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Chapter 11: Corporal Sarai "Echo" Hernandez

Chapter 11: Corporal Sarai "Echo" Hernandez

Sarai sat in the cramped engineering bay, eyes locked on the fluctuating readings scrolling across her display. She tapped a few commands, adjusting pressure thresholds, rerouting power to stabilizers, and logging the irregularities like she was supposed to. Like she didn’t already know exactly what was happening.

Because she did.

The ship wasn’t malfunctioning. The pressure shifts weren’t a mystery. The slow drag they were experiencing wasn’t some unknown anomaly. It was the warp drive.

She kept her expression neutral as she listened to Gabe’s latest report over the comms. His concern was real, and if she weren’t in on the classified details, she’d probably be freaking out too. But she couldn’t say anything. The experimental warp technology they were testing was the real reason this mission was possible—turning what should have been a months-long journey into mere days. The others weren’t cleared to know. Not even Adrienne.

"Echo, I need a second set of eyes on this. Pull up my data and tell me I’m not imagining things."

She leaned back, making a show of sighing as she pulled up Gabe’s readouts, pretending to scrutinize the data. "Yeah, I see the variance," she said, keeping her voice even. "Still within safety margins, though. Could just be stress redistribution from the ship heating up in prep for the Sol shot."

"You sure about that? Because this pattern looks like it’s increasing."

"I mean, pressure fluctuations aren’t exactly unheard of in deep space, especially with gravitational shifts coming up." She shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. "If it goes outside the margins, then we’ve got a problem. Until then, it’s just something to watch."

It wasn’t a lie, not really. The numbers were within acceptable tolerances—for now. And even if the team didn’t know it, the warp drive’s micro-adjustments were designed to counteract the very effects they were worried about. Of course, that didn’t mean it was risk-free. If the drive misfired or destabilized, the pressure shifts would be the least of their worries.

"Alright," Gabe said after a pause. "I’ll keep monitoring."

"Good plan." She forced a smirk into her voice. "Besides, if something was seriously wrong, I’d be the first to panic."

A chuckle came through the comms, and the tension eased just a little. That was the trick—making sure no one got too suspicious, keeping everyone focused on the mission without realizing they were riding inside an untested marvel of human engineering.

She turned back to her screen, watching as the numbers shifted again, tiny adjustments happening behind the scenes as the warp drive prepped for activation.

They were pushing the limits of physics, rewriting what was possible. The only question was whether the ship—and the people inside it—would hold together long enough to see it through.



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