Static

The Heliodrome received three hundred and seventeen messages on the morning of March 4th, 2214. That was normal. Dex Ouma processed two hundred and eighty-nine of them before the anomaly appeared in the queue at 11:42 station time, wedged between a mining survey report and a jurisdictional dispute filing from a Belt arbitration committee.

The origin code was the problem. It resolved to a vessel registry rather than a station or relay — specifically to ICV Aurelius, a colonial vessel that had left Jupiter Station in 2203 and was declared lost with all hands in 2205 following catastrophic drive failure. Eleven years and seven months ago. Dex knew the name because she had been seventeen when the news came through and it was the first total loss she had processed at her apprentice terminal.

She flagged it as a probable code corruption and routed it to the maintenance queue.

The next morning it was back. Different timestamp. Same origin code. Same fragmented payload: seven hundred characters of garbled text that her decryption suite parsed as 47% coherent, which was not enough to reconstruct a message and more than enough to be disturbing.

On the third morning she opened it before coffee.

The coherence had climbed to 61%. The reconstructed fragment read: *— DO NOT ROUTE THIS — OUMA IF YOU ARE READING — station is*

The message cut off there.

Dex sat for three minutes with her hands flat on the console. Then she got up, poured her coffee, sat back down, and read the fragment seven more times.

Her surname was in a message from a dead ship.

That was new.