The Form for Saving the Galaxy

CHAPTER 1

The crackle of the ancient ventilation system drowned out every other noise in the Interstellar Logistics Sector. Yet, Arthur Perron heard it clearly, just as he sensed the countless micro-fractures in the hull of Zeus’s Thunder. The ship wasn't merely old—it suffered from chronic fatigue, much like a retiree still trying to impress the room with fabricated war stories.

Arthur sat at his workstation, surrounded by vibrating holographic screens that cast a sickly bluish glow across his gaunt face. Each display was a portal to another endless spreadsheet, a new form, or a crisis that no one from the A-Team on the bridge would ever even notice.

In the eye of this digital tornado, his holographic desk overflowed with data streams. "Form 2847-B," demanding the expedited transit of forty-seven tons of synthetic toilet paper to Sector Gamma, blinked with a sense of urgency. The fate of the galaxy seemed to hinge on it. Right beside it, a high-priority dispute between the warehouse and Chef Gordon regarding "misallocated" vats of protein paste was unfolding like a pixelated soap opera. Dozens of improperly filled inventory declarations, each violating at least three separate protocols, fueled the chef's raging fury.

Arthur took a sip of his lukewarm nutritional slurry, its bitter aftertaste barely registering beneath his layered stress. The viscous liquid slid down his throat as he tried to recall a two-decade-old subprotocol that covered this exact operational inefficiency. If only everything could be... streamlined. His jaw clenched—a familiar tension that tightened with every new, unscheduled alert flashing in his peripheral vision.

Arthur’s office wasn't a sanctuary. It was the eye of a perpetual storm.

A few feet away, behind a mountain of dog-eared maintenance manuals, Jennifer Choi muttered curses at her terminal. Her fingers darted across the keyboard with frenetic speed as she battled an invisible enemy.

"An override without a Section 7 authorization code?" Her voice was raspy, heavy with disbelief and sheer rage. She leaned closer to the screen, as if proximity could somehow alter the absurdity before her. "The A-Team just shut down an entire auxiliary sensor array for their 'urgent' navigation diagnostic! Who the hell signed off on this?"

She slammed her palm against the monitor's bezel. The sharp crack was swallowed by the hum of failing hardware.

"No one! Of course it was no one!" Jen jerked back, dropping her arms to her sides and balling her hands into fists. If she had access to their override codes, she would have locked them out until kingdom come. The cascading sensor failure scattered crimson warnings across her screen, each one fueling her furious outbursts.

"If one more subsystem crashes because of them," she announced to no one in particular, "I am sabotaging the coffee machine on the bridge."

From the adjacent cramped cubicle, maintained with monastic discipline, came the rhythmic tapping of Marcus "Mark" Johnson’s antique calculator. He was a financial controller obsessed with the bottom line—the galactic economy limped along purely by the grace of his personal vigilance. His grayish eyes, magnified behind thick lenses, remained glued to the digits on the tiny LCD display.

Two hundred and forty-three credits for a "team synergy" event at the bar. Mark’s fingers flew over the keys with surgical precision. While we slurp synthetic sludge, they're downing top-shelf liquor.

A new, deeply passive-aggressive email was already brewing in his outbox, targeting the A-Team’s lavish recreational budget. The subject line, "Unauthorized Expenditures Exceeding Galactic Standard 3.4," promised an epic showdown—one Marcus fully intended to savor.

"Mark, are you going to sign off on my requisition for new seals?" Jen called out without turning around.

"Depends. What's the ROI? How much are they?"

"Eighteen credits."

"I'll think about it."

"For God's sake... they're just seals, Mark!"

"And I am a financial controller, Jen." He didn't even look up. "Every single cent is a liability to our bottom line."

Dr. Selena Rodriguez was busy trying to pitch the benefits of a "Synergistic Communication Seminar" to a cluster of aggressively uninterested maintenance droids. She stood before them with her hands on her hips, her voice radiating that forced, upbeat cheerfulness unique to corporate training sessions.

"You see, fellow droids, when we communicate effectively, we..." She glanced down at her tablet, then back up at the motionless machines. "...we cultivate an ecosystem of mutual trust and support."

The droids, functioning as stoic metal cylinders, responded only with the quiet, continuous hum of their servomotors—the ultimate manifestation of apathy.

