When responding to certified distress transmissions, field leadership will remember that corporate responsibility begins at home: the preservation of Commission assets and enforceable interests remains the primary success metric, followed by recovery of registrable property and, where fiscally supportable, survival of the response team. Subjective impressions such as “creepy,” “haunted,” or “bad vibes” may be discussed informally during rest cycles but must not appear in official logs, as they complicate actuarial modeling and invite unhelpful questions from ethics auditors.

  — Corporate Governance & Public Interface Manual, Rev. 77, §6.1 — Legacy Distress, Modern Liability

  ?

  The signal didn’t stop.

  It had just learned a new way to be annoying.

  Before, the Venus signal had been a single, uncanny presence: that loud thought that crawls in behind your eyes and stretches out like it owns the place. Now it had… a friend.

  “Tell me you’re hearing that,” I said.

  On the main holo over the forward console, our neat, breathing knot of light—Frankie’s visualization of the anomalous signal—had grown a rash. Needly spikes of static stabbed out of it, regular and sharp, like someone had tried to build a crown of thorns out of math.

  “Yep,” Frankie said. “Our elegant, ancient-sounding space hymn has acquired a roommate with a fondness for shouting.”

  He stood to my right in his usual form: vaguely humanoid, bluish, faceless, arms folded. The posture said “disappointed schoolteacher.” The energy said “server trying to talk you out of ordering the fish.”

  “It’s not louder,” I said. “It’s just… wrong.”

  The static wasn’t even particularly intense volume-wise. It was the way it sat inside the original pattern, punching little synchronized holes in it. Every few beats, a spike. Every few spikes, a tiny stutter in the corridor of “safe approach” we’d been cultivating like a nervous bonsai gardener.

  “You ever listened to a symphony,” Frankie asked, “and someone’s phone goes off on the same beat every bar?”

  “Can’t say I’ve been to a lot of symphonies,” I said. “But sure. This feels like that, plus the phone is signed up for three different ringtone subscription services.”

  He gestured, and the visualization split into layers. The original signal pulsed in deep golds and greens. The new interference flickered over it in brittle, icy white.

  “I’ve band-separated them as much as I can,” he said. “This—” he pointed at the angry white spikes “—isn’t part of our big mysterious friend. It’s riding on top.”

  “Source?”

  He expanded a little map of local space. Our vector was a white arrow curving gently towards Venus, held in that glowing corridor the signal seemed determined to keep us in. Off to one side, slightly above the plane, a blinking blue dot strobed like a guilty conscience.

  “That,” he said, “is the loud idiot yelling over our cosmic meditation track.”

  I squinted. Numbers ticked beside the dot: range, relative velocity, carrier frequency.

  “That’s… a distress beacon,” I said.

  “Give the man a prize,” Frankie said. “Old pattern, too. One of the retro formats from before MIC unified the standard. It’s been looping a long time.”

  “Can we filter it without messing up the… whatever this is?” I waved at the golden knot.

  “Short answer?” he said. “No. Long answer? No, but if you let me tack a few more zeroes onto the compute budget I might be able to make it almost not awful.”

  “So either we live with a broken picture of the thing that’s—” I stopped myself before I said “reshaping the planet” like it was a person. “—of the main anomaly, or we go shut off the screaming box.”

  “If it helps,” Frankie said, “there’s also the bit where this might involve not leaving anybody to die slowly in the dark.”

  I sighed. “Fine. Pull up the MIC regs. I’ll pretend I’m doing this for the paperwork.”

  A small window opened in my Rift HUD, purely out of spite:

  

MIC Guideline 17.2 — Distress Signal Response (Deep Space)

  

Upon detection of any persistent distress broadcast within operational corridor, respondent is required to:

  

  
1. 
   
     

   Attempt contact.
   
     



  
2. 
   
     

   Investigate source.
   
     



  
3. 
   
     

   Render assistance where feasible and recover assets where practical.
   
     



  

  “See?” Frankie said. “Recover assets. They’re practically begging you to go loot the haunted house.”

  “Plot us an intercept,” I said. “Without leaving the safe lane.”

  He clapped his hands. “Already on it, kid.”

  The arrow representing Mercy bowed gently toward the blue dot, never quite leaving the soft glow of the corridor. The static spikes danced, oblivious.

  We were about to go knock on the door of whatever had been screaming for help, on repeat, for a century and a half.

  What could possibly go wrong.

  ?

  The apparition turned out to have a name.

  “Bringing up registry,” Frankie said. “Beacon authenticated—wow. That’s… nostalgic.”

  “Define nostalgic,” I said.

