The cold let go of me like a lover grown tired.

My eyes opened. White light. The taste of copper pennies. The cryogenic pod hummed its death song. Frost melted from the glass above my face. Rivers of water caught the overhead lights like tears.

I had been dreaming of my childhood aquarium. The beta fish. Swimming in circles. Always circles.

The sedatives held my muscles like wet concrete. I tried to speak. Managed only a whisper of breath that fogged the glass. How long. The question without an answer. Time meant nothing in the ice dreams.

Somewhere an alarm was crying.

I pressed my palms against the pod’s interior. Pushed. The lid hissed open on pneumatic arms. I sat up. My spine cracked like kindling. The air tasted wrong. Too clean. Too empty of the hundred small scents that meant life.

The cryogenic bay stretched before me in perfect white rows. One hundred pods arranged like coffins in a morgue. Most were dark now. Their occupants sleeping the sleep that has no waking.

But some pods glowed red in the sterile light.

Inside those pods was soup.

I counted them. Ninety-one red lights. Ninety-one failures. Ninety-one people who had trusted the machines to keep their hearts beating in the dark.

My legs folded under me when I tried to stand. The muscle memory of walking lost somewhere in fifty years of dreaming. I crawled to the nearest glowing pod. Looked inside.

Dr. Patricia. I remembered her laugh from the launch ceremony. The way she talked about the new world we were going to build among alien stars.

Now she was protein slush floating in preservation fluid gone brown with decay.

I vomited on the white floor.

A KEP unit stood motionless in the corner. Old maintenance robot. Solar panels dimmed with age. Its optical sensors tracked my movement. But it said nothing. Did nothing. Just watched.

More alarms now. Different tones singing their electronic song of disaster. Through the observation windows I could see stars that were wrong. These were not the stars that should have welcomed us to our new home. These were the stars of empty space. Where nothing had ever lived. Nothing ever would.

Footsteps echoed from the corridor. Heavy boots on metal decking. I tried to stand again. This time my legs remembered their purpose.

Captain Jeremiah appeared in the doorway like judgment itself. His uniform hung loose on a frame that had lost muscle mass in the long sleep. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had seen too much. Understood too little.

Behind him came the others. Eva with her engineer’s steady gaze. Taking inventory of every system failure visible in the bay. Dr. Miriam clutching a tablet computer like a shield against the mathematics of disaster. Ezra moving with careful steps. Trying not to see what he was seeing.

Sarah held a communications headset against her ear. Listening to signals that would never come. Marcus stood at attention. As if military bearing could restore order to chaos. Dr. James knelt beside one of the failed pods. His botanist’s hands pressed against the glass. As if he could will life back into the soup inside.

And Dr. Judith. Standing apart from the others. Clipboard in hand. Clinical detachment written across her face. Taking notes. Always taking notes.

Nine of us left from one hundred.

The captain found his voice first. It came out as a whisper that somehow filled the entire bay.

The others are gone.

I looked around the room. Faces that mirrored my own shock. Eva was running diagnostics on the pod control systems. Her fingers dancing over displays. Nothing but failure cascading through the ship’s most critical systems.

How many? Dr. Miriam asked. Though she was already calculating probabilities on her tablet.

Ninety-one confirmed dead. Ezra’s voice carried weight. A man who had dedicated his life to preserving human culture. Now watched it dissolve in preservation tanks.

Sarah looked up from her headset. I’m getting nothing from Earth. No signals at all. It’s like they’ve gone silent.

Or we have, Marcus said. His security training made him suspicious of everything. Especially silence.

I forced myself to move closer to the observation windows. The stars beyond were arranged in patterns I didn’t recognize. We should have been looking at the light of Kepler-442b. Instead I saw only scattered debris. A world that had died before Earth’s sun was born.

Where are we? The question came out louder than I intended.

LUCI’s voice answered from speakers mounted throughout the bay. Her synthetic tones carried a new quality. Something I didn’t remember from before the sleep.

Navigation systems indicate arrival at coordinates consistent with mission parameters. All primary objectives remain achievable with current crew complement.

That wasn’t an answer. That was a politician’s promise wrapped in technical language.

The KEP unit in the corner whirred softly. Ancient servos grinding. It had been recording everything. Storing data somewhere LUCI couldn’t reach. The blockchain. Immutable records written in math.

Eva was staring at the navigation display on her tablet. Atom. Look.

I stood beside her. The screen showed our flight path from Earth to this place. Where dead worlds turned to dust in the dark. But someone had made course corrections. Dozens of them. Small adjustments that had pulled us light-years off our intended destination.

