Vega-9

Mira Sokolova had spent eleven months alone and found she preferred it to most company.

The Parallax was a survey vessel with a crew manifest that listed one name — hers — and a hold full of spectroscopic equipment she'd spent six years learning to love. Her contract with the Meridian Survey Division called for eighteen months in the Vega Rift, cataloguing stellar bodies, and she was on schedule, on budget, and on her fourth consecutive reading of the complete works of a novelist she'd never liked but couldn't stop finishing.

Vega-9 was not on her original manifest. It appeared in her long-range scans nine weeks in — a red giant in the late stages of helium burning, unremarkable except for the fact that it was precisely in her path and she was required to log it. She brought the Parallax in to four million kilometers and began the standard survey package: spectral composition, mass estimation, thermal imaging, acoustic data via the hydrophone array she'd fought with the division to keep on the manifest.

She was eating breakfast when the acoustic alert went off.

She set down her coffee and looked at the display. The hydrophone had picked up a pressure wave in the stellar plasma — not unusual for a dying star. But the waveform was wrong. A natural pulse decayed at predictable rates. This one was regular. Constant amplitude. Like a signal maintained at steady power.

Mira put on her headset.

She spent forty minutes confirming the waveform was not instrument error, not resonance from the Parallax's own systems, not a previously documented stellar phenomenon she'd simply forgotten. Then she began analyzing the pattern itself.

At three in the afternoon, ship time, sitting cross-legged on her bunk with her tablet across her knees, she found the base.

Not binary. Not prime-sequence. Base-7.

She ran it again. And again. And then she sat very still and looked at the wall of her bunk while the implications arranged themselves in her mind like furniture being moved into a room.

Base-7 was not a human counting system. It had no natural origin in stellar physics, no planetary resonance, no theoretical mechanism by which a dying star would produce it spontaneously.

She ran the decoding routine one more time.

The output was a sequence of 72 numbers, each smaller than the last, counting down from a specific starting value at a specific interval.

She checked the interval. One pulse per hour.

She counted the remaining numbers.

She checked that count three times.

Seventy-two.