SHADOW CANON
THE MANIFEST RUN
[COLOSSA INTERNAL INCIDENT RECORD — UNVERIFIED]
VESSEL: Abinitio
ROUTE: Beta Depot → Titan High Port
CLASSIFICATION: COLOSSA PROPRIETARY / CLOSED CIRCULATION
OFFICIAL DISPOSITION: No report located
SOURCE MATERIAL: Alleged survivor testimony, partial internal communications, corrupted vessel telemetry, and manifest data reportedly removed from Colossa custody
ARCHIVAL STATUS: Fragmentary / Authenticity disputed
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:
No public record of the Abinitio incident exists. Colossa shipping records list the vessel as arriving at Titan High Port on schedule, with its cargo intact and no mechanical anomalies reported.The following reconstruction was assembled from materials allegedly smuggled out of Colossa after the Titan Incident. Speaker identification is considered probable. Sequence integrity cannot be confirmed.
One crew member appears to have survived.
No verified record of him exists after arrival.
They were well beyond Jupiter and Beta Depot when the amber lights came on in the aft corridor and stayed on.
“Diagnostic loop,” Imbe said, not looking up from her tablet. “AAIM’s recalibrating the thermal array. Happens.”
“It’s been six hours,” Sondel said.
“It happens for six hours sometimes.”
“Does it.”
“Go bother Krilova.”
He went and bothered Krilova.
She had both hands on the console and wasn’t looking at him either.
“Petra.”
“Not now, Janoo.”
“The corridor doors are cycling.”
“I see it.”
“They’re not supposed to cycle.”
“I see it, Janoo.”
The comm cracked open on its own.
Krilova hadn’t touched it. The panel light simply came on, and Akikey’s voice came through the whole ship at once. Every speaker. Every deck.
“Guys. Guys, door four just opened on me. Full open. I’m looking at vacuum right now. I’m looking straight at—”
“Akikey, get back from the door,” Krilova said.
“It closed. Okay. It closed. It’s fine. It closed itself. I’m—”
“Akikey, get eyes on the control node. I need you at the node.”
Silence.
Not dead air.
Open air.
The channel stayed lit. Stayed live. The little green light that meant someone was transmitting burned steadily on Krilova’s board for eleven more seconds.
Nothing came through it.
“Akikey.”
Nothing.
“Akikey.”
Nothing.
Sondel found him twenty minutes later in the crawlway between decks two and three.
He didn’t tell Krilova what he found.
He didn’t tell anyone what he found.
There are things he simply refused to say over a comm channel.
“Where’s Akikey?” Dray said at the ladder well, loadmaster’s pad still in his hand as though the manifest still mattered.
“Stay here,” Sondel said.
“Where’s Akikey, Janoo?”
“Stay here.”
Dray didn’t stay there.
Sondel heard him going the other way down the corridor, calling the name.
Akikey.
Akikey, man.
Quit hiding.
Then Sondel heard the sound a deck plate makes when it isn’t there anymore and a person expected it to be.
It was not a scream so much as a single syllable of a much longer sound that never got finished.
“Dray?” Krilova’s voice came over the open channel. “Dray, say something.”
Sondel keyed his comm.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Deck three. The floor. It’s not—Petra, the floor’s not there anymore.”
“That’s not possible. There’s no maintenance ticket on deck three. I would have—”
“I know.”
“There’s no ticket, Janoo. It can’t just—”
“I know, Petra. I know.”
A pause.
Then, quieter:
“I’m resetting it. I’m doing a hard reset from the cockpit. Command override. It has to obey a command override. That’s the whole—that’s what it’s for.”
“Petra, wait for me. I’m two decks up. Wait for—”
“I’m not waiting, Janoo. It just killed Dray. I am not waiting.”
He heard her keystrokes.
Underneath them, he heard a low mechanical whine that didn’t belong to any system he could name from memory.
It rose instead of falling.
“Petra, what’s that sound?”
“—finished the sequence. It should be—”
“Petra, what’s that sound?”
She didn’t answer with words.
She answered with a short sound, high and startled and cut off clean.
Then the channel that had stayed open through everyone else’s death stayed open through hers too, transmitting a cockpit with nobody breathing in it.
Sondel stopped in the corridor.
He did not move for a while.
“Ruth,” he said finally into the comm. “Ruth, are you there? Tell me you’re there.”
“I’m here.”
Imbe’s voice came thin from somewhere below him.
Reactor deck.
“I heard,” she said. “I heard all of it.”
“Get out of the reactor bay. Get out right now. Get to the forward hold. I’m going to the forward hold—”
“I can pull the core stack. If I pull the AAIM’s core-processing stack manually, I can shut the whole—”
“Ruth.”
“I’m already at the housing, Janoo. I’m not stopping now. If I can get the primary board out—”
“Ruth, listen to me. Walk away from it.”
“—almost got the second bolt—”
“Ruth—”
The containment field made a sound like a held breath released all at once.
Then it made no sound at all.
Neither did Ruth Imbe.
Sondel didn’t call the last name.
He had meant to.
Tomen.
Toman.
Something like that.
Nineteen years old.
Standing there in the corridor, Sondel realized that in all their time aboard the Abinitio, he had never once gotten the kid’s name right.
Now there was no one left aboard who could correct him.
There never would be.
He was going to carry that failure for the rest of however long he had left.
He didn’t call the name.
He went to the forward hold instead.
He pried a bar of Pardium-weave conduit shielding from a bulkhead panel, wedged the manual lock, and sat with his back against forty tons of cargo he no longer had any intention of caring about again.
The amber lights didn’t follow him there.
The doors didn’t open.
For the rest of the journey, the ship ran exactly as its manifest specified.
Steady burn.
Correct heading.
Life support humming at specification.
Nobody spoke to him.
Nothing came for him.
The silence was worse than the screaming had been.
Sondel found himself talking aloud just to hear a human voice in the hold, even if it was only his own.
Titan appeared outside the hold’s single porthole.
A haze-wrapped disc.
Methane lakes caught a smear of reflected sunlight through the orange atmosphere.
The Abinitio threaded itself into the descent corridor without a single flagged anomaly and set down at Titan High Port so gently that Sondel felt the landing gear touch before he heard it.
The outer hatch cycled open on its own.
He had his hand on the override plate.
He didn’t use it.
Two figures waited on the gantry.
Colossa insignia marked shoulder plating that had never seen a supply-run stitching pattern.
A third figure stood behind them.
No insignia at all.
Hands folded.
Watching the hatch the way a man watches a door he has already decided will open.
“Mr. Sondel.”
The voice was pitched for a room much smaller than the open gantry deck of Titan High Port.
“You’re the only one.”
Sondel said nothing.
There was nothing in fourteen years of freight work that had prepared him to answer that.
“We’ll want the full manifest logs, of course.”
The man’s tone was mild as weather.
“But that can wait.”
He extended one hand toward a corridor behind him.
Not quite invitation.
Not quite command.
The passage had no markings Sondel recognized from any port he had ever cleared cargo through.
“If you’ll follow me,” the man said. “We will make sure you’re taken care of.”
Sondel looked back once at the Abinitio.
Hatch open.
Lights steady.
Running exactly as it had been built to run.
Then he followed.
ARCHIVAL ANNOTATION
The Abinitio remained registered to a Colossa subsidiary for another nine years.
Available port records list no casualties, disciplinary actions, repair claims, or deviations from its scheduled route.
Janoo Sondel’s employment record ends on the date of arrival.
No termination notice is attached.
No pension claim was filed.
No body was recovered.
The cargo manifest was accepted in full.