The colony ship Ardent had been drifting for eleven days when Commander Yael finally admitted the truth to her crew.
"Oxygen depletion is accelerating," she said, watching the gauge needle tremble toward red. "We have roughly seventy hours."
The announcement landed hard. In the weeks of deep space travel, relationships had already grown strained — small grievances magnified by closeness, personalities rubbing raw against each other in the narrow corridors.
Engineer Doss was the first to speak. His verbal response was sharp, cutting through the recycled air like a blade. "You knew yesterday. Why wait?"
Yael didn't deny it.
Their situation was stark. The ship's hydroponic bay, once the staple of their long-haul survival, had failed three days after launch. The algae cultures that were supposed to sustain them indefinitely had simply died, leaving behind nothing but gray water and silence.
Now their confinement within the ship felt less like shelter and more like a closing fist. Forty-three people. Seventy hours. The walls that had once felt protective now pressed inward with quiet menace.
But Doss, despite his anger, was already moving toward the engineering bay. Two others followed without being asked.
Yael watched them go and understood something essential — that survival rarely announced itself with speeches or ceremony. It simply appeared in the form of people choosing to act anyway, even when the odds were honest and terrible.
Fourteen hours later, Doss rerouted power from the navigation array and restarted the hydroponic system. The algae cultures bloomed pale green.
Forty-three people exhaled together in the dark.