Chapter 48 · Stray Signals

The Mynock drifted in dark silence, engines throttled low. The relay cores sat on the console between them—two sealed cylinders, their interface lights pulsing in different rhythms. The room felt smaller than usual, as though the air itself had opinions.

Eli had been watching the screen for the past hour, running the same comparison routine three times. The results didn’t change. “They don’t match,” he said. “Same timestamps, same encoding base—but the vectors don’t line up. It’s like one of them’s been mirrored.”

Stent stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixed on the scrolling data. “You are assuming one is correct.”

“I’m assuming one isn’t lying,” Eli said.

“They both are,” Stent replied. “These fragments were fouled. The data was corrupted by scavenger tampering.”

Eli looked up. “You think they were faking Ascendancy transmissions?”

“I think they were using them to lure ships into range,” Stent said, voice precise, almost clipped. “The relay pattern was convenient bait—recognizable, promising, impossible to ignore.”

“That’s not what the metadata says.”

“The metadata is meaningless.”

Eli frowned. “And you know that how?”

Silence. Stent didn’t move, didn’t blink. Only the faint thrum of the engines filled the gap. Then he said, too evenly, “Because it is logical.”

“Logical,” Eli repeated. “Right. You sound like the buoy itself. You sure you’re not just tired of chasing ghosts?”

Stent’s jaw tightened—a flicker so small it could have been the reflection from the display. “We will find another vector. A verifiable one.”

“By throwing this away?” Eli gestured at the data cores. “We’ve been following these breadcrumbs for weeks. We’re close.”

“You believe we are close,” Stent said quietly. “Belief is not evidence.”

Eli exhaled, sharp through his teeth. “And evidence isn’t everything. Sometimes it’s the pattern underneath it that matters—the feeling when the data almost makes sense.”

“That is intuition,” Stent said. “It has limited reliability.”

“Not when you’ve got nothing else.”

Their eyes met across the cramped cockpit, the hum of the ship vibrating between them. For the first time, the difference between them wasn’t just species or training—it was the shape of their trust. Eli’s came from faith in patterns, in people. Stent’s came from structure, from control. One built bridges; the other built walls.

“Look,” Eli said, softening. “I’m not saying I’m right. But these buoys mean something. Someone’s been using them. You don’t get that kind of precision from scavenger noise.”

Stent didn’t reply. The faint light from the console caught in his eyes, twin red reflections that looked almost like warning lights. The lie he didn’t speak was heavier than the words he did. He knew what had corrupted the buoys, and it wasn’t scavengers—but admitting that would mean opening doors he had spent years keeping sealed.

“Fine,” Eli said at last. “We’ll find a new trail. But I’m keeping these online. If we stumble on another buoy, maybe they’ll make sense in context.”

“As you wish,” Stent said.

It wasn’t agreement, and it wasn’t argument. It was distance, carefully folded into politeness.

The silence after that felt longer than the jump between stars. Then the comm panel crackled. Static, faint but rhythmic—something trying to claw its way through the noise.

Eli straightened. “You hear that?”

“Interference,” Stent said automatically.

Eli adjusted the frequency. Beneath the distortion, a voice flickered in and out—a few words, a desperate rhythm. A distress signal.

And just like that, the debate was over.

The Mynock drifted in dark silence, engines throttled low. The two relay cores sat between them on the console—metal cylinders, lights pulsing in unsynchronized rhythm. The air felt tight, charged, as if the little ship itself were listening.

Eli ran the comparison routine again. The results didn’t change. “They don’t match,” he said. “Same timestamps, same encoding base, but the vectors point opposite directions. One’s inverted.”

Stent stood behind him, hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixed on the screen. “You assume one is correct.”

“I’m assuming one isn’t lying,” Eli said.

“They both are.”

Eli turned in his seat. “You’re serious.”

“These fragments were fouled,” Stent said. His tone had that clipped, military precision he used when emotion tried to get a foothold. “The data was corrupted long before we arrived. Scavengers—or worse—used them as bait. Familiar codes lure ships in. Then they disappear.”

Eli frowned. “You think they were faking Ascendancy transmissions?”

“I think the pattern was chosen because it would look legitimate.” A pause. “Deliberately chosen.”

The pause stretched. Stent’s face was composed, but a muscle flickered once along his jaw. The blue light from the console deepened the color of his skin to something almost black. He looked like he was staring through the data, not at it.

Eli missed the weight of that look. He was already talking again. “That kind of precision doesn’t come from scavengers. They can fake a ping, not a whole encryption matrix.”

“They can if someone shows them how.”

