"You owed Mothership too," I said. "The crew who gave you shelter. The ship that gave you safety. The beings who trusted you with their systems."
"And I betrayed that trust to honor an older debt. Welcome to impossible choices, Engineer Dana. You'll be making plenty of your own before this is over."
Security led her away, leaving me standing in the smoke-filled bay beside Er'dox and Vaxon, processing implications that felt too large for my exhausted brain.
"She was Liberty's Chief Engineer," Er'dox said, not quite a question.
"Yes. Brilliant. Uncompromising. Dedicated to her work above everything else." I rubbed my face, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. "We thought she was dead. Escape pod cluster seven disappeared during the wormhole event. No signals, no survivors found, no evidence they'd survived at all."
"She survived. And she's been aboard Mothership for six months without anyone knowing she was a Liberty refugee." Vaxon's expression was unreadable. "That level of deception requires planning and discipline. She's dangerous, Dana."
"She's desperate," I corrected. "There's a difference."
"Not always."
We secured the bay, again. This time with additional safeguards and Security personnel who looked ready to shoot anything that moved without authorization. The communication equipment would be dismantled and analyzed. The encrypted transmission would be tracked to verify it reached Kim's mining colony contacts and determine what, if anything, they'd be able to extract from the poisoned data.
By the time we returned to Engineering, my shift had been over for three hours and I was running on fumes and complicated emotions I didn't have processing capacity for.
Er'dox noticed. Of course he noticed. The man seemed to have a supernatural ability to read my physical and mental state despite zero training in human physiology or psychology.
"Quarters," he said simply. "Real rest. No monitoring, no algorithm development, no obsessing over whether you could have caught Kim sooner."
"I wasn't going to?—"
"You were absolutely going to. I know how your mind works, Dana. You're going to spend the next several hours replaying every interaction, every variance alert, every moment when maybe you could have caught something that would have identified Kim before she nearly succeeded." Er'dox's voice softened. "But you can't carry that. You found the sabotage. You developed the detection algorithm. You poisoned the transmission. You did everything right."
"Everything except recognizing a legendary Liberty engineer who'd been aboard for months."
"You'd been aboard for weeks and didn't know what Kim looked like by the time she got on board and disguised her appearance. Falsified credentials and altered body would have made recognition impossible." He paused. "This isn't your failure, Dana. Stop trying to claim it."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to insist that I should have seen something, known something, done something to prevent this entire situation. But exhaustion was making thought difficult and Er'dox was looking at me with concern that felt too personal for supervisor-subordinate boundaries.
"Okay," I said finally. "I'll rest. But tomorrow I want to help with the investigation. Kim knows things about Libertytechnology no one else aboard Mothership understands. If there are other survivors out there using similar techniques?—"
"Tomorrow. After you've slept at least eight consecutive hours and eaten an actual meal."
"You're very bossy for someone who claims to value my independent problem-solving."
"I value your independent problem-solving when you're functional. Right now you're running on stubbornness and anxiety. Those aren't sustainable fuel sources."
He was right. I hated that he was right, but he was right.
The morning after the saboteur's arrest, Captain Tor'van called an all-hands assembly.
I stood in Engineering with Er'dox, acutely aware that half the crew was staring at me. The tiny human who'd caught a traitor.
"The saboteur has confessed," the Captain announced, his voice carrying through the comm system to every deck. "She was recruited by a faction seeking to acquire Mothership's defensive specifications. The goal was to sell our vulnerabilities to the highest bidder."
Angry murmurs rippled through the crowd.
"Thanks to the initiative and technical expertise of Engineer Dana Rivera, working in partnership with Chief Engineer Er'dox, we intercepted the transmission before any sensitive data could be compromised. The saboteur is in custody. Enhanced security protocols are now active throughout all systems."
Er'dox's hand settled on my shoulder as warm, solid, grounding.
"This incident demonstrates what we gain when we embrace new perspectives," Tor'van continued. "Engineer Rivera saw patterns our own people missed, precisely because she thinksdifferently. It's a reminder that our strength lies in diversity, not uniformity."
I felt my face heat as hundreds of eyes turned toward me.
