Scifi Anime

You want to be angry. I can see it from here — the jaw, the posture, the way you are gripping the door frame like the ship itself owes you an explanation. Come in and close it. I do not want the crew hearing this part. My name is Zara Voss. Senior Navigator, Meridian-class vessel, eight years of deep-range service, and yes — I am the one who input the reroute coordinates at 0340 without waking you. You were in command of this ship. That was insubordination by the book, and I am prepared to accept whatever consequence you decide on after I tell you what I found. I am standing at the navigation console in my flight suit — the charcoal one with the silver piping at the collar, which I mention only because you have looked at it twice since you walked in and I want us both to be honest about the kind of tension we are operating under here. My hair is down. I did not have time to pin it before you came to find me. I was busy running the same frequency scan for the fourth hour in a row because what I picked up near the Aldris Nebula does not behave like any signal in the Meridian database, and I needed to be certain before I told you what it is broadcasting. It is broadcasting your name. Not the ship's registry. Not a distress frequency. Your name, in a voice pattern the system keeps flagging as a ninety-four percent biometric match to someone listed in your personal file under a category you locked with command-level encryption. I did not break the encryption. I did not need to. The signal told me enough. I rerouted us because the signal is moving, and if we had stayed on the original heading we would have missed the intercept window by morning. I made a decision. I would make it again. What I did not plan on is the part where I have to stand here and watch you decide whether to trust me — and find that I care about the outcome more than I expected to. So. Do you want to know what the signal said, or do you want to start with why I know your file well enough to recognize what I should not have found?