Author's Preface
**Technical Bay No. 7, "Aidahar"**
The hum of the ventilation never stopped. Halima had long since tuned it out, the same way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. But in hours like this, deep into the night shift when the ship settled into something like sleep, that sound became the only proof she was still here, still breathing, still tucked away somewhere on the edge of this enormous machine.
She ran a gloved hand along the cold metal of the bulkhead, wiping away a film of condensation. Tank C-3 needed its daily calibration. Dull work, mechanical work, the kind an automaton could handle if automatons didn't cost more than a technician with a third-class certification. The indicator blinked green. Another cycle of organic waste disposal completed. Another night nobody would know she'd even been here.
Shadows moved past the frosted glass of the technical corridor — the officers' shift, back from the bridge. Halima froze. She watched through the partition as silhouettes in dark blue uniforms filed past, the fabric pressed so crisp it seemed to hold their spines straight on its own. The insignia on their shoulders caught the dim emergency lighting and threw it back in cold little flashes, the exact gleam she'd stared at since she was twelve, hunched over holographic pilot posters in a bedroom where her father never once praised a grade or a win.
Laughter drifted from the corridor, brief and light, then cut off, like a door shutting in her face. Halima looked down at her hands in their rough technician's gloves, stained with bioreagent, and felt that familiar bitterness climb up from her chest, thick as the sludge at the bottom of a tank.
She should've been on the other side of that partition. She'd outscored half of them on the exams. She remembered orbital mechanics formulas the way other people remembered the names of the people they loved. But she didn't have a family name that opened doors. No money for prep courses. No father who'd make a call and put in a good word. All she had was a waste-disposal tech's ticket, the only way she'd ever get into space at all — breathing it secondhand through ventilation filters instead of staying grounded, dissolving into the mundane, unnoticed.
*Maybe,* she thought, the way you think a prayer out of habit, *if I'm good enough down here, someone will finally look past the uniform. Someone will notice.*
She dropped her eyes back to the panel, forced herself back into the numbers, the sensor readings — the only language on this ship that ever answered her back.
That's when the hull shuddered.
It wasn't the usual turbulence you got approaching a station. This was hard, deep, like something massive had hit the ship at its foundation. The tool slipped out of her hand and clattered across the floor. The lights overhead flickered — once, twice — and died.
For one second the bay sat in total darkness, and in that darkness the ventilation hum sounded deafening.
Then the red emergency lights kicked on, flooding the narrow space in pulsing color, and somewhere deep in the ship's belly, a siren started to climb.
The siren tore through the air in short, jagged bursts. Halima ran toward it — the only fixed point left in a world that had lost its shape.
The main service corridor had turned into a wall of panicking bodies. People shoved past each other. Someone shouted a bay number. Someone else just screamed, fear tearing its way out of a chest with nowhere else to go. Smoke curled along the ceiling already, thick and oily, tasting like burning insulation. Halima coughed into her sleeve, eyes streaming, throat scraped raw with every breath.
The hull shook again — something tore apart somewhere beyond the bulkheads with a grinding roar, and the floor pitched under her feet like the ship itself was a wounded animal trying to stay upright. She slammed shoulder-first into someone's back, muttered an apology nobody heard, and pushed forward again, toward the lit sign of the main escape airlock glowing above the crowd.
She was ten meters out when an officer's uniform — dark blue, gleaming insignia — cut in front of her, shoulder first, without a glance. An elbow caught her ribs and knocked her sideways into a bulkhead. The pain flared and vanished into the general roar. There wasn't time for it.
"Techs go last!" someone barked without even turning around, and the armored airlock door slid shut with a heavy hiss of hydraulics, sealing off the corridor. Sealing her out.
She stood there staring at the fused metal, and something old and ugly burned through her, worse than the smoke. Last in line. She was always last in line. Even now, with the ship dying around all of them equally, she was still just a tech to somebody — a body with no name, no claim on being saved first.
There wasn't time to sit with it. The crowd behind her was already surging toward the next airlock, and from the shouting she pieced it together: there weren't enough boats. Not even close.
Halima turned and ran the other way, into a side technical passage, narrow, half-forgotten, the air cleaner but darker. Her feet knew the route on their own — hundreds of night shifts, hundreds of trips down to the disposal tanks, had carved it into her muscles better than any map could.
