The colony ship Meridian had been drifting for eleven days when Commander Yara Chen finally reviewed the navigation logs.
Something was wrong. The automated systems had managed to omit an entire sequence of course corrections — three critical burns that should have angled them away from the debris field now surrounding them on all sides. Whether the AI had glitched or been tampered with, the result was the same: they were trapped.
Chief Engineer Doss floated into the command module, his face slack and distant. Yara grabbed his arm.
"I need you present," she said sharply.
He blinked. The grief counseling program — the one passengers called "the opiate" — had been running on the civilian decks for days, keeping three hundred colonists calm and compliant while the crew scrambled. Doss had apparently been sampling it himself.
"Sorry," he murmured, shaking his head. "What do you need?"
"A way through." Yara pulled up the debris map. Shattered asteroid fragments filled the display like a frozen storm. Every calculated exit route had at least one massive obstruction blocking it — each chunk of rock a physical impediment between them and open space.
Doss studied the map for a long moment, his engineering mind reassembling itself behind his eyes.
"There," he said, pointing to a narrow corridor near the ship's stern vector. "If we vent the port thrusters in sequence and drift rather than burn, the debris field's own rotation carries us through."
Yara looked at the corridor. Barely wide enough. Barely possible.
"How long to prepare?"
"Six hours."
She nodded. "Then we start now."