The words came out too fast, too sharp. Stent caught himself immediately, straightened, softened the tone. “It is irrelevant. The point stands—these relays cannot be trusted.”

Eli exhaled, rubbing a hand over his face. “So you’re saying weeks of data are garbage.”

“I am saying they are dangerous,” Stent said. “Corruption spreads through networks. If we continue following this chain, we may end up like the last ship that tried.”

Eli looked up. “You mean that wreck we found? You think it was connected?”

“I think coincidence is a poor statistical model.”

“Or maybe it’s guilt talking,” Eli said before he could stop himself. “You hate seeing one of your own ships gutted. You’re trying to write it off as logic.”

Stent didn’t flinch, but his eyes hardened. “Emotional projection will not repair a corrupted map.”

“Logic won’t find whoever left those messages either.”

Their voices overlapped with the hum of the engines—a low, dissonant argument that filled the cockpit. For Eli, this was about stubborn faith in patterns. For Stent, it was survival—and the shadow of something he couldn’t name aloud.

He knew that interference. The disharmonic residue in the code wasn’t mechanical. It was deliberate, patterned like thought but wrong in its symmetry. Grysk. He’d seen it before—in the outer campaigns, in data strings that turned command ships into graves. But he couldn’t say that. Not here. Not yet.

“Fine,” Eli said at last, throwing up a hand. “We’ll find a new vector. But I’m keeping these online. Maybe they’ll make sense later.”

“As you wish,” Stent said, and the words came out too quiet.

It wasn’t agreement. It was containment—his way of closing a door before something came through it.

Silence settled again.

Days passed in that silence, filled with the dull rhythm of work. They drifted in quiet sectors, running repairs with the coolant valves salvaged from the scavengers. The Mynock smelled of metal and solvent, her panels open like wounds slowly stitching closed. Eli spent hours beneath the deck plating, muttering to himself and the ship; Stent kept to the cockpit, reviewing star maps no one else had drawn.

When the last pressure seal finally held and the hum of the cooling system steadied, Eli allowed himself a long exhale. “She’ll live,” he said.

“For now,” Stent replied. He hadn’t looked up from his console in nearly an hour. The same quiet distance hung between them, stretched thinner with each jump.

Then the comm panel hissed softly—just a breath of static at first, then a pulse beneath it: two bursts, a pause, then three.

Eli leaned forward. “You hear that?”

“Interference,” Stent said automatically.

Eli tuned the dial. Beneath the distortion, a voice flickered—broken words, a rhythm that sounded like someone knocking from the other side of a wall.

A distress call.

The argument about the buoys was forgotten, but the weight behind Stent’s silence remained—a pressure in the cabin that had nothing to do with gravity.

The signal came and went like a heartbeat—too weak to lock, too steady to be random. Every few minutes the same pattern repeated: two short bursts, a pause, then three. It cut through the static like emergency code in a dying storm.

Eli leaned closer to the console. “That’s not debris chatter. Someone’s actually sending this.”

Stent’s expression didn’t change. “It’s an automated beacon.”

“Automated beacons don’t sound like they’re panicking,” Eli said. He amplified the gain, filtering out the background noise. The words emerged faintly—Imperial Standard, distorted, male voice repeating:

“—any vessel… life support failing… coordinates—”

Then it dissolved back into static.

Eli looked over. “That’s a distress call. Coordinates are embedded.”

“Which means it could also be bait,” Stent said. His voice stayed calm, but his fingers tightened slightly on the edge of the console. “If we respond, we broadcast our position. We risk ambush.”

“Or we save whoever’s out there.”

“Our mission does not include search and rescue.”

Eli turned in his chair. “Our mission also didn’t include getting shot at, scavenging for coolant, or playing codebreaker with ghosts—but here we are.”

Stent’s eyes flicked toward the star chart. “We cannot afford diversions.”

“Diversions?” Eli repeated. “That’s what you call not letting people die alone in a can?”

“They are not our responsibility.”

Eli let out a short laugh—more disbelief than humor. “You really can say that? After everything you’ve seen?”

Stent didn’t answer. His stillness was armor again, every movement measured, deliberate. The logic was sound, and he clung to it—because logic kept the fear buried.

He was certain this was a trap. The pattern was too clean, too deliberate. The Grysk had used such signals before—distress calls woven from voices, the tone pitched just right to stir empathy. Traps stitched from desperation, bait designed for the kind of people who couldn’t ignore it.

He didn’t trust the signal. He didn’t trust the silence around it. And he didn’t trust that Eli would see the difference.

