Accident

Daryl Quinn installed three new cameras and six motion sensors in a single day — record speed even for him, a man usually proud of his own efficiency — because after Noah's account of the figure in the corridor, no one on the station could sleep soundly, least of all Daryl himself, who was responsible for the physical security of every technical system aboard.

He was working alongside Noah, installing the last sensor at the entrance to technical bay three — the one adjacent to sealed bay four, where all of this had started — when the radio on his belt came alive with Mila's voice, unusually sharp for someone who normally spoke evenly even in crisis situations.

"Daryl, Noah, where are you right now?"

"Bay three, finishing the sensor install," Daryl answered. "What's wrong?"

"I need one of you to check the main oxygen supply valve in the living sector immediately. The pressure sensor in my cabin is showing a four-percent drop in oxygen concentration over the last twenty minutes. Slow, but steady. That's outside normal fluctuation range."

Daryl and Noah exchanged a look, and Daryl felt something tighten inside him — not panic, but the particular kind of engineer's dread that comes from knowing a four-percent oxygen drop over twenty minutes in a sealed life-support system means: there's a leak somewhere, and if it isn't stopped quickly, the number will keep climbing, not hold steady.

"Heading to the main distribution hub," he said. "Noah, check the backup valve in bay two, in case the problem's there."

They split up. Daryl moved quickly toward the main life-support distribution hub — a small but critically important compartment at the very heart of the station's technical level, where all the oxygen, nitrogen, and air-scrubbing lines converged before branching out to the living and working sections.

The hub door was closed, as it should be, but as he approached, Daryl noticed the manual control panel beside the door glowing not with its standard green ready indicator, but with a warning amber — a signal that someone had recently accessed the valve controls manually, bypassing the automated protocol.

He entered his access code and stepped inside.

The hub was small, crowded with pipework and valves, lit by a single technical-white lamp above the central control console. Daryl immediately spotted the problem: the main shutoff valve on the oxygen line feeding the living sector had been turned a quarter-turn off its standard position — not enough to cause immediate, catastrophic decompression, but enough to create a slow, gradually building leak into the backup technical loop, where the oxygen wasn't going to the living quarters but venting uselessly into open technical space, effectively lost without a trace.

This couldn't have happened by accident. A valve of that type required deliberate, physical force to turn — vibration or thermal expansion couldn't shift it even by a fraction of a degree, let alone a quarter turn sufficient to create a measurable leak.

Daryl reached out to return the valve to its correct position when he heard a sound behind him — quick, light, as if someone had darted between the pipe racks in the far, unlit corner of the room.

He spun around sharply, aiming his flashlight into the darkness.

"Who's there?" he shouted, and his own voice sounded foreign to him, too high-pitched for a man used to keeping cool in any technical crisis.

There was no answer, but the darkness in the corner of the room seemed to thicken for a split second — an illusion caused by the play of light and shadow, Daryl told himself, even as he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise with an absolute, animal certainty that he was not alone in this room.

He took a step back, toward the door, keeping the flashlight trained on the dark corner, and at that moment something heavy, metallic by the sound of it, came crashing down onto the pipework directly above his head.

Daryl half-managed to react, flinching aside, but the burst section of pipe — evidently weakened beforehand, invisibly, by the same tampering as the valve — struck him across the shoulder and head in a jet of pressurized technical nitrogen, knocking him off his feet and leaving him completely disoriented for several seconds.

He fell, striking his head against the edge of the control console, and the last thing he remembered clearly, before consciousness began to slip, was the sensation of icy cold from the expanding gas against his face and the sound of the emergency siren finally kicking in somewhere far away, as if underwater.

He woke up in the medical bay, with a throbbing pain at the back of his skull and Mila leaning over him with a handheld scanner checking his skull for signs of concussion.

"Don't move suddenly," she said, noticing he was coming to. "You have a mild concussion and surface frostbite from contact with the compressed nitrogen. It could have been much worse."

"What happened with the leak?" Daryl rasped, trying to sit up despite Mila's hand pressing firmly against his shoulder.

"Noah shut off the backup loop right after he found you unconscious. The leak's stopped, oxygen concentration in the living sector is returning to normal. But, Daryl," she paused for a moment, clearly weighing whether to say more, "the pipe that came down on you couldn't have burst on its own from a simple pressure change caused by the valve being loosened. Noah examined the break. The metal had been scored beforehand, from the outside, deep enough to weaken the structure, but not enough to cause it to fail immediately. Someone prepared this accident in advance and simply waited for the right moment to trigger it."

Daryl lay motionless for several long seconds, processing this information on top of the pain and disorientation already weighing on him.

"Someone wanted this to look like an accident tied to the leak," he said finally. "Someone who knew that I specifically would be the one to come check the valve, because it's my direct responsibility as chief engineer."

"Or someone wanted the blame to fall on the thing in the corridor," Mila added quietly. "One more unexplained incident on the list."

The medical bay door opened, and Amara walked in, followed by Iris and Noah, all three wearing the look of people who had just lived through yet another blow to already frayed nerves.

"How are you?" Amara asked, walking up to the bed.

"I'll live," Daryl said. "What about the access log for the distribution hub? Who went in before me?"

Iris, who had already checked the system, shook her head with an expression Daryl liked less and less.

"The access log is empty for the last six hours," she said. "No entries at all except your own, logged automatically when you entered your code."

"That's not possible," Daryl said. "Someone physically turned that valve and scored that pipe. Someone went into that room."

"Unless that person had a way to erase their own entry from the log after leaving," Iris said slowly, and the same heavy silence that had filled the common room the day before, when no one dared say a certain name aloud, settled over the medical bay.

This time, it was Noah who broke it.

"The only person on this station with administrative access sufficient to edit system logs without a trace is Viktor," he said, finally saying aloud what the whole crew had been silently turning over for the last two days. "I'm not accusing him without evidence. But we should at least ask him directly where he was for the last hour, and why the log record happens to be missing at exactly the moment we need it most."

Amara was quiet for a long moment, looking at Daryl lying there with his head bandaged, still feeling the icy burn of frostbite on his cheek from contact with the compressed gas.

"All right," she said finally, and in her voice Daryl heard the resolve of someone finally ready to confront what she'd been avoiding for too long. "Get everyone, including Viktor, into the common room in thirty minutes. It's time to ask the questions he'll either answer directly, or show us just how much he has to hide."

Outside the medical bay window, invisible in the dark, the planet no one had ever seen kept sending its patient number into the void — but for the first time since observation had begun, Daryl Quinn, lying there with his bandaged head, wasn't thinking about the signal outside. He was thinking about the fact that the most immediate danger to his life had turned out to be much closer than any planet two light-days from help.