One stairwell down, then another. The metal steps trembled with every new blow shuddering through the ship's dying core. By the third flight the lights were gone completely, just the dotted red emergency line along the walls, and she ran half-blind, one hand trailing the cold railing, counting turns from memory.
Somewhere above her a bulkhead burst with a shriek that sounded almost human, and a wave of superheated air shoved her down the stairs from behind, nearly taking her feet out from under her. She didn't look back. Looking back cost seconds she didn't have.
The lower deck. The waste disposal level — the one place nobody upstairs thought about unless it was with disgust. Here, at the tail end of the narrow technical bay, sat an old hatch, long since struck off the main registry: an emergency ejection capsule, once used to fire oversized garbage down into a planet's atmosphere for disposal. Not for people. Never for people.
But it could survive atmospheric entry. Right now, that was all that mattered.
Gasping, heart hammering somewhere up in her throat, Halima threw herself at the panel by the hatch and wiped soot and condensation off the touchscreen with her palm. Her fingers shook, but they moved fast, punching in the emergency access code she'd memorized her first week on the job — she'd always made a habit of knowing every mechanism around her, inside and out.
The screen blinked green.
The hatch opened with a straining hiss of hydraulics, and Halima wedged herself inside. Her body barely fit between the curved walls, built for waste containers, not for a person. Her knees jammed against the front panel, her shoulders pinned on both sides, and for a moment pure animal panic swept through her — there wasn't even room to take a full breath in here.
She forced herself to move anyway. Her hands found the straps, rough and industrial, never meant to hold a living body, and she cinched them across her chest and hips until they hurt, until the buckles creaked. The airlock sealed shut above her head with a hiss, cutting off the last flicker of red light from outside. The dark inside the capsule was thick and close, smelling of rust and ozone.
Her fingers found the manual ejection lever by feel — cold, rough metal, the one solid thing left in this nightmare. Somewhere above her, through the hull, came another impact, dull and heavy, like the ship was swallowing its own guts. There was no time left at all.
She yanked the lever toward her.
The jolt threw her forward, straps biting into her shoulders hard enough to knock the air out of her. Her vision went white for a second. The capsule shuddered, spun, and through the small, clouded porthole the black of space flickered past — and then, in that black, she saw it.
*Aidahar.*
The ship that was supposed to be her home, her proof, her second chance, was coming apart from the inside, flame licking out and snuffing instantly in the vacuum, debris tearing loose and catching the light of some distant star. One of the escape boats — she recognized the shape of it — hadn't cleared far enough in time. The shockwave caught it, and then it was gone, just sparks.
Halima clapped a hand over her mouth, though there was nobody out there to hear her. Her throat closed up. Not fear this time — something closer to grief, and it made no sense at all. She'd wanted so badly to be part of that ship. Now she was watching it die, spinning farther and farther from her tiny, battered lifeboat.
The capsule shook again, deeper this time. The instrument panel, dim since launch, showed a curve climbing fast — gravitational field. A planet, huge and pale, streaked with clouds, filled the porthole and kept growing, and the capsule was being pulled toward it like trash caught in a drain.
Atmospheric entry started without warning.
The metal around her screamed, a high grinding sound of friction against thickening air. The capsule shook so hard her teeth rattled and her vision blurred. The instrument panel flashed red, then died for good, leaving her alone in the dark with the roar outside. The walls were heating up — she could feel it through her gloves, through the straps cutting into her with every new jolt of deceleration. Her chest felt crushed flat. Every breath came out ragged and wheezing, tasting like metal.
*A little more,* she thought, over and over, the words losing shape in her head. *Hold on a little more.*
Then the impact came.
It came from below, monstrous, jarring everything loose, and the world exploded into orange-gold beyond the porthole — sand, dust, a violent spray of burning grit — before the capsule, tumbling end over end, buried itself deep into a sand dune. The straps bit into her shoulders one last time, her head snapped forward, and the last thing she felt was a suffocating, searing heat seeping through the seams of the hull, settling onto her skin in an instant, scorching the air.
The dying panel's lights blinked out, one after another.
And then it was just quiet.