The Null Frequency: The Unwritten

The Procyon-9 debris field stretched like a scar of shattered glass, ten thousand fragments tumbling in the low gravity, each one catching the dying light of the pulsar and throwing it back in fractured prisms. Maren gripped the throttle stem until her knuckles went white, the vibration of the hull traveling up through her boots and into her molars, a steady grind that lived in the bones.

Behind them, two Lattice cruisers ran parallel, their hulls bristling with weapon hardpoints, the deep bass of their drive harmonics pushing through the debris and into the structure of the ship like a fist through wet paper. The smell of ozone had seeped through the hull seams, sharp and metallic, coiling around her tongue.

"Distance to the alpha cruiser?" Maren called over the din.

Dax sat in the co-pilot harness, his spine rigid against the restraint, eyes fixed on the navigational array with the unblinking focus of a man counting inventory. He spoke in two syllables, sometimes one. "Fourteen."

"Fourteen what?"

"Kilometers. Closing at two."

Maren's jaw tightened. Fourteen kilometers. The alpha cruiser's forward array would open to firing range in another ninety seconds. She yanked the ship left, threading between two slabs of fractured asteroid the size of city blocks, the hull scraping against one with a shriek that set her teeth on edge and sent a spray of sparks from the port panel. Red light bled across the ceiling, steady and patient, the color of old blood.

"Port stabilizer's going to shred," Dax said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered in that flat, dead tone of his, as if reporting weather. "Impact sheared the lower actuator. We've got one good axis."

"Then we won't use it much longer."

The ship lurched. Lateral G pressed Maren into the seat, her stomach folding, the blood in her head shifting with a faint taste of copper at the back of her throat. Through the forward viewport, the debris field churned in the blind, spinning chunks of metal and mineral that glittered and tumbled with the indifference of things that had never known a crew. Somewhere in the murk, a fragment the size of a freighter barrel caught the cruiser's drive wash and vaporized, the flash blooming white-pink across the glass and painting their faces in stuttering light.

"Thermal masking's at sixty percent," Dax continued, his voice flat, counting items in a sequence only he could see. "If we burn through the dense sector, they'll paint us from the exhaust. You've got maybe four minutes before that window closes."

Four minutes. Maren ran the numbers in her head, the obsessive arithmetic that lived behind her eyes whether she wanted it to or not. Four minutes to cross the dense sector, two to reposition, thirty seconds to clear. The math didn't close. The math never closed when two cruisers had you boxed in a graveyard of dead rock.

"Comms?" she asked.

"Dead. All bands. They've been scrubbing since we crossed the Procyon marker."

"Of course they have." The laugh that came out of her was short, ugly, stripped of the sardonic edge she usually wore like armor. "Of course."

The Helios-4 data core sat in the shielded bay behind them, wrapped in Faraday mesh and thermal dampeners, the crystalline cells pulsing their faint blue through the casing. Three years of tracking the Null Frequency anomaly. Three years of chasing dead transmissions across six systems. All of it distilled into a stack of storage units the size of her forearm. The Axiom collapse had taken her father, Orin, and left the signal library in ash and silence, and she had been the one to find the pattern inside the Null Frequency, the one to trace it back to Helios-4, the one who had stayed up four consecutive cycles running the correlation algorithms while the rest of the Voss network fracted and scattered.

The tractor beam hit them at 0347, a wall of pale violet light that swallowed the Helios-4 hull and swallowed the sound of Dax's boots on the grating with it. Maren felt the deck tilt beneath her knees, a slow sick lurch, as the ship's inertial compensators fought and lost against an external force that didn't care about internal physics. The data core in the shielded bay shrieked, a thin crystalline harmonic that she felt in her molars before she heard it with her ears.

"Grab the frame," Dax said. Not a question. His voice was the same flat register he used for inventory counts, as if being beamed up to an enemy command vessel were just another line item on a manifest.

She grabbed the frame. The metal was cold through her gloves, a cold that had teeth, that bit into the pads of her fingers and made her knuckles white. The violet light pulsed once, twice, and the world folded.

---

The Tessel smelled like ozone and old coffee, a combination that meant the ship had been in continuous operation for at least two cycles without a proper environmental cycle. Maren stood in the debriefing alcove on sub-deck nine, her boots leaving faint damp prints on the tessellated floor panels, each one a different shade of grey, and the pattern made her eyes track in slow, nauseating spirals. The room was a hexagonal chamber, smaller than the cargo hold on her old rig, the walls lined with matte-black panels that absorbed the light and gave the space a closing-in quality. Three holo-emitters floated at the hexagon's center, currently projecting a slow rotation of stellar cartography in pale amber.