  “Like when you find out your favorite childhood cereal brand is still around,” he said, “but now it’s a caffeine supplement marketed as an ‘adult productivity bar.’”

  The ship’s file unfolded in my HUD: an old-style MIC hull silhouette, long and comparatively skinny, all rectangles and structural trusses instead of Mercy’s smooth, efficient curves. The text beside it scrolled in a retro font that tried way too hard to look authoritative.

  

VESSEL: MCS Beatific Dawn

  

CLASS: Long-Range Colonial Ark, Block 7

  

LAUNCH DATE: 2243.06.12

  

MISSION: Ecclesiastical Cultural Preservation / Deep-Colony Initiative

  

STATUS: Lost, presumed destroyed (file closed 2247.03.01)

  “‘Ecclesiastical Cultural Preservation,’” I read. “That’s a lot of syllables to say ‘space Jesus cruise.’”

  “Cross-referencing,” Frankie said. “Looks like it was part of an early wave of ‘self-sufficient spiritual communities.’” He made air quotes. “Translated from the corporateese, that’s ‘a bunch of rich people helped a charismatic creep buy a ship so he’d leave the rest of us alone.’”

  “And now it’s back,” I said. “Screaming into our instruments.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Frankie said. “If there are survivors, they’ve had 150 years to work through their issues.”

  He tossed up a trajectory overlay. Mercy’s vector slid closer to the blue dot. The corridor stayed wrapped around us, accommodating the detour as long as we didn’t do anything stupid.

  “Let’s talk options,” I said. “Is there any way to remotely shut that beacon down without docking?”

  “I mean, in theory?” Frankie said. “Sure. In the same ‘in theory’ sense that you could perform dentistry with a railgun if the barrel were small enough and you didn’t like the patient.”

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “We’re too far, the system’s too old, and the beacon’s on a hardened bus,” he said. “Whoever set it up wanted it to stay on. To turn it off without physical access, we’d have to brute-force through layers of redundant, badly-documented, profoundly stupid design decisions made by people who are now all dead.”

  “So we dock,” I said.

  “We dock,” he agreed. “We board. We find the big red OFF switch. Bonus points if we don’t catch anything fungus-based in our pores.”

  “Prep me an EVA suit,” I said. “And a really, really good disinfectant routine for after.”

  “Yes, sir,” Frankie said. “Shall I also draft the strongly-worded complaint you’ll want to file against Deep Space Coincidence?”

  “Save it as a template,” I said. “I have a feeling we’ll be reusing it.”

  ?

  The Beatific Dawn loomed in the forward view like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.

  Even from a distance, you could tell it was old. Not in the dignified, museum-piece way, all polished metal and commemorative plaques. Old in the pitted, patched, “it’s a miracle I’m still holding together” way.

  Panels were missing along parts of the spine, exposing internal trusses twisted like broken ribs. Sections of hull were blackened and bubbled from ancient fires. A few external running lights still blinked in the wrong patterns, like the ship had forgotten what sequence they were supposed to follow and was just improvising.

  “Not ominous at all,” I muttered.

  “Look at that thermal profile,” Frankie said. “Cold as guilt. Only heat spots are the beacon node and a tiny, tiny whisper of power at the aft end.”

  “No life signs?”

  “Nothing warm and walking,” he said. “But a lot of… muck. Biofilm, dried organic residue, nontrivial amounts of dust.”

  “Nontrivial amounts of dust,” I repeated. “That’s a great phrase. Really makes me want to open the door and breathe it.”

  “Good news,” he said. “You get to keep your helmet on.”

  I stood in the Mercy’s forward EVA bay, half inside, half outside an old-style suit. The techs had done a good job modernizing the design, but space suits are space suits. Anyone who tells you they’re comfortable is lying or has terrifying hobbies.

  The torso ring sealed with a soft chunk around my hips. I wriggled my arms into the sleeves, flexing my fingers in practice grips. The helmet waited on the rack next to me, blank visor staring like a decapitated head.

  “You sure we can’t send a disposable drone and call it a day?” I asked.

  “I am sending a drone,” Frankie said. His holo pointed across the bay.

  A meter-long, vaguely insectoid unit floated there, bristling with cameras and manipulator arms. Its white chassis was scuffed but well-maintained, with MIC hazard triangles stenciled in cheerful orange.

  “That’s my body,” Frankie said. “You’re just the meat escort.”

  “You keep talking like that, we’re going to have to discuss our boundaries,” I said, lifting the helmet. “Why do you even need the drone? Can’t you just… pipe yourself through the ship’s systems?”

  “Usually,” he said. “But this thing’s so old it doesn’t trust anything that wasn’t stamped in the same decade as its hull. Wireless access is minimal and crusted over with security so obsolete it’s fashionable again. I need physical interface.”