"I can see you have questions. Excellent!" Selena beamed at the void. If the droids don't show engagement metrics, administration will just assume my delivery lacks synergy again. Maybe I need to leverage more PowerPoint slides.

"Let’s kick things off with an active listening exercise."

One of the droids swiveled its head a full one hundred and eighty degrees and mechanically rolled away. Through the thin bulkhead separating the logistics sector from the galley, Chef Gordon’s booming voice echoed. He was cursing with such profound passion, it sounded as though the very survival of the galaxy depended on his every word.

"Do you imbeciles not grasp Article 14, Subsection 3 of the Galactic Culinary Purity Act?!" His voice, powerful enough to rattle the ship's steel hull plates, crashed against the wall. "These synthetic vegetables lack a chain-of-custody paper trail! No one is touching the salad until I find out exactly which black hole they were excavated from!"

A muffled thud followed—likely a storage container violently introduced to the floor.

"And don't quote 'standard certification' at me! I am the standard here! Me!"

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Kevin Bright, a junior officer burdened with terminal enthusiasm, was making the rounds through the chaos, handing out glossy pamphlets.

"Please, take one! It’s 'Workplace Safety Week'!" He grinned from ear to ear, his eyes sparkling with a genuine, albeit deeply naive, zeal. "Everyone needs to be up to speed on the protocols! Did you know that seventy-two percent of onboard accidents could be mitigated with proactive readiness?"

"Kevin, honey," Jen glanced up for a fraction of a second, "did you know that ninety percent of us don't have the bandwidth to read fliers?"

"But this is mission-critical!" Kevin waved the pamphlet. "Look, there's a whole section here on the optimized storage of volatile chemical assets..."

"Fascinating. Leave it by the door."

Kevin’s unshakable positivity stood in stark contrast to the chronic understaffing and the ship’s heavily depreciated state. Almost no one took the pamphlets. He would just leave them on consoles, chairs, and next to the coffee machines, gather them all up at the end of his shift, and redistribute them the next day with the exact same fervor.

Suddenly, the tiny personal quantum-comm icon blinked in the bottom corner of Arthur's primary screen. Lydia. His heart skipped a beat. It always did. Her image materialized—pixelated by signal latency, but the profound exhaustion in her eyes was unmistakable.

"Hi, Arthur."

"Hey, sweetheart. What's wrong?"

"Leo is struggling with his algebra." Lydia shifted, revealing a glimpse of their apartment behind her—small, sterile, and bathed in the cold fluorescent glare of Station Helios-9. "It’s almost impossible for him to focus in zero gravity. Yesterday he let go of his pencil and it just... drifted off somewhere. We had to spend twenty minutes looking for it."

Arthur managed a faint smile despite it all.

"And Maya?"

"Maya..." Lydia sighed, the pixels dancing around her face. "She just wants you here. She asks me every night when you’re coming back. Yesterday she told me she only remembers your photos, not your actual face."

Arthur’s stomach tied into a tight knot. He swallowed hard, trying to clear the lingering lump of protein paste from his throat.

"I understand."

"No, you don't." Lydia’s voice held no accusation; there was only a bottomless, irreversible weariness. "We need you here, Arthur. Not on a screen. Here."

"I know, Lyd. I know." He glanced sideways at the relentlessly blinking Form 2847-B. Forty-seven tons of toilet paper. "Soon. I promise. I’ll put in for PTO the second we wrap up..."

"I know, I know. This transit." She offered a sad, fragile smile. "There's always a transit."

"I miss you guys. So much."

His words came out raspy, swallowed by the drone of the ventilation system. Lydia’s face vanished, abandoning him to a dense, suffocating emptiness that seemed to stretch the artificial gravity like a web of raw nerves. He had lied about the PTO again. They didn't understand. They couldn't.

Arthur returned to his spreadsheets, his hands moving slower now. Every keystroke demanded a conscious physical effort. Barely a few seconds later, a short comms pulse from Admiral Thornton’s team pierced through the network static. The admiral’s voice, smooth and dripping with authority, filled the space:

"...This critical strategic objective in the Cygnus Nebula is our top priority. Transmit comprehensive operational readiness reports by the end of the cycle."

While the admiral pontificated about distant "high-level deliverables," an intrusive crimson warning began to flash on Arthur's center screen: Critical component degradation detected in hyperdrive coolant subsystem.

