Nora Kessel counted the names on her cracked tablet. Twenty-nine crew, twenty-nine red lines. Only hers stayed clean. She was the ship's medic, and she had failed to save a single person. Now the truth of what killed them sat locked inside the black box, and she had until the backup cells died to reach it. The ship ran dark. No power meant no lights, no map, no way to find the recorder. Nora knew the black box lived somewhere behind the medical bay's rear wall. But without a working panel, she could not open that wall. She checked her tablet's charge. Eleven percent. The recorder's cells would fail before hers did. When they failed, the logs would erase. She pried a floor plate loose with her fingers. Cables ran beneath it. One line still glowed faint blue. Emergency reserve. If she could reroute it to the rear panel, the wall would open. She stripped the cable with her teeth and worked in the dark. A wet clicking sound came from the corridor. Nora froze. Six legs scraped the deck. A shape crawled into the doorway, long and lean, its body plated like an insect's armor. Its jaw hung open, dripping a green fluid that hissed on the floor. She knew this thing. She had watched it kill three crew before the cameras cut out. The screams on her tablet had names beside them now. The creature's jaw swung toward her. She rolled behind an overturned cart. Acid struck the metal and ate through it. The fumes burned her throat. Her torn suit gave her no protection. Nora grabbed the stripped cable in both hands. The blue glow pulsed against her palms. She had one chance. She lunged out, jammed the live wire into the puddle of acid spreading toward the creature, and threw herself back. Current leaped through the fluid. The creature shrieked and seized up. Its legs buckled. It collapsed against the far wall and went still. But the cable was dead now. She had spent the reserve to kill the thing. The rear panel stayed sealed. Nora crawled to the wall anyway. Her hands shook. She pressed the ruined cable's ends together and touched them to the panel seam. A single spark jumped. The wall groaned and slid open one hand's width. No more. She reached inside. Her fingers closed on the recorder, a black cylinder warm with dying charge. She pulled it free. A red light on its side blinked slow. The cells were almost gone. Nora clutched it to her chest. She had the black box. But she had no ship power left to play it, and no working transmitter to broadcast what it held. The light blinked slower. Whatever these logs proved, she now carried the last copy in her hands, running out of time.