“If,” Jalen finished. He filtered the encryption. “It’s a distress loop. Not from the outpost; from an object three light-hours off the new gravity well.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not simply energy,” Dr. Ibarra said. “It’s a memory. A living configuration encoded in the planet. We woke it, thinking we were miners. We were archaeologists who dug their fingers into a living thing.”
“Then we don’t cut; we translate,” Jalen said. He had been studying the waveforms. “We can modulate the echo—send a low-variance pattern that signals withdrawal. Calm the feedback. Give it a simple refrain that says: we are leaving; we mean no harm.” eaglecraft 12110 upd
Her co-pilot, Jalen, tapped the console. “Route looks clean. Cosmic dust low, micro-traffic clear. UPD ETA: forty-one hours.”
“What does it want?” Mira asked.
The bay door opened to reveal emptiness and a hush that felt older than the metal. The crew moved through corridors lined with frost and small scorch marks. A jellylike residue sat where instruments had once been. Their lights reflected in the dark like eyes.
On the bridge, Jalen leaned against the console. “Do you think it will listen to us again?” “If,” Jalen finished
They altered course for UPD and found the outpost by the way the sky bent around it: a ring of tethered habitats circling a core of processing towers, haloing a crater rim. The station’s beacons were dimmed and laced with static the way a lantern is when its fuel runs low.