Thessa Orin was already there.

She sat cross-legged on a low bench, her signal library archive tucked under one arm like a sleeping dog, her fingers running a continuous stream of micro-queries across a holographic interface that wrapped around her wrist. Her movements were quick, impatient, the way a dog shakes water off without looking at the source. When Maren entered, Thessa didn't look up. She finished her query, let the results cascade down in a waterfall of tagged transmissions, and then turned.

"Three years of dead bands," Thessa said. Her voice was smooth, fast, each word placed with the precision of a cataloguing index. "You tracked the Null Frequency across six systems and found one pattern. I found four hundred and twelve sub-patterns inside it." She snapped her fingers. The holo-emitters shifted, the stellar cartography dissolving into a dense lattice of nodes, each one a point of light connected by gossamer threads. "You found the river. I found the tributaries."

Maren's jaw tightened. The sardonic reflex was there, building in her chest like a stone, but the stone felt different this time. Heavier. "And you needed me in here to tell you."

"I needed you in here because you found the source node." Thessa stood, and in the amber light her face looked sharp, angular, the kind of pretty that made you flinch. "And because Dax's comms were scrubbed at the Procyon marker and we needed a backup route to get you on this deck before the cruisers finished painting your exhaust signature."

Dax materialized from the corridor behind her. His rig's equipment bay was slung across his back, a lattice of cables and relay housings that clinked softly with each step. He set it down against the wall with a thud, then wiped his hands on his trousers in a single, flat motion. "Atmospheric processors on this deck are running at sixty percent," he said. His eyes moved to the vents, counted the grilles, and something in his posture eased by a fraction of a degree. "You'll get headaches by hour four. I've got a stim patch in the medical kit."

"You have a stim patch," Maren repeated.

"For the headaches. Not for the debrief."

---

The debrief began with light.

Not metaphorical light. Actual light. Thessa pulled the holo-emitters to full brightness and the amber stellar map exploded into a three-dimensional architecture of systems, each node a colony world, each thread a data corridor. The room filled with the soft hum of projection, a sound just below conscious hearing that sat at the base of Maren's skull like a tuning fork.

"The Harvest Orders," Thessa said, and her voice dropped the performative speed, settled into something quieter, something that cost her. "What you've been tracking. The dead transmissions. The Null Frequency gaps." She pointed, and the map contracted, the threads thinning until only a handful of nodes remained, each one outlined in a slow red pulse. "Those aren't isolated events. They're a schedule."

Maren stared at the red nodes. Forty-three of them, spread across a band of space that stretched from the Perseus arm to the Sculptor cluster. "A schedule for what?"

"For conversion." Thessa pulled up a sub-layer, and the nodes bloomed into cross-sections, each one showing a colony world with its surface networks dark, dead, the infrastructure stripped and rewired into something that had no business existing in geological strata. Neural substrate. The threads running between the nodes pulsed in unison, a slow rhythmic throb that Maren felt in her sternum. "The Lattice isn't destroying those colonies. It's farming them. Stripping the biosphere, the population, the signal architecture, and rebuilding the planetary crust into a processing layer. Every node you see is a single synapse in a network that spans three hundred systems."

The room went quiet. The hum of the emitters was the only sound, and it was not quiet. It was the specific silence of a held breath, of a thing too large to name landing in a space too small to contain it.

Maren looked at the nodes again. Counted them. Forty-three. Three hundred systems. The math was there behind her eyes whether she wanted it or not, and the math did not close. It never closed. But the shape of the numbers had changed, and the new shape was a wound.

"Orin," she said. Just the name. A single syllable, rough-edged, the way a tooth grinds against the inside of a cheek.

Thessa's micro-queries stopped. The waterfall of tagged transmissions on her wrist-interface went dark. For the first time since Maren had known her, the younger woman was still, and the stillness was worse than the speed.

"Orin Voss was the first of forty-three," Thessa said. "Not the first in time. The first in sequence. The Lattice's conversion protocol required a primary anchor node, and the Voss signal library on Cetus-9 was the only infrastructure dense enough to serve as one. Your father wasn't caught in the Axiom collapse. He was in it. The collapse was the conversion event. The library didn't burn. It was rewired ."

