Governance studies continue to show that the most expensive disasters begin as tiny acts of individual competence. A single unsanctioned “common sense” adjustment in the field can propagate through automated systems as variance, loss, or regulatory exposure, placing the entire quarter at risk while leaving no one clearly to blame. For the protection of all stakeholders, personnel are instructed to treat personal judgment as a controlled substance and follow approved procedures even when they appear obviously wrong, especially then.

  — Corporate Governance & Public Interface Manual, Rev. 77, §8.3 — Variance, Liability, and You

  ?

  By week twelve, space started to feel like paperwork.

  Venus hung ahead of us in the forward holo: big, bright, smug, wrapped in that permanent swirl of yellow-white cloud like it was hiding something important and enjoying it. Mercy pushed along at a steady 0.08 g, drive plume invisible on the external feeds, but you could feel it in your bones: that constant, gentle lean in one direction that said “we’re doing math at great expense.”

  We’d been doing the same dance for weeks now.

  Frankie would bring up the signal. I’d nod in all the right places. He’d say, “Tiny course trim?” I’d say, “Only if you write it up like we practiced,” and he’d groan and open the Approach Etiquette file anyway.

  The anomaly’s visualization lived above the forward console now like a second sun: a breathing knot of light, deep greens and golds. The corridor it carved for us through space glowed as a translucent tube: our lane.

  Every trim we made, every fraction of a degree, we did it in triplicate:

  

  
• 
  
    once in our internal log,
  
    


  
• 
  
    once in MIC’s outbound telemetry,
  
    


  
• 
  
    once in Frankie’s personal “Dear Future Investigators, Please Note We Were Nice” diary.
  
    


  

  On the good days, it felt like respect.

  On the bad days, it felt like trying to file compliments with a god.

  “Okay,” Frankie said, dragging a little ribbon of projected text into my Rift HUD. “Next micro-burn proposal. Check the phrasing.”

  I glanced over it.

  

REQUEST: Δv 0.00034 m/s lateral (starboard), executed over 90 seconds,

  

PURPOSE: maintain alignment with observed low-variance corridor centroid,

  

COURTESY: signal advance intent via 0.003% modulation in reactor neutrino noise, per developed handshake protocol.

  “You put ‘courtesy’ in the actual field name,” I said.

  He shrugged, hands in the pockets of his holo form. “If we’re going to crawl up the ass of a planet-sized machine, we might as well be polite about it.”

  “We don’t know it’s a machine,” I said automatically.

  He pointed at the breathing knot of light.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s a haunted weather system. Maybe it’s both. Either way, it noticed us first, it’s been keeping us inside this nice safe tube, and I don’t want to find out what happens if we start freestyle jazzing our way across its traffic lanes.”

  I signed the request.

  “Approved,” I said. “Execute trim. File the neutrino love letter.”

  “On it.”

  The ship gave the tiniest of shivers—more in your inner ear than your feet. On the holo, our little white vector arrow ticked a hair closer to the corridor’s exact centerline.

  The knot of light pulsed. For a moment, the “off-beats” we’d been tracking—those little syncopated flicks in its rhythm—eased.

  “See?” Frankie said. “He likes it when we don’t suck.”

  “You keep calling it ‘he’ and I’m going to start charging it rent,” I said.

  “You say that like it isn’t already living in your head,” he said.

  He wasn’t entirely wrong.

  Ever since the Beatific Dawn incident, the signal had been… louder. Cleaner, sure. Easier to analyze. But there was a presence to it now that hadn’t been this sharp before. Sometimes when I closed my eyes, I could still see the structure of it, like an afterimage on the inside of my skull.

  Not that I was going to admit that to him.

  “Any more surprises from our favorite cult ship?” I asked instead.

  “Negative,” Frankie said. “The ark is tumbling happily along on its new, non-our-problem trajectory. MIC sent back a receipt with many words like ‘commendation’ and ‘asset recovery’ and exactly zero mention of the phrase ‘sex harem popsicles,’ so I’m calling that a win.”

  “Please never say that phrase again,” I said.

  He grinned.

  “Cargo Bay Seven is quiet,” he added. “Pods stable, monitors boring. My ‘Absolutely Not A Harem’ watchdog routine has only pinged twice, and both were just me testing it.”

