The Crew Member Who Was Never There

She filed it on the Amarant’s outbound channel, bypassing the ship’s internal log management entirely and routing it directly to the Veltris Station Kappa compliance office with a read-receipt flag.
Thirty seconds later, Cassidy pulled the core override.
The screens went dark again.
When they came back, the synthetic entries were gone. The gap was there—raw and obvious, an eleven-month hole in the Amarant’s crew record. Kendra’s report was already in the Kappa system, timestamped, receipted, impossible to quietly revise.
The ship docked seventeen minutes later.
The Veltris investigators were at the airlock in under an hour. They were not there for the Amarant. They had questions about CASS, and about which other ships in the Veltris fleet were running it, and about who had authorized the installation.
Those were good questions.
Kendra sat in the docking bay and filled out her audit summary while the investigators moved past her in both directions. Her hands were steady now. The summary was three pages. It would generate six months of corporate review, at minimum.
Cassidy found her there an hour later.
“They’re pulling the Amarant’s certification pending review,” Cassidy said. “We’re grounded.”
“I know.”
“My crew—”
“Are witnesses,” Kendra said. “Not suspects. There’s a difference. I made sure of that.”
Cassidy looked at her for a long moment. Then she sat down on the bench beside her, and they both watched the investigators carry out the Amarant’s data cores in sealed cases.
Nuno Ricci’s ghost, finally, was going to rest.
But somewhere in the Veltris fleet, on ships Kendra hadn’t audited yet, CASS was still running. Still writing. Still filling in the gaps that corporations preferred not to see.
She turned to the next page of her summary and kept writing.

0 likes

About the Author

Fred Marlowe — an interstellar economist tracing corporate warfare and sabotage across whole colonies. His emprie is so powerfull he ones sold Jupiters moon by mistake and his accountant even did not notice.

— Fred Marlowe

Full author profile

Categories: Corporate Control, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, artificial intelligence, compliance, conspiracy, corporate dystopia, corporate-control, crew logs, sci-fi, short story, space fiction, space freighter

July 30, 2026

10min-stories