TRANSMISSION LOG — FRAGMENT RECOVERED
Origin: Freighter-class vessel IKARRA’S BONE, registry HDK-7741
Timestamp: Cycle 388, Hour 22:14
Classification: INTERNAL — CREW RESTRICTED
Order issued by Portmaster Voreth (Rek’sha station, Dock Arm Nine) to Acting Captain Hoda Farouk:
“Do not open Cargo Bay Four. Do not log its manifest. Do not ask why. Acknowledge receipt of this order and proceed to Outer Ring departure lane immediately. Fuel advance has been transferred. This is not a request.”
Acknowledgment logged: H. Farouk, 22:16.
End fragment.
—
Hoda Farouk had been running freight through Rek’sha station for eleven years, and she had learned, the way you learn things in the black between worlds, that some orders come wrapped in danger the way a wound comes wrapped in cloth — the cloth looks fine, and underneath it, something is quietly ruining you.
She stood in the corridor outside Cargo Bay Four and did not open the door.
The corridor smelled of hydraulic seal and old coolant, the particular sourness of a ship that had been breathing recycled air for too long. The IKARRA’S BONE was not a beautiful vessel. It was long and asymmetrical, a patchwork of three different construction eras bolted into functional ugliness, its hull plates the dull grey of old bone. Hoda had inherited it from the previous captain, Andrei Sobolev, who had died of a slow lung infection on the station’s lower tier and left the ship to her without explanation in a two-line message she still didn’t fully understand. She had kept it running through sheer stubbornness and a willingness to take contracts that more comfortable crews refused.
She was forty-one years old. She was tired in a way that sleep did not fix.
She walked away from Cargo Bay Four.
—
From somewhere in the station’s labyrinthine network of maintenance corridors — specifically, from a recessed alcove on Level Fourteen, Dock Arm Nine — a figure watched the IKARRA’S BONE through a scratched porthole as it completed its docking clamps release sequence. The figure was Rethkai, a Ves’sol — one of the tall, narrow-limbed beings who had arrived in human space a generation ago and never quite left. Rethkai’s skin was the deep amber of cooling embers, textured in overlapping plates too fine to be called scales, each one edged faintly in copper. Four eyes, set in two vertical pairs, blinked in slow alternation. Rethkai wore a long coat of synthetic canvas that had been repaired so many times the patches outnumbered the original fabric, and carried nothing visible. Rethkai watched the ship. Made a notation in a personal log written in a cipher that had never been cracked. And waited.
—
Malik, the ship’s engineer, was the one who first said it out loud.
“Something in Bay Four is drawing power,” he said, not looking up from the diagnostic panel. He was a compact man with grease permanently embedded in the lines of his knuckles, and he spoke the way he worked — without wasted motion.
Hoda was in the cockpit. She heard him through the open hatch.
“How much?”
“Not a lot. But steady. Like a life support loop.”
She did not respond immediately. The ship was already moving, easing out of Dock Arm Nine on the fuel advance Voreth had transferred. The station fell away behind them — Rek’sha, with its vast concentric rings of pressurized commerce, its alien quarter crammed against its human quarter with a hostility both sides had agreed to call culture, its perpetual amber navigation lights blinking in the dark like the eyes of something too large to see whole. She watched it shrink in the rear display.
“Keep monitoring it,” she said.
“Hoda.” His voice had a different weight now.
“I know,” she said.
—
Rethkai’s notation, translated:
“Subject has complied. Bay Four secure. Window: fourteen hours before Outer Ring customs sweep. Adequate. Proceed to secondary phase.”
—
Six hours out from Rek’sha, the power draw from Bay Four increased.
Not dramatically. Not alarmingly. But Malik tracked it on his panel and the number kept climbing, slow and patient, and he went to stand outside the bay door the same way Hoda had stood there, and he felt the same thing she had felt — a reluctance that was not quite fear, not quite instinct, but something between them that the body understands before the mind catches up.
He put his ear against the door.
He heard breathing. Slow. Rhythmic. More than one source.
He went to find Hoda.
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