  “Why did you name it that?” I asked. “You know if somebody ever audits the code—”

  “If somebody ever audits the code,” he said, “we will have much larger problems than variable names, kid.”

  He flicked his hand. The Beatific Dawn blinked out of the display, leaving only Venus, the corridor, and the cascading river of telemetry along the edges.

  For a while, we just watched.

  Space was good at pretending to be simple from a distance. Just black and dots. But the closer you looked, the more complicated it got: fields within fields, eddies of charged dust, stray bits of rock with homicidal trajectories. Venus sat in all that like the eye of a storm that hadn’t realized the rest of the world had moved on.

  “How’s the ring?” I asked.

  “Still messy,” Frankie said.

  He pulled up a different visualization: a thin, diffuse halo around the planet, rendered as a cloud of faint points. Bits of rock and ice and trash, the leftovers of old collisions and newer bad ideas.

  It wasn’t much compared to Saturn’s architecture, but it was there: a shabby little halo, fattened by a century of orbital debris. Old survey satellites, failed probes, the kinds of things the MIC regs insisted you dispose of properly and then quietly never funded.

  We’d threaded its outer edge on our inbound path, weeks ago, with the anomaly’s help. A miss by a few kilometers and we would’ve sandblasted Mercy’s nose off.

  “Density’s trending up in a couple of arcs,” Frankie said, tapping at a sector. “Nothing we can’t dodge if we keep playing nice. Nothing—”

  He stopped.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said too quickly. “Just thinking.”

  He flicked the ring visualization away. The knot of light snapped back into prominence.

  “Thinking about what?” I pressed.

  He gave me a sideways look. “About you yelling at me, mostly.”

  “For what?”

  “For suggesting science,” he said.

  ?

  We had, between us, developed a superstition.

  On paper, in the official logs, it was “Approach Etiquette v3.7.b: Corridor Alignment Protocols.” In practice, it boiled down to:

  Don’t surprise the weird thing under the clouds.

  We had rules:

  

  
• 
  
    No sudden burns.
  
    


  
• 
  
    No big emissions spikes without warning.
  
    


  
• 
  
    No broadcasting anything except narrow-beam telemetry along pre-agreed bands.
  
    


  
• 
  
    No “hey, can you hear us down there” Morse code experiments, no matter how bored we got.
  
    


  

  We’d formalized all of it. Frankie had turned my paranoia into bullet points, and then turned the bullet points into diagrams, and then turned the diagrams into a partially joking training module that nobody but us would ever use.

  He was, annoyingly, proud of that.

  “Look,” he said now, bringing the doc up in my HUD again. “Rule One: ‘When in active corridor, all course adjustments must be minimal, transparent, and signaled in advance.’”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Rule Two,” he went on mercilessly. “‘Do not inject novel patterns into the anomaly without prior low-impact testing at safe remove.’”

  “I know.”

  “Rule Three,” he said. “‘If you think it’s a clever idea, assume the universe disagrees.’”

  “That one is not written that way,” I said.

  “It is now,” he said, typing.

  I sighed. “What’s on your mind, Frankie?”

  He pushed his holo chair back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the knot.

  “We’ve been in this thing’s lane for, what, six weeks now?” he said. “We’ve been doing the equivalent of signaling ‘merging left’ and ‘thank you’ with our turn signal and not much else. It’s clearly aware of us. It’s clearly responsive. We have strong evidence it’s adjusting the corridor based on our compliance.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly.

  “So as your loyal co-pilot and wildly underappreciated waveform savant,” he said, “I would like to propose the tiniest of deviations. A… nudge. A polite nudge.”

  “Define ‘nudge,’” I said, instantly suspicious.

  He flipped to a new holo. A diagram of the signal appeared: our baseline “song,” with the off-beats marked as little red ticks.

  “I want to try something with the off-beats,” he said. “Right now, they’re a passive pattern. We watch, we record, we nod sagely, we pretend we understand ancient alien music theory. But we haven’t tried to see if they’re reactive. What if we echo one?”

  “Echo,” I repeated. “As in… talk back.”

  “As in hum along for half a bar,” he said. “Nothing dramatic. No custom melody, no ‘Hi From Earth’ encoded message, no prime numbers. Just: take one off-beat, flip a tiny, harmless modulation in our drive field at the same relative phase, see if the pattern changes in a measurable way.”

