It started as a whisper.
Navigation Officer Amira Okonkwo was the first to notice it—a faint signal bleeding through the ship's long-range comm arrays, so weak that the automated systems had flagged it as background radiation and moved on. But Amira had spent fifteen years listening to the static between stars, and she knew the difference between noise and something trying to be heard.
"Captain to navigation," she said, keying her comm.
Saito arrived three minutes later, still pulling on his uniform jacket. His hair was mussed from sleep, but his eyes were sharp and focused. "What have you got?"
"Unknown signal. Bearing two-seven-mark-four. It's weak—really weak—but it's there." She pulled up the data on her main display. "I've been tracking it for the last hour. It's repeating. Same pattern, every forty-seven seconds."
Saito leaned over her shoulder, studying the waveform. "Can you clean it up? Get me something I can hear?"
"I can try." Amira's fingers danced across her console, applying filters, boosting gain, stripping away layers of cosmic static. The signal resolved slowly, like a photograph developing in chemical baths.
BEEP... pause... BEEP BEEP... pause... BEEP... pause... BEEP BEEP BEEP...
"It's a repeating pattern," Amira said. "Not random. Someone built this."
Saito straightened. "Where's it coming from?"
She ran the triangulation, her heart rate increasing as the numbers resolved. "It's... it's coming from the same coordinates as our rendezvous. The signal is originating from the object we're supposed to tow."
The mess had gone quiet. The entire crew had gathered, drawn by the tension that had suddenly infected the ship's atmosphere. Varga stood by the coffee machine, arms crossed. Webb leaned against the bulkhead, his face unreadable. Chen sat at the table, forgotten eggs congealing in front of her. Dmitri Volkov, their pilot, had come up from the drive room, his massive frame filling the doorway.
"Could it be a distress beacon?" Webb asked. "Maybe whatever we're towing has survivors."
Saito shook his head. "No. The coordinates we were given were for salvage, not rescue. If there were survivors, Corporate would have sent a recovery vessel, not a tug."
"Then what is it?"
No one had an answer. The signal continued its rhythmic pattern, beeping away in the silent ship.
BEEP... pause... BEEP BEEP... pause... BEEP... pause... BEEP BEEP BEEP...