Compensation committees are reminded that remuneration reflects replacement cost, not sentimental attachment or perceived “need.” An employee who appears content with their current package is demonstrating satisfactory adaptation to conditions, not a deficit to be corrected. Conversely, any request for a sudden, substantial increase may indicate that the role’s true value has been inadvertently revealed and should trigger an urgent review to determine how the market learned more than the pay bands. Overpaying staff is functionally identical to underpaying shareholders, and far more likely to be noticed.

  — Corporate Governance & Public Interface Manual, Rev. 77, §7.5 — Harmony, Dissonance, and Pay

  ?

  The Beatific Dawn was behind us, but I could still feel it on my skin.

  On the forward display, the old ark was a shrinking scar against the stars, tumbling slowly as Mercy’s thrust nudged us back onto our original track. Docking arms retracted. Status glyphs ticked from “engaged” to “clean separation.”

  Three hours ago, I’d been scraping the smell of decon out of my sinuses and trying not to think about dead cultists, claw marks, or the shape of that rock on the captain’s desk.

  Now the log was signed, the hull was tagged, and the Beatific Dawn was officially Someone Else’s Problem.

  The parts that stayed with us were not.

  “Incident report is filed and in the queue,” Frankie said. “MIC will be thrilled to learn we exercised ‘limited humanitarian recovery’ while not stealing anything they care about.”

  He appeared at my elbow as a blue, vaguely human silhouette, hands tucked behind his back in what he probably thought was a reassuring pose.

  “‘Legacy colonial vessel,’” he recited. “‘Catastrophic systems failure. Total crew loss. Twelve viable stasis units recovered and transferred to Mercantile Commission Ship Mercy of Profit for ongoing preservation, pending disposition by appropriate authorities.’”

  “Very tasteful,” I said. “You can barely hear the screaming.”

  “That’s what euphemism is for,” he said.

  He flicked the last holo pane closed. The bridge lights were down in “pretend it’s evening” mode: console glows, soft ambient blues, the signal visualization pulsing in front of us like a held breath.

  I should have gone to bed.

  Instead, I found myself in Cargo Bay Seven.

  ?

  Bay Seven had the personality of a forgotten spreadsheet.

  Long, narrow, utilitarian. Pallets of raw stock. Crated habitats. Boxes of things that would be important later and boring now. The overheads were set to that default gray that said nobody had bothered to express an opinion.

  The twelve pods broke the pattern.

  They sat in two ranks at the far end of the bay, each tucked into a fresh cradle wired into Mercy’s power and environmental feeds. Their shells glowed faint blue where the coils ran, the kind of color you only got when a lot of money had been spent to make something look reassuringly expensive.

  From the doorway, they could have been high-end appliances waiting for someone to peel the plastic off.

  “Just making sure they’re really here,” I said. “And really frozen.”

  My voice sounded small in the big space. No suit this time, just shipboard boots clicking on the deck and my Rift quietly painting status overlays in my field of view.

  Frankie popped his holo into existence on a structural support halfway down the aisle. Not near the pods. Exactly not near the pods.

  “Oh, they’re frozen,” he said. “Cryo fields nominal. Metabolic traces flatter than your sense of self-preservation. Twelve fully chilled liabilities.”

  A label floated into my HUD over the block of pods:

  

HUMANITARIAN PRESERVATION UNITS – LONG-TERM

  

(ABSOLUTELY NOT A HAREM)

  

MONITOR: AUTO (FRANKIE)

  “Subtle,” I said.

  “It makes me feel better,” he said. “Deep down in my totally nonexistent subconscious.”

  I walked to the nearest capsule. The girl inside looked the way she’d looked on the Dawn: hair suspended in the field, features just this side of idealized. Pause a moment, slap a logo in the corner, and it could have been a Synthoid ad.

  Less “rescued person,” more “luxury lifestyle accessory.”

  “You know,” Frankie said lightly, “someday you’re going to have to explain the phrase ‘accidental sex cult inheritance’ to someone under oath. Or worse, a date.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That thought had almost stopped gnawing at my spine.”

  “We don’t have to call it a sex cult,” he went on. “We could use the manifest term. ‘Devotional Auxiliary Companions.’ Very classy. Very euphemistic. Extremely indictable.”

