ArtFlow

The transmission came at 3:47 AM, ship time. Mara had been awake for nineteen hours when the console lit up — a single broken pulse from a frequency that hadn't been active in six years. She pressed her headphones tight against her ears and listened to the white noise underneath, the kind that hides voices if you wait long enough. Outside the porthole, the gas giant Kepler-7 rotated in slow indifference, its amber storms older than human memory. She typed the coordinates into the nav system with cold fingers. The ship's AI flagged the destination as restricted. She overrode it without hesitating. Some signals you follow not because you understand them, but because something older than reason tells you that you must.

Three days out from the station, the heating system began to fail in small, polite ways — a degree here, a degree there, as if the ship was apologizing for something it hadn't done yet. Mara slept in her suit and ate cold rations and tracked the signal as it grew cleaner, more deliberate. It wasn't random noise. It was a pattern. Seven pulses, pause, three, pause, one. She recognized it on the fourth day like a face emerging from fog — it was her own distress code, the one she had broadcast six years ago when her first ship went dark over the Meridian Belt. Someone had kept it. Someone was sending it back.

The derelict station hung against the stars like a held breath. No lights, no transponder, no heat signature — officially dead for six years, officially empty. Mara suited up alone because there was no one else, docked manually because the automated systems refused, and floated through the airlock into darkness that smelled like recycled air and old fear. Her torch swept across the main corridor. The walls were covered in writing — thousands of lines, dense and careful, in a handwriting she would have recognized anywhere. Her own. Dates that hadn't happened yet. Coordinates she hadn't visited. And at the end of the corridor, a door she had never seen before, slightly open, with pale light coming through the gap like a question she wasn't sure she wanted to answer.