Disclaimer: This story is a work of fan fiction based on the concepts and settings inspired by SpaceX and its Mars mission endeavors. All characters, events, and scenarios depicted are entirely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. The use of real-world entities, such as SpaceX, Elon Musk, or Starbase, is purely for creative inspiration and does not reflect any real events, individuals, or operations associated with these entities. No affiliation with or endorsement by SpaceX, Elon Musk, or any related organizations is implied or intended. The term "Citadel" and other original elements are products of the author's imagination and are not associated with any existing organizations or intellectual properties. This work is not for profit and is shared solely for the enjoyment of fans and readers.
7
The halls of our Starbase dorm-wings were a succession of white, minimalistic suites—its walls hummed with the pulse of Starbase’s utility infrastructure and life-support systems. My heart, noticeably, pounded a little louder in my ears with every step I took as I rushed toward Amina’s suite.
I felt as though my jacket was totally transparent and everyone could see the secure drive I wasn’t carrying around in my pocket. Elon’s stark warning, Citadel hacks people, steadily clawed away at my thoughts. I couldn’t shake the image of his exhausted eyes, the weight of a man carrying a truth too heavy for one person. The thing is, I wasn’t just sharing the knowledge of his weighty truth, now I was also carrying the risk of exposing it.
I reached their door and knocked. No answer. I knocked again, only louder. This time I stole a quick glance down the hall to make sure no drones or late-night techs were lurking about. As the door finally slid open I was surprised to see Ji-hoon sitting on the edge of Amina’s cot with his hair disheveled and eyes narrowed with suspicion. Behind him, Amina typed away at a makeshift workstation. Her tablet glowed with what looked like a detailed schematic of Starbase’s lower levels.
“You’re late,” Ji-hoon said, stepping aside to let me in. “We were just about ready to leave without.”
Amina locked eyes with me and frantically mouthed the words, I had to tell him! as Ji-Hoon stood up and turned his back towards her.
“Move?” I asked, my voice tighter than I intended. “You’re still going to go through with trying to break into the one of the most secure server rooms on the planet?"
Amina turned, her expression a one of determination, bewilderment, and impatience. “Do we even have a choice, Evan? You said it yourself, Citadel’s not in the logs, not in the manuals. Maybe the residual clues are somewhere in Colossus’s core. We’re can't wait for another incident, another sim to go haywire.”
I closed the door behind me, lowering my voice. “We can’t do this, not tonight. I’ve got a lead, something promising, but if you go poking around in the server room, you’ll set off every alarm in Starbase. We’ll lose the only shot we have at cracking this open.”
Ji-hoon crossed his arms, bouncing his stylus nervously against his elbow. “A lead? What, you just magically discovered answers in the last two hours? You already tried to keep this from me once. Spill it, or I’d say your fear is getting the best of you and we’re moving forward anyway.”
I paused as the immense weight of Elon’s instructions smothered me. I, by no means, could tell them what I learned about Citadel, not yet. Not until I was positive they both could be trusted. “I’ve found a trace in the sim data,” lying as I tried to keep my voice steady. “It’s a sophisticated backdoor in the code, something the cybersecurity team missed. I’m working on it, but if we storm the server room, you’ll tip off whoever’s behind this. They’ll cover their tracks and we’ll never discover who did this.”
Amina’s eyes bored into my soul, searching for tells in my microexpressions. “You’re holding out on us,” she said, her voice low but increasingly caustic. “You’ve been acting weird all day today. What part of this aren’t you telling us about?”
I shrugged sheepishly and leaned against the wall—trying my damnedest to make it seem casual. “I’m just trying to keep us all from getting kicked off the mission and thrown in jail. Are you willing to risk everything without being one-hundred percent sure? If so, that’s your decision but I’m telling you, what I’m onto here is the answer.”
Ji-hoon snorted, not convinced. “Under control? You’re an indie videographer, Evan. You’re no cybersecurity expert. I need to know what your lead is.”
My mind raced for a bone to throw him. “It’s a data fragment, something embedded in the sim’s telemetry. I’m cross-referencing it with the logs, but it’s tedious work. Just give me a day. Twenty-four more hours and I’ll have something concrete, I know it.”
Amina didn’t budge, her arms crossed tightly. “Twenty-four hours is a long time when someone’s playing games with our lives. What if the next breach takes us out for real?”
Her words rang with truth, echoing Elon’s warning about Colossus. I wanted so much to tell them about Citadel, to relieve myself of this tremendous burden, but the stakes were just too high. If we were caught in the server room, it wouldn’t just expose us—it could expose Elon’s master plan, maybe even ground the entire Mars mission.
“I totally get it,” I said, softening my tone. “But we need to be really smart here and not let our emotions dictate our actions. If we trip a single alarm, we’re done. Let me follow this lead. If it turns out to be nothing, we break into that server room tomorrow night”
Ji-hoon exchanged a concerned glance with Amina. Their silent communication dripped with doubt. Finally, Amina sighed, her shoulders slumping forward. “Fine. Twenty-four hours. But, Evan, if you’re jerking us around I swear I’ll never trust you again.”
