Webb had forty-three names on his list and he was going to use every one of them.
He sat in the small conference room on Deck 2 that Walsh had assigned for testimony collection, the room that had been used for budget reviews before the world ended, and he worked through the names one at a time. Each person who sat across from him brought something different: a story, a grievance, a face that looked like it hadn't slept since the cascade. Some brought physical evidence. A woman from Deck 14 brought a photograph of her son, printed on ship paper, the kind of image that was meant for a memorial wall but had been carried here instead because she wanted Webb to see what a nine-year-old boy looked like when he was alive. Webb looked at the photograph. He didn't look away.
"He was in the corridor," the woman said. Her name was Lina Cho. Her voice was the kind of flat that comes from repeating a story enough times that the words have worn smooth. "He was walking to the commissary. He'd been doing that every day since we launched, by himself, because he wanted to prove he was old enough. Ninety-one seconds. He was two sections from the emergency oxygen."
Webb wrote the name. Wrote the distance. Two sections from the emergency oxygen. Maybe forty meters. A nine-year-old running.
"Thank you," he said. "I'll make sure the Council hears this."
The next testimony was from an engineer, one of Santos's remaining team. Her name was Reyes. She didn't bring a photograph. She brought a datapad with the cascade failure timeline on it.
"The captain gave the shutdown order at approximately 1120," Reyes said. "Santos confirmed and began systematic disconnection at 1121. The entity's burn order came at 1127. Six minutes between the captain's order and the entity's response." She tapped the datapad. "If the shutdown had begun forty minutes earlier, before the entity's concentrated push on Deck 14 began, my team would have been working on nodes that weren't yet at maximum power. The cascade damage would have been a fraction of what it was."
"Why wasn't the order given earlier?"
"Because the captain was still deciding. The entity had been probing for two hours before it concentrated on Deck 14. During those two hours, the captain was on the bridge watching Hassan block access attempts. The situation was deteriorating but hadn't reached critical. The captain waited until Deck 14 was at risk before acting."
"She waited until people were about to die."
Reyes paused. She was an engineer, not a politician. "She waited until the threat was immediate. Whether she could have acted sooner with less damage isāthat's a judgment question, not an engineering question."
Webb noted it. Judgment question. That was the whole inquiry, distilled.
---
The corridor outside the conference room had a crowd.
Not a protest. Not yet. Just people, standing in the passage near the Deck 2 council chambers, waiting for news or for purpose or for someone to tell them what happened next. Webb recognized faces from his coalitionāthe Earther faction, the people who'd organized petitions and protests and the memorial disruption. They looked different now. The memorial disruption had been about grief and politics, about demanding a return to Earth that everyone knew was impossible. This was different. Forty-three of their people were dead. The politics had become personal.
Gabriel Hertz was among them. The water systems tech who'd been one of the sharper voices in the Earther cell, the one who could talk about structural grievances with enough clarity to make the comfortable people uncomfortable.
"How's it going?" Hertz asked.
"Twenty-two testimonies so far. I'm seeing the Council inā" Webb checked. "Thirty-one hours."
"Is it going to matter?"
The question had the casual weight of a man who'd stopped trusting institutions somewhere around the third day of counting the dead. Webb understood the feeling. He'd told people the system would protect them. The system had not protected them.
"I'll make it matter," Webb said.
He turned to go back inside and found Voss standing at the end of the corridor.
Not approaching. Not calling out. Just standing there, hands clasped behind his back, the Norwegian corporate representative doing what he did best: being present where presence communicated something. Voss caught Webb's eye. Tilted his head toward a side passage. The universal gesture of *a word, privately*.
Webb hesitated. Then followed.
The side passage led to a maintenance alcove, the kind of space where cleaning equipment was stored and conversations happened without witnesses. Voss stood among the supply shelves with the posture of a man accustomed to rooms with better furniture.
"Mr. Webb. My condolences on your coalition's losses."
"Get to it."
Voss's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Ha. Direct. I appreciate that." He adjusted his cuffs. "The inquiry you have requested will produce a recommendation. That recommendation will address the captain's authority during crisis situations. I expect it will propose some form of oversight mechanism, a requirement for Council approval before decisions of a certain magnitude."
"That's the idea."