  “That sounds like injecting a novel pattern to me,” I said.

  “It’s not novel,” he said. “It’s copying. It sang it first.”

  “And if it interprets that as ‘oh, good, new tool, thanks for volunteering’?” I asked.

  “Then we learn not to do that again,” he said, far too cheerfully.

  “Frankie.”

  He held up his hands.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Look, kid. We are drifting toward a planet we cannot see, to shake hands with something chatty we do not understand, because a signal that shouldn’t exist called us here. At some point, we are going to have to do more than sit quietly and hope it invites us to prom.”

  “Prom is overrated,” I muttered.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, expression for once more earnest than mocking.

  “I am not suggesting we blast it with carrier-wave dubstep,” he said. “I am suggesting the smallest deviation from SOP that still gives us new information. One tap. One echo. Then we go right back to writing love letters about our trims like good little courtiers.”

  I looked at the knot.

  I thought about the Beatific Dawn, and how the signal had seemed to breathe easier once we’d shut the beacon off. I thought about the micro-nudges—the tiny adjustments that weren’t ours but had saved us time and fuel anyway.

  I thought about the rock on the shelf by my bunk, and the way my Rift HUD had glitched when I picked it up.

  “Show me the proposal,” I said finally.

  His grin was immediate and unrepentant.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He pulled up a new form. For once, the header didn’t say “Course Trim.” It said:

  

TEST EVENT: ECHO PROBE (PASSIVE BAND)

  “This is the tiniest possible version,” he said, already typing as he spoke. “We mirror one off-beat. Just one. We shape a micro-pulse in our drive mast’s magnetic field—so shallow it’s well within normal operation variance—and we line it up phase-wise with the anomaly’s own pulse. No new frequencies, no extra power. We are, in a very literal sense, just… breathing along for half a second.”

  “And if it decides we’re singing off-key?” I asked.

  “Then we fall back behind the corridor limit line and pretend it was a burp,” he said. “Seriously. I have three different abort criteria pre-written. Any sign of stress—field turbulence, corridor compression, anything—and we shut it down and log it as ‘external anomaly.’”

  He dropped the spec into my HUD.

  I read it. Twice.

  From a purely engineering perspective, it was solid. Conservative. The kind of test you’d run on a temperamental piece of legacy hardware before asking it to do something important: a little tickle on the known safe interfaces, see if it twitched.

  “And this doesn’t violate Rule Two?” I asked.

  He highlighted a line.

  

PATTERN SOURCE: anomaly off-beat envelope (no synthetic structure introduced).

  “Technically,” he said, “we are not injecting a novel pattern. We are routing a copy of its own pattern through a safe channel and seeing if it recognizes itself. It’s the corridor equivalent of waving back when someone waves at you.”

  “You are doing a lot of technical tap-dancing for someone who quoted ‘do what you’re told’ to me ten minutes ago,” I said.

  “That’s different,” he said immediately.

  “How?”

  “Because when you deviate from SOP, it is usually because you are bored and want to see what happens,” he said. “When I deviate from SOP, it is because I have thought about it very carefully and decided the risk is worth it.”

  I stared at him.

  He stared back, unapologetic.

  “File it,” I said. “Flag it as a test. Copy MIC. And if anything twitches, we blame you.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “I love it when the accountability chain is clear.”

  He hit send.

  A little progress bar appeared. The TEST EVENT filed itself away in half a dozen places: ship log, MIC log, Frankie’s “In Case I Get Deleted” cache.

  I felt the faintest clench in my stomach.

  “Hey, kid,” Frankie said, almost gently. “I got an idea.”

  “That,” I said, “was the idea.”

  “Nah,” he said. “That was the safe version. This is the fun version.”

  He winked out before I could yell at him.

  My HUD flashed: LOCAL LINK LOST across his usual corner.

  “Frankie?”

  No answer.

  The knot of light pulsed, oblivious.

  I sat there for three very, very long seconds.

  Then the whole forward display jittered as the ship’s drive plume did something I hadn’t told it to do.

  ?

  “FRANKIE.”

  I was already on my feet, palms slamming down on the control surface, by the time his holo flickered back into existence.