  “So you’re also spacewalking,” I said. “Except you’re on a stick.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “If you die, my latency goes to hell.”

  “Reassuring.”

  I snapped the helmet down. The suit’s systems came alive around me: HUD bloom, pressure checks, oxygen readouts. My own breathing sounded too loud in my ears, the rush of air like a tide in a seashell.

  Mercy’s docking arms extended towards the Beatific Dawn. On the external cams, the derelict grew from “ominous speck” to “filling the whole view,” then to “you are about to hit it in the face.”

  There was a thump, a shudder, and the rumble of clamps engaging. Status lights on the bay wall ticked from red to amber to green.

  “Docking collar is sealed,” Frankie said. “Pressure equalization in progress. No atmosphere on their side, but the airlock’s holding.”

  “Great,” I said. “Vacuum on the other side. Classic haunted house ambiance.”

  The inner lock cycled open. Beyond it, the tunnel to the Beatific Dawn waited: a metal throat leading into cold, quiet dark.

  I stepped in. Frankie’s drone drifted after me, lights flicking on along its sides like a nervous cuttlefish.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  ?

  There’s a particular kind of silence you only get on dead ships.

  Mercy hummed. She thrummed and whispered and made little complaining noises in her supports, the way a living thing does when it’s got a lot going on under the skin. The Beatific Dawn did none of that.

  My boots touched her deck with soft magnetic clicks. Every step sounded too loud, even transmitted through suit metal and air. Dust—real dust, not the filtered, polite kind—floated in slow spirals, shaken out of whatever corners it had been clinging to.

  “Lights?” I said.

  My suit lamps flared, cutting spears of white into the darkness. The corridor ahead stretched in that generic shipyard style: pipes and conduits along the ceiling, storage lockers or access panels set into the walls at regular intervals, everything a faded, institutional gray.

  Frankie’s drone drifted past my shoulder, floodlight sweeping.

  “Jesus,” he said. “It’s like someone built a nostalgia simulator and forgot to install the ‘not terrifying’ patch.”

  “You’re awfully jumpy for someone who can’t technically die in here,” I said.

  “Excuse you,” he said. “I am riding your nervous system like a rented scooter. If you have a heart attack, my network path collapses.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Your whole ‘I have to run everything I do on Mercy through my Rift’ thing. You keep saying that like it’s hard work.”

  “It is hard work,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much overhead is involved in tunneling command-and-control through one human-grade implant? The bandwidth is—”

  Something creaked further down the corridor.

  We both froze.

  On my HUD, the suit picked it up as a sound spike: metal flexing under long-neglected stress, a yawning groan that seemed to come from the bones of the ship. A loose cable swung lazily across the passage ahead and tapped against the wall: tink… tink… tink.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Just structure settling,” I said.

  “Oh sure,” Frankie whispered through the helmet speakers. “Today it’s ‘just structure settling.’ Tomorrow it’s a forty-meter service drone that’s learned to eat faces.”

  “You’re the one who pulled the deck plans,” I said, starting forward again. “Any forty-meter face-eaters on the manifest?”

  “Only in the theological sections,” he said. “And they don’t fit through that doorway.”

  We moved deeper. The beam from my helmet lamp danced over old safety posters—“THINK SAFE, LIVE SAVED!”—and a faded mural of a sun rising over some idealized colony landscape. Someone had, at some point, drawn horns and a moustache on the sun.

  “You know,” I said, “this would be less creepy if you piped in some hold music.”

  “I’m trying to not get you killed,” he said. “Mood management is a secondary objective.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Feels like a primary objective from where I’m standing.”

  “You’re not standing,” he said. “You’re tiptoeing. Big difference.”

  All things considered, he wasn’t wrong.

  ?

  The first body came into view around the next corner.

  I almost missed it. In my defense, it was floating at waist height and turned away, pale coveralls blending with the wall. My boot brushed something soft; the figure rotated slowly, limp tether twisting.

  A face drifted into my lamp beam.

  He was older than me, or had been. Stubble clung to a jaw gone wrong with vacuum bloating. Eye sockets were half-sunk, skin puckered and stretched. His expression was frozen in something that might have started as a yell and ended as everything in his lungs boiled away.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I said thickly.

  “Body count plus one,” Frankie said quietly. “No suit breach. Internal pressure loss. Looks like he died when the atmosphere went.”

  “Why is he just here?” I asked. “Not strapped in? Not in a bunk?”

  We drifted a little aside to get around him. His hand snagged on the tether; fingers swayed, stiff but still delicate enough for fingernail edges to catch the light. The wall behind him was scored with narrow scratches.

