Vivian-3 didn’t look like someone who’d spent the last few days staring down the slow, bureaucratic suffocation of an entire station, but only because she’d perfected the art of aggressive neutrality. Arms crossed, jaw set, she leaned against the briefing room’s battered console, waiting for Judas to start talking. Eden, her Buddy, floated by her side with the same unreadable poise, its soft ambient glow the only thing suggesting it was still listening.

  Across the table, Tariq and Reya were fidgeting, while Dara had gone for the power move of leaning back in her chair with an expression that suggested she’d already written off this entire meeting as a waste of oxygen. Caleb, to his credit, at least looked interested, though that might’ve just been because he wasn’t usually allowed in meetings like this.

  “So,” Vivian said, after a silence that had gone on long enough to make Judas feel like he’d already lost. “You have something that requires my attention.”

  Judas exhaled. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  He tapped his slate, pulling up a schematic of the mass driver’s coil array. The image hovered over the table, projection flickering slightly with the station’s cheap hardware. “I need you to understand that what I’m about to tell you isn’t speculation. It’s not a hypothesis. This is hard data, and if we don’t do something about it, we’re all going to have a very bad day.”

  Vivian’s gaze didn’t flicker. “Go on.”

  Judas zoomed in on E13, highlighting the anomaly in the flux telemetry. “The mass driver’s been overcompensating for phantom fluctuations. At first, I thought it was just telemetry drift—happens sometimes, and normally, it balances out. But it’s been too consistent. Caleb and I had been going over it for weeks, doing every sort of repair imaginable, and it just kept going up and up. And when I correlated it with the positions of the six extra lampreys that docked with us—”

  “The ones that don’t exist,” Dara interjected.

  “Right. The ones that don’t exist. Turns out, they’ve been feeding fake data into the station’s telemetry. E13 thinks the station is shifting, so it corrects. But it’s not shifting. Which means every time it adjusts, it throws itself further out of alignment.”

  Vivian’s expression darkened, but she didn’t interrupt.

  Judas gestured sharply at the projection. “Now, most of the time, this isn’t a problem, because we’re not launching anything huge often enough for it to matter. But in about 80 days? We are. That asteroid’s already inbound. We have to launch it - I'm sure the NSS won't give us a choice in the matter. And when we do, this is what’s going to happen.”

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  He tapped the display again. The projection ran a simulated trajectory. At first, everything looked fine—the asteroid followed its standard acceleration curve, shooting down the driver’s length like a bullet in a railgun.

  Then it clipped the final coil.

  The station didn’t explode instantly. That would’ve been too easy. Instead, the impact destabilized the entire mass driver array, sending shockwaves through the frame. The asteroid didn’t stop—it couldn’t stop—but it left just enough destruction in its wake to send the entire station into a catastrophic chain reaction. Modules tore loose. Atmosphere vented. By the time the simulation finished, Caliban was in three distinct pieces, none of which looked particularly livable.

  The room was silent.

  Vivian sighed through her nose. “This is confirmed?”

  Judas nodded. “I ran the numbers five times. Samson checked them. It’s real.”

  “Sorry, Vivian. Also, hi, Eden. When this is all over, we should go on a date,” Samson teased, gently drifting over Judas's head like a square halo.

  Vivian stared at the projection for another few seconds before muttering, “Well. That’s worse than I expected.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Judas said, dryly. “It gets better.”

  Vivian turned her gaze back to him, unimpressed. “How.”

  Judas leaned back. “You tell me. Anything you think we should know about this lockout we've been having?”

  Vivian’s eyes narrowed.

  Then she sighed again, longer this time, and waved a hand over the console. A different projection blinked into existence—a supply chain forecast, overlaid with shipment schedules. But where Judas had expected to see the usual balancing act of requested cargo versus available capacity, there was something… off.

  She highlighted the food rations. “They haven’t cut anything now, obviously. The shipments in transit can’t be rerouted, so what we’re getting, we’re getting. But four years out? They’re already scaling back. Less dried coffee, less variety in proteins. Substituting lower-calorie options. And the shipments the year after that?” She zoomed in, running a quick comparison. “Designed for a human crew fifteen percent smaller.”

  Judas stared. “They’re planning to starve us out.”

  “Or at least… make it an inevitability,” Vivian said, voice tight. “We get just enough supplies to maintain operations. Nothing more. Which means if we don’t start shipping out material at the rate they want, they’ll start cutting the rations to match.”

  Dara let out a short, humorless laugh. “And here I was, worried about the NSS snapping our necks in our sleep.”

  “They don’t have to,” Vivian said. “They just have to wait. Who can mutiny on an empty stomach?”

  Judas ran a hand down his face. “So let me summarize. If we don’t fix the mass driver, we’re all dead in 80 days. If we do fix it, we get to live long enough to slowly starve.”

  Vivian folded her arms. “Pretty much.”

  Reya rubbed her temples. “I hate it when you two are in the same room. The bad news compounds.”

  Judas let out a short breath. “Yeah, well. We can worry about the long game later. First priority? Not getting turned into orbital debris.”

  Vivian nodded. “Agreed. But if we want any chance of surviving long term, we need to take control of our supplies. Figure out what we actually have left to work with.”

  Judas glanced at the projection of the mass driver, still frozen mid-catastrophe. Then at the shipment records, counting down to slow, inevitable deprivation.

  “Well,” he muttered. “Guess we’ve got our work cut out for us.”