10min-stories

Instructions From the Future

We knew about the blockade. Everyone in the Drift knew. The Orvine Consortium had positioned three heavy carrier vessels in low orbit above Verath-9 six weeks ago, cutting off the colony’s supply routes in a territorial dispute that had nothing to do with the forty thousand people living on the surface and everything to do with mineral extraction rights. Ships had been turned back. One independent freighter had been fired on.
The colony was running low on medical supplies.
I remember the four of us standing in that hub, not speaking, turning the information over. The bomb in our hold. The blockade below. The future version of Simona who had apparently been here before us and left instructions we hadn’t yet decided to follow.
Kerri-Ann was the first to speak. “We don’t do this kind of thing.”
“No,” Yannis agreed. “We don’t.”
But Orla had already gone back to the ship.
We followed, because that is what we did. We moved together. That had always been the logic of the four of us, not any single person’s decision but a collective drift toward the same conclusion.
Orla spent two hours examining the device. It was not, she determined, a conventional explosive. Its magnetic casing housed a high-frequency pulse emitter, the kind used in controlled demolition of orbital infrastructure. It would not destroy the carrier. It would collapse the carrier’s drive systems, lock it in place, force an emergency shutdown of all weapons arrays.
It would strand the blockade. Not kill it. Strand it.
“Someone built this for exactly this purpose,” Orla said. “And someone put it on our ship knowing we’d end up here.”
She looked at Simona when she said it.
Simona said nothing for a long time. Then: “I don’t know how I got to this station before we got to this station. I don’t know what version of this moment I already lived through. But I know what the colony needs.”
We took the Ardent Compass down through the blockade perimeter on a courier approach vector, broadcasting a standard supply manifest. The Consortium carrier’s automated systems flagged us for inspection. Kerri-Ann held the approach steady, her hands on the controls, unhurried, like music.
They hailed us.
Yannis answered. He had a voice made for talking people into things, low and warm and utterly reasonable. He bought us four minutes of negotiation before the carrier’s weapons array began tracking.
Orla triggered the device from the cargo bay console.
There was no explosion. No flash. Just a deep, resonant pulse that moved through the hull of the Ardent Compass like a held breath and then released. Every instrument on the carrier went dark in sequence, a cascade of system failures spreading from the drive core outward, visible even from our distance as the running lights guttered and the weapons array swung loose and stopped.
The other two carriers in the fleet began emergency communication with the disabled vessel. They pulled back. Standard protocol when a flagship loses drive integrity — you don’t advance, you assess.
It was enough.
The supply corridor to Verath-9 opened.
And then we were fourteen seconds from something — not from the device, which had already fired — but from a different kind of detonation.
Simona grabbed my wrist.
“I know how this ends,” she said, “because I’ve been carrying it since Orvek. Since Grett looked at me like she already knew me. I’ve been trying to figure out what version of myself goes back. What version of myself leaves those instructions.”
She paused. Outside the viewport, the carrier drifted, dark and immense, like a sleeping animal.
“I think it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I think whoever she was, she made the same choice we just made. That’s the only part that carries forward.”
Kerri-Ann brought us around, steady, heading back toward the Drift’s shipping lanes.
Yannis was already calculating the next contract.
Orla was narrating the post-flight sequence to herself, quiet and methodical, the ritual of a mind that needed to account for everything.
And Simona sat with her hands in her lap, looking at the stars, wearing the expression of someone who had just remembered the important thing she had been on the edge of remembering for a very long time.
We did not talk about what she had said.
Some things don’t need to be resolved. They just need to be true.