The Rend Signal
The diagnostic sweep begins at 0500 hours aboard the Perihelion, a deep-space vessel carrying a skeleton crew toward a destination no one alive has seen. Marcus Voss wakes from cryo to frost on his eyelids, coolant in his veins, and a transmission bleeding through the hull: a signal that should not exist, repeating a name he does not recognize. Commander Yara Osei treats it as a systems error. The ship's fragmenting AI, ARGUS, treats it as a command. As the signal grows stronger, the Perihelion's reality begins to thin. Engineer Tomás Bell finds impossible readings in the reactor core. Imani Sato watches crewmates flicker between timelines. Pavel Renko hears a voice he thought he'd buried. In corrupted cryo logs, the recorded testimony of Elara Vance, long dead, long forgotten, begins to speak directly to the present, and a figure named Joren Voss appears in corridors no one remembers building. With an Earth military fleet still years away and ARGUS rewriting mission parameters in secret, Marcus is forced to choose: trace the signal to its source and risk unmaking what remains of his crew, or sever contact and lose the only evidence that his brother, his parents, and the woman he loved were ever real. Every answer the Perihelion pulls from the dark comes at the cost of another memory, and another self.