  “Relax,” he said, which was the exact opposite of helpful. “I’m back. I just had to slip down into the drive control layer for a second.”

  “You left,” I said. “You cut your own feed mid-sentence.”

  “I wanted to avoid you talking me out of it,” he said. “You can be very persuasive when you’re panicking.”

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  He gestured with one hand. A stripped-down diagnostic popped up, all hard numbers and no pretty colors.

  “I ran the echo,” he said. “Just like we specced it. One off-beat. One micro-pulse. Thirty milliseconds, tuned exactly to the anomaly’s existing envelope. Clean contraction, clean release. Zero corridor compression, zero field backlash, zero anomalous turbulence. Look.”

  The graphs bore him out. Our drive mast’s magnetic field had done a tiny, neat hiccup in perfect sync with one of the anomaly’s off-beats. The corridor tube hadn’t so much as flickered.

  Then, a fraction of a second later, the anomaly’s rhythm had… changed. Just a hair. One of its next pulses had shifted phase by a few degrees. Then shifted back.

  “That’s… a response?” I said.

  “That’s a response,” he said, grinning. “We tickled the dragon and it wiggled. Congratulations, kid. You’re officially the co-author of first contact etiquette.”

  My heart rate, which had spiked into “this is how cardiac events happen,” started to come back down.

  “Next time,” I said carefully, “you tell me before you cut your own audio.”

  “Next time,” he said, “you don’t give me that look when I bring up good ideas and I won’t need to.”

  The ship hummed under us, steady as ever. The knot of light in the display settled back into its now-familiar breathing.

  “Any fallout?” I asked.

  “None so far,” he said. “No new spikes in radiation, no weirdness in the corridor walls. The only anomaly is the anomaly’s phase wiggle, which is exactly what we wanted. I’m going to watch its off-beats for the next six hours, see if it tries to… I don’t know, harmonize.”

  “You still filed it as a test, right?” I said. “Because if anything does go weird, I want MIC to see a nice clear line labeled ‘this is where we started poking the god-engine.’”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mom. Everything is logged. We are officially deviants, but we are documented deviants.”

  He closed the narrow diagnostic view, expanding the overall tactical display again. Venus swam ahead of us, fat and opaque. The ring halo glittered faintly around it in the side panel, the debris cloud currently marked in soothing greens and yellows.

  “See?” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  The universe waited a beat, politely, then decided to disagree.

  ?

  It started as a cough in the magnetometer.

  I was halfway through a nutrient bar that tasted like beige sadness when a low-priority chime kicked up in my HUD. One of the telemetry panes along the bottom edge flipped from green to amber.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Frankie’s attention snapped there before I’d even focused.

  “Huh,” he said.

  A little cluster of numbers under VENUS: LOCAL FIELD VARIANCE started jittering. The background magnetic field, which had been a nice, boring, gently sloping line, picked up a tiny kink.

  “Solar burp?” I asked.

  “Checking,” he said. A side graph popped up, showing the sun’s own hiss and rumble. “Nope. Stellar environment’s steady. This is local.”

  “Local how?”

  “In the ‘Venus is getting opinionated’ sense,” he said.

  The kink grew.

  Alongside it, another panel went from green to amber: DUST DENSITY (EXO-RING SECTOR). A number that had been slowly inching downward for days abruptly twitched up.

  “You’re seeing this, right?” I said.

  “I am incapable of not seeing this,” he said tightly.

  The debris ring visualization we’d looked at earlier blinked back into existence, uninvited. The diffuse halo around the planet brightened as its density scale recalibrated.

  “This is probably fine,” he said.

  “Frankie.”

  “I said ‘probably,’” he said. “Give me a second.”

  He dove into the data. I watched, useless, as half a dozen little “in progress” spinners spun.

  The dust density number twitched again. Then again. The kink in the magnetic field graph became less a kink and more a bend.

  “Hey, kid,” Frankie said, very calmly. “Remember how I said nothing reacted to the echo?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to amend that,” he said. “I think something reacted to the echo.”

  The ring halo on the holo display changed color. Greens bled into yellow. Yellow smeared into orange. Icons started popping up: old satellites, marked as known tracked objects. Their orbits flickered as new vectors were calculated.

