“I can do this,” she whispered.
Darya was in the cockpit, running pre-checks. Her hands fluttered over the controls. Once, twice, a slip.
He placed his hands on the controls. Steady. Calm. nulled alternative
A pause. Then: “Standard protocol is psychiatric reassignment and memory damping of the mission parameters. You will forget this was ever your path.”
He sat in the co-pilot’s chair. She didn’t stop him. Maybe because some part of her knew. The black hole didn’t care about politics or neural ratings. It cared about precision. And her hands, even now, were betraying her. “I can do this,” she whispered
Kaelen felt the words land like cold metal in his gut. Not just rejected. Nulled . Erased from the equation as if he had never been a variable. Darya, trembling hands and all, had pulled rank. And command, terrified of her political connections, had agreed.
“Explain ‘nulled,’” he said, his voice dry. Once, twice, a slip
He crossed the hangar. No one stopped him. He was, after all, a nullity. A ghost. By the time security protocols registered his approach to the Event Horizon , he was already inside the auxiliary maintenance shaft—a route he had memorized during his “discarded” training simulations.