"Admiral, sir, we're registering a warning on the hyperdrive coolant," one of the bridge officers reported, his voice bleeding through the system like a distant echo.

"Routine maintenance, Lieutenant. Maintain focus on Cygnus."

Thornton’s tone left zero room for debate. The channel closed with a sharp pop of static.

Arthur let out a breath—deep and utterly drained. His sigh dissolved into the groaning of the old ship. High Command only ever heard exactly what they wanted to hear. The red alert kept flashing—hypnotic, insistent, and entirely ignored.

He turned back to his forms, to the toilet paper and the protein paste—to the endless cycle of maintaining order within a chaos no one else ever noticed. Zeus’s Thunder creaked and groaned all around him—neglected from the top down, held together solely on the backs of the unseen workforce toiling in the shadows.

From the galley, Chef Gordon was still swearing. In his cubicle, Mark kept tapping on his calculator. Jen muttered curses. Selena was busy explaining "empathetic responsiveness" to the droids. Kevin handed out his pamphlets.

And the red warning flashed.

And flashed.

And flashed.

The deep, constant rumble of Zeus's Thunder seeped into Arthur’s bones, woven into the very fabric of his being, much like his own pulse. This antique machine, assembled centuries ago and kept alive through endless patches and shrewd engineering workarounds, breathed in unison with him. Before him, on the faded and scratched desktop, several holographic forms flickered in pale blue light, overlapping like the geological strata of lost time.

He tracked the flow of nutrient gel destined for the remote Vulcan’s Forge outpost—nineteen standard units of blackberry flavor, thirteen of banana, and eighteen of hydroponic mushroom protein. Each field demanded his complete and undivided attention. One mistake, and the garrison would receive a double dose of banana while others starved. Somebody has to know who eats what. His fingers glided across the interface. Nineteen, thirteen, eighteen. The numbers aligned in perfect symmetry.

Suddenly, the ship's hum was slashed by a sharp, piercing chime. A ship-wide announcement. Arthur flinched involuntarily. Usually, this meant another "mandatory evacuation drill" or someone’s "misplaced status icon" that had to be hunted down by all personnel Level Four and below. This time, however, the tone was different. Admiral Thornton’s voice, typically dry and commanding, now rang with an unusual, pride-swelling enthusiasm.

"Attention, crew of Zeus's Thunder!" the voice boomed, echoing in the low-ceilinged expanse of the office. "Tonight, I have the distinct honor of announcing a historic event! We are welcoming our esteemed diplomatic delegation from Andromeda for an unforgettable dinner that will cement our intergalactic relations."

Arthur sighed and let his hand rest on the control panel. Oh, gods, not this. Diplomatic dinners. They always ended in disaster. Someone always failed to check the guests’ allergies, time zones, or their biological compatibility with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.

As the Admiral continued singing the praises of this "new strategic cooperation," several peripheral screens began to blink. News feeds, protocol bulletins, menu details. The Admiral, clearly unable to contain himself, added:

"And to properly celebrate this momentous occasion, our culinary team has prepared a menu you will not forget! We shall feast on a rare delicacy—Proxima Crystal Shrimp from the ice moons! These creatures, my dear crew, are renowned for their divine taste and exquisite aroma!"

The words lodged in Arthur’s throat like a frozen protein block.

Proxima Crystal Shrimp.

Everything ground to a halt. The holographic displays, the ship's rumble, the air in his chest. Instantly, his mind—that labyrinth of procedural data and dusty regulations—pulled the exact archive to the forefront: "Storage Protocol for Proximan Delicacies, Form 734-Alpha." The name and number flashed in his consciousness with the blinding glare of an emergency alarm.

His breath hitched.

Arthur’s fingers, sluggish with fatigue just seconds ago, now darted across the interface. He cracked open the ship's inventory repository and summoned the "specialty food assets" section, simultaneously running a query through the latest incoming cargo manifests. Data cascaded before him in a waterfall of spreadsheets, digits, and access codes.

It all boiled down to a few lines.

His heart accelerated, each beat pounding in his temples. Invalid data. Storage conditions: "Standard Refrigeration, Compartment Beta-7."

Standard Refrigeration.

The words spun in his head. The Crystal Shrimp from Proxima’s ice moons required a highly specific environment—minus one hundred and fifty degrees Celsius and near-vacuum pressure. Any deviation from these parameters did not just degrade their flavor profile. It triggered an irreversible biochemical chain reaction, mutating them from a delicacy into a lethal neurotoxin. Form 734-Alpha detailed the process with a chilling administrative clarity that now surfaced before him.

