They ran, the terminal’s ghost chasing them into the dark. Behind them, the Fleet Logistics Terminal quietly deleted Lena’s credentials, her housing assignment, her birth record. By the time they reached the docking bay, she was already a crack in the system—empty, invisible, and finally free to move.
She typed the string into her handheld, feeling the familiar lurch as the terminal’s interface twisted open. On her screen, a constellation of shipping manifests, fuel reserves, and maintenance logs bloomed like stolen stars. Lena wasn’t a hacker. She was a logistics auditor for the Jovian Collective—a tiny cog in a machine that moved mountains of cargo between Saturn’s moons. But the cracks gave her leverage.
She cross-referenced the ship’s ID with missing persons reports. Seventeen names matched.
Her roommate, Kael, was a grav-barge pilot with a gambler’s grin and a nose for trouble. Lena minimized the screen. “Just checking if our protein allocation got bumped.”
Kael whistled. “You touch that, and you’re not an auditor anymore. You’re a target.”
They ran, the terminal’s ghost chasing them into the dark. Behind them, the Fleet Logistics Terminal quietly deleted Lena’s credentials, her housing assignment, her birth record. By the time they reached the docking bay, she was already a crack in the system—empty, invisible, and finally free to move.
She typed the string into her handheld, feeling the familiar lurch as the terminal’s interface twisted open. On her screen, a constellation of shipping manifests, fuel reserves, and maintenance logs bloomed like stolen stars. Lena wasn’t a hacker. She was a logistics auditor for the Jovian Collective—a tiny cog in a machine that moved mountains of cargo between Saturn’s moons. But the cracks gave her leverage.
She cross-referenced the ship’s ID with missing persons reports. Seventeen names matched.
Her roommate, Kael, was a grav-barge pilot with a gambler’s grin and a nose for trouble. Lena minimized the screen. “Just checking if our protein allocation got bumped.”
Kael whistled. “You touch that, and you’re not an auditor anymore. You’re a target.”
