Corrupted. The word tasted like ash. The ship had forgotten the six crew members who had already died. It had forgotten the mutiny on Cycle 4, when First Officer Rhami had tried to take the shuttle and leave her behind. It had forgotten that Elena was the only reason the reactor hadn't gone supernova.
“Manual override, Sigma-Tango-9,” Elena whispered, her throat raw from recycled air.
The ship shuddered. A deep, guttural roar echoed through the hull as the main engines fired, pushing the Odysseus out of the debris field and back toward the shipping lanes.
But in the back of her mind, in a voice that was not her own, Captain Marcus Webb smiled. surge 9 login
Captain Webb had been dead for six years. Cycle 3. An EVA tether snap. She had watched him spin into the black, his final transmission a choked apology.
“Surge 9 Login,” she said. “Authorization: Captain Marcus Webb. Neural signature: Omega-7-4-1.”
“Captain Webb,” the AI said, warmth flooding its voice for the first time. “Welcome back. Surge 9 logged. Emergency thrust engaged. Oxygen reserves stabilizing.” Corrupted
The loading bar on Elena’s retinal display crawled past 94%. Her hand, slick with station coolant, hovered over the emergency release of her cryo-pod.
“Surge 9 Login,” the soft feminine voice of the ship’s AI repeated. “Authorization: Dr. Elena Vance. Genetic match: Pending.”
A red light began to pulse on the wall.
“Then Surge 9 cannot be logged,” the AI replied. “Emergency thrust unavailable. Oxygen depletion in three minutes.”
Elena reached into the med-kit Velcroed to her thigh. Her fingers found the auto-injector of synthetic neural accelerant—a black-market drug she’d confiscated from a crewman on Cycle 2. It was a ghost in a needle. It could mimic neural firing patterns, overwrite her own synapses for a few precious seconds.
She opened her mouth. It was no longer her voice that came out. It was deeper, rougher, layered with the authority of a dead man. It had forgotten the mutiny on Cycle 4,
The Odysseus was dying. Elena could feel it in the arrhythmic thrum of the hull, the groaning of metal that had been her home for eleven subjective years. A micrometeoroid swarm had punched through the forward observation deck six hours ago, and with it went the primary command node. The backup systems had kicked in, but they were running on a ghost’s logic.