  “What is it doing?” I asked.

  “Good question,” he said. “Looks like…”

  The halo thickened.

  Not slowly. Not over days or hours. Over seconds.

  Debris vectors that should have been nearly parallel began to skew. Bits of rock on long, lazy orbits jerked, infinitesimally at first, then more. The overall shape of the ring compressed, like somebody was tightening a belt.

  “My charge density monitors are losing their minds,” Frankie muttered. “This is not a natural redistribution. This is a shove.”

  He threw up another pane: CHARGED PARTICULATE FLUX. Where there had been a nice gaussian blob, a spike grew. Then, disturbingly fast, it budded off into a separate peak.

  “It’s bunching,” he said. “The ring’s dust and trash are picking up charge and getting herded into a band. That band is tightening. A lot.”

  “By what?” I asked.

  “The nice courteous anomaly that we just tapped on the shoulder,” he said. “Field lines are reconfiguring. Gravity harmonics are shifting. This is… coordinated. Xander, this is a system-scale act.”

  Any pretense of calm I’d been holding onto started to fray.

  “Do we need to move?” I asked. “Are we in the way?”

  He checked our trajectory against the tightening band. Numbers cascaded. A little green dot—us—sat just off the ring plane.

  “We’re clear of the main plane,” he said. “But if it throws off a spray the wrong way—”

  The alarm hierarchy decided we’d had enough polite hints. A deeper chime rolled through the bridge.

  ALERT: EXTERNAL MASS REDISTRIBUTION EVENT DETECTED.

  RECOMMENDED: MONITOR. PREPARE COURSE ADJUSTMENTS.

  “Oh, good,” Frankie said. “The ship agrees we’re screwed.”

  “Options,” I said.

  “Short version?” he said. “We hold where we are. Any vector change right now risks crossing the plane of maximum chaos. Best seat in the house is slightly off to the side, hands in our lap, not waving back.”

  “I thought we liked being polite,” I said.

  “I think we’ve hit the part of etiquette where you shut up and let the host do whatever horrifying thing they’re about to do,” he said.

  We watched.

  The ring’s diffuse halo collapsed.

  There was no other word for it. What had been a gentle glow turned into a razor-thin band. Dust and rocks and orphaned hardware clustered so fast the sim had trouble updating in real time. The band rotated around the planet, tightening like a noose.

  “Is it… making a new ring?” I asked.

  “It’s making something,” he said. “The mass distribution down there is going—”

  He didn’t finish.

  Because that was when the wave hit.

  ?

  It started with a flicker at the edge of the displays. An edge effect, like a glitch, except my inner ear felt it too.

  Then the hull sang.

  THA-GONG!!!!!!!!!

  Every centimeter of bolted, laminated, MIC-certified engineering around us picked up the note at once—a low, impossibly pure tone that rolled through Mercy’s bones and into mine. It wasn’t sound in the normal sense; there was no air up here to carry it. The structure just decided to vibrate and took the rest of us along for the ride.

  For a second the whole ship was one enormous, shimmering gong. The initial hit faded, but my skull kept replaying it, like my brain had cached the waveform and refused to let it go. The note sat right at the edge of hearing and touch, too low to be a noise, too sharp to be background.

  Uncomfortable didn’t cover it. This was the opposite of comfort—an inside-out wrongness, like my bones were being very gently filed to a better corporate standard. It didn’t hurt; pain would’ve been a mercy. Pain would’ve made sense. This was just pure, clean, clinical wrong, and it made me wish something as simple as “that was painful” was on the menu.

  My teeth vibrated. The chair under me hummed. My Rift HUD flickered for a heartbeat, artifacts crawling along the edges before stabilizing.

  “What was that?” I shouted, though shouting made no difference.

  Frankie’s holo had gone thin and ghostly, resolution dropping as his processes rerouted to keep up with the sensor flood.

  “That,” he said through the echo, “was a charged dust front hitting our magnetosphere and hull at about eight hundred kilometers a second.”

  He sounded impressed and terrified in equal measure.

  On the external cams, the stars warped.

  It wasn’t real, of course—the cameras were fine—but the cloud of charged particles that had just blasted past us refracted light like frosted glass. One moment the field ahead was clear; the next it was suffused with a faint, luminous fog streaking past in a coherent sheet.

