Half the crew of Olbers Deep is dead. The other half is gone. The survivors who came off on the relief hauler will not say a word, and the refining line that should have stopped the week people started dying never so much as stuttered.

Amsa crewed that rock once, ten years ago, second rotation, young enough to think a clean diagnostic meant a safe one. Half her crew came off it breathing because she fixed the systems fast enough. The other half did not, and the rock kept the difference. She has not said its name out loud since.

She goes back for the money. It is the line she has worn so long it stopped chafing.

It takes her two days to read the wrongness in the metal and one cold morning to understand it. Ten years ago a man whose name she never got clean paid her rate and a half to make a refining stage tolerant of a feed that ran outside its spec. The rate was good, and what the feed was is not a question a mechanic gets paid to ask, so she did not ask it. She fixed the stage. It held. It has been running every hour since, and the etched key to its calibration has ridden in the lining of her coat the whole time.

She built the thing that is killing them. The operators who could mind it blind are the ones on the missing list, taken off the floor the day they had minded it long enough to ask what it was for.

Kvor carries the jurisdiction from the wrong side of a wall. Amsa reads the machine. A Mars closure team docks in thirty-one hours, and the moment it does, the rock and its records and everyone still able to say what happened here belong to the people who own it.

Olbers Deep — Book 6 of the Amsa Logs. Releases December 4, 2026.

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