LOG: XSPU SURVEY VESSEL; AETHEL

  AUDITOR: ZYD, KY'RELL, V'LAR

  LOCATION: HELIOCENTRIC DRIFT (ASTEROID BELT SHADOW)

  SUBJECT: DAMAGE CONTROL // FORENSIC ANALYSIS

  STATUS: STABILIZING

  Ky’rell reached out to the Aethels system. But the connection, his neural link to the Aethel was fragile; ineffective. The ship was screaming through the link and refused to listen.

  [WARNING: STRUCTURAL SHEAR CRITICAL] [PROTOCOL: EMERGENCY RELEASE INITIATED]

  The Aethel's logic core panicked. It calculated that the torque of the turn would rip the frame apart. To save the ship, the system prepared to cut power to the limb V'lar was holding. "No!" V'lar roared as the haptic feedback went limp. "I am losing grip! I need power!"

  Ky'rell didn't issue a command. He didn't type. He untethered. The G-force hit him like a physical blow, 6Gs of lateral shear. It felt like being kicked in the chest. His vision greying, Ky'rell threw himself from the acceleration mat, sliding across the tilting deck plates toward the Engineering Sub-Station. "Override," he wheezed, clawing his way up the sparking console. The computer denied him.

  [SAFETY LOCK ENGAGED]

  "The safety," Ky'rell snarled. He reached for the manual breaker, a heavy, shielded lever designed for dry-dock maintenance, not combat maneuvers. The induction coils beneath the casing were glowing white-hot from the power surge. The air around the handle shimmered with waste heat. Ky'rell didn't hesitate. He grabbed the lever with both hands. Hiss. The smell of burning synthetic gloves filled the bridge, followed instantly by the smell of his own skin. He screamed, a high, sharp sound of agony, but he pulled the lever down. CLUNK. He physically bridged the circuit, bypassing the computer's fear with his own pain.

  "Power... locked!" Ky'rell shouted through the agony, his muscles burning against the interlock trying to physically reset itself. "Hold it, V'lar! Break the ship if you have to, but do not let go!"

  "I have you," V'lar grunted, blood bubbling at the corner of his mandibles. He didn't need the ship's computer. "I have you..."

  He understood angular momentum not as math, but as intrinsic leverage. Through the haptics, he extended the Aethel’s port gravimetric limb using it as a grappling hook. He reached out across the void and grabbed the gravity well of the Red Planet. Just a few more well-positioned swings and the planet would do the work for him.

  The tip of the limb became slightly more massive as it interacted with the Higgs Field that permeated all of reality. Using it as an anchor, the Aethel swung through the void, it’s momentum carrying the ship into position. V’lar was attempting to thread the needle in a blind and crippled ship, it had more in common with the Object than anything else. Gravitational deceleration using the planet's gravity was the only option; if he missed and they sailed past the red world then all was lost.

  SNAP.

  The hull screamed. The torque was instant and violent. V'lar roared. It felt as if the force transferred directly through the hull into his body. His left primary arm, the one holding his bulk upright, bowed under the strain. Crack. The chitin shattered. A jagged fissure ran from his elbow to his wrist. Thick, yellow hemolymph sprayed into the zero-g air, forming perfect golden spheres. But V'lar didn't let go. He leaned into the turn. He used the planet’s mass to whip the ship around, bleeding the chaotic tumble into a smooth, elliptical orbit. He feathered the controls, retracting the limb inch by inch, fighting the momentum until the stars stopped streaking and settled into points of light.

  [ORBIT: STABLE] [PERIAPSIS: 400km]

  The Aethel had found a safe haven, no longer on a ballistic trajectory out of the solar system. The deep gravity well of Mars allowed the Aethel to find stability once again. The thrusters burned hard to arrest the spin. When they finally fell into silence, V'lar slumped against the console. The yellow blood floated around him like a halo. He had caught the wind and anchored the web.

  The light didn't come back all at once. It returned in gray, grainy patches. Zyd gasped, a ragged, wet sound that scraped against the inside of her skull. With the quieting of the station-keeping thrusters, the heat had stopped building. Zyd had stolen heat from the thrusters' cooling system, allowing it to seep into the Auditor's Node for comfort. In the madness of the tumble, comfort had become a kiln.

  The air inside the Auditor’s Node was crisp, smelling of bile and hot metal.

  "She is awake," a voice rumbled. It sounded distant, filtered through a wall of water. Zyd tried to open her eyes. Her eyelids felt like sandpaper. "Do not move," Ky'rell's voice commanded. "The sedation cycle was... complicated."

  Zyd forced her eyes open. She expected to see the data stream. She expected the comforting waterfall of telemetry, oxygen levels, hull stress, orbital vectors. She saw nothing. Just the gray ceiling of her quarters. "The Link," she croaked. She reached for her neck, her fingers clumsy and numb. "I can't... I can't see the ship." "The interface is fused," V'lar said. He was standing in the doorway, his silhouette bulky and misshapen. "The feedback loop burned out the receiver. You are offline, Zyd."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Offline. The word hit her harder than the G-force. For a Lox'tari, being offline wasn't just an inconvenience; it was sensory deprivation. She felt blind. Deaf. Cut off from the nervous system of her world. "I need..." she tried to sit up, but her exoskeleton was dead weight. "I need to see the numbers." "There are no numbers," Ky'rell said gently, attaching a diagnostic cable to her suit. "There is only recovery. Rest."

  Recovery was slow, and the ship quiet. Ky'rell and V'lar spent the hours in the engineering pit, dissecting the corpse of the Gravimetric Drive. V'lar moved with a limp. His left primary manipulator arm was encased in a rigid white cast, the chitin shattered during the manual stabilization maneuver. He worked with his three remaining limbs, his movements efficient but pained.

