Read Chapter 10: The Pilot's Plague

The crawlspace smelled of rust and recycled air. Kaelen sat with his back against a conduit housing, the slab’s cold weight in his lap, its dim glow the only light. The fragment he’d pulled from the deeper cache was smaller than the first—a palm-sized shard of memory crystal, cracked along one edge, its surface webbed with corruption that flickered like dying stars.

He thumbed the activation stud. Static hissed. Then a voice—female, clipped, trembling with the particular cadence of a woman recording her final words.

“…secondary log, supplemental. Date: Ship-year 217, Day 40. Arrival confirmed. Landing parties dispatched per Charter Protocol. Survey teams Alpha through Echo report surface atmosphere stable within nominal parameters. Initial scans indicate no immediate biological threat.”

Kaelen’s breath caught. *No immediate biological threat.* So the surface *had* been viable. The plague came after.

The voice continued, faster now, strain bleeding through.

“Twelve hours post-landing, Survey Team Alpha reported symptoms consistent with systemic neurological degeneration. Agitation. Confusion. Loss of motor function. By hour eighteen, all five members were unresponsive. Echo team attempted extraction. They did not return.”

A pause. The sound of breathing—shallow, panicked.

“The pathogen appears airborne. Vector unknown. Containment protocols insufficient. Command has ordered full quarantine of the landing bay. The outer locks are sealed. We are—we are instructed to…”

The recording fractured. Static poured out, harsh and white, before the voice resolved again, quieter.

“This is Chief Medical Officer Ilyse Orden, signing secondary log under Article Seven protocol. The survey mission is terminated. The surface is not survivable. I am transmitting this fragment to the primary Log with my recommendation: the ship must not land. The ship *cannot* land. If any crew survives this, they must know we did not choose this.”

The shard went dark. Kaelen stared at it, his thumb still pressed to the dead stud.

*They did not choose this.*

He replayed the words in his mind, turning them like a stone in his palm. The Fragment had said the Circle descended from those who chose to fake the journey rather than face the surface threat. But this—this medical officer’s testimony—said the plague had already broken out. The decision hadn’t been a choice between landing and lying. It had been a choice between *dying* on the surface or *lying* to everyone else.

And they’d chosen the lie.

Kaelen closed his eyes. The ship hummed around him, the eternal thrum of engines that had been idle for forty-one years. Every maintenance shift he’d ever worked, every filter he’d replaced, every false alarm he’d answered—all of it had been theater. A play performed for an audience that didn’t know it was still in the seats.

He thought of Lyra. Of the medal she’d won in the engineering trials, the one she’d pressed into his hand before her final deployment shift. *“If I don’t come back, you’ll know why.”* He’d laughed at her then, told her she was being dramatic. She’d only smiled.

Was that when she’d found the Log? Had she sat somewhere like this, in the dark, listening to a dead woman’s panic while the ship sailed nowhere?

The question burned in his chest, and he pushed it down. He couldn’t afford to feel it yet. He needed to get to Jena’s chip, to meet Sefia in two hours, to find the rest of the Log. But first—

His fingers found the seam on the shard’s back casing. The crack ran deeper than he’d thought, a hairline fracture that split the crystal nearly in two. He pried at it gently, feeling the casing give. A smaller chip nested inside, sealed with a wax-like resin that had hardened over decades.

Probably why the fragment hadn’t fully corrupted.

He scraped the resin away with his thumbnail and popped the chip free. It was barely larger than a fingernail, but it was intact—glossy, clean, unmarred. He slotted it into his reader’s secondary port.

The screen flickered, then resolved into text. Not audio. Data logs. Dry, methodical, the kind of documentation that came from a bureaucratic mind, not a desperate one.

*FOUNDER’S PLAGUE — SUPPLEMENTAL ANALYSIS* *Prepared by: Dr. H. Vey, Chief Geneticist, Ship’s Medical Directorate* *Classification: ULTRA — Eyes Only, Esteemed Circle*

*Post-mortem examination of surviving tissue samples confirms the pathogen is not native to the destination planet. Genetic sequencing reveals synthetic markers consistent with shipboard laboratory engineering.*

Kaelen’s blood went cold.

*The outbreak strain shares 92.7% homology with a bioweapon candidate developed in Ship-year 201 under Project Vesper. The project was discontinued by order of the Esteemed Circle following the death of its lead researcher. However, laboratory records indicate a full production run was completed prior to termination.*

*It is the opinion of this office that the release was intentional. The timing—12 hours after landing, prior to full survey validation—suggests deliberate deployment to force quarantine and prevent colonization.*

He read it three times. The words didn’t change.

The plague wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a native threat. The Founders—the original ruling families, the ones who’d built the ship and chartered its mission—had *engineered* a bioweapon to kill their own landing parties. To give themselves a reason never to land.

So they could keep their power.

Kaelen’s hands shook. Not with fear. With something colder, harder—a rage that settled into his bones like frost.

The current Circle. The Esteemed families who wore their lineage like crowns. They weren’t the descendants of heroes who’d made a hard choice in the face of an alien threat. They were the children of murderers who’d sold out their own people to stay on top.

Renaud had called the deception a noble lie. *“The greatest good for the greatest number.”* She’d said it with such conviction, as if the Circle’s hand had been forced.

But this chip said otherwise. The Circle *chose*. They engineered an atrocity to justify a lie, and they’d been feeding that lie to every generation since.

He looked down at the shard in his lap, the corrupted warning glowing faintly: *NEVER OPEN THE BAY DOORS.*

They were still terrified. Forty-one years later, they were still afraid the truth would slip out—that someone would crack the locks, lower the ramps, and let the whole ship see what was on the other side.

And Kaelen was beginning to understand why.

He reached into his boot and pulled out the hand-drawn map Sefia had given him. The Bridge’s lower hall was marked in careful pencil strokes, an engineer’s steady hand, a route she’d probably traced from memory the night she’d decided to betray her own conspiracy.

She’d said she helped build the false readings. She’d said she was complicit.

But she’d also given him this.

The question wasn’t whether he could trust her. It was whether he had a choice. The drone had seen his face. The Circle knew someone had accessed the Log, and it wouldn’t take them long to trace the maintenance schedule, to match the access point to a lower-deck tech who’d been asking questions.

He had two hours to reach the crawlspace. Two hours to decide if Maris—*Sefia*—was leading him into a trap or toward the truth.

Kaelen pocketed the chip and the shard. He folded the map with precise, deliberate movements and tucked it back into his boot. Then he crawled toward the vent shaft, the ship’s endless hum filling his ears like the whisper of forty-one years of lies.

He paused at the vent’s edge, one hand on the grate.

Ilyse Orden’s voice echoed in his head. *They must know we did not choose this.*

But someone had. Someone had chosen all of it.

And Kaelen was going to make sure their descendants answered for it.