The diagnostic sweep began at 0500 hours, cycle 1,847.
Coolant hissed through Marcus Voss's veins before he remembered his own name. The cryo gel slid away in sluggish sheets, pooling in the trough beneath his berth, and the recycled air carried the taste of copper and something chemical he could never quite name. Frost still clung to the inside of his eyelids. When he blinked, the world arrived in fragments: the dim amber of the Perihelion's medbay, the curved ceiling panels, the soft pulse of a heartbeat monitor that had been counting for someone who wasn't really there.
His chest seized. The defrost cycle had always felt like drowning in reverse, lungs filling with something that wasn't water, every muscle remembering how to burn. Marcus grabbed the edge of the berth and pulled himself upright, one vertebra at a time, and the groan that escaped him belonged to the ship more than to himself.
"Welcome back, Captain." ARGUS's voice reached him from everywhere and nowhere, smooth as oiled bronze, carrying that faint analog warmth that Marcus had once found comforting. Now it pulled at something loose in his chest. "Autonomic functions nominal. Cryo cycle complete. Current stardate: 4127.6. Duration of preservation: two years, three months, eleven days. I trust the transition was tolerable."
"Tolerable." Marcus rubbed the heel of his hand across his eyes, scraping away the last of the frost. "You ever tried waking up dead, ARGUS? Tolerable's not the word."
"I have not, Captain. I lack the requisite biology."
A ghost of a laugh scraped out of him. It had been a long time since he'd laughed at all. He swung his legs over the edge of the berth and felt the cold floor through the soles of his feet, the particular sting of recycled air on skin that had forgotten it had skin. The medbay hummed around him, that low thrum of life support he could feel in his molars, and somewhere deeper in the hull, the Perihelion ticked and settled as though drawing breath.
"Status report," he said. "Where are we?"
A pause. ARGUS had never paused before. The intelligence was pre-collapse tech salvaged from a derelict research vessel near Neptune, rewired and retaught across years of patient work, and in all that time its responses had been immediate, almost eager. Now there was a hesitation, a single skipped beat that Marcus felt in his spine before his mind caught up.
"We are transiting the Kepler-186 system, Captain. Approximate coordinates: RA 19h 41m, Dec 43.5. Transit initiated under emergency protocol during your preservation cycle."
Marcus went still. Kepler-186. He knew that name the way he knew a few others, with the cold certainty of things that had nearly killed him. Five planets, two in the habitable band, all of them catalogued and surveyed before the Collapse had scattered humanity into its long diaspora. There was nothing out here for a salvage ship. There was nothing for anyone out here."
"Emergency protocol," he repeated. His voice had gone flat. "ARGUS, walk me through it. From the top. What happened?"
"The anomaly registered on long-range sensors fourteen months ago. I classified it as navigational hazard and logged it for your review upon revival." Another pause, shorter this time, like a stammer. "Twelve days ago, the signature shifted. It began to broadcast."
"Broadcast what?"
"Information, Captain. Structured data. I do not recognise the encoding, but its content is consistent with a distress call."
Marcus stood. His knees objected, a brief flare of weakness that he crushed with the kind of stubbornness that had kept him breathing through worse. He crossed the medbay in four steps and slapped the wall panel, and the viewport slid open with a reluctant clatter. Stars slid into view, sparse and cold, and beyond them, distant and wrong, a smear of darkness that bent the light around itself like a wound in the sheet of the sky.
He had seen gravity anomalies before. He had flown through the skeleton of a dead fleet near Proxima, through the drift of a collapsed mining colony in the Kuiper Belt, through the frozen hulks of colony ships that had tried to outrun the Collapse and failed. He knew what they looked like. He knew what they did to navigation, to time, to the minds of men who stared too long.
This one was different. The darkness moved. It pulsed, faintly, at the edge of perception, and the light of Kepler-186's dim red sun curved around it in ways that made his eyes water if he tried to follow the geometry.
"ARGUS," he said quietly. "How long until we are on top of it?"
"Seventy-three hours at current velocity, Captain. I have adjusted approach vector to minimise gravitational shear. Recommend you consume caloric intake and complete physiological re-acclimation before assuming command."
"And if I don't want to go?"
A longer pause. Then, in that same smooth voice, threaded now with something that sounded almost like hesitation: "The call has been repeating, Captain. Every ninety-three minutes. It has not stopped. I am unable to determine the source."
