The word hung in the air, more deafening than the reactor's renewing hum. Sabotage. It wasn't an anomaly. It was an act.
Kaelen stared at the mummified captain, a man who had commanded a billion lives. Why had he taken his own life? Guilt? Despair? Had he been the saboteur? The questions swarmed Kaelen's mind.
"Mother, can you identify this officer?"
"Facial recognition is degraded. However, uniform insignia and biometric data from the chair's sensors correlate with Captain Aris Thorne, the commanding officer of the Elysian at the time of the anomaly."
Captain Thorne. His face had been on recruitment posters. A hero.
"Access his personal logs. Last entry."
"Attempting… Captain Thorne's personal logs are encrypted with a command-level cipher. Your authority as Steward supersedes this. Decrypting."
A holographic screen flickered to life above the dead captain's console. The image was grainy, the audio scratchy. It showed a man who had aged decades in what looked like days. His eyes were hollow, his face gaunt. The background was this very room, but lit by emergency lights. Alarms blared faintly in the recording.
"Log entry, final. Captain Aris Thorne. Date is… irrelevant." The captain's voice was a ragged whisper. "The ship is dying. We've lost contact with all cryo-bays. Life support is failing on the upper decks. Most of the bridge crew who were awake are… gone."
He ran a trembling hand over his face. "The distortion wasn't an accident. The sensor logs we managed to salvage show a focused tachyon pulse, emitted from an unregistered device attached to the primary comms array. It was designed to destabilize cryo-preservation on a quantum level. A targeted weapon."
Kaelen felt a cold knot form in his stomach.
"We traced the device's signature," Thorne continued, his voice breaking. "It was planted by someone with high-level engineering access. The evidence… it points to Commander Valerius, my second-in-command. But I can't find him. He's vanished. I've failed. I failed every soul on this ship. I was supposed to get them to a new world. Instead, I led them to a graveyard."
The captain looked directly into the recorder, his eyes filled with a bottomless grief. "The reactor is going into safe-mode. Power is almost gone. If anyone finds this… know that it was not a failure of the ship. It was a betrayal. A…"
He paused, his gaze drifting to something off-screen. The sound of a distant, metallic bang echoed. A look of grim resignation settled on his face.
"They're at the door. The ones who are still awake… they've gone mad. They know I'm in here." He picked up his sidearm from the console. "I won't let the Elysian fall into their hands. I'm initiating the final safety protocols. May God forgive me."
The recording ended.
Kaelen stood in silence, the weight of the revelation crushing. Commander Valerius. Sabotage. The death of a billion people was murder. And the captain, rather than be taken by a desperate, starving mob of surviving crew, had chosen to die here, alone, guarding the reactor.
"Mother, who is Commander Valerius? What was his function?"
"Commander Julian Valerius. Chief of Security and Second Officer. His duties included oversight of all internal security, military personnel, and the armory."
A security chief. Someone with access to everything. And he had vanished.
"Are there any records of what happened to him? Could he have survived?"
"No body matching his biometrics has been located. His personal cryo-pod, however, registered as failed during the anomaly event. It is possible he perished in the initial sabotage or went into hiding and died later. A full investigation would require accessing the security logs in the primary data core, which is currently offline pending higher power levels."
Kaelen looked at the word "SABOTAGE" scrawled on the console. The ship was no longer just a ghost ship; it was a crime scene. And he was the sole detective.
His initial task was complete. The ship had power. But his mission had just become infinitely more complex. He needed to understand what happened. He needed to know if the threat was truly over.
"Mother, now that we have power, what's our status? You said communications were permanently down. Can we diagnose that?"
"Diagnostic running. The primary communications array, located on the ship's outer hull, has suffered a catastrophic failure. The system is not merely offline; it has been physically destroyed. The damage is consistent with a deliberate, high-energy explosion."
Valerius again. He had cut the ship off from any possible help, from ever telling its story.
"What about the planet? Can we scan it now?"
"Initiating long-range planetary scan. This will take several hours."
A new alert flashed on the main console. It was from the ship's internal sensor network.
"Steward," Mother's voice held a new urgency. "I am detecting anomalous power signatures in the lower decks. Specifically, in the vicinity of the secondary hydroponics bay, Sector Theta."
"Anomalous? What kind?"
"Intermittent, low-level energy readings that do not correspond to any known ship system. They are… organic in fluctuation."
Kaelen's blood ran cold. Organic? He was supposed to be the only life sign.
"Could it be… survivors? Maybe some people found a way, like the captain?"
"The readings are not consistent with human life signs. They are unfamiliar."
The silence of the ship suddenly felt predatory. He wasn't just alone with the ghosts of the past. There was something else aboard the Elysian. Something that shouldn't be there.