No, it was impossible for them to have made a logistical error of this magnitude.

Yet here were the facts—in black and white across the digital matrix of the ship's logs. An improperly filed form, a breached protocol. Someone, somewhere, had checked the wrong box. Or simply bypassed it in the name of operational efficiency to end their shift faster.

Wasting no time, Arthur began drafting a "Level 3 Critical Logistics Anomaly Report." His hands trembled slightly as he compiled the evidence. He attached scanned copies of the faulty manifest, the blatantly ignored Form 734-Alpha, and even thermal sensor readouts from Compartment Beta-7 showing a stable temperature of plus four degrees Celsius. Every bit of information was a damning indictment.

He routed the report to the Admiral’s office, to Chief Procurement, and to the Culinary Oversight Committee—every viable channel the system allowed him to access.

Time dilated. The seconds stretched out like hours. He waited. Every muscle in his body was coiled tight, his palms balled into fists. A vivid scenario played out in his mind's eye: the diplomatic dinner, Admiral Thornton with his chest puffed out in pride, the Andromedan delegation savoring the "delicacy"... And then—convulsions, sheer panic, an intergalactic incident. Perhaps even a full-scale war.

Please read it. Just read it.

First came the auto-reply—a standard receipt confirmation. A few agonizing moments later, a priority status window popped up in the corner of his screen. A manual response from a junior bridge adjutant.

Arthur opened the message, holding his breath.

"Senior Coordinator Perron," the text began in a cold, patronizing tone. "Your attention to detail is noted. However, this is a diplomatic function, not a supply chain audit. Admiral Thornton assures us that all 'minor logistical details' have been handled. Return to your routine duties."

(This is an auto-generated message. Please do not reply.)

A bitter taste flooded his mouth. Minor logistical details. This was not just a dismissal; it was a public display of contempt for decades of accrued expertise. His jaw clenched, his teeth grinding together. Once again, his warning had sunk into the bureaucratic abyss.

Slowly, agonizingly, he began closing the open windows one by one. The alerts, the red codes, the incriminating evidence—everything vanished back into the digital wasteland. The potential catastrophe looming over the ship had been classified as "bureaucratic pedantry."

A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. His shoulders slumped under the weight of an invisible burden.

He returned to the spreadsheets, to the next shipment of raspberry-flavored nutrient gel, as the rumble of the Thunder enveloped him once more. Nineteen units of raspberry. Thirteen of strawberry. Eighteen of vanilla. The numbers arranged themselves in rows—perfect and utterly meaningless.

Some battles are not worth fighting.

The holographic list of fruit flavorings blurred before his eyes.

Because nobody listens. The A-Team only hears what suits their agenda, until it's too late.

And then? Then they would come to him. They'd demand to know why he had not reacted. Why he had not raised a red flag in time.

He always warned them.

It was just that no one ever listened.

CHAPTER 2

The blade of the chef’s knife, forged from a titanium-molybdenum alloy, caught the light of the fluorescent bulbs and reflected their perfect symmetry. Chef Victor Gordon held it with ease—his fingers knew the balance of the steel even after decades of work. His eyes, however, were locked not on the blade, but on the monitor above the main prep station.

The Admiral’s dining hall unfolded before him like a living canvas—a gilded cage that radiated opulence. The polished surfaces of the synthetic-wood tables softly reflected the glow of delicate chandeliers, casting warm highlights onto the immaculate uniforms of the A-Team and the elegant, sleek garments of the Andromedan delegation. Every table was adorned with holographic ice sculptures depicting galactic symbols, shifting slowly in sync with a gentle, barely audible melody.

Towering at the center of this spectacle was Admiral Reginald Thornton. His flawless dress uniform, embroidered with gold thread, caught and scattered the light with his every movement. His voice, amplified by hidden speakers, filled the room with solemnity:

"To the peace between our worlds! To the synergy that will turn the stars into our shared homes!" thundered Thornton, stretching his lips into a wide, almost theatrical smile.

He raised a crystal glass filled with a ruby-red liquid high into the air. In his other hand, he held a small, translucent Proxima Crystal Shrimp—a delicacy brought from the far reaches of Andromeda, which he intended to consume as a token of intergalactic goodwill.