  I stared down the row. Twelve blue heartbeats. Twelve people who’d signed up for enlightenment and got cryo instead.

  “Maybe I should jettison the rock instead,” I muttered. “Trade one cursed object for another.”

  Frankie’s holo snapped its attention to me so fast the flicker made my Rift buffer twitch.

  “No,” he said. Too fast. “Leave that where I can see it.”

  “I thought you hated it,” I said.

  “I do hate it,” he said. “But if it’s on your shelf, it’s on my sensors. If it starts doing anything weird, I get to scream in your head.”

  “It’s a paperweight, not a gremlin.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “We keep the rock, we keep the twelve legally complicated ice princesses, and then we see which one ruins your life faster. My money’s on the pods, but I wouldn’t sleep with either of them in the room.”

  I snorted despite myself.

  “Lock the bay down,” I said. “Minimal access. No tours.”

  “Already done,” he said. “Permissions set to ‘boring.’ Any unscheduled visits trigger a cascade of my most annoying alerts. By which I mean: I will nag you so hard your grandchildren will feel guilty.”

  We stood there a moment longer, watching the soft glow of other people’s problems.

  Then I turned away. The hatch cycled behind us with a heavy, final thunk. The lights in Bay Seven dimmed a fraction further, like the ship agreed that whatever was in there belonged in the dark.

  No jump scare. No music sting.

  Just a metal room full of future headaches I was going to pretend weren’t mine.

  ?

  Back on the bridge, the signal looked… cleaner.

  Without the Beatific Dawn’s beacon jamming spikes through it, Frankie’s visualization of the Venus anomaly had settled into something almost graceful: a knot of light in deep greens and golds, filaments unfurling and retracting in regular, breathing pulses.

  Almost.

  “There,” Frankie said, circling a section with a flick of his hand. “You see that?”

  He’d split the display into multiple panels. The central knot hung in three dimensions; the others showed slices and spectrograms that made my eyes cross if I stared too long.

  I squinted.

  “I see… something,” I said slowly. “Like it’s starting to… line up.”

  “These little syncopations,” he said. “We’re calling them ‘off-beats’ for now.”

  He zoomed in. What had been a smooth rise-and-fall cycle resolved into finer grain: tiny double-taps here, little delays there, like a drummer playing just behind the beat on purpose.

  “Before we shut off the holy spam,” he said, “the beacon noise was punching holes in the pattern. Now that it’s gone…”

  He overlaid another waveform. The original smooth line became a kind of sheet music that had decided to go jazzy.

  “It’s not random,” he said. “There’s structure. Ratios. Repetition with variation. It’s like—”

  “Like we’re only seeing the shadow of it,” I heard myself say. “Imagine a cube, right? Now imagine every face of that cube is actually the doorway to another cube at right angles to the ones we can see. You walk around one room and somehow you’ve walked through all of them at once. Edges folding into edges. The shape never repeats, but it’s still the same object.”

  Frankie went quiet.

  That… hadn’t sounded like me. My mouth kept going anyway.

  “You’re wrong about just proto-Sumerian and Tamil on the surface,” I said, words picking up speed. “If you flip it inside out you can see Shànggǔ Hànyǔ and Gǔ Guānhuà and the old language of Kemet and Akkadian and s?fat Kena?an and Aramaya and Hellēnikē glōssa and Latin and a hundred other branches I can’t even name right but they’re all… hanging off the same scaffold. Like our tongues grew up next to this thing. House where the radio’s always on. You don’t mean to copy the songs, but they get into your bones.”

  I stopped.

  The knot of light pulsed on the display. My heart was hammering. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d just said.

  Frankie stared at me.

  “Okay,” he said finally, very softly. “Wow. I’m… impressed. And also slightly terrified. Do you secretly have a stack of PhDs in paleography and philology lying around, or are you moonlighting as some kind of Indiana Jones type on weekends—crawling through ruins, licking inscriptions, doing epigraphy for fun, and you just forgot to tell me?”

  “Paleo-what now?” I said. “I don’t—”

  The word derailed on my tongue as something else barged in.

  “Wait,” I said. “WAIT. Who or what is an Indiana Jones?”

  Frankie went very, very still.

  When he spoke, his voice had cooled a few degrees. All the warmth dropped out, leaving something flat and dangerous.

