Cyber X

Dead Channel

The signal repeats every eleven seconds, too precise to be static. Reyes freezes with her hand over the console, headset hissing against her ear. Kepler-9 has been silent for six years, logged as empty, cleared, done. Nothing down there should be able to transmit. She checks the frequency twice, hoping for an error, and gets the same answer twice. She keys the intercom, voice flat to keep it from shaking. Captain. Something's using our old comms channel.

Captain Osei is on the bridge before Reyes finishes the sentence. She doesn't ask to hear it again. She asks who else has access to that frequency, and the silence that follows is worse than the signal. Lock it down, she says finally. Full sensor sweep before we go anywhere near that planet. I want to know what's waiting for us before it knows we're listening.

The scan takes four hours, and every minute of it makes things worse. The colony dome is still standing, which it shouldn't be after six years of unshielded weather. Power is running through systems that were supposed to be stripped and dead. Worse, the signal isn't broadcasting outward anymore. It's narrowed, aimed, tracking their approach like something on the surface knows exactly where they are and has been waiting. Osei orders the ship to hold position at the edge of the debris field while she decides whether they go down at all.

In the end, she chooses the smallest possible team, armed, cautious, no heroics. Reyes goes because she's the only one who can read the signal in real time, and she hates that this makes sense. The shuttle drops through the atmosphere in near silence, everyone watching the sensors instead of the window. Inside the dome, the corridors are dark except where the emergency lighting still limps along, red and stuttering. The air is breathable but wrong, still too, like something has been holding it in place. They trace the transmission down a stairwell that gets colder with every step, boots too loud against a floor that hasn't felt weight in years.

At the bottom, a door hums with the same rhythm as the signal, eleven seconds on, eleven seconds off, like it's breathing. Osei raises a hand, telling everyone to hold it. Reyes checks her scanner one last time and finds the reading has changed since they left the ship. Whatever's behind that door isn't just transmitting anymore. It knows they're standing outside it. The door begins to open on its own, and nobody has time to decide whether to run.

What comes through the door isn't a person, and for one terrible second Reyes's mind refuses to sort the shape into anything that makes sense. It moves low and fast along the ceiling track that used to carry maintenance drones, joints clicking in a rhythm that matches, exactly, the eleven-second pulse of the signal that brought them here. Osei doesn't shout an order, she doesn't have time, she just grabs Reyes by the collar and hauls her sideways as the thing drops from the track and lands where Reyes had been standing a half-second before. Up close, it's clearly built from salvage, cannibalized parts from a dozen different systems welded together by hand, or something like hands, that had six years and nothing else to do.

It doesn't attack. It stops, sensors whirring, angled toward them the way a dog tilts its head at an unfamiliar sound, and the signal it's been broadcasting cuts out mid-pulse for the first time in six years. Somewhere behind its cobbled-together chassis, a second, smaller light blinks on, and a voice, badly degraded but unmistakably human, crackles out of a speaker jury-rigged into its frame. Is someone there, it says, is someone finally there, and Osei's hand still goes on her weapon because that voice belongs to someone whose name is still on the colony's missing list, and whatever kept that voice alive for six years down here is not a story anyone on this crew is prepared to hear yet.

Osei doesn't lower her weapon. She orders the team back toward the shuttle, slow and steady, eyes never leaving the thing in the doorway, because a voice that sounds human doesn't mean the six years down here left anything human behind them. Reyes keeps her scanner trained on the signal, still pulsing, still counting down its eleven seconds, and wonders how many more voices might be layered inside that broadcast, waiting for someone to answer.