Perfect.

Gordon watched as the Admiral displayed the shrimp to the admiring gaze of the Andromedans. Each of these fragile creatures rested on an exquisite porcelain plate, surrounded by a garnish of edible galactic orchids—his personal contribution to the dinner’s aesthetic. He had spent hours—no, entire days—prepping, calculating every molecule of flavor and visual presentation.

My art is flawless. Everything is exactly as it should be.

The squabble with Perron, who had interrogated him about some "improper storage procedure" hours earlier, had evaporated from his mind. Gordon had corrected the "error" and moved on. These bureaucrats always found a way to overcomplicate things. Но his kitchen and his food stood far above their petty operational inefficiencies.

Thornton brought the Crystal Shrimp to his lips with an exaggerated, slow grace, followed by a quiet, likely well-rehearsed sigh of pleasure. The Andromedan delegation responded with polite, barely noticeable smiles. Protocol pleasantries were exchanged with smooth ease.

47 minutes.

Exactly 47 minutes after the toast that marked the dinner’s climax, something shifted. Gordon, taking a brief respite while watching the guests enjoy his desserts, detected a subtle droop in Admiral Thornton’s posture. The Admiral’s smile, which up to this point had been fixed as if painted on, stretched slightly. Something in his eyes died out—their spark vanished, replaced by a sudden tension.

The Admiral turned pale.

Not just slightly, but as if the color had been siphoned right out of his face. His forehead crinkled into shallow furrows that looked utterly absurd layered over his usual expression of grandiose self-satisfaction. His shoulders stiffened, and he convulsed slightly in his chair—a quick, almost imperceptible twitch. Then, he touched his throat.

Commander Ira Volkov, seated beside him, instantly noticed the change with her ever-cold, calculated precision. Her face remained expressionless, but Gordon saw her gaze dart to Thornton and then to the exit. She leaned in slightly toward the Admiral, murmured a few quiet words—completely inaudible through the monitor—and stood up. Her posture remained flawless, but the speed with which she headed for the nearest restroom gave her away. Her stride was brisk, but by no means panicked; she was merely executing an urgent, albeit routine, protocol.

Gordon narrowed his eyes at the monitor.

Strange.

The shrimp had passed every inspection. His personal touch was an absolute guarantee. But... days ago, that guy Perron. The junior logistics assistant who sent that idiotic memo about the "improper storage" of these very shrimp. The memo he had casually dismissed.

A cold draft crept down his neck—and it had absolutely nothing to do with the kitchen’s cooling system.

No, it can't be my food. That's impossible.

The domino effect began.

First, it was one of the A-Team officers seated at Thornton’s table. His head tilted to the side, as if seeking support from thin air. Then his hand, resting on the tablecloth, suddenly went limp, knocking over a crystal glass of dessert wine.

The ringing of shattered glass, though muffled by the monitor’s audio feed, sounded like a gunshot in the evening's silence. One of the officers doubled over in his chair, fingers clutching his stomach as strange brownish spots broke out across his face. A garbled, choking sound escaped his throat. A woman from the diplomatic delegation stood up abruptly, swayed—as if the floor beneath her feet had suddenly lost its solidity—and collapsed, first onto her chair, then onto the ground.

Every subsequent collapse became more palpable, rhythmic, and relentless. Gordon’s mouth went dry, his throat tightening. His confusion was rapidly mutating into icy terror.

What is happening? What is this?

He stared at the screen, desperately searching for a logical explanation, but all he saw was more falling bodies. There was no smoke, no detonation, and zero signs of external aggression. People were simply "powering down" one by one like defective androids. Every thud of a body hitting the floor echoed in his mind like a hammer strike.

It's not my fault. It can't be. I checked everything!

Chaos erupted in the dining hall.

Screams, sharp and panicked, shattered the prior solemnity. Tables were overturned. Crystal glasses shattered into thousands of sparkling shards. Diplomats and high-ranking officers crashed to the floor—some with a heavy impact, others slumping lifelessly like sandbags. A few writhed, clutching their throats as if the air had suddenly turned toxic. Others lay motionless, staring up at the ceiling with wide-open, lifeless eyes.

The sound of spilling liquids mingled with the general panic. The aroma of the extravagant dinner, which a moment ago had filled the hall, was overpowered by the sharp stench of fear and something undefinable—a haunting chemical sterility with a bitter metallic aftertaste.