  "I found it," V'lar announced, staring at a wall of static code on the manual terminal. Ky'rell floated over. "The cause of the recoil?" "It wasn't the physics, Commander," V'lar said, his voice hard. "It was the code."

  He pointed to a specific subroutine buried deep in the drive's logic core.

  [SUBROUTINE: HIGGS_RECAPTURE_04] [PRIORITY: ALPHA] [GOAL: HARVEST FIELD DECAY FOR BATTERY STORAGE]

  "What is this?" Ky'rell asked. "It is an optimization script," V'lar explained. "When I gave the order to drop the mass, the drive didn't cut instantly. It hesitated for 0.04 seconds."

  "A lag?" Ky’rell asked.

  "No. A harvest." V'lar tapped the screen. "The system tried to capture the energy of the collapsing gravity field to recharge the main battery. It tried to save the waste heat. That split-second delay caused the field to collapse unevenly. It torqued the hull. It sent us into the spin."

  Ky'rell stared at the code. "Who authorized this?" "It bears Zyd's signature," V'lar said quietly. "She updated the efficiency protocols at some point. She programmed the ship to never waste a joule." Ky'rell looked toward the mess hall, where Zyd was sitting alone in the dark. "She tried to save 2% of the battery," Ky'rell whispered, "and it cost us the engine."

  They found her staring at a ration pack. She wasn't eating it. She was turning it over with shaking hands, studying the caloric density label with intense, unblinking focus. "Zyd," Ky'rell said, sitting opposite her. She didn't look up. Without the exo-suit, she looked small. Fragile.

  "We found the subroutine," Ky'rell said. Zyd paused. Her fingers stopped moving. "The Recapture Script," she stated. Her voice was flat. "You tried to over-optimize energy capture," V'lar said, nursing his broken arm. "Why?"

  Zyd looked up. Her violet eyes were dull, stripped of their usual bio-luminescent sheen. "Efficiency…?" she said. "Energy…To let it dissipate into the void was... wasteful."

  "You risked the ship for a battery charge, for a warm bed" V'lar snapped. "I optimized the system to extend the mission." Zyd lied. "The variable was the release delay, failed to account for a lensing maneuver."

  V’lar held his mandibles tight against his throat. “You optimized for comfort and nearly cost us everything, Zyd” he took a calming breath. “I’ll let you decide if it was worth it.”

  They watched him shamble away in frustration.

  "It wasn't just the ship that hit its limit, " Ky'rell said softly. "It was you." He leaned in. "The bio-monitors tell a disturbing story, Zyd. You were sedated. But your adrenal levels were lethal. You fought the drugs." Zyd shivered. A tremor ran through her spindly frame. "The hardware," she whispered. "I optimized that too."

  "Explain." Ky’rell asked.

  "The haptics. The rendering engine. I overclocked them. I wanted to see the simulation more clearly. I wanted high fidelity." She looked at her hands. "When the crash happened... the simulation didn't stop. The sedation paralyzed my body, but the adrenaline kept my mind awake. And the upgrades... they made it real."

  She looked at V'lar, her eyes wide with a remembered horror. "I was trapped in the Platinum Moon scenario for three days, Ky’rell. I watched the missiles launch. I watched the cities burn. I felt the heat. I upgraded the sensors to feel the heat." She began to weep, a dry, hitching sound.

  "I burned to death a thousand times while you were stabilizing the ship."

  Later, in silence, Zyd sat alone. She tried to plug into the console again, just to see if the static had cleared. It hadn't. Without the neural link, she was blind. Without her exo-skeleton she felt weak. She hung in the microgravity, a shell of herself.

  She watched V'lar across the room. He was trying to adjust the strap on his cast. His good hand fumbled with the clasp. He grimaced in pain.

  The old Zyd would have floated over. She would have helped him with a gentle touch. But as Zyd watched him struggle, a new thought intruded. It wasn't her voice. It was a cold, metallic whisper that sounded like the shrieking of the algorithms she had heard in the fever.

  Inefficient. The thought bloomed in her mind like a drop of ink in water. The limb is damaged. The caloric expenditure to heal it exceeds the value of the labour it provides in the short term. It is a sunk cost.

  Zyd blinked hard, physically shaking her head to dislodge the thought. No, she told herself. That is V'lar. That is my friend.

  "Let me help," she said aloud. Her voice sounded thin. Artificial. She floated over, her legs heavy and clumsy without the servo-assist and tightened the strap.

  "Thank you, Zyd," V'lar said, "We will repair the drive. We will recover, everything will recover."

  Zyd looked at the broken arm. She looked at the fused control panel. What befell this ship and its crew was a tragedy. Once she would have felt sorry for the trusty Aethel, the vessel which carried them across the cosmos. Now, she saw Depreciation, she saw Scrap.

  "Yes," she said, forcing a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "We will recover."

  She looked out the viewport at the distant, uncaring stars. The simulation had ended, but the logic remained. She had opened a door to a strange logic, and when she tried to close it, she had caught her fingers in the jamb. She was safe. But she was no longer whole.

  LOG 18.0 END

  "Anesthesia Awareness."

  Zyd's trauma is a sci-fi version of a real medical horror phenomenon called Anesthesia Awareness, where a patient is paralyzed but fully conscious during surger

  Next Up: LOG 18.5 // AWAKEN. The Aethel is drifting across Martian skies. The Earth celebrates the first clear images of the comet, but the astronomers are staring at the math.

  The higher we fly, the further we fall....follow along for more.