I nodded, a kind relief washed over me but it was tainted by guilt. “It’s a deal. Promise me you’ll just lay low and, for Godsakes, keep this quiet until I get back to you.”
As I left their suite, the door softly slid closed behind me. The corridor felt a few degrees more frigid than before. I’d bought us time but this was a fragile truce. I couldn’t believe Amina just brought it upon herself to tell Ji-Hoon everything and her instincts were razor sharp. I knew she was on to the fact that I was hiding something. Ji-hoon was just naturally a skeptic. If I didn’t deliver something concrete soon, they both would go rogue, and it would be completely out of my hands.
The rocket yard glowed faintly through the corridor’s narrow series of windows, the giant Starships, that once looked like imposing giants, were quickly beginning to seem kind of normal. It’s striking how quickly we can adapt, I thought to myself.
I kept thinking about Elon’s words, Get to Mars before they can stop us. This dream of his felt so close, yet impossibly fragile and far away. The new world I had opened my eyes to was a messy, tangled in a web of secrets that I was only beginning to understand. I needed to figure out a way to trace Citadel’s footprint without tipping my hand, and I needed to do it with quickness.
Tucked back away in my own suite, I engaged the digital lock on the door and pulled out the secure drive, plugging it into my tablet. The sim footage loaded, and I scrubbed through it again, frame by frame, searching for anything I’d missed. That now familiar word Citadel flickered on the control panel, just as I’d shown Elon, but this time I noticed something else—a faint timestamp in the corner of the frame. This timestamp was out of sync with the sim’s official data log. The video clip was off by exactly 2.37 seconds. This was a discrepancy much too precise to be merely accidental.
My fingers trembled as I typed, cross-referencing the timestamp with Starbase’s network logs. Segments of the logs were redacted, which was standard for such sensitive systems, but there was a single entry that caught my eye. It was an unauthorized access attempt on Colossus’s auxiliary server, timestamped exactly 2.37 seconds before the sim breach. The access came from an internal terminal, not an outside hack. This was the gotcha-moment I was searching for—someone inside Starbase had triggered the breach.
My stomach began churning. Citadel wasn’t only monitoring us, they were embedded in our ranks. My mind flashed memories of Dr. Patel’s white-knuckled grip, Torres’s lingering glances, the cybersecurity team’s delayed arrival. Even Amina and Ji-hoon, with their reckless plan, could be playing a role I didn’t yet fully understand or maybe didn’t even want to.
Elon’s warning came to the forefront of my mind, They hack people.
I leaned back, the tablet’s glow casting shadows across the entirety of my tiny room. The timestamp was a lead, yes, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to know who accessed that terminal, and I needed to do it without alerting Citadel or whoever the hell they’d compromised. The server room was out of the question. Amina was right about its importance, but breaking in was just pure suicide. Instead, I’d have to use the one tool I had—the footage. If I could trace the terminal’s location through Starbase’s internal cameras, I might find the culprit without having to ever set foot into the restricted zones.
I pulled up the camera feeds. My access was limited but enough to start. The timestamp narrowed my search window and I focused on the auxiliary server’s access points. Hours rolled by. My eyes began to dry out a burn as I scanned grainy footage of empty corridors and flickering lights. Then, finally, a figure appeared on a feed from Sublevel 3 near the auxiliary server. The timestamp matched perfectly. The human figure was hooded. Their face totally obscured but their gait was deliberate, practiced. They knew the cameras were there and avoided them expertly—almost. A single frame caught the hiking up of their sleeve and revealed a glimpse of the inside of their wrist and a tattoo of a coiled serpent inside of a perfect circle on it.
My breath caught as I searched through my own rattled memory. I happened to be a connoisseur of tattoos and I recalled a faint memory of seeing that particular one before. It was on one of the, somewhat mousey looking, cybersecurity techs who’d arrived from Hawthorne last week. The name on her badge said Lena. She seemed like a quiet woman who had a knack for blending into any background. Could she be Citadel? Or was she a mole or a pawn? Were there more like her?
I copied the frame to the secure drive and wiped my tablet’s cache. I had to tell Elon, but I couldn’t risk a message being intercepted. I’d need to go see him in person again, and I’d need to do it before Amina and Ji-hoon’s patience had run out. The clock was ticking, and the walls of Starbase felt like they were closing in, in each shadow it felt as though a potential traitor was lurking.
As I slipped the drive back into my pocket, the faintest of hums broke the silence. It was a meandering service drone lingering just outside my door. Its sensors blinked red, which meant it was actively scanning the room. I froze, my heart thumping. Had it been there the whole time? Was this just a routine search, or was someone watching me more closely? Rumor had it these drones could even use wi-fi to see through solid walls.
Just then, the service drone whirred dutifully away but fear and doubt it left in its wake lingered. I was in way deeper than I’d ever imagined, and there was no turning back. Citadel was closer and more embedded into our world than I’d anticipated. This particular truth I now held in my hands was a blade I wasn’t sure I was competent enough to wield. Immediately after that moment of doubt it felt as though a dam of unknown courage I had within me burst. The time for fear had long past, I thought to myself, If not you, then who? If not now, then when?.
To be continued…