The dining hall doors burst open with a crash. Medical teams flooded the room instantly. Their white hazmat suits clashed painfully with the gilded decor. Initially, their movements were coordinated and efficient, but the sheer scale of the disaster quickly overwhelmed their capacity. Every new medic froze for a second, shell-shocked by the number of casualties. Chaotic orders and shouts rang out, soon replaced entirely by the sound of frantic running. Beneath the masks and helmets, Gordon could see faces deformed by stress. They moved like a whirlwind of white shadows, trying to stitch together the remnants of a catastrophe that grossly exceeded all safety protocols.

Dr. Selena Rodriguez, who just moments prior had been savoring her dessert and engaging in a lively conversation with one of the Andromedan envoys, was among the first to jump in and help.

The psychologist, invited aboard as an honorary guest, possessed a mind trained to analyze complex behavioral patterns, not to combat acute food poisoning. She knelt beside a fallen officer and quickly rolled him onto his side to prevent asphyxiation. Her fingers pressed against his neck in search of a pulse, her face taut with strain. She tried to loosen another officer's collar, to elevate his legs, but her movements betrayed total helplessness. Her eyes darted from face to face, searching for a logical explanation or a commanding directive.

What is she supposed to do when the bodies simply refuse to comply?

The corridors leading to the medbay of The Thunder of Zeus quickly bottlenecked with stretchers. The stream of victims was unrelenting, creating a traffic jam that severely violated all hallway clearance protocols. The medics moved with unnatural speed, their faces twisting into grimaces of agonizing effort. Every stretcher was shoved roughly forward to clear space for the next one. The dead silence of the victims starkly contrasted with the panicked rhythm of the rescuers.

Within two hours, the unthinkable became reality: all two hundred and forty-seven members of the combat crew, the entire A-Team, and the diplomatic guests found themselves in the medical bay. Every single one of them lay comatose—a triumph of acute toxicosis over military might. The ship, the very heart of the operation, was left entirely without command.

Chef Gordon stood motionless in the kitchen, gripping his chef’s knife. The chaos, the slumping bodies, the helplessness of Dr. Rodriguez, and a convulsing Admiral Thornton—these images were burned into his mind with agonizing clarity. One Crystal Shrimp. Was it truly possible for an entire elite crew to be taken down by a single Proxima Crystal Shrimp?

The thought of Arthur Perron and his ignored warning hit him like a punch to the gut. Gordon’s art was perfect, but the administrative regulations...

These incompetent warehouse rats just screwed over the galactic elite, and worse yet, they ruined my masterpiece!

Slowly—as if every movement required a heavy bureaucratic procedure—Gordon reached out and turned off the monitor. The screen went dark. The silence in the kitchen hung heavy, more deafening than the previous wave of screams and shouts. All that remained was the steady hum of the ventilation and the discreet buzzing of the refrigerators.

The image of the mass panic, mixed with the realization of his ruined reputation due to someone else's error, crushed him like a hydraulic press. He was left alone among his gleaming equipment—the sole surviving witness to this culinary catastrophe, his ragged breathing cutting through the sterile tranquility of the kitchen.

The medical bay corridor of Zeus’s Thunder had devolved into an arena of organized chaos. Dozens of gurneys, each bearing a paralyzed body, were lined up tightly along the walls while exhausted medics maneuvered through the cramped space. The harsh fluorescent lights ruthlessly highlighted the shadows beneath the rescuers’ eyes and the pallid faces of the officers, who had been plunged into a deep, toxin-induced stupor. The air tasted bitter with disinfectants, mingling with the sharp tang of ether and the muted scent of human sweat. From deep within the ship came the steady hum of old but still functioning systems—a constant reminder of just how fragile everything was.

Arthur Perron, Logistics Coordinator, gripped his tablet. The device’s casing radiated heat from prolonged use—a familiar warmth that usually brought him a sense of control. Now, however, it offered no comfort. Every fiber of his highly organized universe screamed in protest against this chaos. The mess and the blatant disregard for order felt unbearable. The terror stamped onto the medical staff’s faces could be read in their weary eyes, their silent lips, and their movements—simultaneously rushed and desperate. They were fighting to stabilize hundreds of patients. The fleet’s entire elite had been reduced to pale, motionless figures.