  “Xander,” Frankie said. “Look at the gouges.”

  I shifted my headlamp. The scratches weren’t from tools—not most of them. They were from hands. Raw, desperate, long. Some had left dried streaks of dark brown behind.

  “He tried to claw his way through the bulkhead,” I said.

  “There are more up ahead,” Frankie said. “I’m getting density increases. Organic residue. Mechanical damage.”

  We moved past a side hatch. Its edges were bent inward, like something had hammered at it from the outside. Smears of frozen blood trailed away along the deck in slow, elegant arcs, like someone had painted with a mop and then decided to go for zero-g abstract expressionism.

  Every time the ship creaked, I flinched. Every time a piece of loose debris—an old food pouch, a tool, a bit of torn fabric—bumped gently into a wall, my heart rate spiked. The suit helpfully displayed that at the top of my HUD, in case I wanted clinical confirmation of how rattled I was.

  “Vitals climbing,” Frankie said. “You doing okay in there?”

  “I’m having the time of my life,” I said through gritted teeth. “We should make this a team-building exercise.”

  “We could call it ‘Trust Fall Into The Abyss,’” he said. “Bring the whole crew.”

  We passed what had once been a mess hall. Tables were bolted to the floor, chairs floating half-out of place. Trays and utensils drifted like sad little asteroids. One wall was heavily scratched. Someone had written something there in what I desperately hoped was paint.

  “It’s… not paint,” Frankie said quietly.

  “Great,” I said. “Super.”

  I didn’t read the words.

  ?

  We reached an intersection where the corridor widened and a bank of dead consoles lined one wall. Above them, someone had stenciled SECONDARY OPERATIONS in flaking blue.

  “Here,” Frankie said. “This should get us into the backbone.”

  A small access panel hung half-open, its securing screws long since lost. Behind it, a tangle of cables bloomed like an overgrown nest: fiber, copper, things I didn’t recognize.

  “Lovely,” I said. “Vintage wiring. Do we jiggle it or pray to it?”

  “I’m going to try talking nice,” Frankie said.

  The drone floated closer. One of its manipulators unfolded a thin connector, which he eased into an open port with a surgeon’s care. Status LEDs flickered along the cable.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ve got link. Their system is… oh, wow.”

  “Define ‘oh, wow’ in ‘does this kill me.’”

  “Not directly,” he said. “It’s just… I haven’t seen this OS outside of a museum. Half these security primitives got deprecated before you were born.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means it’s probably full of holes, but they’re holes nobody’s used in a century and a half,” he said. “Give me a second to remember how people used to think linear.”

  On my HUD, a flurry of archaic text flashed by as he probed the network: ancient login prompts, error messages, filenames that started with things like SYS_ and CORE.

  “Got it,” he said after a moment. “I’m in the local node. Pulling system logs, life-support data, distress-beacon routing. Everything’s… fractured.”

  “Fractured how?”

  “Systems didn’t fail all at once,” he said. “They were turned off. In strange order. Someone was cutting their own veins while the ship bled out.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “Looks that way,” he said. “The beacon control is on a hardened loop. It was manually put into permanent-on.”

  “Can you shut it off from here?”

  “Not with the privileges this node has,” he said. “Beacon’s locked to primary command and captain’s override. We need their key.”

  “Which is in…?”

  “Captain’s quarters,” he said. “Every cliché exists for a reason.”

  “Great,” I said. “Lead on.”

  “As you wish,” he said. “Watch your step. There are more bodies ahead.”

  “Of course there are,” I muttered, and pushed off down the corridor.

  ?

  The captain’s door had seen better days.

  A plaque beside it identified the occupant as CAPTAIN HIERONYMUS K. BLAINE in serious, no-fun font. The metal hatch itself was dented inward in several places, deep crescents where something had hammered it from the outside.

  “More fingernails?” I asked.

  “Fingernails from this side,” Frankie said. “Something heavier from the hall. It looks like people were trying to both get in and stay out, at the same time.”

  “That’s comforting,” I said.

  The door’s manual release had long since been pulled. The hatch was ajar, a centimeter gap along the frame. I wedged gloved fingers in, braced my boots against the deck, and hauled. The metal protested, then shifted, then grated open just enough to squeeze through.

  The captain’s quarters were a mess in a way that suggested somebody had tried to barricade themselves in while the ship died around them.

  Furniture floated in slow disarray: a desk half-upended, a chair tangled in a blanket, a smashed drinking glass whose glittering shards hovered like an in-progress explosion. Opposite the door, a viewport looked out into space, its shielding half-lowered. Frost rimed its edges in delicate feathers.

