THE VOID GAUGE

The wrench felt heavier than it should have, which meant Jack Morrison's right mechanical arm was drifting out of calibration again. He had been telling Commander Patel about the drift for three weeks. Patel had nodded, made a note on his tablet, and said, "I'll put it on the maintenance queue." The maintenance queue on the Atlas was a place where things went to be acknowledged and forgotten, which is to say, it was exactly as efficient as the rest of the ship's management system: adequate, incompetent, and held together by the stubbornness of people like Jack who had been keeping this rust bucket airborne for twenty-five years.

He stood in the corridor outside the observatory, looking at the door. The observatory was at the far end of the Atlas—a cramped room no bigger than a shipping container, packed with instruments that had been more relevant when the asteroid belt was being actively mapped rather than strip-mined into oblivion. The Void G