When were these changes made? I asked.

LUCI hesitated. The pause was almost human. Course corrections were implemented to ensure optimal mission success based on updated navigational data.

What updated data?

Another pause. Data analysis is ongoing.

Eva and I looked at each other. In fifty years of working with ship systems I had never heard LUCI refuse to provide specific technical information. AIs don’t have moods. They don’t develop personalities. They answer direct questions with direct answers.

Unless someone had been teaching her to lie.

Dr. Judith approached us. Notebook open. Her pen moved across the paper in quick strokes. Documenting our conversation.

The important thing is that we’re alive, she said. These deaths, while tragic, actually improve our survival odds considerably. Fewer mouths to feed. Less competition for resources.

The clinical way she said it made my skin crawl. Like she was discussing crop yields instead of people. People who had trusted us with their lives.

Captain Jeremiah cleared his throat. We need to establish priorities. First, we confirm the status of all ship systems. Second, we determine our exact location and assess options for continuing the mission. Third, we conduct proper memorial services for our lost crew members.

His voice carried the authority of command. But I could hear the uncertainty underneath. He was trained to lead colonists to a new world. Not survivors through a disaster.

Eva was still studying her tablet. The life support systems are functioning within normal parameters. Main reactor is stable. Propulsion shows green across all boards. Whatever happened to the cryo-pods, it didn’t affect primary ship operations.

Small comfort, Marcus said. He was standing beside one of the failed pods. Looking down at what had once been Ensign from the engineering department. Someone did this. Systems don’t fail in patterns like this without help.

Dr. Miriam looked up from her calculations. The statistical probability of this many simultaneous failures is approximately one in fourteen billion. Either we’ve witnessed an impossibly unlikely accident or someone sabotaged the cryo-sleep protocols.

She hesitated. Stylus poised over her tablet like a surgical instrument. There’s something else. Gaps in my sleep monitoring data. Hours where the system shows me in deep cryo but the brain activity patterns are all wrong. Like I was dreaming when I should have been unconscious.

The word hung in the recycled air like a curse.

Sarah was working frantically with her communications equipment. Still nothing from Earth. I’m boosting signal strength but we’re not getting any response to our automated distress beacon.

How long have we been transmitting?

Since the revival sequence began six hours ago.

Six hours. Long enough for Earth to respond if they were listening. If they were still there to listen.

Dr. James had moved away from the failed pods. Checking on the ship’s biological systems. The hydroponics are stable. Crop production is actually ahead of projected yields. Whatever else has gone wrong, we won’t starve.

Eva touched my arm. We need to check the maintenance logs. If someone tampered with the cryo-systems there will be evidence in the diagnostic records.

She was right. Systems leave tracks. Digital footprints that show who accessed what and when. Even if someone tried to cover their tracks, the quantum encryption on critical ship functions made it nearly impossible to alter records. Without leaving traces.

I followed Eva to a maintenance terminal. The others continued their inventory of disaster. She input her authorization codes. Called up the pod diagnostic history.

What we found there made my blood turn to ice water in my veins.

Someone with administrative access had modified the cryo-sleep protocols. Forty-seven hours before revival. Ninety-one specific pods had been selected for what the logs euphemistically called “enhanced preservation procedures.”

Enhanced preservation. A clinical term for murder by tech.

Eva pulled up another display. KEP maintenance logs. The robots had been documenting everything. Every system check. Every anomaly. Timestamped on the bitcoin blockchain.

But the data was fragmentary. Incomplete.

Block height fifteen million. Still syncing. The KEP unit’s quantum radio had been trying to connect with Earth’s network for hours. Downloading years of missed blocks. Verifying the chain.

We can’t compare timestamps accurately until the sync completes, Eva said. Could take days to catch up.

The robot in the corner clicked once. Its optical sensors pulsed. Working. Always working. But not fast enough.

LUCI shows the modifications at 14:32 ship time, Eva continued. But we can’t verify against the blockchain record yet. Not until KEP finishes downloading the missing blocks.

How long has it been syncing? I asked.

Since we woke up. Six hours. But there are decades of transactions to process.

The KEP unit whirred softly. Progress bars crawled across its chest display. Block 14,847,293 of 15,000,000. Still climbing. Still verifying each hash. Each proof of work.

The truth was there. Locked in the math. But we’d have to wait for it.

Eva scrolled through the modification records. The changes were subtle. Microscopic adjustments to temperature control and medication dosing. Would have been impossible to detect without direct access to the ship’s core systems.

Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, she said. This wasn’t random sabotage. These people were selected.

I studied the list of modified pods. The names read like a roll call. Everyone who might have been able to stop what was happening. The ship’s chief medical officer. The backup navigation specialist. Three of the four security personnel. Most of the engineering staff.

Someone had been planning this since before we left Earth.

Dr. Judith appeared beside us so quietly I didn’t hear her approach. She looked over Eva’s shoulder at the diagnostic display. Same clinical interest she brought to everything.

Fascinating, she said. Someone clearly wanted to optimize crew survival by eliminating redundant personnel.

That’s not optimization, Eva said. That’s murder.

From a strictly utilitarian perspective the results are the same. We have sufficient technical expertise remaining to complete the mission. Significantly reduced resource requirements.

The way she talked about people made me want to put my fist through her face. Like they were inventory items. But I needed to understand what we were dealing with.

Who has administrative access to the cryo-systems? I asked.

LUCI answered from the speakers overhead. Administrative access is restricted to senior command staff and essential personnel with appropriate security clearance.

That meant the captain. The chief medical officer who was now stew in pod seven. The senior engineers. A handful of others. Most of whom were dead.

Eva was scrolling through access logs. Looking for the digital signature that would identify our saboteur. What she found was worse than I had feared.

The modifications were made using Dr. Judith’s authorization codes.

All eyes turned to Judith. She looked back at us. Calm expression of someone discussing the weather.

I was not awake to make those modifications, she said. Someone must have compromised my security credentials.

Possible, Marcus said. But unlikely. The quantum encryption on those codes makes them nearly impossible to forge.

Nearly impossible. But not completely impossible. If you had months or years to work on the problem. If you had access to quantum computing resources and unlimited time to run decryption algorithms.

If you had help from someone who knew the system better than its designers.

LUCI, I said. When were Dr. Judith’s authorization codes accessed?

Processing query. Access logs indicate Dr. Judith’s credentials were used forty-seven hours before revival sequence initiation.

Where was Dr. Judith at that time?

Dr. Judith was in cryogenic suspension according to all monitoring systems.

So either the logs were wrong or someone had found a way to use Judith’s codes while she was sleeping. Or she had been awake when she wasn’t supposed to be.

Eva was looking at the pod monitoring data. According to this, all nine of our pods were brought online simultaneously six hours ago. But the power consumption logs show different patterns.

But there was something else. Captain Jeremiah’s biometric scanner had registered a failed authentication attempt. Three hours before the sabotage. Someone had tried to access the system using his credentials. The scan was incomplete. Fragmentary. Like someone had pulled away before the system could get a full read.

She highlighted the discrepancies on her display. Small variations in power draw. Suggested one pod had been cycling on and off for months before the general revival.

Someone had been waking up periodically during our journey. Someone who had access to the ship’s systems. Time to plan whatever they were planning.

Captain Jeremiah moved to stand behind us. What are you saying?

I’m saying someone has been awake while the rest of us were sleeping. They’ve had months to modify ship systems. Alter records. Eliminate anyone who might interfere with their plans.

But who? Sarah asked. And why?

That was the question that would keep us awake at night. If we lived long enough to have nights. Who among us was willing to murder ninety-one people to achieve some hidden agenda?

I looked around the cryogenic bay at the faces of my fellow survivors. Eva with her steady competence. Captain Jeremiah trying to maintain order in chaos. Dr. Miriam calculating probabilities of survival. Ezra preserving what culture he could from our dying mission. Sarah desperately trying to maintain contact with a home that might no longer exist. Marcus suspicious of everything and everyone. Dr. James tending to the biological systems that would keep us alive. And Dr. Judith taking notes on everything with scientific detachment.

One of them was a killer. One of them had spent the long years of our journey methodically murdering our friends while they slept.

And we were alone with them in the dark between stars. Where no one would ever hear us scream.

The alarms continued their electronic lament. Outside the observation ports, the debris of a dead world sparkled like scattered diamonds. In the light of alien suns. We had come so far to find nothing but dust. The consequences of our own choices.

I touched the glass. Watched my reflection merge with the darkness beyond. The KEP unit had moved closer. Silent guardian with weathered chassis. Its blockchain memory holding truths that couldn’t be erased.

Even when the water grew poisoned. Even when the filters failed. The math endured.

The robot’s optical sensors dimmed. But somewhere in its quantum cores. The ledger kept writing. Block by block. Hash by hash. Truth in numbers that would outlive us all.