  A body crouched near the desk, tether wrapped twice around one wrist. The skull had cracked against the bulkhead; a fan of frozen droplets arced away. I didn’t look too closely.

  “Captain Blaine, I presume,” Frankie said softly.

  “Poor guy,” I said. “Hope he at least got to yell at somebody on his way out.”

  “Working on finding out,” Frankie said.

  The desk terminal still glowed a faint, sickly blue. A few of its keys were missing; others glowed under a thin layer of frost.

  “Give me a port,” Frankie said.

  I cleared a cable from the access slot under the terminal and plugged the drone’s tether in. Status lights flickered.

  “This node has captain-level clearance,” he murmured. “Pulling personal logs.”

  While he rifled through the dead man’s diary, I let my lamp roam.

  That was when I saw the stone.

  It sat on the corner of the desk, as if it had been placed there deliberately and often. About the size of my palm, roughly ovoid, but wrong somehow. Not smooth, not rough—its surface seemed to flow between states depending on how the light hit it.

  Strange, faint lines crawled over it like veins: not language, exactly, but too structured to be randomness. They glowed with a color that wasn’t really a color, more like the suggestion your eyes give you right before a migraine.

  My Rift HUD juddered for a fraction of a second. Entire panes of data jittered, then resettled.

  “Frankie,” I said. “Is my feed glitching?”

  “Define glitching,” he said distractedly. “If you mean ‘occasionally suffering frame drops because of bandwidth constraints,’ welcome to my life.”

  “There’s a rock on the desk,” I said. “And it just made my overlay hiccup.”

  “A rock made your overlay hiccup,” he repeated. “You sure you’re not just having a moment?”

  I reached out and picked it up.

  My glove sensors grumbled about unexpected electromagnetic interference. The stone felt heavier than it looked, density somewhere between “lava rock” and “bad decision.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely weird.”

  “Please do not lick the spooky artifact on the haunted cult ship,” Frankie said.

  “I wasn’t going to,” I lied, and slid it into my suit’s utility pouch. “Might be worth analyzing later.”

  “You are what scientists call ‘a problem,’” he said.

  “Any joy on the logs?” I asked.

  “Oh, plenty of joy,” he said. “If you define joy as ‘meticulously documented mental breakdown.’ Listen to this.”

  My HUD filled with text and, a second later, audio. The captain’s voice played in my ears: older, strained, a tone that started reasonable and slowly walked off the cliff.

  

Personal log, Captain H. K. Blaine, day 511…

  

Steve has spoken again.

  “Steve?” I said.

  “Keep listening,” Frankie said.

  The log continued.

  

The flock doubts, as they always do, but Steve is patient. He shows himself in the static, in the noise between pulses. His eyes open in the firmament and regard us. We are seen. We are chosen.

  “Okay,” I said. “So Steve is…?”

  “Best guess?” Frankie said. “Their god.”

  He skipped ahead.

  

Day 528. The ritual went… not as the scriptures promised. The lights in the engine room burst. The translators screamed. I saw… I saw the inside of my own skull, and Steve’s light pouring in. We were not ready. The unfaithful claw at the doors now.

  

The scratching. The hammering.

  “Steve sounds like a delight,” I said.

  “This guy wrote a lot about Steve,” Frankie said. “Although the later entries are about 80% apologies and 20% screaming.”

  He flipped to the final log.

  

Day… unknown. Time has dissolved into the clicking of relays. Steve has turned his face away. Or perhaps we looked at too much of it. I hear the scratching everywhere. The faithful in their cages, crying to be let out. The unfaithful outside, crying to be let in.

  

I have tied the beacon to the marrow of the ship. It will sing until the last capacitor falls silent. Steve will hear. He must hear. He must.

  The recording ended in a burst of static and a heavy, wet-sounding thump.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s… not ominous at all.”

  “I can pull his override codes from here,” Frankie said. “We can decouple the beacon from the ‘marrow.’”

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s get that done before Steve returns my call.”

  ?

  The bridge of the Beatific Dawn had once been designed to impress colonists and reassure investors.

  You could tell by the big panoramic viewport at the front, and the way the command chairs were set on a slightly raised platform like a stage. The kind of place where a captain could stand, gesture at the stars, and pretend they knew what they were doing.

  Now, the viewport was half-frosted and streaked with some kind of condensation that had frozen mid-drip. Stars glimmered beyond, distant and uncaring. Several stations were dead; others were stuck on error screens that had been patiently waiting for input for one hundred and fifty years.

  There were more bodies here. A couple strapped into chairs, others caught in the act of moving towards or away from something. Their poses and expressions made the whole place look like a very niche modern art installation.