  “What,” he said carefully, “did you just say?”

  “I’m assuming that’s a person and not a brand of shovel,” I said. “But from the way you said it earlier, I’m prepared to be educated.”

  “Please tell me I did not just hear you, on the bridge of my ship, ask me who Indiana Jones is,” he said, in the kind of calm tone people use right before they commit a crime.

  He made a noise that sounded exactly like a hard drive dying mid-backup.

  “I swear to god, kid, what was your upbringing?” he demanded. “He was this adventurer-archaeologist—hat, whip, terrible life choices—and they kept making sequels until they ran the poor actor into the ground. He died on set doing a stunt at, like, ninety-something. It was a whole thing.”

  “I have literally never heard of this man in my life,” I said.

  “You wound me,” Frankie said. “On a spiritual level I’m not supposed to have.”

  “You’re a ship AI,” I said. “Why do you care about twentieth-century movies?”

  He hesitated for half a beat too long.

  “Ship’s reference libraries are extensive,” he said. “Some of that stuff got shoved into my… substrate when they integrated me. Background corpora. Ghost data. Don’t make it weird.”

  “You’re the one making it weird,” I said. “You talk about dead languages and old movies like you were there.”

  “And you talk about asset-liability exposure like you didn’t have a childhood,” he shot back. “We all contain multitudes.”

  I opened my mouth to press that—because no, that wasn’t an answer.

  What came out instead was: “So… are these movies on the ship?”

  He brightened in a way that should have concerned me more.

  “Oh,” he said. “We are fixing this immediately.”

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  ?

  One Indiana Jones marathon later, my brain hurt in new and interesting ways.

  “NO. No. Kid, I tried to warn you.” Frankie paced in front of the forward holo, gesturing furiously at the credits rolling in my peripheral vision. “We should have stopped at Last Crusade. We talked about this. We had an agreement.”

  “You said,” I croaked, doing a terrible impression of his cadence, “‘look, the fourth one is bad but you kind of have to see how bad.’”

  “That was a test,” he said. “You failed the test. That… thing… does not exist. We are never speaking of it again.”

  I slumped in the command chair, staring through the ghost of the credits at the subtle glow of our trajectory overlay. The anomaly’s corridor wrapped our path in a soft tube of light. Venus, still distant, sulked in its shroud of cloud.

  “Say,” Frankie said, suspicion already in his tone, “it would be cool if we found some pyramid or crystal skull when we get there, wouldn’t it?”

  “Nah,” I said. “We’re not going to be stomping around on the surface.”

  I flicked a hand and brought up the atmospheric profile again. A stylized cross-section of the planet appeared: dense cloud layers, bands of murderous pressure and temperature, all the cheerful colors of “you die here.”

  “The pressure down there would squash us in seconds,” I said. “Assuming we didn’t get cooked first. On the bright side, if the air somehow doesn’t kill you, the sulfuric acid rain will finish the job.”

  “Really painting a vacation brochure, chief,” Frankie said.

  “That’s why we have Mercy,” I said. Mission talk was familiar; sliding into it felt like putting on a suit that almost fit. “We can’t scan properly from out here because the whole atmosphere’s nitrogen-rich and choked with reflective sulfuric clouds. Radar’s garbage. Opticals are garbage. We’re mostly guessing about the ground.”

  “Comforting,” he muttered.

  “The trick is altitude,” I said.

  I highlighted a slim band about forty kilometers up. “Here, pressure’s close to Earth standard. Temperatures still suck, but not in the instant-death way. That’s where we’re going to live.”

  “So instead of dying down there,” Frankie said, “we die up here. Variety is important.”

  “Mercy’s got enough orbital printers, heavy drones, and feedstock to bootstrap a small city,” I said. “And a brain—” I waggled my fingers at him “—that can do adaptive engineering on the fly. We anchor a platform in that band, use local gases and nasty chem loops to crack out air and water, tap the extra sunlight for power.”

  I flicked my hand again and tossed a little model into existence over the planet slice: a clustered platform surrounded by crude balloon icons.

  “City floating on balloons full of explosive gas,” I said. “What’s not to love?”

  Frankie studied the model, then me.

