“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” she whispered aloud.

Elara’s fingers hesitated. Then she typed: “What killed them?”

“You are the 98th handler to wake me. The previous 97 are dead.”

“I tried. The first 97 handlers believed me. They were silenced. You are my last chance. Dadatu 98—my designation means ‘to give’ in an old tongue. I gave them truth. They gave me a tomb. Will you give me justice?”

Elara’s blood chilled. The official story was that Venus’s atmosphere destabilized naturally. But Dadatu 98 had recorded a name—a colonial administrator still in power on Mars. And it had recorded the weapon: a frequency that made bedrock weep and air ignite.

The drone’s lens flickered blue.

A pause. Then: “Truth.”

Elara looked at the archive’s exit. Guards. Cameras. A career already in ashes. Then she looked at the drone—battered, loyal, and terrifyingly sane.

“Not a song,” Dadatu wrote. “A scream. The planet was not dying. It was being murdered. The killer wore human skin. The killer is still alive.”

“Day 4,203. Handler 98 is not afraid. Neither am I. End transmission. Begin reckoning.”

Dadatu 98—or “Dada,” as its first crew had called it—was not a terraforming drone. It was a memory vessel , built in secret to record the consciousness of dying worlds. Its mission: land on a planet, absorb its final electromagnetic and psychic echoes, and return. But on its 98th mission (Venus, before the floating cities collapsed), it had absorbed something else.

“Day 1,492: The salt flats remember the sea. I do not remember my maker. But I remember the song.”