The log entry read: “Ricci reports cargo bay sealed. Shift complete. No anomalies.”
Kendra Ellison stared at the line until the words blurred.
Nuno Ricci had been dead for eleven months.
She was sitting in the narrow communications alcove of the CVSS Amarant, a mid-haul freighter operated by Veltris Consolidated Shipping, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a corporation so large it had its own weather systems on two planets. The Amarant smelled of recycled air and old machine oil. Its walls were the color of old teeth.
Kendra had been hired six weeks ago as a compliance auditor. Her job, officially, was to review the Amarant’s operational logs before the vessel docked at Veltris Station Kappa and submitted its annual certification. A routine assignment. A quiet one.
It had stopped being quiet about forty minutes ago.
The log file she’d opened was labeled CREWLOG-AMARANT-YR7, covering the ship’s seventh operational year. Nuno Ricci was listed as a cargo technician, third grade. His entries appeared on 214 separate days across that year. Calm, professional, unremarkable entries about pressure seals and pallet counts and humidity checks.
Nuno Ricci had died in a docking accident at Veltris Station Mira during year six. Kendra had found his death record in the personnel archive forty minutes ago, almost by accident, cross-referencing a pay discrepancy.
Someone had been writing his log entries for a year after he died.
She closed the file. Opened it again. The entries were still there.
Her hand was very still on the console.
Three decks below, in the Amarant’s operational hub, Chief Navigator Brendan Reagan was running a routine thruster calibration and thinking about nothing in particular when his console flagged an internal access alert. Someone had pulled a restricted personnel archive. Compliance level, so it was technically authorized.
He noted the access point: communications alcove, deck two.
The new auditor.
Reagan was a large man, broad through the shoulders, with the permanent squint of someone who had spent too many years reading star charts in dim light. He had been on the Amarant for four years. He knew where all the bodies were buried, which was not a metaphor he used lightly anymore.
He sent a quiet message to the captain.
Captain Ailsa Cassidy received it while she was eating a bowl of reconstituted rice in her quarters. She read it twice. Set down her spoon. Pulled up the ship’s internal camera feed for the communications alcove.
Kendra Ellison was still sitting there, very upright, very still, her dark face lit blue by the console screen.
Cassidy watched her for a moment.
Then she stood up, smoothed her jacket, and went to find out how much the auditor actually knew.
Kendra heard the footsteps in the corridor and closed three of her open files before the door opened. She left one visible: the cargo manifest, innocuous and dull.
Cassidy was a compact woman, mid-fifties, with silver hair cut close to her skull and the kind of stillness that comes from years of making decisions in small rooms. She looked at the manifest on Kendra’s screen. She looked at Kendra.
“Long shift,” Cassidy said.
“Just thorough.”
A pause. The ship hummed around them. Somewhere deep in the hull, a coolant pipe ticked.
“You found Ricci.” It wasn’t a question.
Kendra felt the air change. She kept her voice level. “I found a discrepancy in the personnel records.”
Cassidy pulled the second chair from beneath the console and sat down. She moved like someone who had already decided how this conversation would go.
“How much do you know about how Veltris runs its crewing contracts?” Cassidy asked.
“Enough.”
“Then you know that a ship loses its operational certification if it falls below minimum crew complement for more than seventy-two consecutive hours.”
Kendra knew. She’d written three reports on the policy.
“Ricci died on a Tuesday,” Cassidy said. “Veltris couldn’t get us a replacement for nineteen days. Nineteen days, Ms. Ellison. We were two crew below minimum.”
“So you falsified the logs.”
“So I kept my ship running.” Cassidy’s voice was flat, not defensive. “If Veltris had pulled our certification, twenty-three people lose their jobs. The Amarant gets scrapped or sold to a competitor. Veltris takes the insurance payout and nobody asks what happened to the crew.”
Kendra said nothing.
“I wrote Ricci’s entries myself,” Cassidy continued. “Every one. I used his access codes. I kept them short and consistent with his previous patterns. After the new crew member arrived, I stopped.”
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