Contain. Quarantine. Extract.

She told the story only once, and even then she left pieces out. Not to protect herself — there was nothing left of herself that needed protecting — but because some things, once spoken aloud, stop being true. They become just words. And what happened on Carris-7 was never just words.
Radhika Bose had been a signal analyst for eleven years before the colony went quiet. She knew the difference between equipment failure and deliberate silence. Equipment failure was messy — broken packets, static bursts, half-formed carrier waves dying on the relay. Deliberate silence was clean. Carris-7 had gone clean.
The Meridian Outpost sat at the edge of the Veth Corridor, a crescent-shaped listening station bolted to the outer hull of a decommissioned ore-carrier that someone, decades ago, had decided was too expensive to scrap and too useful to abandon. It had been repurposed, welded over, expanded with pressurized modules that jutted from its flanks like barnacles on an old ship. The interior smelled of recycled air and machine oil and the faint, persistent sweetness of the algae processors that kept the oxygen levels stable. Every surface was either brushed metal or impact-resistant polymer the color of old bone. Radhika had lived in this station for three years, and she had learned to read its sounds the way a sailor reads water — the low hum of the relay arrays meant the feeds were clean; a rising pitch in the ventilation meant pressure variance in the outer hull; silence from the signal room meant nothing was coming in, or nothing was supposed to. She slept four hours a night in a bunk barely wide enough for her shoulders. She ate from vacuum-sealed packets heated on a coil plate bolted to the wall beside her workstation. She had a photograph of her mother tucked under the edge of her monitor, curling at the corners from the dry recycled air. She had not spoken to anyone outside the station in six weeks, and she had been fine with that, because the signals came in and she processed them and the work was enough. Until Carris-7 went clean.
The colony had been running for four years. Twelve hundred people. Agricultural settlement, mostly — they were growing protein cultures and modified grain strains in the low-gravity fields on the planet’s second plateau. They sent a daily status packet at 0600 station time, as reliable as a heartbeat. On the morning it didn’t arrive, Radhika ran diagnostics for two hours before she admitted what she already knew.
Then Corvax arrived.
He came in on the supply shuttle that docked at 1400, and he was not listed on the manifest. He was a tall man, pale in the way of someone who had spent too long under artificial light, with a jaw that looked like it had been broken once and set slightly wrong, and pale grey eyes that moved constantly, cataloguing. He wore a Meridian Corps uniform that fit too well — not standard issue, tailored — and he carried a case that he set down on the signal room floor without asking permission, unlatched it, and began connecting equipment to Radhika’s relay board before she had finished asking who he was. He said his name was Corvax. He said he was from the deep-signal division. He said he was there to help.
“You don’t help,” Radhika said. “Deep-signal doesn’t dispatch for a missed packet.”
“They do,” he said, “when the packet was preceded by something unusual.”
He pulled up her archived feed and found it himself — forty seconds of signal she had logged as interference and flagged for later review. She had not reviewed it yet. When he played it through the board’s audio processor, it did not sound like interference. It sounded like breathing. Not human breathing — something slower, with a resonance that sat below the range of easy hearing and pressed against the sternum like a held note. A pattern inside the pattern. Repetition that was too deliberate to be noise.
Radhika sat very still.
“How long have you had this?” she asked.
“Long enough,” he said, and would not meet her eyes.

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About the Author

Naomi Hale — a survivor of a collapsed illegal colony. Rumors says she was finally saved by James Calder.

— Naomi Hale

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Categories: First Contact, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, alien intelligence, atmospheric, first contact, framed narrative, sci-fi, short story, Signal, space station, Survival

August 17, 2026

10min-stories