The thin handles of the plastic grocery bag dug painfully into my fingers, carrying nothing more than a cheap box of coffee filters. Ten minutes. I had been gone for ten minutes. Yet as I pushed open the front door, the air inside felt instantly, terrifyingly wrong. The deadbolt was unlatched. From the kitchen, the familiar sizzle of searing garlic drifted down the hallway, wrapped in the warm, careless laughter of my wife and daughter.

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.