The Eleven-Minute Drift

The transit sickness hit Ines like a copper coin pressed beneath the tongue. When the *Caldera* shuddered out of the second jump, the sub-light manifold groaned through the deckplates—a deep, metallic protest that rattled the screws in her pilot console. On the primary avionics display, the master chronometer flickered, scrambled its digits in a green blur of phosphor, and slipped backward fourteen minutes. Outside the cockpit's polarized canopy, the local stars were not crisp pinpricks but dull, trembling smears, as if the vacuum itself had failed to set. "Transition complete," Tomas Rhee whispered. The navigator was hunched over his plotting tank, fingers digging into the edge of his console so hard his knuckles shone grey. A bead of sweat hung from his jaw, refusing to fall despite the freighter's one-third standard gravity. "We cleared the outer gate. Vector matches the ledger, Ines. Exactly on profile." He was lying, or at least misreading his own readouts. You didn't spend fifteen years hauling bulk freight across the rim without memorizing the resonance of an engine burn. The *Caldera* had shed too much forward momentum, and the main bus was crying out under an uneven load.…