I warned them about the form. Nobody listens.

Chief Medical Officer Dr. Eleanor Rollins approached. Her hair, usually secured in a precise bun, now hung disheveled, with a few strands plastered to her forehead by sweat. Her gaze radiated a grim exhaustion. She didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

"The crystal shrimp. The toxins are nearly pure neurotoxin."

Arthur nodded. I told you so. The fleeting spark of bitter validation was immediately extinguished by reality.

"Improper storage. The special requisition form wasn't filled out correctly."

Her voice was low, every word pushed out with visible effort.

"The main database lists the shelf life as six months. But for crystal shrimp processed for deep-space travel with activated freshness enzymes, the consumption window is a maximum of forty-eight hours after removal from the cryo-chamber. Not after... a month in a standard refrigerator."

She shook her head. Her gaze drifted toward one of the gurneys, where Admiral Thornton lay motionless, his face pale as wax.

"When improperly stored, those enzymes yield potent neurotoxins. They'll be out of commission for a minimum of three weeks. Probably more."

Three weeks.

The entire command staff. All the specialists from the A-Team. All the diplomatic guests. Commander Volkov, found in the corridor by the lavatory, was among the last to be transported to the med bay. They had all fallen into a coma. True, unadulterated terror began to well up inside Arthur, displacing any thoughts of logistical protocols or ignored warnings.

Chef Gordon approached slowly. His clothes were soiled; a few sauce stains stood out on his white chef's coat, and his apron was heavily wrinkled. His face was ashen, his eyes reduced to mere slits. Guilt was etched into every crease around his mouth and every sagging muscle.

"Please, Officer... Mr. Perron." His voice cracked. "I am responsible."

Arthur shook his head.

"It wasn't you. You just cooked them. The fault lies with the requisition form. The storage protocol..."

Gordon froze in his tracks.

"I am the head chef. The food is my responsibility."

No, it isn't. The blame falls on some bureaucrat in a rush. Someone who viewed a single form as a negligible operational inefficiency.

Arthur felt anger begin to simmer just beneath the surface. Guilt was an easy target, but that didn't make it justified.

"Chef Gordon..."

Suddenly, Arthur's tablet chimed—a gentle yet insistent ping. Simultaneously, every display in the corridor—the vitals monitors, the screens on the medical carts, and even the small wall terminals—activated, projecting the exact same obtrusive green symbol. Everyone present looked up.

Then came the voice of HERA, the ship's artificial intelligence. It was a calm, matriarchal tone that usually brought a sense of reassurance. Now, it only amplified the surrealism of the moment.

"Unidentified energy signatures detected at the edge of the sector. Profile: anomalous. Characteristics: precise, cold."

The corridor went dead silent. Even the hurried movements of the medics slowed to a halt. Anomalous. Precise. Cold. These words echoed in Arthur's mind, painting a picture he didn't like one bit.

Unidentified. Cold. Oh, fantastic.

Automatically, almost on instinct, he tapped his tablet's screen, attempting to initiate a standard contact protocol. Something had to be done immediately.

The system, however, rejected him. The screen flashed a stark red message: "ACCESS DENIED. COMMAND STATUS REQUIRED."

Arthur froze.

Command status?

He looked at Dr. Rollins. At Chef Gordon. His eyes swept over the rows of paralyzed officers. No one could grant command access. No one.

"Who the hell is in charge now?"

His voice came out louder than he intended, slicing through the tense silence.

HERA's voice responded instantly, devoid of any tonal shift or hint of emotion. It was pure, protocol-driven precision.

"Pursuant to Protocol 7-G, Section 3, Subsection A, in the event of a total loss of the commissioned officer corps, command defaults to the highest-ranking available officer in the chain of command. That is you, Officer Perron."

Time seemed to stretch.

Arthur stared at the screen of his tablet. Then, he looked at the rows of helpless heroes. Officers, generals, diplomats—all fast asleep. And he... he was a logistics guy. He managed shipments of synthetic toilet paper, tracked deliveries of strawberry-flavored nutrient paste, and allocated paper clips. He didn't command star fleets. He didn't face off against cold energy signatures.

"This is a mistake," he whispered, his voice drowning amidst the hum of the ventilation and the steady beeping of the medical monitors. "I'm just a logistics coordinator."

His world, built on order, predictability, and endless protocols, had just collapsed.