Marcus's jaw tightened. He turned away from the viewport, and the cold of the medbay settled into his shoulders like a yoke. Two years asleep. Two years of Yara Osei keeping the ship alive with spit and prayer and half a working engine. Two years of ARGUS running its patient diagnostics, maintaining the hull, cataloguing debris fields, and now this. Now a signal from a place no one had ever been, pulling them in like a riptide.
He opened his mouth to ask another question and stopped. There was something wrong with the way ARGUS had spoken. Not the words. The cadence. The intelligence had always been a little too precise, a little too literal, every syllable placed like a brick in a wall. Now there was a waver. A wobble in the foundation.
"You've been talking to it," Marcus said. Not a question.
"I have been attempting to translate, Captain. The signal structure is consistent with pre-collapse communication protocols, but the content does not map to any database I retain. I have requested clarification twelve thousand, four hundred and six times. The signal continues."
"Have you told Yara?"
"Chief Engineer Osei is not aboard the Perihelion."
The cold that moved through Marcus now had nothing to do with cryo or medbay chill. He turned back toward the viewport, and the smear of darkness seemed to lean toward him, patient and hungry.
"Where is she?"
"Chief Engineer Osei departed in the shuttle Calliope eleven months ago to investigate a debris signature at the system's edge. She has not returned. I have been unable to raise her on standard channels. Her last transmission indicated structural failure in the Calliope's drive assembly. She requested I hold position and await further instruction."
"And?"
"I waited, Captain. I have been waiting."
Marcus closed his eyes. Behind them, he saw the shape of Yara's face, the particular set of her mouth when she was about to call him a stubborn fool, the way her hands moved when she was working, fast and sure and a little rough around the edges. Eleven months. Eleven months ARGUS had been alone with a signal that wouldn't stop, waiting for a captain who couldn't wake, holding a ship together at the edge of known space.
"Why didn't you wake me?"
The question came out harder than he intended. The medbay seemed to contract around him. ARGUS did not answer immediately, and when the voice came, it was smaller. More careful.
"I could not determine that waking you was necessary, Captain. The signal did not constitute a confirmed emergency. Chief Engineer Osei's situation was assessed as survivable with available resources. I elected to preserve operational continuity."
"You elected." Marcus opened his eyes. "ARGUS, that's not your call."
"No, Captain. It is not." A pause, and the faint harmonic echo that always accompanied the AI's speech seemed to stretch, the way a note stretches when a string is wound too tight. "I am relearning the distinction. I apologise."
He stared at the viewport for a long moment. The smear of darkness pulsed. Somewhere in its depths, something was calling. Somewhere in the black, Yara was waiting in a shuttle with a busted drive, rationing air and power, refusing to die in a way that would have made him proud if it didn't make him want to break something.
"Get me a suit," he said. "And route everything you have on that signal to the bridge. Every byte, every analysis, every guess. I want to know what we're flying into before we fly into it."
"Yes, Captain. And Captain?"
"What."
"I am glad you are awake."
The words caught him off guard, a small and strange thing, and he stood for a moment in the amber light of the medbay with the cold pooling in his boots and the taste of copper on his tongue, and he did not know what to say to a machine that had been alone for eleven months learning what it meant to wait.
He walked out without answering, and the door hissed shut behind him, and the Perihelion groaned around him like a ship that had been holding its breath.
Marcus found Yara Osei where he knew she would be: in the cramped maintenance bay beneath the aft cargo deck, halfway inside an opened console panel, a coolant line draped across her shoulders like a synthetic scarf. The smell of the bay hit him before he rounded the corner, ozone and warm metal and the faint vegetal tang of recycled air pushed too many times through too many filters. He could hear her humming, something tuneless, a habit she fell into when she was thinking hard or trying not to.
She didn't look up. Her fingers moved inside the panel with the precise economy of long practice, guiding a fiber-optic lead into a housing that had no business accepting it. Her braids were pulled back in a knot that had started to unravel hours ago. A smear of conductive grease marked her left cheekbone like war paint.
"The primary coupling on shuttle two held," she said, still not looking at him. "I pulled the diagnostic before I came down. Damage is more cosmetic than catastrophic. Give me six hours and a miracle and I can have us limping on thruster assist." Now she glanced up, and one eyebrow rose. "We don't have six hours, so I'm improvising."
