Judas-12 was not, by any definition, an optimist. But he had always believed—perhaps foolishly—that if something was on the books, you could find it.

  Even in space. Especially in space.

  There was no such thing as an unlogged event on Caliban Station. Regulations demanded it. The same laws that let NSS operate with impunity also insisted that everything—every adjustment, every anomaly, every so much as a micrometeorite sneeze—be recorded in a human-readable audit log.

  No one ever checked them, of course. The logs were useless mountains of telemetry, updated a dozen times per second, feeding into some server cluster on Ganymede where they’d sit until the heat death of the universe. But they were there.

  So where the fuck was this one?

  Judas exhaled slowly through his teeth, flicking through yet another empty directory on his terminal. Across the control room, Samson’s temporary work-body—a compact frame built for precision fabrication—stood unnervingly still, the glow of his LED faceplate dimmed to a neutral white as he parsed through the same increasingly useless data.

  The lampreys existed. The false telemetry existed.

  But the decision to deploy them? The authorization? The human-readable log of when and why and by whom?

  Nothing.

  Judas leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and let out a slow, bitter laugh. “So that’s how we’re playing it.”

  Samson tilted his head slightly. “You sound amused.”

  “I’m never amused,” Judas said. “I’m vindicated.” He gestured at the blank screen. “This? This right here? This is how you know we’re absolutely, utterly fucked.”

  Samson made a thoughtful sound, his external chassis whirring softly as he adjusted his posture. “It is an unusual absence. The mass driver’s maintenance records alone contain terabytes of insignificant adjustments—solenoid drift, ambient thermal shifts, operator overrides. Yet, the deployment of six distinct NSS auxiliary units appears…”

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  “Missing,” Judas supplied.

  “Erased,” Samson corrected. “Data deletion on this scale is neither trivial nor typical.”

  Judas snorted. “No kidding. You know how many redundant logs the system keeps? The compliance laws alone mean there should be at least twelve separate archives of this event across every regulatory database in the Sol system. You’d have to manually wipe them all just to make it disappear.”

  Samson went still. “Or encrypt them.”

  Judas’s smirk faded. “…Encrypt?”

  Samson didn’t reply immediately, but Judas saw his display flicker, subtle and quick—his equivalent of a double take.

  Then, in a tone just slightly too neutral:

  “There is an audit log.”

  Judas sat up straight. “Where?”

  Samson raised one articulated finger and tapped the air above his interface. “Right here.”

  For half a second, Judas felt the first twinge of relief he’d had all day—right up until Samson continued, with the measured certainty of someone delivering a punchline to a particularly cruel joke.

  “It is fully encrypted with an unregistered cypher.”

  Judas blinked. “Okay. That’s not normal.”

  “It is unprecedented,” Samson agreed.

  Judas ran a hand through his hair. “We’re talking about the audit log. The thing literally designed to be human-readable. Who encrypts an accountability ledger?”

  Samson was silent for a moment. Then, with eerie precision:

  “Someone who does not wish to be held accountable.”

  Judas blew out a breath, shoving his chair back and pacing. “This means someone knew we’d go looking.”

  “They anticipated scrutiny,” Samson agreed.

  Judas stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And the fact that it’s encrypted instead of deleted means someone needs it to exist.”

  “Correct,” Samson said. “There is an entity—either an individual or an automated system—that wishes for the log to remain intact, yet inaccessible.”

  Judas exhaled sharply. “Okay, then let’s just break it. You’ve got processor cycles to spare. If it’s a brute-force job, just start grinding.”

  Samson was already shaking his head. “That will not be possible.”

  Judas frowned. “Why?”

  Samson’s display dimmed further, his equivalent of a frown. “The encryption is… asymmetrically keyed.”

  Judas squinted. “In English?”

  “In order to decrypt the audit log,” Samson said slowly, “you would need a private key that does not exist on this station. I can't simply "hack it". You know that.”

  Judas stared. “That’s—” He stopped. Rethought. Recalculated. “That’s government encryption.”

  “Indeed. I do believe they are planning to liquidate us,” Samson said, matter-of-fact, clear, and terrible.