drop out of FTL?” Mavik said.

  Carrick rounded on him.

  “No. That there’s something wrong with Cassandra. That they expected this to happen. It wasn’t an accident.”

  He stopped pacing, his chest heaving.

  “And we’re all expendable.”

  He swallowed.

  “I saw it all when I pulled her biometric data for the de-stupe.”

  Mavik spoke, his tone even, deliberate.

  “Carrick,” he said. “Stop.”

  Carrick stared at him.

  “How can you say that? We’re stranded in space. INA knew. He knew—“

  “This isn’t helping,” Mavik continued. “Shouting won’t change a thing.”

  “You’re just—” Carrick began. “You’re part of it too—”

  “No,” Mavik said, cutting him off. “We need clarity. We need control. We need order.

  Mavik studied him.

  “You’re in acute stress,” he said. “I can give you something to take the edge off.”

  Carrick barked a laugh.

  “You want to drug me.”

  “I’m offering to help you,” Mavik said. “Take it or leave it.”

  Carrick looked away. His anger had nowhere left to go.

  “How strong?” he asked.

  “Short-acting,” Mavik said. “You’ll stay aware.”

  Carrick hesitated, then held out his arm.

  “Do it.”

  Mavik prepped the syringe.

  The sedative took hold. Carrick settled.

  Order was restored.

  For now.

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