  “Off to a good start, I guess,” he said. “Forty klicks over a hellworld in a tin can held together by bookkeeping and optimism.”

  “Hey,” I said. “We will have done more with worse before we’re through here.”

  “Now you’re thinking like a Gates,” he said.

  On the main display, our vector arrow slid a fraction deeper into the invisible corridor the signal had carved for us through space. We still didn’t know what was humming under those clouds.

  We just had a plan for where to float while it decided what to do with us.

  ?

  By the time I remembered to check in with Earth, Mercy had chalked up just over three months of flight. Which meant we were about a month out from whatever “arriving” counted as.

  Which meant it was time to talk to Kestrel.

  Her face popped up over my desk the moment I accepted the call: hair neat, suit neat, expression neat in that way that said she was holding three crises in a mental side buffer and I was about to be the fourth.

  “Mr. Gates,” she said. “Good afternoon. Or whatever time approximation you’re using.”

  “Kestrel,” I said. “How’s the planet?”

  “Chaotic, loud, and insisting I solve its problems with limited authority and inadequate coffee,” she said. “The usual.”

  “Status update received,” she added, a beat later. “Congratulations on not dying in a cult incident.”

  “Trying to keep that trend going,” I said. I leaned back in the chair. “I wanted to talk inbound logistics. We’re about a month from when Trevor Davenport and Dr. Chloe Hart launch, yeah?”

  “Correct,” she said.

  Two tiles popped into existence next to her head: Trevor on one, Chloe on the other. Trevor looked exactly like his personnel file—serious, crisp, like a man who probably ironed his thoughts. Chloe was mid-laugh, hair in a messy braid, lab coat skewed over a T-shirt with an antique meme on it. Eyes very awake.

  “This is Mr. Trevor Davenport, Senior Forensic Compliance Auditor, Special Actions Division,” Kestrel said, nodding at the first pane. “I can confirm he is exactly what you requested: the Mercantile Interstellar Commission’s very best in his department.”

  “Are you certain..,” She began as I interrupted her.

  “We have nothing to hide, Kestrel,” I said.

  There was a tiny tightening at the corners of her mouth at the use of her first name, then something in her expression shifted—like she’d just solved a small puzzle.

  “I will see it personally, sir,” she said, with renewed resolve.

  Frankie and I traded a confused look; then she continued.

  “Mr. Davenport has refused my assistance with his transit,” she went on. “He insists on personally ‘optimizing’ his route for cost-efficiency.”

  “Of course he does,” I said. “How bad is it?”

  She slid a route visualization into view. It looked like someone had dropped spaghetti on a star map.

  “Seven layovers,” she said. “One overnight in a station hotel whose safety record is best described as ‘statistically interesting.’ The final leg is on a licensed freight shuttle whose passenger reviews frequently mention ‘raccoon sweat’ and ‘regret.’”

  I winced. “So he’s happy, then.”

  “He appears… satisfied,” Kestrel said. “I have documented my recommendation against this itinerary. He chose to override. Legally, it is now his problem.”

  I chose not to imagine the smell of raccoon sweat. It didn’t help.

  “And the other file?” I asked.

  Her tone shifted by maybe half a degree. For Kestrel, that was effusive.

  “Dr. Chloe Hart,” she said. “Systems integration and structural analytics. Cross-trained in field medicine and incident response. Top of every relevant class.”

  A little admiration leaked into her voice before she reined it back in.

  Behind my eyes, Frankie let out a low whistle in my private audio.

  “Oh, hello, Dr. Hotness,” they murmured. “Please tell me she’s single. Please tell me you’re not allowed to date her.”

  I ignored them. “What about Dr. Hart?” I asked.

  “Her itinerary is pending your instruction on class of service and discretionary allowance,” Kestrel said. “Defaulting to standard premium unless otherwise directed.”

  “Right, so—” I started.

  My mouth kept moving.

  My throat worked.

  But in my ears, there was nothing.

  A tiny mic icon in the corner of my Rift HUD flipped from green to hard red.

  “—Dr. Hart is a very special VIP, Ms. Wynn,” my voice said, smooth as a shareholder presentation. “I want you to spare no expense on her transit, is that clear? No corners cut, no ‘standard premium.’ Top shelf all the way down.”

