Eighteen Hours
The first sign that something was wrong was the silence. Kepler-9 was never silent. The station breathed — air processors humming, water recyclers clicking through their cycles, the constant low thrum of the centrifugal ring that gave them something approximating gravity. Dara Osei had lived with these sounds for fourteen months, and they had become so embedded in her awareness that she no longer heard them consciously. She heard their absence. She woke at 03:47 station time to a quiet so complete that for three disoriented seconds she thought she had gone deaf.
The status panel beside her bunk was dark. She slapped it, and it flickered to life with a display she had never seen outside of training simulations: a cascade of red warnings scrolling too fast to read, dominated by a single line in bold text that said ORBITAL DECAY INITIATED — DEORBIT IN 18:12:33. The number was counting down. Dara was out of her bunk and into the corridor in under ten seconds, barefoot, wearing the regulation sleep shirt that she privately considered the ugliest garment ever manufactured, and running toward the engineering hub with the particular focused calm that comes from being very good at your job and very frightened at the same time.
The engineering hub was empty. It should not have been empty — Kowalski had the night shift, and Kowalski was religious about his duties in the way that only