Mira turned, still half inside the access panel. “What kind of odd?”
It had answered .
“I tried. The override is hardware-level. It’s like the station has taken control of our systems remotely.”
Below that, a single line of code—a command she didn’t recognize, encrypted with a cipher that made no sense. It wasn’t military. It wasn’t civilian. It was something else. Something alien in the mathematical sense, a pattern of logic that felt like a language but read like a scream. carrier p5-7 fail
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.
The woman hadn’t been trying to escape. She had been trying to deliver something. A message. A key. And P5-7 hadn’t failed. It had been opened .
The lights flickered. The temperature in the cabin dropped ten degrees in five seconds. Dex reached for the emergency power cutoff, but his hand stopped halfway, trembling. Not from fear. From something else. Something that felt like a hand wrapped around his wrist, gentle but absolute. Mira turned, still half inside the access panel
She suited up for EVA—a process she could do in her sleep now, though her hands trembled slightly as she clipped her tether to the hull. Dex stayed behind to manage the ship’s systems, his face pale on the comms display. Mira stepped out into the silence, her boots magnetizing to the Rocinante ’s skin, and then she pushed off toward the pod.
“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 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: The override is hardware-level
Mira slammed into the airlock and cycled through with shaking hands. The inner hatch opened, and she floated into the cabin, tearing off her helmet. Dex was at the controls, his face gray.
Dex didn’t argue. They had worked together long enough that he trusted her tone. The helmets locked into place with a soft hiss, and the world narrowed to the visor’s display and the recycled taste of their own breath.
Mira didn’t blink. She didn’t curse. She simply stared at the string of characters, her breath fogging the inside of her helmet visor. Carrier P5-7 was the primary deep-space relay for the entire Jovian Crescent—a chain of fifteen automated comms stations strung between the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter. Without it, there was no real-time contact with Earth. No telemetry from the outer colonies. No distress signals. No orders.
Mira felt a prickle at the base of her skull—the kind of instinct that had kept her alive through a pirate interdiction near Europa and a depressurization incident in the rings of Saturn. “Match it against known debris databases.”
He pointed to the main display. The star field was gone. In its place was a single, scrolling line of text—the same encrypted code she had seen on the pod. But now it was changing. Evolving. Growing longer and more complex with each passing second, as if something was writing itself into existence.