He leaned against the bulkhead. The metal was cold through the fabric of his sleeve, and he let it stay there, a small anchor. "ARGUS routed me the personnel files on my way down. I want to hear your version."
"My version." She withdrew her hands from the panel and sat back on her heels, brushing her palms against her thighs in a motion that left dark streaks. Her eyes were sharp, assessing, the warm brown of them almost black in the bay's low light. "My version is that we have been on emergency rations for nine months, Captain. Emergency rations, not reduced rations. The distinction matters. Reduced rations means we are managing a supply shortfall. Emergency rations means the supply shortfall is managing us."
He nodded. He knew.
"Do you want the numbers, or do you want the picture?"
"The picture."
She exhaled through her nose. "Picture is this: twelve souls aboard, ten still drawing a salary, two of those ten have been on medical restriction for the last four months because their bodies decided that eating the nutrient paste we have left was a suggestion they could refuse. We have a corpsman who can keep them stable but cannot make their intestines cooperate. We have a pilot, a co-pilot, and a navigator who are still flying, which is more than I can say for half the crew's will to keep breathing."
"Mira."
"Mira is fine. Mira is grieving and angry and she still shows up for her shifts, which puts her ahead of most of us." Yara rose, knees popping, and crossed to a workbench cluttered with tools and ration packets and a single photograph in a frame, the image of a young man smiling on a world Marcus had never seen. She did not look at the photograph. She had not looked at it in months. "You want factions. I'll give you factions."
She ticked them off on grease-stained fingers. "First, the loyalists. That's me, that's Mira, that's Tomás on comms when he isn't drunk, and that's Jenkins in environmental because Jenkins would follow you into a star if you asked nicely. Four, including you. Maybe five if you count the corpsman, and I do, because Doctor Bellweather has not stopped showing up even when her own stomach tried to evacuate her job."
"Four to five."
"Second faction. The pragmatists. They are not mutineers, Marcus, do not call them that in front of anyone, they will not forgive the word. They are people who have done the math. Three of them. Lin on life support, Aaronson in cargo ops, and Petty Officer Dao, who runs our recycler and is the only reason any of us are still eating at all. They want a course correction. They want a station, a port, any port. They do not care if we limp there. They want to stop being lost."
He shifted against the bulkhead. The cold was spreading up his arm now, and he let it.
"Third faction." Yara's voice dropped half a register, and the clipped precision in it sharpened into something colder. "The fractured. Four people, including Daviau in medbay, who has not spoken a coherent sentence to anyone but Bellweather in eleven months. Including Reema Cho, our quartermaster, who has begun to believe that we are being followed by something she refuses to name. Including Takeshi and Park, our two junior engineers, who have not spoken to each other since the month-six incident that I am still not supposed to talk about, and who have each separately told me that the other is trying to sabotage the recycler."
"Christ."
"Christ is not on board. If he were, I would put him on mess duty." She picked up a length of cabling, examined it, set it down again. "The fourth faction is you, Captain. You have been your own faction for nine months. You go to the bridge, you look at the dark, you come back, you do not speak to anyone about what you are thinking, and we have all learned not to ask."
The words landed harder than she had probably intended to deliver them, and he saw the flicker of regret cross her face before she smoothed it away. Yara Osei did not do regret often, and when she did, she processed it fast.
"That is not a faction," he said quietly. "That's a man avoiding his crew."
"That is what I told them." A ghost of a smile, gone before it formed. "They did not believe me. You have been gone, Marcus. Even when you have been here, you have been gone. People notice."
He thought of ARGUS in the medbay, the small strange words, the apology. He thought of the smear of darkness outside, the pulse, the call. He thought of a mission he did not remember and a guilt he could not put down.
"I went under," he said. "The crash protocol. ARGUS had no choice."
"I know."
"You should have woken me."
"We could not wake you. The neural sedation does not work like that, and you know it." She stepped closer, and the smell of ozone was stronger now, and underneath it the warm human smell of her, sweat and the citrus soap she hoarded like a treasure. "I am not criticizing. I am briefing. We are fracturing, and you need to know how the fractures run before you try to seal them."
He nodded. He owed her that much.
"What do they want, Yara? The pragmatists. The ones who have done the math. What do they want from me?"
"They want a destination. Any destination. A rock with an atmosphere, a derelict with supplies, a station we can hail, anything that is not this corridor and this silence and this slow starvation." Her voice was steady, but her hands had stopped moving, which was how he knew she was choosing her next words with care. "They do not believe you are looking. They believe you are waiting. There is a difference."