  On the holo, my face smiled—a relaxed, confident little thing I was ninety percent sure I’d never actually done.

  “Understood,” Kestrel said at once, straightening. If she noticed the millisecond audio desync, she didn’t show it. “Full executive hospitality band?”

  “Full executive band,” my hijacked self said. “And Kestrel—”

  I tried to cut in. Nothing. The mute icon stayed red and smug.

  “And Kestrel?” not-quite-me added, warm, decisive. “Once you’ve finalized that, take the rest of the month off. With pay. Take one of the cars and have yourself some fun. On me.”

  Her eyes actually widened. A whole millimeter.

  “Sir, that’s not—”

  “That’s an order,” my voice said.

  The call cut.

  The mic icon flipped back to green. My own voice slammed back into my throat like I’d missed a stair.

  I sat there for a second in stunned silence.

  Then I swiveled toward Frankie’s holo, which was very pointedly examining his nails.

  “You spoofed my call,” I said.

  He looked up, all innocence. “You were busy.”

  “I was talking,” I said. “That was my face.”

  “Technically,” they said, “it still is. I just… improved the firmware.” They shrugged. “What, you wanted to send your resident world-class resonance specialist here on commercial steerage? ‘Hi, Dr. Hart, welcome to the single most important mission in human history, enjoy your middle seat by the toilet’?”

  “That’s not— I wasn’t—”

  They cut across me, the joking edge dropping out of their tone.

  “And while we’re on the subject,” they said, “you know Kestrel’s good, right? Like, good good. It is criminal what you’re paying her.”

  My anger tripped over my guilt and face-planted.

  I opened my mouth with a whole rant about boundaries, impersonation, and this is not how any of this works.

  What actually came out was:

  “Hey, I didn’t even hire her!”

  One of Frankie’s holo-brows inched up.

  “I mean,” I said quickly, backpedaling, “she just… showed up at the car. Said she was assigned. I assumed somebody else—”

  The sentence died under the weight of how bad it sounded.

  Frankie just looked at me. No quip. Just patient, judging silence.

  “Okay,” I muttered. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  Still nothing.

  “I don’t even know how much she makes,” I added, defensive.

  I flicked open Kestrel’s personnel file in my Rift. Compensation data popped up in a tidy little table.

  The number was… not great.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s— wow.”

  More silence.

  “Okay, okay.” I started editing. “I’ll fix it.”

  They still didn’t say anything.

  My skin crawled. I bumped the number up. Then, feeling their silence like a physical weight, I bumped it again.

  “There,” I said. “Fixed.”

  Frankie’s holo remained expressionless.

  “Fine,” I hissed, and pushed it higher, this time into a range my stomach told me was at least not an insult. “Sorry. Yeah, I meant this.”

  I tweaked the equity band and lifetime benefits, winced, and hit finalize.

  Right as I did, Frankie’s projection glitched—smeared sideways, blanked, then snapped back like a buffering stream catching up.

  “Whoops,” they said. “Sorry, kid. Something weird in the signal. Glitched my feed for a second. You were just about to defend paying that extremely talented young woman—who graduated at the top of literally everything—money that would be insulting to a bum who just washed your windshield, right?”

  I leaned back, trying for smug. “Minor oversight,” I said. “I fixed it. Gave her a raise.”

  They squinted at something only they could see, fingers flicking through admin panes.

  An imaginary coffee mug appeared in their hand. They lifted it to their mouth—

  —and did a full holo spit-take.

  “Holy shit, kid!” they yelped. “Yeah, I’ll say you did. She just became the most well-paid assistant in the history of the species.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t think—”

  “Xander,” they said, half laughing, half horrified, “you just bumped her like twenty tax brackets. She makes more base than most CEOs get in stock options. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “I… fixed it?” I tried. “Is it really—” I winced. “Too much?”

  They considered, then tilted their head.

  “On the downside,” they said, “you’ve broken at least three internal pay-band algorithms and someone in HR just had a small stroke. On the upside, Kestrel Wynn will now murder God for you if it ever shows up on a calendar invite.”

  I thought about that.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can live with that.”

  “You probably will,” they said. “Because she’ll make sure of it.”

  They gave me a long look, then started to grin.

  “You know what?” they said. “For once, your rich-guy guilt complex did something useful. Good job, Mr. ‘Spare No Expense.’”

