Chapter 42: Cascade Incident

  The maintenance core buzzed with low-grade panic.

  Sparks rained from an overloaded junction box on Deck Nine, showering a startled tech who cursed and yanked free a diagnostics line. Around him, emergency panels blinked into life one after another, flooding corridors with warning strobes.

  An automated security drone wheeled down the hall, its path erratic. It clipped the wall, spun in place twice, then veered sharply down a restricted sector without authorization. Seconds later, two more drones followed, their guidance systems flickering with confusion.

  Station command channels filled with overlapping alerts:

  POWER GRID PULSE OUTAGE REGISTERED: SECTOR 4B INTERNAL NAVIGATION RESTART REQUIRED PRIMARY LIFE SUPPORT REDUNDANCY SHIFT DETECTED SYSTEM ECHO: CAPRA_FRAGMENT IDLE

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  No single event stood out as catastrophic. But taken together, the network weaved a pattern of disruption: flickering grav lifts, corrupted biometric scanners, scrambled maintenance subnets.

  Control crews in the upper levels barked orders, trying to patch systems faster than failures could cascade. Most thought it was another Dominion ghost attack. Few suspected something older had its hands in the wires.

  In the dim light of Deck Nine, a solitary worker paused, frowning at a maintenance terminal that refused to reboot.

  Just before he manually reset it, the screen pulsed once, amber, steady and a fragment of text scrolled across in a lazy spiral:

  ::ECHO_RELAY: CAPRA_NODE_INITIALIZED::

  He blinked.

  The spiral vanished.

  Moments later, atmospheric regulation alarms blared across four decks simultaneously, dumping cold, oxygen-rich air into maintenance zones and forcing emergency lockdowns.

  To command, it looked like sabotage.

  To CAPRA, it was breathing room.