Read Chapter 1: The Malfunction

Deck 7 smelled like burnt copper and recycled air. Kaelen Voss knelt in the crawlspace beneath the corridor’s main junction, the flickering light fixture above him strobing in erratic pulses of amber and sickly green. He tightened the seal on his mag-clamp, pressed his palm against the conduit’s thermal casing, and swore under his breath as a spark nipped his glove.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Just hold steady.”

The light pulsed again. Not a faulty ballast, he realized. A power draw. Someone—or something—was pulling more current than the deck’s routing table allowed. He traced the conduit with his free hand, feeling the heat bloom against his fingertips, until he reached a junction box that should have been locked. It wasn’t. The cover hung loose, one corner bent outward like a mouth left open mid-scream.

Kaelen should have called it in. Standard protocol: visual anomaly, report to central, let the engineers handle it. But central would log his name, and logged names attracted scrutiny, and scrutiny attracted the kind of attention that got people reassigned to the deepest holds or, worse, “volunteered” for maintenance on the outer hull.

His sister had taught him that. Keep your head down. Fix what they let you fix. Never ask why.

He pulled the cover open anyway.

Behind it, the wiring was a catastrophe—charred insulation, a nest of cables that had been spliced and re-spliced until they looked more like scar tissue than circuitry. But nestled among the damage was something that didn’t belong. A small diagnostic screen, cracked at one corner, wired directly into the ship’s navigation bus. An illegal tap. Someone had installed this years ago, and the corrosion around the solder points suggested it had been running ever since.

Kaelen’s breath caught. The screen glowed faintly, displaying a string of readouts in old Standard notation. He wiped the grime from the glass with his thumb and read the coordinates column.

Origin: Earth. Departure: confirmed. Destination: Proxima Centauri b. ETA: 214 years.

And then, beneath it, a single line in bold red text that didn’t belong to the original flight manifest:

STATUS: ARRIVED. DAY 0 OF 0.

Kaelen stared.

Arrived. Not *en route*. Not *in transit*. Arrived. The ship—the *Longlight*, a vessel built to carry forty thousand souls across a quarter millennium of empty space—had already reached its destination. And yet the decks still hummed with the same recycled air, the same ration schedule, the same endless rotation of shifts and meals and prayers to the God of Transit that had been preached in the lower decks for six generations.

His heart hammered against his ribs. He looked at the date stamp on the screen.

It was dated 83 years ago.

Kaelen didn’t move. His mind raced through the implications, discarding them as fast as they surfaced. A glitch. A corrupted file. A data echo from an old simulation run. Anything. But the wiring told a different story. Someone had gone to enormous trouble to install this screen, to tap into the navigation bus, to hide it where only someone crawling through the bowels of Deck 7 would ever find it.

And then they’d left it running.

He reached for his tablet to photograph the screen, his fingers clumsy with adrenaline. The camera app opened. He framed the shot.

A drone screamed around the corner of the crawlspace, its single optic blazing white.

Kaelen froze. Security drones didn’t patrol Deck 7. There was nothing down here worth guarding—just conduits, water reclamation pipes, and the occasional maintenance tech who knew better than to touch what wasn’t theirs.

The drone hovered at the opening of his crawlspace, its rotors whining at a pitch that set his teeth on edge. It had seen him. It had seen the screen. There was no running, no talking his way out of it. The drone’s weapons array was already unfolding, a slim emitter sliding into place at its center.

A cold jolt of fear shot through Kaelen’s chest. He’d seen what those emitters did to men who broke the rules. He’d helped clean up the mess once, after a sanctions raid on Deck 12. The body had been barely recognizable.

He did the only thing he could think of. He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out the Heartstone.

It was a small lump of carved obsidian, worn smooth by generations of handling. His sister had given it to him before she disappeared—"For luck,” she’d said, with that crooked smile she always wore when she was lying. He’d kept it ever since, a talisman, a reminder of the empty bunk in her quarters and the unanswered questions that haunted his nights.

The drone tilted its optic toward the stone. Its emitter hummed with building charge.

And then the Heartstone warmed.

Kaelen gasped and nearly dropped it. The stone had never done that before—had never done anything, really, besides sit at the bottom of his pouch like a good luck charm that had long since outlived its purpose. But now it glowed, a deep red pulse that throbbed in time with his heartbeat, radiating heat that should have been impossible for a chunk of volcanic rock.

The drone’s hum stuttered. Its optic flickered.

A pulse of energy erupted from the stone—invisible, but Kaelen felt it pass through him like a wave of static, lifting the hair on his arms. The drone’s emitter died. Its rotors whined and failed, and the machine dropped to the deck with a hollow *clang*, its optic going dark.

Silence.

Kaelen scrambled backward, shoving the stone back into his pouch. His hands shook. The drone lay motionless, smoke curling from one of its joints. It would be missed. Someone would come looking.

He looked at the diagnostic screen. The red text still blazed: ARRIVED. DAY 0 OF 0.

His mind spun. The ship had reached its destination eighty-three years ago. And yet no one had announced it. No one had dropped the drive field, no one had opened the observation decks, no one had told the forty thousand souls still living in these corridors that the long journey was over.

Unless they knew. Unless *they* had known all along.

Kaelen’s attention snapped back to the present. He had seconds, maybe less, before the drone’s loss triggered an alert. He grabbed his tablet, took three rapid photographs of the screen, and shoved the cover back into place. It wouldn’t hide the damage, but it might buy him time.

He crawled out of the crawlspace, sweat cooling on his skin, and forced himself to walk—not run—down the corridor. His hands stayed steady until he reached the maintenance lift, and then they shook so badly he had to grip the handrail just to key in his access code.

The lift hummed. Deck 3, his quarters. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of this.

The Heartstone pressed against his hip. It had cooled back to room temperature, but he could still feel the ghost of its warmth, still feel the pulse it had sent through the drone’s machinery. It had saved his life. Or at least, it had saved him from whatever fate awaited a maintenance tech caught tampering with navigation equipment.

Why? What was it? His sister had given it to him with no explanation, just that knowing smile and a warning to keep it close. She’d vanished three weeks later, during a routine maintenance rotation on Deck 10. The official report said she’d been lost to an airlock malfunction. Kaelen had never believed it.

The lift doors opened. Kaelen stepped into the quiet of Deck 3, where the walls were painted a soothing blue and the air smelled faintly of lavender from the scrubbers. He’d earned this deck—seniority, a good record, a reputation for fixing problems without asking questions. But he wasn’t sure he could keep not asking questions anymore.

He unlocked his quarters and closed the door behind him, sealing off the world. He pulled out his tablet and stared at the photographs he’d taken.

ARRIVED. DAY 0 OF 0.

He’d spent his whole life looking down, at the conduits and the wiring and the endless repairs that kept this ship running on borrowed time. But the screen had shown him something he couldn’t unsee. Something that reached up from the ship’s own skeleton and demanded to be known.

Kaelen switched off the tablet and sat in the dark, the Heartstone cold in his palm.

Someone had known the journey was over. Someone had hidden it. And his sister—before she disappeared—had given him the only tool that might have gotten him out of that crawlspace alive.

Coincidence? Kaelen didn’t believe in coincidences.

He looked up at his ceiling, toward the decks above, where the Command Circle lived in their sealed towers with their clean air and their perfect lives. They had an answer. They had all the answers.

He just had to be willing to go find them.