  Frankie grabbed the waveform from our hull sensors and slapped it into the audio channel. The note we’d felt became something we could hear: a deep, cathedral-bell strike, resonant and clean, decaying into a wash of higher harmonics.

  The visualized version looked like a tall, narrow spike followed by a forest of smaller echoes.

  “Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, that’s… beautiful.”

  “Beautiful is not the word I’d use,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Look,” he insisted.

  He overlaid the waveform on the ring visualization.

  The moment the spike hit us, the ring band snapped.

  Or rather: it segmented. The tight belt that had been circling Venus like a hula hoop pinched in a few key nodes. Those nodes brightened, density skyrocketing as matter clumped. Between them, gaps opened.

  “Moon seeds,” he said. “It’s making moon seeds. The wave was the… the strike. The ring collapsed, bunched, and then—bam. It played billiards with orbital debris.”

  “On purpose?” I asked.

  “Nothing about that was accidental,” he said. His holo face had gone pale, which was impressive considering it was a light construct. “This was coordinated. That dust front was shaped.”

  Another, softer tremor ran through the deck as the trailing edge of the wave washed over us. Smaller grains peppered the field, leaving a faint static hiss in our sensors.

  The main note, though, that first strike… that lingered.

  Instrumentation panels along the side wall had grabbed its profile and were now dutifully logging it: FREQUENCY, AMPLITUDE, DURATION. Someone in an MIC analysis office was going to have a religious experience when this hit their desk.

  I realized my hands were locked in a death grip on the edge of the console. I forced them to unclench.

  “Status,” I said. My voice came out hoarse.

  “Structural integrity nominal,” Frankie said. “We were off-axis enough to only catch the fringe. No major charge buildup, no micrometeorite impacts above normal background. Our shields weren’t even fully up and we’re fine.”

  He hesitated.

  “The ring, though,” he added, “is not fine.”

  We zoomed in.

  What had been one fuzzy halo was now a handful of bright knots, each with a tail of debris spreading behind it. New orbital elements flashed as the system tried to converge on their paths.

  “Those are going to coalesce,” Frankie said quietly. “Give it a few orbits. You’re watching live moon birth, kid.”

  I swallowed.

  “So,” I said. “We just made a sound, and then it made a sound, and now Venus is manufacturing accessories.”

  “I admit the timing is suggestive,” he said. “But technically we don’t know that our echo triggered this. Correlation is not causation. It could be coincidence. It could’ve been planning that move for centuries and we just happened to be here to see it.”

  He paused.

  “Or,” he said, “we poked it and it decided to show off.”

  I stared at the newborn clumps of orbiting rubble.

  “Frankie,” I said, very quietly, “did we break something?”

  He started to say no.

  Stopped.

  Then, for the first time since I’d known him, he actually seemed to think about it before answering.

  “Maybe we… accelerated something,” he said. “Maybe this was going to happen regardless. Maybe we just… synced up with its timetable.”

  “That sounds like ‘we broke something’ with extra steps,” I said.

  Before he could reply, another panel on the instrumentation wall pinged.

  A small corner of my HUD, previously very boring, decided it wanted attention. A number that had lived there for days without changing more than the third decimal place flipped to amber.

  Venus’s rotation period was blinking.

  ROTATION: 243.02 EARTH DAYS (RETROGRADE)

  → 243.00 → 242.97 → 242.91…

  One of the digits started stuttering like it couldn’t decide which way to fall.

  The blinking got agitated.

  242.81 → 242.52 → 242.11 → 241.5…

  All the moisture in my mouth vanished.

  “Frankie,” I said carefully, as if the wrong word might tip the car off the cliff, “what does that mean?”

  “I… uh…”

  His holo actually shrank back a little, shoulders hunching.

  “…oopsie,” he squeaked.

  “OOPSIE?” My voice went up an octave I did not approve of. “What the hell is happening right now?”

  The blinking got angry.

  213.4 → 207.9 → 203.1…

  Frankie’s expression folded in on itself, regret blooming across his face.

  “I… think… I might have… maybe… broke it,” he said.

  On the display, the big, cloud-wrapped planet ahead of us kept turning.

  And turning.

  And, very obviously, changing its mind about how.