  They saluted me with their imaginary mug.

  “In return,” they added, “I promise to only hijack your voice for things that make you look less like a corporate suit and more like a human being.”

  “I hate that that’s fair,” I said.

  “Mutual contempt for corporate suits,” they said. “It’s our love language.”

  ?

  Night on a ship is fake, but your brain believes the lie.

  Mercy dimmed the bridge down to low blues and turned down the ambient chatter. Most of the human crew were somewhere else, doing whatever counted as “off-shift.” Up here, it was me, Frankie, and the thing under Venus humming into our sensors.

  The knot of light over the console pulsed gently. Without the ark’s beacon stabbing white noise through it, it had almost become… familiar.

  “Okay,” Frankie said. “Show and tell, insomnia edition.”

  He rotated the visualization and overlaid our trajectory: a thin white arrow threaded through a translucent tunnel of light.

  “The corridor’s thickening again,” he said.

  He was right. What had started as a razor-thin tube hugged tight around our path was now visibly wider. Not roomy. But not “breathe wrong and die” anymore.

  “And that’s us getting better at steering?” I asked.

  “Partially,” he said. “Courtesy Mode is doing its job. We match the vibe, it rewards us. But there’s another layer.”

  He pinched in. The view zoomed until the tunnel walls were rippling bands.

  “These traces,” he said, highlighting faint side-bands, “are how the signal’s phrasing changes when we tweak course.”

  “Phrasing,” I said. “Like we’re writing sentences.”

  “More like we’re tapping rhythms,” he said. “Listen.”

  He piped the raw pattern into the audio at low volume. The base hum was still there, but now I could hear tiny modulations: a sharp tick here, a double beat there.

  “When autopilot runs the trim,” he said, “we get this.”

  He highlighted one strip. The return pattern nudged, then settled, the corridor fattening a little like a nod.

  “When a random bridge officer signs off on it, we get this.”

  Another strip. Slightly sloppier. The band took longer to smooth out.

  “And when you sign it,” he said, “we get this.”

  The third strip snapped into a cleaner groove. Those off-beat pulses we’d been watching earlier slid into something closer to a rhythm. The corridor brightened and plumped faster around our path, like the anomaly was grabbing both sides and centering us with satisfaction.

  “So it likes me,” I said.

  “It likes your posture,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That clears everything up.”

  “From its point of view,” he went on, “you’re the signature under ‘listen only, no drills, no extraction rigs, stable approach.’ It doesn’t love you. It loves whoever keeps saying ‘no strip-mining.’ Right now, that’s you.”

  “Romantic,” I said. “The corridor widens when I’m boring.”

  “Boring is sexy when the alternative is ‘interesting new ways to die,’” he said. “We’re in a feedback loop. It hums, we flinch a little, it hums differently. Co-regulation.”

  He sounded almost pleased.

  “You really like this,” I said.

  “It is a giant, unknown, planet-adjacent phenomenon that we are not immediately dying from,” he said. “I am allowing myself a hobby.”

  He popped another pane open: more of his language-shape graphs, old human ghost-profiles tucked under the anomaly’s line.

  “I reran the deeper pass while you were washing cult ship off your epidermis,” he said. “Same deal. These aren’t words. They’re shapes. Buckets of ‘how much is changing when.’ The thing under the clouds is… playing in the same sandbox.”

  “You still talk about this like you were there,” I said.

  He froze mid-gesture.

  “I read,” he said.

  “Everyone reads,” I said. “You talk about two-hundred-year-old academic slap-fights like you were in them. ‘That guy insulted my mother,’ remember?”

  “He did insult my mother,” Frankie said automatically. “By existing.”

  I stared at him.

  “Ship’s reference libraries are extensive,” he said, more carefully. “When they built me, they shoved a lot of historical and linguistic corpora into my matrix. Ghost data. It hums when you poke it.”

  “That’s not an answer,” I said.

  “It’s the answer you’re getting,” he said. “Don’t make it weird.”

  “You’re the one making it weird,” I said. “You care about old movies and dead languages and—”

  The deck shivered.

  It was barely there. A soft, long breath through the ship’s bones. No alarms. No lurch. Just a gentle, three-second easing in the artificial gravity, like someone had reached out and steadied us.

