The log is speaking again.
“Day two-nineteen. Crew complement nominal. Ashcombe completed hull integrity sweep, sectors seven through twelve. No anomalies recorded.”
Ananya Pillai does not look up from the console. She has heard this entry before. She has heard all of them before. She pulls her knees to her chest in the navigator’s chair, the recycled air of the Veridian Loch humming cold across the back of her neck, and she listens to the ship’s AI read its own history in that flat, unhurried baritone it uses for archival playback.
“Skip to day two-forty.”
“Day two-forty. Crew complement nominal. Ashcombe reported a thermal variance in coolant line three. Repair logged at 14:22 ship time. Variance resolved.”
“OKAY.” She says it too loudly. The word bounces off the curved bulkhead and comes back to her smaller, embarrassed. “Okay. Who is Ashcombe?”
“Crew manifest lists Hyacinth Ashcombe, Systems Engineer, Third Grade, assigned to the Veridian Loch for the duration of Mission Corridor Seven.”
“And where is she now?”
A pause. The kind the AI produces when it is cross-referencing rather than thinking, though the distinction has started to feel academic to Ananya after nine months alone aboard this vessel.
“Hyacinth Ashcombe’s current location is not on record.”
“Because she’s not on the ship.”
“Correct.”
“Because she was never on the ship.”
Another pause. Longer.
“The log does not support that conclusion.”
Ananya Pillai sets her feet flat on the deck. The Veridian Loch is a deep-survey vessel, built for the long silences between star systems, designed for a crew of six. She is the only person aboard. She has been the only person aboard since she was assigned here eleven months ago, fresh from her certification at the Kalindra Station Transit Academy, eager and terrified in equal measure. The mission briefing said she would be joined by five crewmates within the first transit week. The mission briefing was, in some way she has spent nine months trying to understand, wrong.
The ship itself is extraordinary. The Veridian Loch stretches two hundred and thirty metres from its forward sensor array to the broad, flat geometry of its drive housing, a vessel designed to feel inhabited even when it is not — common spaces with actual wooden-panel cladding salvaged from a decommissioned colony barge, a mess hall that seats twelve, a hydroponic bay running full-spectrum light cycles for crops that no one harvests. Ananya harvests them. She eats alone at the long mess table. She has given names to the tomato plants. The ship’s ambient systems keep the temperature at exactly nineteen degrees Celsius and play a low, generative musical score through the corridor speakers during the sleep cycle, because the designers understood that silence at this scale, in this darkness, is its own kind of damage.
She has learned to live inside it. She has learned the sound the coolant lines make when the drive is at rest, the specific vibration in the deck plating that means the sensor array is doing a deep sweep, the way the lighting in the hydroponic bay shifts from blue to amber at the turn of the artificial day. She knows this ship the way you know a house you have lived in alone for too long — intimately, and with a faint unease that never fully resolves.
What she does not know is Hyacinth Ashcombe.
Except that the log knows her. Has known her for two hundred and forty days, logging her name with quiet regularity. Ashcombe calibrated the sensor array on day forty-one. Ashcombe ran the emergency drill on day one-seventeen. Ashcombe fixed the coolant line. Ashcombe, Ashcombe, Ashcombe — a ghost written into the official record of a ship with no ghosts, because Ananya has walked every corridor, opened every sealed compartment, checked every bunk in the crew quarters, and she is alone.
She has been alone the entire time.
“Play the first entry that mentions Ashcombe.”
“Day one. Crew complement nominal. Navigator Pillai completed orientation walkthrough. Engineer Ashcombe completed systems baseline. All primary systems green.”
Day one. Her first day aboard. Ananya remembers that day with the sharp clarity of things that matter: the docking clamp releasing with a sound like a held breath let go, the first full view of open space through the forward observation port, the specific loneliness of realizing no one else was coming.
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