THE LONG DARK BENEATH

Dr. Lena Voss stared at the navigation array and watched the numbers rearrange themselves into a lie she had written.

The Aurora Station hung in the void between Proxima and the Centauri corridor, a spinning titanium skeleton holding twelve thousand sleepers in cryo-stasis. It was the largest colony ship ever built, a city of corridors and cryo-bays and hydroponic gardens that stretched across three kilometers of hull plating. Lena was the station's senior navigator, the only human who understood the full geometry of their journey. She had spent seven years computing the precise trajectories that kept them alive, and before that, seven more years at the Academy learning the mathematics of orbital mechanics. She had been twenty-six when she accepted the navigator's commission. She was thirty-three now, and she had not seen a real sky since she left Mars orbit.

Seven years of stars. Seven years of numbers. Seven years, and she had never notic