Commander Yara pressed her palm against the cold viewport, staring at the debris field that had once been Station Helios. The explosion had occurred approximately six hours ago — close enough to that estimate that mission control had stopped arguing about the timeline.
She pulled up the dossier on her tablet: forty-seven pages of intelligence reports, crew manifests, satellite imagery, and intercepted transmissions, all pointing toward one conclusion. Someone inside the station had sabotaged the reactor deliberately.
Behind her, Lieutenant Okafor entered the bridge looking completely disheveled, his uniform half-fastened and his hair wild from whatever brief sleep he'd managed to steal. He'd been running diagnostics for thirty-two hours straight.
"I found something," he said, dropping into the navigation chair. "The saboteur used our own emergency protocols against us. They rerouted the cooling system through the auxiliary grid before triggering the overload."
Yara turned slowly. "That's not a random act. That's training."
"Exactly." He rubbed his eyes. "This is a major setback for the whole operation. We've lost the only relay station between Earth and the outer colonies. Communications blackout starts in four days."
Yara stared at the floating wreckage glittering against the dark. Somewhere in those forty-seven pages was a name. Someone who knew the station's weaknesses better than anyone. Someone who had walked its corridors, memorized its schematics, and waited.
She closed the dossier and set her jaw.
"Then we have four days," she said quietly. "Let's not waste them."