"The idea is sound. The problem is enforcement. Captain Okafor retained command authority during the review. If the Council recommends restrictions and the captain declines to accept them, who enforces the restriction? Security reports to the captain. The bridge crew reports to the captain. The Council has moral authority. The captain has operational authority. Moral authority without operational teeth isā" He paused, as if choosing among several accurate words. "Decorative."
Webb's eyes narrowed. "What are you offering?"
"The Corporate Consortium controls logistics infrastructure. Supply chains, distribution networks, maintenance scheduling for systems that Santos does not directly oversee. If the Council establishes meaningful oversight of the captain's crisis authority, the Consortium can provide the operational infrastructure to make that oversight functional. Not just a recommendation. A mechanism."
"You want the Council to have real power over the captain."
"I want the ship to have real governance. One person making decisions for two million is not governance. It is monarchy." He said the word without inflection, as if it were a technical classification rather than an insult. "The captain's decision killed five hundred and thirty-seven people. I do not say this to condemn her. I say it because a decision of that magnitude should not rest on one set of shoulders. Even competent shoulders."
The argument was good. That was the problem. Voss's arguments were always good. The logic was clean and the sentiment was reasonable and the man delivering it had spent seven months undermining Zara's authority through resource manipulation and backroom dealing.
"What do you get out of it?"
"A stable ship. Corporate stakeholders require predictable governance to plan resource allocation. Predictability requires process. Process requires institutional checks on unilateral authority." He met Webb's gaze. "I understand your suspicion. I have earned it. But consider the alternative. You present your inquiry without structural support, the Council recommends toothless guidelines, the captain nods politely and ignores them the next time a crisis demands speed. Your forty-three dead become a footnote in a pattern."
Webb stared at him. The man was good. Voss had read the room and found the angle and delivered the pitch with just enough corporate frankness to seem honest.
"I'll think about it," Webb said.
"That is all I ask." Voss stepped past him toward the corridor. Stopped. "Mr. Webb. Your daughter Amara. She was not among the casualties?"
Webb's back went rigid. "She wasn't."
"I am glad to hear it. Children areā" He caught himself. The briefest stumble, barely visible. "Regrettable. All of this is regrettable."
He left. Webb stood in the maintenance alcove among the cleaning supplies and thought about what it cost to agree with a man he didn't trust about a problem they both saw clearly.
---
Zara's closet-office at 0100.
Bridge logs covered the deskānot on the tablet but printed, because printed documents could be spread out and annotated and arranged in a timeline that a screen couldn't hold all at once. Wei had suggested it. "Paper has persistence," he'd said, in the way he said things that sounded simple and turned out to be the only approach that worked.
The timeline was laid out in twenty-minute increments from the moment the secondary failsafe fired to the moment the navigation core died. Each increment had three columns: ship systems status, entity actions, bridge decisions. Wei had helped her populate the first two columns. The third column was hers alone.
"Zara, the gap here," Wei said. He stood beside the desk, pointing to the 1050-1110 block. "Twenty minutes between the trigger firing and your arrival on the bridge. During those twenty minutes, Hassan was blocking mesh network access and Santos was fighting the backup layer. Neither had received direct orders from you because you were in the corridor."
"I was forty seconds from the bridge when the alarm sounded."
"You were forty seconds from the bridge. You arrived atā" He checked his notes. "Approximately 1048. Forty seconds is fast. But the entity's first directed push came at 1047. By the time you arrived, Hassan was already blocking."
"She didn't need my order to block."
"No. She acted on standing instructions. But the inquiry will ask why the captain was not on the bridge when a known threat escalated to active engagement." He looked at her. "Have we considered preparing an answer for that?"
"The answer is I was in the corridor outside my office. There's no standing requirement for the captain to be on the bridge at all times."
"There is not. But Webb's inquiry is not about regulations. It is about judgment. And the judgment question is: should the captain have been on the bridge during a period when the saboteur's trigger was within 0.05 percent of firing?"
She didn't answer. He was right. She knew he was right. She'd been in her office reviewing Hassan's verification data when the alarm sounded, because the verification work had seemed like the priority at the time, because the trigger threshold was still 0.05 percent away and Vasquez had said eighteen hours.
Eighteen hours that turned out to be zero.