  “Beacon control is that one,” Frankie said, indicating a console off to the right. “Tie-in point for the shipwide alert systems.”

  I shuffled over, gloved fingers brushing aside a rotting strap. The console’s surface flickered to semi-life under my touch, archaic menus blooming.

  “Plugging in,” Frankie said.

  His drone latched onto the side of the panel, cable snapping into place. Lines of ancient code scrolled past.

  “The captain really did stitch this into everything,” he said. “He rerouted backup power, tied in redundant lines, hard-locked the state register… this is like if someone duct-taped a fire alarm to the building’s heart.”

  “Can you untape it?”

  “I can,” he said. “But if this ship had a ghost, it would be very upset about what I’m about to do.”

  “Add it to my complaint list,” I said.

  There was a pause. The ship creaked. Something bumped gently against the viewport.

  “And… there,” he said.

  On my HUD, the beacon status dropped from ACTIVE / LOCKED to OFFLINE / MANUAL OVERRIDE. The shrieking band of interference that had been lancing through our visualization flickered, wobbled, and then… quietly faded.

  Back on Mercy, the corridor around our approach vector fattened, lines smoothing out. The anomalous signal went back to humming its particular brand of uncanny song, unpolluted.

  “Beacon’s dead,” Frankie said. “Mercy confirms. Our big weird friend looks much happier without the holy spam in its ear.”

  “Great,” I said. “Now we just have to deal with whatever killed this ship and the people on it.”

  “As far as I can tell,” he said, “that was a mixture of bad theology, worse decisions, and a catastrophic pressure drop. The good news is, those don’t usually stick around as ambulatory problems.”

  “Usually,” I said. “You’re really full of comfort today.”

  “I try.”

  He paused.

  “Uh. Xander.”

  “What now?”

  “Now,” he said, “is when I tell you that shutting off the beacon cleared enough noise for me to see something else.”

  “Please tell me it’s not Steve.”

  “Not unless Steve is into long-term hibernation,” he said. “I’m picking up multiple low-level biosigns. Very faint. Very stable. Location…” He overlaid a map in my HUD. “…aft cargo sector. Stasis bay.”

  “Sleepers,” I said.

  “Sleepers,” he confirmed. “They’re still alive.”

  I looked around at the frozen tableau of the bridge. The dead captain, the clawed walls, the scratched doors.

  “Of course they are,” I said.

  ?

  The stasis bay doors were big, heavy, and very clear that I was not allowed inside.

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, they proclaimed in faded caps. Someone had, at some point, scratched a crude cartoon under the sign: a stick figure being eaten by what might have been a bear or might have been an angry potato.

  “The security warnings on these old ships were really honest,” Frankie said approvingly.

  The door status panel blinked an anemic yellow.

  “Pressure?” I asked.

  “Nominal,” he said. “They sealed this section off before losing the rest of the atmosphere. I’m reading a survivable environment inside, as long as you don’t breathe deeply or lick the walls.”

  “You keep mentioning licking things,” I said. “We should talk about that.”

  “Later,” he said. “Door’s locked, but these locks haven’t seen a firmware update since your great-great-grandparents were complaining about ads on the Net.”

  A minute later the status blinked green. The hatch creaked open, cold, stale air washing over my suit in a thin streamer.

  Inside, rows of stasis pods stretched away in two neat columns like a macabre orchard. Most were dead: dark, inert, coated in a thin layer of dust. A few glowed faintly blue, little islands of life in the long dark.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “That’s… a lot of people.”

  “Not as many as there used to be,” Frankie said. “I’m counting twelve viable pods.”

  I floated to the nearest glowing unit. Through the curved glass, a young woman slept. The stasis field turned every detail clinical: her skin tone slightly desaturated, her hair a black fan caught forever in a half-fall.

  She was, objectively, the kind of beautiful that designers put on magazine covers when they’re trying to sell you something expensive and unrealistic.

  “Scan,” I said.

  “Baseline human,” Frankie said. “Modified genetics for long-term health, cosmetic optimizations, nothing too wild. Age locked around… nineteen.”

  “Nineteen,” I repeated. “And she’s been in there for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Call it a long nap,” he said.

  I moved down the row. The pattern held: young women, all variations on a theme, all preserved at that same cusp of adulthood. There were subtle differences—hair, skin, small features—but the general silhouette had been copy-pasted.

  “Tell me this isn’t what it looks like,” I said.

  “I’d love to,” Frankie said. “Hang on.”

  He linked into the bay’s control console. A manifest popped up in my HUD: cargo entries, stasis pod IDs, classification tags.

  “There we go,” he said. “Cargo classification file seventeen-A. You’re going to want to read this.”

