Month six of nine, and the Meridian hummed along its long arc toward Mars like a held breath. Five crew, four hundred systems, three redundancies for every one that mattered — and still the ship found ways to bite.

First it was a coolant loop tripping offline for no reason anyone could find. Then a scrubber cycling into fault mode at 3 a.m., waking the whole crew to the smell of stale recycled air. Then a comms blackout that lasted six hours and left everyone staring at a silent console, waiting for a voice that didn’t come.