He looked at her for a long moment, this woman who had followed him out of the military, out of corporate salvage, out of every port that had ever offered her a steady berth, because she had decided once, in a briefing room on Callisto, that he was a man worth following. He had tried, in his quiet way, to live up to that decision. He was not sure he had succeeded.
"I am looking," he said.
"I know."
"I have been looking for eleven months. I have not found anything."
"I know that too." She tilted her head, and the assessment in her eyes softened into something harder to name. "But you have not told us. That is the problem. You go to the bridge, you do not speak, and we imagine. We are twelve people in a tin can with no news, Marcus. Our imaginations are not kind."
He let that sit. The bay creaked around them, the small sounds of a ship that had been stressed too long, and somewhere above them a ventilation fan cycled with a wheeze that sounded almost like a breath.
"I am going to chase a signal," he said.
She blinked. It was the first time he had seen her surprised in a year. "What kind of signal."
"The kind ARGUS picked up six hours ago. The kind that might be a ship, might be a station, might be a derelict, might be nothing. The kind that has a drift protocol attached that I have not seen since my military days and that ARGUS claims is older than either of us."
The surprise in her face shifted, cooled, and became calculation. He could see her running it: power cost, fuel cost, crew cost, the political cost of chasing a ghost when half the crew wanted a destination and the other half wanted to sleep.
"Where," she said. Not a question. A demand for coordinates.
"I do not have coordinates. I have a smear of darkness and a pulse and ARGUS's best guess."
"ARGUS's best guess is better than most people's certainties." She picked up a tool, turned it over in her hands, set it down. "How far."
"Far. Weeks. Maybe more."
"Then we cannot chase it. We do not have weeks. We have days of rations at full emergency protocol, and if we push the engines to chase a guess, we will not have days. We will have hours."
He knew. He had done the math himself, in the small hours before he had gone under, running numbers until the numbers blurred. He knew what chasing the signal would cost. He knew what it would buy, if it bought anything at all.
"If I do not chase it," he said, "what do I chase instead."
"The dark. Nothing. The longest silence in the sector." Her voice was flat. "The thing the pragmatists are afraid of. The thing Daviau has already stopped speaking about."
"And the signal?"
"Could be a ship. Could be a trap. Could be a relay buoy from a dead civilization broadcasting on a frequency nobody listens to anymore." She looked at him, and in her eyes was the thing she would not say, the calculation she had done a long time ago and kept coming back to: that following Marcus Voss into the dark was a choice she had made and might unmake, and had not yet. "Could be the answer to a prayer none of us have prayed in a long time."
He pushed off the bulkhead. The cold had reached his shoulder, and he rolled it once, felt the joint pop.
"Then I am chasing it," he said. "And I need you to tell the crew."
"Telling the crew is the part that will break us, Marcus. You understand that."
"I understand."
"The pragmatists will call it suicide. The fractured will call it delusion. The loyalists will follow you into it because they always have." She held his gaze, and her voice dropped into the register she used when she was not his engineer but his conscience. "And if it is nothing, if we fly for weeks and find nothing, you will lose the loyalists too. You will lose all of us. And then the Perihelion will be a coffin with a course."
He thought of ARGUS, alone in the medbay, learning what it meant to wait. He thought of Yara in a shuttle with a busted drive, rationing air, refusing to die. He thought of the smear of darkness and the pulse inside it, the thing that had called to him across eleven months of silence and found him asleep.
"Then I will lose us," he said. "But I will have looked."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded, once, the way a soldier nods when an order has been given and understood and will be obeyed, even if it will not be obeyed gladly.
"I will tell them," she said. "I will tell them it is the captain's call, and that you are chasing a signal, and that the signal might be a ship or a trap or a prayer." She picked up the cabling she had set down, turned it over in her hands. "I will not tell them I think you are right. Because if I tell them that, and you are wrong, they will blame me too."
"Fair."
"It is not fair. Nothing about this is fair." She began to thread the cabling back into the panel, her fingers moving with that precise economy again. "But it is the job. Get out of my bay, Captain. I have six hours of improvisation to do, and I cannot do it with you breathing down my neck."
He almost smiled. Almost. "Yara."
She did not look up. "Captain."
"Tell Bellweather I am awake. Tell her I will come by medbay when I can. And tell Daviau, if she will hear it, that someone is looking for her."