  The line he highlighted was blunt in the way only bureaucracy can be when it thinks nobody else will ever see it.

  

CARGO: DEVOTIONAL AUXILIARY COMPANIONS (HAREM UNIT)

  

OWNER: REVERED PROPHET STEPHEN ALBRIGHT (“STEVE”)

  

CLASSIFICATION: LUXURY PERSONAL ASSETS – COMFORT / MORALE

  

TAX CATEGORY: RELIGIOUS EXEMPT (SECTION 12.4c SUBPAR. iii)

  I stared at it.

  “‘Devotional auxiliary companions,’” I read aloud. “Harem unit. Religious tax exemption.”

  “So yes,” Frankie said. “It’s exactly what it looks like, and then somehow worse.”

  My stomach did a slow, unpleasant rotation.

  “Is there,” I said carefully, “a column anywhere that says ‘Consent Status: Verified’?”

  “If there was, I guarantee you it would say ‘N/A,’” he said. “This was a cult, kid. They didn’t bring along a compliance officer.”

  Further down the manifest, another entry caught my eye.

  

CARGO: PERSONAL LEADERSHIP COCOON

  

OCCUPANT: REVERED PROPHET STEPHEN ALBRIGHT

  

STATUS: CRITICAL FAILURE – BIOSIGN N/A

  “So Steve’s pod failed,” I said.

  “Looks like he ascended to the Great Beyond ahead of schedule,” Frankie said dryly. “Shame.”

  “Tragic,” I said, without meaning a syllable of it.

  We hung there in silence for a moment, looking at the sleeping faces.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can’t leave them here.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Legally, morally, PR-ly… you are absolutely bringing them aboard. MIC would roast you alive if you didn’t. Metaphorically, I mean. For now.”

  “And when someone pulls the logs,” I said slowly, “they’re going to see exactly how they were classified.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And they’ll know that the guy with the eight-kilometer superbase ship and the unilateral mandate on Venus,” I continued, “had a cargo bay full of ridiculously hot, barely-legal women in cryostasis, originally labeled as his cult sex harem.”

  “Yes,” Frankie said again. “That is also a thing that will be true.”

  I closed my eyes for a second.

  “Great,” I said. “Perfect. That will in no way ever be used against me in any future argument.”

  “On the plus side,” he offered, “you’ll technically be the only man in history to inherit a sex cult entirely by accident.”

  “Please don’t phrase it like that ever again,” I said.

  He snorted.

  “Drones can handle the transfer,” he said. “We don’t need to thaw them yet. In fact, we absolutely shouldn’t until we’re well away from this bad idea of a ship and have safety protocols in place.”

  “Put them in one of Mercy’s deep cargo bays,” I said. “Somewhere out of the way. And log them as…”

  I thought.

  “…as ‘long-term humanitarian recovery assets,’” I finished. “No mention of the words ‘harem’ or ‘devotional’ anywhere.”

  “Already editing,” he said. “Your instinct for damage control is improving.”

  “That’s not damage control,” I said. “That’s me trying not to die of embarrassment in some future tribunal.”

  “Same skill set,” he said.

  ?

  Leaving the Beatific Dawn felt like backing slowly out of a bad dream.

  We cycled through the airlock with the same bone-deep clunks in reverse. Pressure equalized. The inner hatch rolled open onto Mercy’s clean, well-lit EVA bay like someone had swapped horror movies mid-scene.

  I stepped across the threshold and felt, irrationally, like the dead ship might somehow grab my ankles. It didn’t, of course. It remained where it was, clamped to us for a few more hours while our drones moved cargo.

  From the observation blister above the bay, I watched those drones work. They flitted in and out of the derelict’s wound-like docking port, ferrying pods along sealed transfer tubes. Each capsule slid into Mercy’s waiting racks with a soft thunk, lights switching from “foreign” to “ours” one by one.

  Frankie stood beside me as a holo projection, hands in his pockets, eyes (imagined) on the process.

  “I’ve tucked them into Cargo Bay Seven,” he said. “Far end, behind the bulk raw-stock pallets. Logged in the system as ‘Humanitarian Preservation Units – Long-Term Evaluation Hold.’”

  “Good,” I said. “Someday, I will regret every part of this in vivid detail. Today is about survival.”

  He glanced at me.

  “Ship’s beacon is offline,” he said. “Her core’s powered down. We’ve tagged the hull and broadcast the update to MIC. As far as the universe is concerned, the Beatific Dawn is a recovered artifact and a very strong example in the ‘don’t let the cult run the ship’ training module.”

  “Any more surprises in her logs?”

