“Mayday?” Dex asked.
“I’m reading power fluctuations. Carrier signal is… it’s broadcasting. But not on any known frequency. Mira, it’s broadcasting through us. Through the ship’s comms. I can’t shut it off.”
The Rocinante , their battered maintenance corvette, drifted in the black between Callisto and Ganymede. They had been en route to repair a minor transponder glitch on P5-7 when the failure alarm had screamed through the ship’s speakers—a sound like a dying animal. Now the silence was worse.
She looked toward P5-7. The twisted solar arrays were still dark, but now she saw something else—a faint, pulsing light from the station’s core, deep inside its ruined structure. A light that matched the rhythm of the pod’s data pulse. carrier p5-7 fail
She pulled her probe free and pushed off from the pod, turning toward the Rocinante . “What kind of problem?”
Mira ignored the corpse—she had learned long ago that sentiment was a luxury in hard vacuum—and focused on the pod’s control panel. The screen was cracked but still glowing. Lines of text scrolled upward, too fast to read. She plugged her suit’s data probe into the pod’s auxiliary port, and the text froze.
“I’m picking up something odd,” Dex said suddenly. “Mayday
“Moving how?”
The Rocinante ’s own comms were silent now. Not even static. Just the cold, mathematical proof that P5-7 had stopped speaking to anyone.
“Thermal signature. About two thousand klicks spinward of P5-7’s last known position. Small. Cold, but not ambient cold. Like something that’s been running and just shut down.” But not on any known frequency
She froze, mid-drift. “What?”
Mira looked at the pod outside the viewport—at the woman’s frozen face, the cracked visor, the blinking light. And she understood.