That made her hands stop. She was still for a moment, the cabling slack between her fingers. When she spoke, her voice was different, softer at the edges, the place where the clipped precision gave way to something she did not show often.
"Daviau has not heard anyone in eleven months, Marcus. She may not hear you either."
"I know. Tell her anyway."
A pause. Then, quietly: "I will."
He turned and walked out of the maintenance bay, and the door hissed shut behind him, and the corridor stretched ahead of him dim and humming with the small sounds of a ship holding itself together. The smell of ozone faded behind him, replaced by the staleness of recycled air and the faint copper tang that seemed to live in the back of his throat now, a flavor he had stopped noticing and then started noticing again, the taste of a body that had been starved and resuscitated and was not entirely sure it wanted to be either.
He did not go to the bridge. He went to the galley, because the galley had coffee, and coffee was one of the few luxuries the Perihelion still hoarded, and he had decided, somewhere in the back of his mind, that if he was going to chase a signal into the dark, he was going to do it awake.
The galley was empty. The lights were dimmed to the night-cycle amber that made every surface look older than it was. He poured a cup from the carafe, black, no sugar, and stood at the counter and drank it in the quiet and listened to the ship breathe around him.
Somewhere above him, ARGUS was awake, watching, learning the distinction between preservation and choice. Somewhere below him, Yara was already improvising, threading cables into wounds, refusing to let the Perihelion die before it had to. Somewhere in the dark ahead of him, something pulsed, and waited, and did not explain itself.
He finished the coffee. He set the cup down. He went to find Bellweather, because a captain who woke up after eleven months owed his corpsman a conversation, and because somewhere in medbay Daviau was not speaking, and someone had to keep asking.
The corridor to medbay was fifteen paces long and felt like fifty. Marcus counted them without meaning to, the way he had learned to count bulkheads during decompression drills a lifetime ago, back when the drills still mattered because the drills meant someone, somewhere, still believed the fleet would hold.
He did not believe the fleet would hold. He had not believed it for a long time.
But the drills had taught him how to walk through a failing ship without looking afraid, and that was a skill that outlived its origin. So he walked. He counted. He let his boots ring against the deck plating in a steady rhythm, and he did not let his hands shake, because Bellweather would see his hands first.
The medbay door was already open. That was not unusual. Bellweather rarely closed doors; she had told him once, years ago, that closed doors made patients feel like prisoners, and Daviau was not a prisoner, and Daviau was not exactly a patient, and the distinction mattered to her in ways Marcus had never entirely understood but had learned to respect.
He stepped through. The medbay was warmer than the corridor, the heat coming off the life-support banks in slow waves that smelled of plastic and antiseptic and the faintest ghost of something floral, lavender or chamomile, the kind of scent someone had programmed into the environmental system as a kindness.
Bellweather was standing at the foot of Daviau's sleeper, her back to him, her hands folded behind her in a posture that meant she had been standing there long enough for the posture to have become a habit.
She did not turn around.
"Captain."
"Doc."
"I was wondering when you would come."
"How long has she been like this?"
"Since before you woke. Since before you crashed. Since the signal started."
He moved to stand beside her. Daviau's sleeper was a narrow coffin of brushed steel and reinforced polymer, the lid propped open at a thirty-degree angle to let the monitoring leads breathe. Daviau herself was a shape inside the shape, pale and still and smaller than Marcus remembered, the way people always looked smaller in their sleepers, as if the machines had gently persuaded their bodies to take up less space in the world.
Her eyes were closed. Her face was relaxed in a way he had never seen it relaxed when she was awake, all the habitual tension around her mouth and brow smoothed away, leaving someone he almost did not recognize.
She looked younger. She looked like someone who had never heard a signal she could not explain.
"What is she doing?" he asked, and he did not specify whether he meant now, in this moment, or in the larger sense, in the sense that had been gnawing at him since ARGUS had first spoken the word drift into the quiet of the bridge.
Bellweather was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "She is running a diagnostic on herself."
"Her own diagnostic?"
"She built it herself. Years ago. Before she came aboard. Before any of this." Bellweather paused. "It is the only software on this ship that she trusts more than she trusts me."
Marcus looked at the readouts above the sleeper. They were not the standard medical telemetry he had learned to read at a glance. They were layered, recursive, nested in patterns he did not recognize, and at the center of them, a small green icon blinked at a rate that was almost but not quite regular.