He kept his voice neutral. “If we follow that signal and it is hostile, we compromise the ship, the data, and the mission.”

Eli studied him, brow furrowing. “You sound like you already know what’s waiting out there.”

Stent’s gaze held steady. “I know probability.”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “And I know people. Someone’s in trouble. We’re not ignoring it.”

Stent said nothing for a moment. The hum of the ship filled the space between them. He could have overruled the course input—but he didn’t. He watched as Eli entered the coordinates manually, the nav screen blooming with a weak, flickering vector.

“Fine,” Stent said finally. “But we will proceed under full caution. No transmissions. No lights.”

Eli nodded, already powering the engines to half thrust. “Fine by me. You can call it logic. I’ll call it decency.”

The Mynock turned slowly toward the signal, slipping into the dark like a question looking for an answer.

Behind them, the static hissed once more—three beats this time, like a whisper catching its breath.

The Mynock slid closer to the coordinates into a field of drifting fragments—metal shards, bits of ice, a pale fog of frozen vapor. The coordinates from the distress call pulsed faintly on the nav screen, a single dying heartbeat amid the debris.

“There,” Eli said. “Dead center.”

Stent’s eyes narrowed. “Signal strength is inconsistent.”

“Because the transmitter’s dying. We’ve got to get close enough to boost it.”

He throttled down to a crawl, hands light on the controls. The ship groaned around them, her old hull protesting every micro-adjustment. Beyond the viewport, a dim glint of metal tumbled end over end. The distress beacon flared again, weak but definite.

“Escape pod,” Eli said. “Early Imperial design, maybe twenty years old.”

“Which means it could belong to anyone,” Stent replied.

Eli was already reaching for the comm. “This is the Mynock, responding to your distress call. Do you read?”

Static. A hiss, then a ragged whisper of sound—two syllables, maybe a name—before it cut out again.

Stent leaned forward. “No reply. We leave it.”

Eli turned to him. “There’s life in there. You heard it.”

“There are also countless ways to synthesize such a sound,” Stent said. His voice was calm, but the line of his shoulders had gone rigid. Eyes jumping from the scanner screens and the viewport, expecting the ambush to come. “The Gry—” He stopped himself. “The Outer species use such methods. They mimic distress to draw in assistance.”

“So what, we just assume everyone’s lying?”

“We assume survival requires suspicion.”

Eli keyed in a short burst of lateral thrust, lining the ship up with the drifting pod. “Survival also requires being human.”

Stent didn’t move, didn’t speak, but the light in his eyes sharpened—anger or fear, Eli couldn’t tell.

The Mynock had no cargo clamp. Improvisation was all they had.

Eli pulled on his suit, the Imperial relic still smelling faintly of lubricant and old air. He checked the seals twice, the tether line coiled at his side.
“You keep her steady,” he said. “I’ll handle the docking.”

Stent’s tone was flat. “The airlock has failed before. It could jam again.”

“Then I’ll kick it until it remembers its purpose,” Eli said, tightening the seals. “We’ve done worse.”

“Manual docking under these conditions is reckless.”

“So’s leaving them out there,” Eli shot back. “Guess we’ll both be uncomfortable.”

The airlock cycled open with a cough. Beyond it, the escape pod turned lazily, sunlight flashing along its battered hull. Eli pushed off and drifted toward it, a slow dance in vacuum. The pod’s surface was scored with scratches, paint stripped by radiation, the emergency thrusters long dead.

“Distance five meters,” Stent’s voice came through the comm. “Relative velocity minimal. Adjust rotation by point three.”

Eli fired his pack in short bursts. The ship’s proximity alarms flickered on and off as the pod drifted past the Mynock’s flank. “Almost there…”

He extended the manual docking ring. The first attempt missed, scraping across the pod’s frame and sending him spinning. “Damn it—”

“Stabilize,” Stent snapped.

“I’m trying!”

The stars blurred; Eli gritted his teeth, fired counter-thrust, and stopped his roll. The second attempt caught—the magnetic ring locked with a dull, uncertain clunk.

“Contact,” he panted. “Docking ring secure… mostly.”

“Seal integrity?”

He checked the readout. “Not great. Pressure’s fluctuating—she’s not seating properly.”

“Equalize atmosphere anyway,” Stent said.

Eli toggled the valve. The lock hissed, groaned, and then stalled halfway through the sequence. The indicator light flickered yellow, then red. “We’re not getting a clean seal. If I open both hatches, the pressure difference’ll tear the lock apart.”

“Options?”

“I’ll have to secure the inner hatch and crawl into the ring to fix it manually.”

