Chương 14: Episode 14 - The Morning After

Korrath made tea. This was not news. Korrath had been making tea every morning since day two, calibrated for the squad's species composition, distributed without announcement, and received without ceremony. The ritual had long since become the rhythm of B-7's mornings — the smell reaching the bunks before anyone was fully awake, the cups appearing on the locker shelves with the dependable inevitability of something that had decided to be permanent. This morning it was the same. Exactly the same.

The same smell, the same cups, the same sequence. Korrath at the heating unit, the altar light burning small and steady behind him. The sounds of the station through the walls. The blinking fixture doing what it always did. Cassian lay in his bunk for approximately forty seconds longer than usual before getting up. He was aware, in the specific way of someone cataloguing their own behaviour, that he was doing this because the morning felt different and he was giving himself time to determine how.

He arrived at: not dramatically. Not in any visible way. The room was the same room. The people in it were the same people. Something had shifted in the ground underneath. He got up. He took his cup. He sat at the common area table and opened his tablet and started where he always started — infrastructure file, outstanding items, status checks. The records request for 7D-114 was still pending, day thirteen of acknowledged-no-response. He added a note: escalate to secondary channel.

He had been building toward this for a week. Today felt like the right day. Krell'va was at the door, battle-braid secured. Ren-Thalen was in her corner, bioluminescence at its resting amber. Nyx'ara had come down from her bunk with slightly less velocity than usual, which was not something he would have noticed a week ago and which he now catalogued without deciding what it meant. Cirus had his slate out before his feet hit the floor. The morning was the same. He kept noticing the ways it wasn't.

* The afternoon training session was a standard coordination drill — the same format as the one that had produced four penalty flags in the first week, same grid configuration, same objective parameters. He'd run it intentionally. Baseline comparison. The score was the same as last week. Twentieth place composite, consistent with the two-week trend, no meaningful deviation from the trajectory they'd been on since the first evaluation. The formation was different. Not dramatically.

Not in a way that would have shown up in the headline score. But he ran the post-session overlay the way he always did, and in the position data — the granular, second-by-second record of where each frame had been relative to every other frame throughout the drill — something had shifted. The gaps were smaller. Not because anyone had been told to close them. The micro-adjustments that happened when two frames moved in adjacent vectors were faster by half a second on average.

The hull perimeter, which had been expanding and contracting in a pattern he'd been able to predict from the individual failure modes, had held tighter in the moments where it historically lost cohesion. He went through the data three times to make sure he wasn't seeing what he wanted to see. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. He wasn't. The shift was real. Small, but real, and more importantly: none of them had been told to change anything.

He hadn't briefed a different approach. He hadn't adjusted the standing orders. Whatever had changed had changed in the space between last night and this afternoon, which meant it was coming from somewhere he hadn't put there.

"Your analysis face," Nyx'ara said, from across the common area. She was eating post-session, not looking at him.

"What about it?"

"You've been staring at the overlay for twenty minutes. Either something went very wrong or something went unexpectedly right."

"Something shifted in the formation data."

"Good shift or bad shift?"

"Good. Small. Unexplained." She looked up from her tray.

"How unexplained?"

"I can't attribute it to any specific adjustment I made to the approach." A pause. She looked at the mark on her wrist — a quick glance, not quite conscious, her photodermis running one brief warm pulse at the wrist that she didn't suppress because she didn't notice it. She looked back at her tray.

"Huh," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"You're going to log it as a data point."

"I already have."

"Of course you have." She went back to eating.

"Let me know when you figure out what caused it."

"I will." He turned back to the overlay. He was fairly sure he already knew what had caused it. He was going to wait until he had three more sessions of data before he wrote it down, because writing it down before he had the data was the kind of thing that turned theories into assumptions, and he'd had enough of other people's assumptions to last him several years.

* That evening, while the secondary channel appeal for 7D-114 was processing — he'd found a maintenance oversight pathway through the station's physical infrastructure office that sat outside the standard administrative chain, which had seemed worth trying — he pulled the previous squad's performance record. He'd known it existed since week one, filed a note to access it when he had time, and had been consistently finding other things more urgent. Tonight felt like the right time.

He was already in the administrative system. The record was three layers deeper than the standard accessible files, which was itself interesting — squad performance records weren't usually protected — but not locked. He got in. Squad 7-Delta, previous cohort. Academic cycle ending fourteen months ago. The record was mostly complete. Assessment scores, drill performance metrics, the standard evaluation framework across three months of the academic year.

They'd ended at twenty-second in the composite ranking — two places above where his squad currently sat, worth noting without over-interpreting. The record showed a trajectory of modest improvement, consistent with a functional squad operating under the same resource constraints B-7 always carried. Then it stopped. Not at the end of the year. Mid-year. Month three of a four-month cycle, the record simply ended. Not graduated, not transferred with documentation — the standard transfer notation was absent.

The final entry was a drill score. After that, nothing. A gap where the remaining months should have been, and in the administrative fields where transfer reason and destination posting would normally appear: redacted. Not blank. Not missing. Redacted. Someone had been there and removed it. He sat with that for a moment. A squad assigned to B-7 that had reached twenty-second place and then simply stopped existing in the record system mid-year, with the relevant administrative information specifically removed.

A viewport in the same room, bolted shut pursuant to an incident report that also didn't exist in the accessible records. He added to the infrastructure file: Previous 7-Delta cohort — record terminates month three, mid-year. Transfer documentation redacted. No destination posting. Cross-reference: 7D-114. These are the same story. He didn't know what the story was yet.

He was becoming increasingly confident that finding out was going to require getting access to something that wasn't in any system the station's administrative channels were going to hand him voluntarily. He noted: escalate. Different approach. Think about it. He closed the file and opened the formation overlay. The next drill was in two days and the data was more immediately actionable than a redacted record from fourteen months ago. He had eleven specific adjustments to build into the standing orders before then.

He started from the first. He would come back to the record. He always came back.