Silence had weight in deep space.
Inside the cockpit of his rusted freighter, The Nomad's Reprieve, Rotham floated in a womb of darkness and hums — the low, constant song of life support systems and drifting fuel cells.
Just beyond the curved glass canopy, the stars stretched endlessly, static and cold.
No planets. No stations. No transmissions.Until it came. A sharp click from the comms array broke the silence.
Rotham's eyes snapped open. He sat up from the reclined pilot seat, every muscle stiff from long travel.
SIGNAL INBOUND — UNRECOGNIZED PROTOCOL.
PING INTERVAL: 4.1 SECONDS.
SOURCE: CLASSIFIED.
He frowned. No beacon had ever used that cadence. He tapped the console. The message was short. Compressed. Almost old-fashioned — like the emergency bursts used during the Collapse Wars nearly a century ago. But this one was different. Fragmented. The waveform formed a spiral pattern. In its center, five characters pulsed in steady rhythm.
N-A-R-I-S
"Naris…?" Rotham whispered. The word meant nothing to him.
Or — at least — it shouldn't have.
He leaned closer to the screen, pupils narrowing. His breath fogged the edge of the glass.
Because the spiral…He had seen it before.In dreams that came after long jumps. Dreams where his name wasn't Rotham. Dreams where the stars whispered.
He ran a deep scan. The signal was faint, almost ancient. It was being broadcast from somewhere beyond the Cradle Belt, just past the classified border of the Perseid Grave — a sector considered cursed and off-limits since before he was born.
Rotham hesitated. He should log it, forward it to a Union hub, maybe sell the coordinates to an Archive ship. That would be the smart thing.
But smart had never uncovered truth.
He reached for the nav-controls and punched in a new course. The thrusters whined as The Nomad's Reprieve angled toward the outer zone.
Course Set: SECTOR PERSEID-0947 — ADRA-9 ORBITAL GHOST STATION
"Adra-9…" he murmured. "What the hell are you?"
The signal pulsed once more — like a heartbeat in the dark.
And Rotham followed it.