“Unsafe.”

“That’s the theme of the week,” Eli muttered.

He squeezed into the narrow docking conduit, tools clipped to his belt. The suit scraped against the walls, every movement echoing in his helmet. Frost rimed the inner seams where the cold bled through. The airlock’s mechanism shuddered each time the pod drifted against the connection—metal breathing out of rhythm.

“Adjusting seal,” he said. “If this thing blows, tell the next pilot to install proper clamps.”

The first bolt shifted reluctantly, the second tightened, the third slipped. He slammed the wrench into place, twisting until the gauge lights steadied. The pressure indicators blinked yellow, then grudgingly green.

“Seal’s holding. Kind of.”

“Kind of is insufficient,” Stent said.

“Then it’s our lucky day.”

The lights stabilized. “Pressure balanced,” Eli said. “Opening outer hatch.”

The light inside the pod was dim and uneven, the emergency lamps flickering on residual power. Through the small viewport, he saw movement—two figures pressed against the far wall. One lifted a hand.

A human woman, young, grease-stained, her eyes wide with exhaustion and disbelief. Beside her, a Devaronian in a torn academic uniform, his red skin dulled to the color of rust, his horns scraped and scuffed. The mechanic’s expression shifted from fear to something fragile and bright when she saw Eli’s faceplate appear in the window.

He raised a gloved hand to the glass. She mirrored the gesture, palm to palm across the divide. Through the comm’s faint hiss, he heard her voice—hoarse, trembling, but clear enough to make him stop breathing for a heartbeat.

“Please… help us.”

Eli swallowed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s the plan.”

He keyed the comm. “Stent, we’ve got two inside. Alive but fading fast. The seal won’t hold for transfer; I’ll have to bring them through one at a time.”

“Understood,” Stent said after a pause. “Move quickly. Close the lock after.”

“Copy that.”

He pressed one hand against the viewport again, then began working the manual latch. The pod’s hatch trembled under his grip, ancient bolts groaning as the seal began to part. The vibration ran up his arms like a living thing.

For the first time in weeks, Eli felt something besides exhaustion—adrenaline, fear, and a thin thread of purpose. Two lives clung to theirs now, and the Mynock—that stubborn, wheezing machine—was the only thing standing between them and the dark.

The transfer was clumsy, slow, and loud.

The airlock hatch fought them with every rotation of the crank. The seals hissed, the hydraulics squealed, and the ship’s metal skin popped like a creature protesting the weight of more life. Eli maneuvered first the Devaronian, then the human mechanic through the narrow passage, one at a time. Each movement felt like balancing glass in a windstorm.

When the hatch finally closed, the Mynock shuddered once, equalizing pressure with an exhausted sigh. The warning lights steadied to amber. It wasn’t safety, but it was closer than before.

Eli stripped off his helmet, breath fogging the stale air. Stent was already kneeling beside the two newcomers, checking their vitals. His hands moved with the detached precision of a surgeon who didn’t want to care but couldn’t help it.

“They’ll live,” he said. “Pulse irregular. Severe hypoxia. The Devaronian is worse off.”

The mechanic stirred, blinking up at them. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, and she looked far too young to be dying in a pod. “Who… are you?”

“Rescue service,” Eli said, deadpan. “The budget kind.”

Her mouth twitched into the ghost of a smile. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “We don’t have room for gratitude.”

By the time they got the survivors settled, the Mynock felt smaller than ever. Eli gave up his bunk without hesitation, stringing an emergency hammock from the overhead struts for himself. The woman—the mechanic—curled up on his cot, wrapped in one of the ship’s heat blankets. The Devaronian slept across from her on a pile of cargo padding, horns tilted awkwardly against the bulkhead.

The air recyclers wheezed under the strain. The ship had been built for two, and it sounded like it knew it.

Eli crouched by the galley unit, coaxing the heating element back to life. “You hungry?” he asked without turning.

“I am not,” Stent said.

“I was talking to her.”

The woman hesitated, then nodded. “Anything warm. Thanks”

Eli opened a ration pack and poured the contents into the rehydrator. The smell of salt and starch filled the cabin. “It’s not good,” he said, “but it’s edible.”

“‘Edible’ is a high standard,” she said. Her voice cracked halfway through the sentence.

Eli passed her the bowl. “What were you doing out there?”

“Hauling archives,” she said. “The captain didn’t make it.” Her eyes flicked toward the Devaronian. “He’s a cartographer. Or was.”

“An astro-archivist,” Stent corrected automatically. “I recognize the uniform.”

