72 Hours

The first thing Mira tried was the comms array.

She wasn't panicking — she was methodical, which was the reason the division trusted her with solo missions. She composed a tight-burst transmission to Ferris Station, the nearest inhabited structure, fourteen light-hours away at current position: anomalous stellar signal, possible countdown sequence, requesting acknowledgement and relay to division chief. She tagged it priority-one, which she had never used before in eleven months.

The transmission failed.

She ran diagnostics. The array was functional — all green. She tried the emergency relay frequency, the public beacon channel, the long-range military band she technically didn't have authorization to use and used anyway. Nothing left the ship. The packets queued and queued and did not clear.

She went outside on the maintenance line to check the antenna physically and found it undamaged, properly aligned, pointed at the correct transponder relay.

Back inside, she cross-checked the stellar interference logs. Vega-9 was putting out electromagnetic noise in the comms bands — not unusual for a dying star, but the density of it was. She had read theoretical papers about dying stars generating EM shields dense enough to occlude communications. She had never expected to be inside one.

She was fourteen light-hours from the nearest humans, with a comms blackout of unknown duration, watching a countdown that had moved from 72 to 67 while she was outside.

She made herself more coffee and went back to the data.

The countdown was the obvious headline. But there was something else in the signal she hadn't fully processed — a secondary structure, woven between the counting pulses. Faint, harder to isolate. She spent three hours building a filter and another hour cleaning the output.

What emerged was a string of coordinate data.

She ran it through the nav computer.

The coordinates were not for Ferris Station. They were not for any charted system she could find. They were not, as best as she could tell, pointed at anything at all — just a vector through empty space.

She ran it again.

And then she understood.

The coordinates pointed to a position that would only be occupied by one object in the current alignment of the Vega Rift.

The Parallax.

The pulse wasn't broadcasting into the void. It was broadcasting to her.