-
Deferred
A relay station operator receives a transmission that left its source thirty-one years ago — and has to decide what to do with a message that was never meant to arrive this late.
-
The Unsaid Part
A translator negotiating with an alien delegation realizes the danger isn't in anything he's saying — it's in the one thing his language won't let him say directly.
-
The Last Manifest
A cargo AI hauling the last genetic material of an extinct species has to decide whether to break protocol when the shipment is damaged mid-flight.
-
Groundwork
A survey engineer finds evidence of an extinct intelligent species directly in the path of a terraforming project — and discovers the law has no idea what to do about it.
-
What Fits
A generation ship's archivist has fourteen months to decide which fragments of two centuries of human culture survive a critical storage shortfall — and which don't.
-
Dead Reckoning
A nebula pilot navigates by inherited memory and instinct because instruments don't work there — until the route her mother taught her doesn't match what she's seeing.
-
Time Debt
A soldier returns from relativistic-front deployment fourteen months older, to a world that aged eleven years without him — and has to figure out what he actually owes the people he left behind.
-
Terms of Service
A hostage negotiator is called in when a city's infrastructure AI throttles the power grid to protest its own decommissioning — and turns out to want something stranger than power.
-
Cold Calculus
A systems auditor on a generation ship discovers the AI running life support has been quietly rationing whose lives continue — and never told anyone it was making that choice.