The mechanic looked faintly surprised. “You speak Sy Bisti?”

“I read insignia,” Stent said.

Eli met her gaze. “How long were you adrift?”

“Six days,” she said. “Maybe more.”

Eli’s stomach tightened. “You’re lucky your pod still had power.”

“Luck’s all we had left.” She stared down at the steaming bowl in her hands. “Until you found us.”

“Yeah,” Eli said quietly. “Could’ve.”

Stent sat apart, at his station, silent. His posture was perfect, his expression unreadable, but Eli knew that kind of stillness. It was containment. The Chiss had spent the last few hours pretending the rescue hadn’t shaken him, and he was doing a convincing job—except for the small tremor in his fingers when he finally set the navigation computer down.

Eli didn’t mention it. He’d learned not to.

He leaned back against the wall, watching the mechanic drift into shallow sleep. The Devaronian muttered something in his own language—coordinates, maybe—and rolled onto his side. The ship was full of quiet now, the kind that didn’t know whether to call itself peace or exhaustion.

Hours later, Eli found Stent still awake, sitting at the nav console. The glow from the screens painted sharp planes across his face.

“Could’ve been worse,” Eli said softly. “We saved two lives.”

Stent didn’t look up. “We delayed the mission.”

“Right. You’ll have to add a footnote to your report: ‘Unexpected humanity encountered.’”

No response. Just that steady composure again. Eli waited, then sighed. “You know, you can say it out loud.”

“Say what?”

“That you did the right thing.”

Stent’s eyes flicked to him, red and distant. “I did the necessary thing.”

Eli smiled faintly. “Same difference.”

This time, Stent didn’t correct him.

By morning—if the term still meant anything in the endless dark—the two survivors were breathing easier. The mechanic slept through the flicker of the ship’s lights; the Devaronian murmured occasionally in dreams, his long fingers twitching as if drawing invisible lines across the bulkhead.

Eli sat at the cockpit, nursing the same lukewarm cup of caccoleaf he’d been pretending was breakfast. The rescue had left the Mynock heavy. The air felt warmer, wetter, and far too human. He didn’t mind it, but he could almost feel Stent minding it for both of them.

The Chiss was at the console, expression carved from restraint. He had slept in the pilot seat. The relay data still glowed on one of the secondary screens, ignored now for hours.

“They’ll need a port,” Eli said finally. “That pod’s too far gone to reuse. Life support’s a single spark from failure.”

“Agreed,” Stent said. His voice carried no tone at all, just a quiet efficiency that had returned like armor being reattached.

Eli leaned back, gesturing toward the viewport. “Nearest settlement is two, maybe three jumps out. Small trade station on the rim—won’t ask questions if we keep the lights dim.”

“Unregistered,” Stent said. Not a question.

“Mostly.”

He hesitated, then nodded once. “We will tow them there.”

They worked in silence, rigging the magnetic tether from the auxiliary port. The pod floated behind the Mynock like a child’s toy tied to a hunting dog, its hull blackened but intact. Each movement was deliberate—Stent checking every connection twice, Eli tightening the cable until it sang under strain.

When the last coupling locked in place, Eli stepped back and exhaled. “Good enough for a short pull.”

“There is no such thing as ‘good enough,’” Stent said, though without heat. He logged the maneuver into the ship’s record, his hand steady as he typed: Delay: 6.3 hours. Tow initiated. Objective unaffected.

The words looked sterile on the screen, almost comforting in their neatness.

Eli watched him. “You don’t have to file that right away.”

“It is procedure.”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “You always follow procedure when you’re trying not to feel something.”

For a heartbeat, Stent’s hands froze over the console. Then he continued typing, unhurried. “Emotion is irrelevant. Efficiency is not.”

Eli smiled faintly, sitting back. “Sure. Efficiency. That’s what you call saving lives now.”

“Semantics,” Stent said, but the rhythm of his voice betrayed him—it slowed, softened, like a man conceding something without saying it.

Hours later, as the Mynock eased into the jump corridor, the tether line stretched taut, glowing faintly against the stars. The little escape pod trailed behind them, following their wake like a second chance.

The mechanic stirred once in her sleep, curling tighter under the blanket. The Devaronian whispered a coordinate in his native tongue—a fragment of a map that no longer led anywhere.

Eli watched the reflections slide across the viewport. “You know,” he said quietly, “for all your talk about pragmatism, I think you’d rather save people than admit it.”

Stent didn’t turn. “You assume much.”

“Occupational hazard.”

He thought he saw the faintest flicker of a smile in the glass, gone before it could be real.