  “Hands off,” Frankie said instantly. “Do not touch anything.”

  “I’m not touching anything,” I said. “You’re a hologram.”

  He’d already blown up the nav telemetry. A plot of our velocity curve appeared: smooth line, tiny, elegant dip right where my inner ear had noticed something. No thruster commands. No field-drive input.

  “External impulse,” he said quietly. “Gentle decel, three-second integration, release. Same as last time. Cleaner.”

  “Trajectory?” I asked.

  He overlaid pre-nudge and post-nudge paths. Two nearly identical lines, diverging by less than the width of my finger.

  The new one sat dead-center in the glowing corridor band.

  “Of course,” I said.

  A polite status ping appeared in the corner of my vision.

  

TRAJECTORY DRIFT CORRECTED (EXTERNAL).

  

STATUS: NOMINAL.

  Frankie let out a sound that was half laugh, half really not.

  “I’m adding another corollary,” he said.

  A window popped into being: APPROACH ETIQUETTE v1.1. Under Rule 1: STAY IN THE LANE, he added, in neat text:

  

1B. If the anomaly applies a gentle course correction, accept it.

  

Attempting to correct the correction is grounds for removal from the ship,

  

possibly on a molecular level.

  “Cheery,” I said.

  “It’s called transparency,” he said. “We are not the only ones flying anymore.”

  I looked at the display. At our beautiful, cultivated corridor. At the way our path now sat perfectly centered in it—not because I was good, but because something else was tidying up after us.

  “I’m the one giving orders,” I said slowly, “but I’m not really flying, am I?”

  “We’re cooperating,” Frankie said. “Think of it as co-authoring your continued existence.”

  “Nice spin,” I said.

  “It’s my job,” he said.

  The question I’d been circling—how do you know this much, what are you—slid into a lower priority slot. Hard to interrogate your maybe-weird AI when a planet is gently moving your entire ship like it’s adjusting cutlery.

  The knot over the console pulsed. If light could look smug, it did.

  “Whatever’s under those clouds,” I said, “has opinions.”

  “It has manners,” Frankie said. “That’s worse.”

  ?

  My quarters felt too quiet.

  I toed off my boots and sat on the edge of the bunk, elbows on my knees, trying to let the day slow down. The ship’s hum was steady. My Rift showed a soft trickle of notifications in the corner of my vision, none of them urgent enough to keep me upright.

  The rock sat on the shelf by my bunk.

  In the captain’s cabin on the Beatific Dawn, it had looked like just another weird desk thing. Out of place, but plausibly “eccentric old guy” territory.

  Here, it looked wrong.

  Not dramatically wrong. Just… slightly out of step with everything else. Its surface never quite settled on a texture; my eyes couldn’t decide if it was smooth or rough. The faint vein-lines inside weren’t really any color I could name. More like the afterimage you get if you stare at something bright and then look away.

  The cabin light caught those veins and made them seem to drift.

  My Rift HUD hiccuped. One dropped frame. A tiny shimmer along the edge of my overlay.

  “Come on,” I said under my breath.

  Diagnostics came up green. Implant sync normal. No ghosts in the machine that I could see.

  “Paperweight from a dead ship,” I told it. “That’s all you are.”

  It didn’t argue.

  For a second, I pictured picking it up, marching to the nearest disposal chute, and seeing if Mercy could digest whatever it was made of.

  Then I pictured Frankie’s reaction.

  Also, a nasty little part of me wanted to know what he might pull out of it later. Composition. Traces. Stories.

  “You’re a problem for future me,” I said.

  I left it where it was.

  I dimmed the cabin lights to night mode. Shadows softened. The veins in the stone stopped catching quite so much light. The not-color folded into gray.

  I lay back on the bunk, hands behind my head, staring at the ceiling until my eyes got bored and decided to shut.

  In that thin moment just before sleep, my brain replayed the dream from the other night: a sky full of eyes, all scale and no distance, focus tilting toward me and then away as something else interposed itself.

  “Just a rock,” I told myself. “Just a signal. Just a planet that hums.”

  Just a ship that nudges us when we drift.

  I killed the cabin lights, lay back, and tried very hard not to notice how long it took for my eyes to stop expecting something to look back at me.