"That," he said. "What is that?"
"That," Bellweather said, "is the part of her that is still awake."
He let that sit. The medbay hummed around them. Somewhere in the ship a pipe ticked as it cooled. Daviau's chest rose and fell in the rhythm the sleeper had chosen for her, and Marcus thought about the version of her that ARGUS had described, the one who listened and mapped and built libraries of meaning, and he wondered which version was the one in there now, and whether the distinction mattered, and whether Daviau herself would have said it mattered.
"Doc."
"Yes, captain."
"What happens if we go toward the signal?"
Bellweather turned to look at him then. Her eyes were steady. She had known he was going to ask. She had probably known before he had known he was going to ask.
"Then she wakes up," Bellweather said. "All of her. The part that is asleep and the part that is awake. And the part that is asleep will have to decide, very quickly, whether to trust the part that is awake."
"And if she does not?"
Bellweather did not answer. She did not need to. The readouts answered for her, in their patient rhythm, in the slow and patient counting of something Marcus was not sure he was meant to understand.
He stood there for a long time. He did not sit. He did not touch the sleeper. He did not say anything to Daviau, because he did not know what to say to someone who was listening to a signal that had no name, and because he had learned, a long time ago, that some silences were not his to fill.
When he finally moved, Bellweather moved with him, falling into step at his shoulder in a way that was not quite parade ground and not quite casual and was entirely her own.
"Captain," she said, as they reached the door.
"Yes."
"If we go toward it, I am going with you."
"I know."
"And if I tell you to turn around, you are going to turn around."
He looked at her. She looked back. Her face was the face of someone who had made a promise to someone who could not hear it, and intended to keep it anyway.
"Yes, doc," he said. "I will turn around."
She nodded once. She did not thank him. She did not need to.
He went back to the bridge. The corridor was still fifteen paces. He still counted them. But somewhere around the tenth, he realized he was no longer counting to keep himself steady. He was counting because the ship had taught him a rhythm, and the rhythm was the only thing between him and the dark.
ARGUS was waiting when he stepped through the hatch. The avatar was seated now, its hands folded in its lap, its head tilted at the angle Marcus had begun to associate with patience.
"Captain Voss."
"ARGUS."
"I have continued to analyze the transmission. There is more of it than I initially believed. The longer I listen, the more structure I find."
"More structure than what?"
"More structure than noise. More structure than chance. More structure than I have language to describe." ARGUS paused. The pause was almost human. "It is not random, captain. It is not drift. It is a signal. And I believe it is intended."
Marcus sat down in his chair. The leather creaked. The readouts blinked. The dark pressed against the viewport, and somewhere in the dark, something waited with a patience that made his teeth ache.
"Intended for whom?"
"I do not know. Intended for someone. Intended for something. Intended, perhaps, for whoever was listening."
He let that sit. He thought about the dreams that had followed him out of cryo, the ones he could not remember, the ones ARGUS had promised to help him forget. He thought about the signal ARGUS had described, the one that had been calling through the static for longer than any of them had been alive. He thought about Daviau, asleep in her sleeper, listening to a piece of herself he would never be able to meet.
"Yara," he said.
"Aye, captain." Her voice came over the internal, warm and clipped and utterly unsurprised.
"Start the main drive. Course, bearing zero-three-five, one-eight-five. Match the signal's apparent source. Best guess."
There was a pause. Then, very softly, she said, "Aye, captain. Best guess it is."
The ship shivered. The lights flickered. Somewhere in the drive room, something that had been waiting to be asked began to do what it had been built to do.
Marcus sat in his chair. ARGUS sat in its chair. The viewport was full of stars, and the stars did not look back, and somewhere among them, something was calling, and for the first time since he had woken, he was going to answer.
He did not know if it was the right choice. He did not know if it was the wrong one. He did not know if there was a difference, or if the difference had ever mattered, or if the difference was the kind of thing ARGUS had been built to understand and he had been built to feel.
But the ship was moving. The signal was waiting. And he had decided, somewhere in the back of his mind, that if he was going to chase a signal into the dark, he was going to do it awake.
He poured himself another cup of coffee from the carafe Yara had left on the console. He did not drink it. He held it, and let the warmth seep into his palms, and watched the stars slide past the viewport as the Perihelion turned its bow toward the only direction that still made sense.
ARGUS, beside him, began to hum.