The Source

The countdown hit 36 and Mira had a choice to make.

She could spend the remaining hours attempting to break the comms blackout — find a gap in the electromagnetic density, boost output to an unsafe level, hope a tight-band pulse made it through to the relay. Low probability, high cost, no guarantee.

Or she could stop trying to go through the signal and start going toward it.

She spent four hours on the comms attempt. Nothing cleared. Then she plotted an approach vector to Vega-9 — not to the stellar surface, but to the plane of the acoustic emission source, which her triangulation had placed at approximately 800,000 kilometers from the photosphere, inside the outermost layer of the corona.

She brought the Parallax in slowly, watching the thermal shields climb. The corona was hot enough to cause structural concern at the hull tolerances she'd been given. She crossed the threshold at reduced speed, listening to the temperature alerts, watching the acoustic signal strengthen on every instrument.

At 620,000 kilometers, the hydrophones showed the source was not diffuse. It was a point.

She zoomed the optical array to maximum and looked at the image for a long time without breathing.

It was a structure. Roughly spherical, perhaps 200 meters in diameter, suspended in the corona at a depth that should have vaporized any known material. It was not radiating heat. It was not, as best as she could measure, even particularly warm. It sat in the plasma the way a stone sits in a river — surrounded by something that should destroy it, entirely indifferent.

It was visually dark. No lights, no markings, no obvious access points.

But it was unmistakably the source of the countdown.

The countdown, now at 3, ticked to 2 as she watched.

Then 1.

Then, for the first time in nine weeks of observation, Vega-9 fell completely silent.

Mira sat in the dark of the bridge and waited.

When the structure opened, the light that came from inside was not the light of a star.

It was the light of something older.