“Helmets on,” Mira said. “Full seal.”
We were here. We are still here. You opened the door. Now we come through.
“Show me,” she said.
Mira killed the thrusters and let momentum carry them. The object resolved itself slowly: a pod. A standard emergency escape pod, the kind carried by civilian freighters and corporate shuttles. But this one was scarred—deep gouges in its hull, a shattered viewport, and a single, blinking red light on its exterior that pulsed in a slow, irregular rhythm. Not a standard distress pattern. Something else.
The diagnostic screen flickered once, then went dark. For a long moment, the only light in the cramped cockpit came from the faint, greenish glow of the backup display, casting Lieutenant Mira Vales’s face in the color of old sickness. Then the words appeared, blocky and absolute, as if carved into the glass:
“Nodes don’t just reset,” Mira said. She unstrapped from her seat and floated toward the rear of the cockpit, where a narrow access panel led to the ship’s secondary comms array. “Not the primary carrier. Not without a reason.”
“Mayday?” Dex asked.
The void swallowed sound, but she could feel the vibration of the pod’s data pulse through her suit—a rhythmic thrum that matched the blinking light. She grabbed the pod’s emergency handle and twisted. The hatch resisted, then popped open with a puff of frozen atmosphere. Inside, the woman’s body floated loosely against its restraints, arms outstretched as if reaching for something.
The ship’s speakers crackled. At first, Mira thought it was static—the random noise of a broken carrier signal. But then she heard it: a voice. Low and fragmented, like a recording played backward and forward at the same time. Words in no language she knew, but somehow, impossibly, she understood their meaning.