It was sometime after midnight shipside—though literal night had little meaning in orbit—when Jaxon Cole found himself wandering the corridors alone, unable to sleep, unable to shake the sense, half a taste, that something undefinably important was about to slip through his fingers. Every metal plate his boots touched felt charged—maybe with history, maybe just with dread, maybe both. His thoughts battered against themselves in circles: had he done enough? Had he lost something critical in his effort to keep peace? Was "peace" ever anything but the absence of shooting?
He glanced through a viewport, caught the faint blue gleam of the artifact's pulse echoing in the hull reflection. For a flash, he remembered his mother's old story—how, when he was a kid growing up on Epsilon-9, he'd wander under the mining beacons at night and listen for voices in the wind. "You hear what you need to hear," she'd said, and he'd rolled his eyes then, ten years old and too smart for fairy tales. But she'd been right: now, every echo brought a different answer.
Turning a corner, Jaxon almost tripped over two figures seated against a bulkhead. It was Milo Crane and the alien security officer Yhral, backs pressed to the cold wall, quietly sharing a bottle of something clear, sharp-smelling, probably not regulation.
"…No, I swear I saw him freak," Milo was saying, waving a hand with more life than Jaxon had seen from him in weeks. "Turns out aliens can't stand card tricks. Almost jumped right out of his—oh, hey, Commander." Milo's eyes darted, suddenly awkward. "We—uh—we're just—"
Jaxon raised both hands. "If you're apologizing for being human, you're a few years late."
Yhral—glassy-eyed, uncertain—gave a careful alien nod. "Your crew… speaks of haunted ships. Where I am from, the oldest captains tell of 'echo-ghosts'—not spirits, but memories, trapped in places. Sometimes, what returns is not a ghost, but understanding, or a mistake needing to be lived again."
Milo shrugged. "Or sometimes it's just a bad game of dice in the dark."
Jaxon almost smiled—almost. "Carry on. But I want you both up by morning for sensor drills—alien hangovers don't get you out of paperwork, Crane."
He left them, feeling both lonely and, paradoxically, comforted by their messiness.
In the dim-lit engine bay, Izzy Tran and Kael huddled over a tangle of sensor wires, their faces painted silver-blue by bouncing code. Izzy's hair was rumpled, eyebrows drawn—a look Jaxon knew meant she'd been stewing, probably talking herself in anxious circles, for hours.
"You ever wonder," she said, not looking up, "if maybe the artifact wasn't supposed to bring people together—just… force us to face the things we can't escape? I keep thinking, what if these new signals pull us into another war, or break what little we've built?"
Kael hummed, soft, almost musical. "In my people's tongue, there's no word for fate. Only for walking a path. Sometimes paths cross. Sometimes they fracture. It hurts each time—but if you don't walk, you cannot find."
They sat in silence, the hum of the ship and the faint whirr of cooling fans their only witnesses. Izzy's chest ached—not from fear, not exactly, but from yearning for certainty. She almost wished for another mystery, if only so she could move instead of wait.
Elsewhere, Laina Morozov penned a journal entry—handwritten, by actual pen—because it felt more real than tapping keys. *Today I stitched a wound in a creature I've never seen, using thread carried from a dead planet. I told it a story I barely remember from my own mother. It thanked me in three languages. I wish I could tell her what we've done.*
Bennett, meanwhile, sat propped in the cargo bay, helping an alien child—her face streaked with oil and wonder—fit together a simple toy engine. The child giggled as the engine fizzed to life, startling them both. "Back home, my sister would've called that magic," Bennett said, and found, to his shock, that he was grinning.
When morning finally arrived—marked by the gentle shift of deck lights, not the rising of any sun—Jaxon convened officers and delegates before the central console. The artifact's beacon still pulsed, but steadier now, a grounded thrum rather than an anxious wail.
"We're getting closer," Izzy reported, voice thick from lack of sleep, "to pinpointing the source. It's ancient, Commander. Massive—built into an asteroid cluster. Not on any chart."
Kael added, "Its pattern changes when we link data—almost as if it's watching, learning from what we share with one another."
Milo snorted. "First contact led to first hangover. Now we're headed for first cosmic therapy session."
Jaxon let the crew banter for a minute—let laughter, awkward and small, stitch its way through the tension. Then he pointed at the display, his voice steady but laced with hard-earned humility:
"We go together. All of us. Anyone not ready to keep listening—to their own doubts, to someone else's pain—should stay back. But if you're willing, if you feel as lost and unfinished as I do, let's find out what's waiting for us in the dark."
No one spoke for a moment. Then, one by one, heads nodded. Resignation. Hope. A flicker of wonder.
And as the Nightingale swung out from orbit, aligning herself with the beacon's distant call, every heart aboard beat with the ragged, unexplainable certainty that this journey, like every truly human adventure, was only getting messier—and, somehow, more worth it—with each new step.