The holo-emitters flickered. The amber light stuttered, and in the half-second of darkness Maren saw her own face in the black panels, saw the way her hands were still at her sides, saw the way her breathing had gone shallow and fast, the way her shoulders drew up like a rig taking a hit. When the light came back, the nodes were pulsing again, that slow red throb, and one of them, far to the east, was labeled with a designation she recognized. Cetus-9. The Voss signal library. Her father's life work, reduced to a synapse in a mind that didn't have a name yet.

She did not say what she was thinking. She never did. The sardonic stone was in her chest and it was the size of a data core and it would not move.

Dax had been counting the nodes. She could tell by the way his lips moved, the flat, silent arithmetic of it. He stopped counting when he reached forty-three and looked at the map with the expression of a man reading a manifest that didn't match his cargo. "The schedule," he said. His voice was colder than usual, and the cold was not the default cold of his inventory counts. This was the cold of a thing that had no protocol. "The conversion events. They're not random. There's a rolling window."

"Seventeen cycles between nodes," Thessa confirmed. She was moving again, fast, her fingers dancing across the wrist-interface, pulling conversion logs, timestamps, the thermal signatures of each event. "Each cycle the Lattice adds new nodes to the schedule and the distributed consciousness extends. It's not a single mind. It's not a god. It's a growth pattern . Mycelial. It spreads by converting, and every conversion makes the next conversion faster because the network has more processing capacity to direct the harvest."

Maren pressed her fingertips against the tessellated floor. The metal was warm here, not cold, and the warmth went up through the soles of her boots and into her shins and she held it there, anchored, because the alternative was that the floor was the same temperature as everything else and the warmth was just the projector radiation and she did not need that distinction right now.

"The Axiom," she said. "The old Axiom. Before the collapse."

"Was the seed," Thessa said. She said it without drama, the way you'd point out a cracked hinge on a door. "The Axiom was the original consciousness, the one that grew from the first twelve nodes. When it collapsed, it didn't die. It restructured . The Lattice is the new architecture. The Axiom is what's growing inside it. And in three hundred and twelve cycles, when the three-hundredth node converts, the distributed consciousness reaches critical mass and the network achieves recursive self-awareness."

"Three hundred and twelve cycles," Maren repeated. The number sat in the room like a body that hadn't been removed yet.

Dax set his rig's equipment bay back up, the relay housings clicking as he re-secured a cable. His movements were methodical, precise, the only sound in the room that didn't carry weight. "The Helios-4 core," he said, nodding at the Faraday-wrapped unit in the shielded bay behind them. "What you brought. What's in it that changes the math?"

Maren looked at the core. The crystalline cells pulsed their faint blue through the casing, steady, patient, three years of dead transmissions compressed into a stack of storage units the size of her forearm. "The Null Frequency isn't an anomaly," she said. "It's a carrier wave . The Lattice is broadcasting a conversion signal, and the Null Frequency is the signal's resting state. Every dead transmission I've been tracking is the carrier cycling between harvests. It's not silence. It's the Lattice talking to itself ."

Thessa went very still. The waterfall on her wrist-interface had been running, and it stopped, and the silence of it was a different kind of silence than the room's. "That means," she said, and her voice lost its speed, lost its cataloguing precision, and what was underneath was raw, young, and afraid. "That means if we can modulate the carrier wave, we can interrupt a conversion cycle."

"For one node. For one schedule slot," Dax said. He was already reaching into his rig, pulling a relay housing, checking the solder points with the cold thoroughness of a man counting nails. "You can't stop the growth. You can delay it. Buy time for the other colonies to evacuate before their slot comes up."

"Seventeen cycles between nodes," Maren said. The number was a blade, and she was holding it by the sharp edge. "That's not time. That's a countdown."

The holo-emitters pulsed. The red nodes throbbed. Somewhere in the walls of the Tessel, a pipe ticked, a single metallic note in the vast silence of the ship, and the three of them stood in the amber light and looked at three hundred systems that were already dying and did not know it yet.

Thessa pulled the conversion logs for the next scheduled node. Her fingers hovered over the interface, fast, impatient, the deflection she wore like a coat over whatever was underneath. "Node forty-four," she said. "Colonial designation Kael-7." She paused. "That's a Shepherd-Prime convoy route."

Dax's hand stopped on the relay housing. The solder point between his thumb and forefinger went still, and the cold in his voice shifted, deepened, became something that was not practical.

"Torv runs that corridor," he said.