"Put it in the timeline," she said. "Captain's location: closet-office, reviewing verification data. Forty seconds to bridge after alarm. Include the standing instruction to Hassan regarding mesh network blocking."
Wei made the note. Precise. Careful. His handwriting was military-neat, each letter formed separately, no shortcuts. He'd been doing this for seven hours without complaint.
"Zara. The seventy-two hours."
"The Council voted for seventy-two hours. I used three."
"The question they will ask is whether three hours was sufficient."
"Three hours was what the entity gave me."
"Was it? Or was three hours what you gave yourself?" He set down his pen. "The entity's concentrated push on Deck 14 began at approximately 1100. The power levels reached dangerous thresholds at approximately 1115. You gave the shutdown order at approximately 1120. There was a twenty-minute window between the first signs of the concentrated push and your order. During that window, you could have contacted Walsh. You could have requested an emergency Council session by comm. Even five minutes of consultationā"
"Five minutes of consultation would have been five minutes of the mesh network pushing closer to killing nine thousand people."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps five minutes of consultation would have produced the same decision with Council authorization, and the inquiry we are now preparing for would not exist."
She stared at him. Wei stared back. The quiet, level gaze of a first officer who was helping his captain and also telling her the truth.
"You think I should have called Walsh."
"I think the inquiry will argue you should have called Walsh. Whether I agreeā" He paused. "Have we considered that the question itself might be the wrong frame? The question is not whether you should have consulted the Council in those twenty minutes. The question is whether the command structure of this ship requires a single individual to bear the full responsibility for decisions of this scale. Webb will argue it should not. That argument has merit."
"If decisions require committee approval, people die while the committee votes."
"If decisions require no oversight, people die because one person was wrong." He picked up his pen again. "Both arguments have merit, Zara. The Council will have to choose which risk it prefers."
---
Thomas came at 0300.
He didn't knock. The closet-office door was openāit was always open when Zara was working because the space was too small and the air too stale with the door closed. He appeared in the doorway with two mugs of the synthetic coffee that tasted like nothing and warmed your hands, which was the real purpose of synthetic coffee at 0300.
"You should be sleeping," he said.
"I'm working."
"You've been working for twenty-two hours."
"I'm aware."
He set one mug on the desk, on top of a printed bridge log, and leaned against the doorframe. Thomas was good at doorframes. He had the build for itātall, angular, the body of a man who spent his days in archives and his evenings walking the corridors talking to people about what they remembered. The ship's historian. The man who'd found Larsen's letter in the undelivered mail. The man who'd been in her bed three weeks ago, before the trigger fired, before five hundred and thirty-seven people died because of her order.
"The inquiry is in twenty-nine hours," she said. "I need the timeline clean."
"Wei can help you with the timeline tomorrow."
"Wei went to sleep at midnight. Like a reasonable person."
"Be a reasonable person."
"Thomas." She didn't look up from the logs. "Not now."
He was quiet for a moment. She could hear him breathing in the doorway. The synthetic coffee steamed between them, untouched.
"Zara, you can't prepare for this by exhausting yourself. The Council isn't going to be impressed by how little you slept. They're going to be impressed by how clearly you can explainā"
"I said not now."
The words came out harder than she'd planned. Clipped. Two syllables each, bitten off at the edges. The voice she used on the bridge when a subordinate was wasting her time, which was not the voice you used on the person who'd held you in the dark and listened to you talk about David and hadn't asked for anything except your honesty.
Thomas's hands went still on the doorframe. He looked at her. Not hurtāthat would come later, if at all. Surprised. Recalculating. The expression of a man who'd thought he understood the terrain and had just discovered a fault line.
She should apologize. She knew she should apologize. The words were right there: *I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way, I'm tired and scared and five hundred and thirty-seven people are dead and I don't know how to carry this.* All she had to do was say them.
She picked up the next bridge log and started reading.
Thomas stood in the doorway for another ten seconds. Then he took his mug and left. His footsteps faded down the corridor, each one measured and deliberate, the walk of a man giving someone the space they'd demanded and wondering if the space was what they actually needed.
The synthetic coffee on the desk cooled. Zara read the bridge logs. The conduit hummed overhead. Outside the closet-office, the ship moved through unnamed space, and somewhere on Deck 2, Webb was building a case out of forty-three names and the question of how much power should fit inside one pair of hands.
