Transit

Boyd refused to come, and Eleanor did not try very hard to change his mind.

"Someone has to keep the lights on here," he said, which was true in the narrow sense and also, they both understood, a kindness — a reason that let neither of them say the real one, which was that Boyd had looked at the flight recorder transcript over her shoulder once, read four lines of it, and quietly decided that whatever was out at those coordinates was not a mystery he needed solved badly enough to risk becoming a line item in someone else's spreadsheet of unexplained transfers.

"I'll keep the array live," he said instead, at the airlock, in the tone of a man handing over the only tool he had. "Whatever you send back, I'll get it out to more than just Command's inbox before anyone can decide it needs containing. That's the best I've got."

It was, Eleanor understood, considerably more than nothing. She did not know, yet, that it would matter more than either of them could guess.

The Corvid Reach was not built for comfort, and the six-day transit to Sector 9 felt considerably longer than six days, the way waiting always did in a ship too small to walk more than forty paces in any direction without doubling back. Eleanor spent the first two days going through Solis's archive a second time, looking for anything she'd missed. She spent the third day in the ship's cramped signals bay, working alongside Solis's comms specialist — a quiet, precise woman named Ilyas who asked no questions about why an outside analyst had full clearance to their sensor logs and clearly resented not being told, in the specific tight-jawed way of someone professional enough not to say so.

It was Ilyas who caught the second signal.

"Not the lullaby," she said, on the fourth day, sliding a waveform across the shared display without preamble. "Different carrier. Same origin point, near as I can triangulate with what we've got out here."

Eleanor pulled the audio up and heard, this time, not a woman's voice but a man's — older, rougher, singing nothing at all, simply speaking, in the same untranslatable cadence Aldric Pemm had used in his last six recorded minutes eleven years and one incident report ago.

She ran it through her filter anyway, the same crude tool she'd built on Post 7's zeroed-out budget, and got back something she had not expected: not gibberish, not noise, but a structure. A grammar. Repeating morphological units in positions that suggested nouns, verbs, something like tense. Not a language she could translate. A language that was, unmistakably, *a language* — internally consistent, rule-governed, and completely unlike anything in the station's linguistic archive, human or otherwise.

"It's not garbage," she said, mostly to herself. "It's not what decompression trauma sounds like. It's not what a dying man sounds like. It's someone speaking fluently in a language we don't have a dictionary for, because we've never met anyone else who speaks it."

Solis, arriving in the doorway in time to hear the last of it, said quietly, "Or because the people who used to speak it were us, before they stopped being us in a way we have words for."

Eleanor didn't have an answer for that, and the silence that followed was the kind that made the hum of the Corvid Reach's life support feel suddenly very loud.

On the fifth day, she asked Solis the question she had been building toward since the galley conversation on Post 7.

"What happens to us if we get there and it's the same as Farsight 4. If the answer costs the same thing it apparently always costs."

Solis considered this for a long moment, methodically, the way she seemed to consider everything, as though every answer she gave had already been rehearsed against a version of this exact question asked by someone she couldn't save. "Then I write the honest report," she said. "Not the decompression version. The real one, however incomplete, filed through channels that don't only report to Command — I've spent four years building exactly enough of those channels to make sure this time, someone outside the system that's been erasing this for eleven years actually sees what happens. I can't promise you it protects you. I can promise you it stops being invisible."

"That's not the same as safe."

"No," Solis agreed. "It isn't. I don't think safe is available to us anymore, Analyst Cole. I think it stopped being available the moment you let that lullaby play a twelfth time instead of filing the four-line version and going back to sleep. I think the honest version of this conversation is that we are choosing, both of us, between two kinds of unsafe — the kind where nobody ever finds out what's out here, and the eleven-year pattern simply continues, quietly, forever. Or the kind where we go look, and whatever it costs us, at least it costs something on the record."

Eleanor thought about Farsight 4, decommissioned and erased from casual memory. She thought about the two analysts reassigned to postings that did not exist. She thought about Pemm's last six minutes, cut clean with no static, no error, simply nothing — the sound of a sentence stopping because someone had put a hand over the speaker's mouth.

And she thought, unwillingly, about the woman's voice singing to something it called *little star*, patient and careful and unmistakably tender, in a recording that had waited eighteen years to be heard by anyone at all.

"I want it on the record," she said. "Whatever it is. I want it on the record before anything else happens to it."

On the sixth day, the drift marker resolved on the Corvid Reach's forward sensors, and it was no longer a single ambiguous frame from a decommissioned probe. It was real, and enormous, and closer than any of the eighteen-year-old data had prepared them to see it, and it was — Eleanor understood this in the same instant everyone on the bridge went silent — not derelict.

It was waiting.