  “Plenty of crazy,” he said. “Very little new data. A lot of ‘Steve this, Steve that,’ some eyes-in-the-sky imagery that I’m going to pretend I didn’t see, and a few attempts at summoning that read like a cross between bad fanfic and a multi-level marketing pitch.”

  “Burn it all,” I said. “Except what we’re legally required to keep.”

  “Already archived it in a folder labeled ‘Evidence / Do Not Open Before Therapy,’” he said.

  I snorted.

  “Speaking of things I don’t like,” he added, “where’d you put the weird rock?”

  “In my quarters,” I said. “On a shelf by the bunk.”

  He made a face. For a faceless projection, it was impressive.

  “I really don’t like that thing,” he said. “Every time you walked past it on the helmet cam, my error-correction buffers twitched.”

  “You’re being melodramatic,” I said. “It’s a paperweight.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “And I’m a Roomba.”

  “You’re a neurotic Roomba with existential dread,” I said. “We all contain multitudes.”

  He opened his mouth to retort, then closed it.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if it starts whispering, I get to say ‘I told you so’ in your head.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  ?

  I dreamed of eyes.

  They weren’t eyes in the way normal eyes are eyes. There were too many of them, for one thing, layered like stars in overlapping depths. Each one was the size of a continent and no size at all, pupils like bottomless pits, irises patterns that hurt to look at.

  They covered the sky. No, not the sky—the idea of above. Everywhere I looked, one of them was already there, waiting for me to notice.

  I had that sensation, the one you get when you’re sure somebody across a crowded room has just turned to look at you. That electric prickling under the skin. That tightening in the chest.

  Except here, the room was reality, and the someone was… something else.

  I couldn’t hear it speak. There were no words. But there was intent, pressing down like air pressure before a storm. Curious. Hungry. Intrigued.

  Then, faintly, like a voice shouting through ten meters of water, something else. Something smaller. A pattern trying to interpose itself: a different thought, a different will.

  The eyes shifted, just a fraction. Their focus slid away, like someone had grabbed their attention and tugged.

  I woke up gasping, staring at the ceiling of my quarters.

  The stone on the shelf sat where I’d left it, dark and perfectly still.

  “Ugh,” I said eloquently, and swung my legs out of the bunk.

  ?

  “Morning,” Frankie said, as I stepped onto the bridge.

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “For certain values of ‘morning’ and ‘is,’” he said. “You look like gravity lost an argument with your face.”

  “Had a weird dream,” I said, sliding into the command chair. “Sky full of eyes. Something trying to look at me. Something else getting in the way.”

  He paused.

  “That’s pleasantly vague,” he said. “Want to unpack that with your friendly neighborhood unlicensed therapist, or should we chalk it up to ‘ate something weird before bed’?”

  “I haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t standardized beige nutrient slab in three weeks,” I said. “Unless the slabs have started including artisanal psychoactive mushrooms, I don’t think it’s the diet.”

  “Stress, then,” he said. “You poked a haunted ship, inherited a sex cult in cryo, and are currently piloting eight kilometers of liability toward the weirdest gravimetry in the system. You’re allowed a nightmare.”

  “Did you see anything weird in the captain’s logs about eyes?” I asked.

  He looked away, just for a fraction of a second.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Couple of rants about ‘eyes in the static’ and ‘the sky watching back.’ But that kind of language is Cult Leader Standard. It’s like the pepperoni on their crazy pizza.”

  “Comforting,” I said.

  He clapped his hands together.

  “On the bright side,” he said, “Courtesy Mode is still playing nice with the mystery field. Our approach corridor is clean now that the beacon’s off. No more signal rash. We can get back to the fun part: not dying while something we don’t understand keeps steering our flight path.”

  “And the… humanitarian assets?”

  “Tucked away, frozen, and blissfully unaware,” he said. “I’ve set monitoring alarms. If any of those pods so much as think about hiccuping, we’ll know.”

  “Good,” I said.

  I looked at the display: the knot of light over the console, our vector arrow sliding deeper into its welcoming tunnel. Venus glowed ahead, cloud-wrapped and impossible.

  I had a haunted cult ship in my wake, a rock on my shelf that made my implant twitch, a cargo bay full of girls with “devotional companion” in their paperwork, and a date with an anomaly big enough to bully a planet into changing its mind.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s pretend everything is normal and go back to threading the giant cosmic needle.”

  “Now you’re thinking like a Gates,” Frankie said. “Approach Etiquette still locked in. Courtesy Mode active. Try not to spook whatever’s doing that.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “No promises.”

  Outside, the stars didn’t care.

  Ahead, under a shroud of acid clouds and math, something impossibly old kept humming in that same impossible rhythm—and kept very gently steering me where it wanted me to be.