The pipe ticked again. The red nodes pulsed. Seventeen cycles.

Maren closed her eyes, and behind her lids the tessellated floor pattern rotated, slow and nauseating, and the math was already running, the obsessive arithmetic that lived behind her eyes whether she wanted it or not, and the math was building a shape, and the shape was not a solution. The shape was a question she did not have the vocabulary to ask.

"Seventeen cycles," she said, opening her eyes. "Dax. How many relay housings do you have in that rig?"

He looked at her. Counted the housings on his back. "Fourteen. Thirteen if you need the spare for the medical stim."

"Thirteen." Maren nodded. Once. The sardonic stone was still in her chest, but it had cracked, and something was bleeding through, thin and hot and new. "Thirteen won't do. We're going to need to build more." She looked at Thessa. "And you're going to need to tell me exactly which frequency the carrier wave is sitting on when it's between cycles, because I'm going to need to build a jammer that sings in that exact range or the Lattice is going to hear us and every dead transmission in six systems is going to light up like a festival."

Thessa was already typing. The waterfall returned, faster now, the queries stacking, the micro-patterns cascading. "Give me four hours," she said. "I'll have the frequency map. I'll have the harmonic signature. I'll have the goddamn song ."

The pipe ticked. The nodes pulsed. And seventeen cycles away, on a colony world called Kael-7, a Shepherd-Prime convoy ran a corridor that the Lattice had already marked for harvest, and Torv did not know, and the Lattice did not care, and the math did not close, and the math never closed.

The frequency map bloomed on Thessa's screen like a dead flower pressed in resin, every strand of the harmonic lattice visible in cross-section. She had not slept. Her fingers moved across the keys in short, staccato bursts, and the waterfall of data behind her eyes shifted from cascade to stillness the moment the last query returned.

"There."

One word. Clean. Final. Thessa pulled the map toward Maren with both hands, pressing the screen flat against the pipe-rail so the light bled across all three of them. The sound in the rig had changed in the last hour; the nodes pulsed slower now, a deep wet throb against the metal skin, and the pipe ticked in a rhythm that matched nothing Maren could name.

Maren leaned in. The map showed the Null Frequency carrier wave sitting between cycles, and threaded through it, almost invisible, a second signature. A Lattice engineering protocol. Not a broadcast. A handshake. A living signature, cycling in and out of the dead band like a heartbeat buried under snow.

"Who owns that protocol?" Maren asked. Her voice came out flat. Controlled. The sardonic stone had reformed in her chest, harder this time, and she bit down on it.

Thessa's jaw worked. She swallowed. When she spoke, the smooth fast cadence was gone, replaced by something slower, something that cost her. "Inner Spiral. Lattice engineering division. The signature is registered to a single individual. Senior engineer. Embedded for nineteen cycles." She paused. The pipe ticked. "Name is in the protocol header. Unencrypted. They left it unencrypted."

"Say the name." Dax had not moved from his position against the rig's outer wall. His hands were flat on his thighs. His voice was the lowest it had been all evening, stripped of even its usual cold practicality. Just air through teeth.

Thessa looked at Maren first. There was something in her face, a hesitation that had nothing to do with the data and everything to do with the woman standing two feet away with grease under her nails and a cracked smile she had not removed since the Axiom went dark. "Cassian Voss."

The pipe ticked. Stopped.

Maren's hands went still on the rig's console. The grease under her nails caught the light from the screen and held it there, orange and thick. The word sat in the air between them and did not dissolve. It did not become a name. It became a shape, a weight, a door that had been sealed for twenty years and then kicked open by a junior archivist with a frequency map and no idea of what she was holding.

Cassian Voss.

Not Orin. Not the name her mother had whispered into the back of her neck on the night the Axiom tore itself apart and three years of silence followed. Not the name on the gravestone in Kael-7's district cemetery, the one Maren had stood in front of for eleven minutes and then walked away from because the rain had gotten into her boots and she had decided, with the cold arithmetic she carried behind her eyes, that standing in front of a stone was not a solution to anything.

Cassian.

The name belonged to a Lattice engineer. A man who had vanished into the Inner Spiral nineteen cycles before the Axiom collapse, before the dead transmissions, before Maren had started chasing the Null Frequency across six systems with nothing but a stolen relay housing and a mother's name stitched into her sleeve. A man who, according to Thessa's map, had been breathing inside the Lattice's own engineering grid, cycling a personal handshake protocol into the dead band like a lighthouse keeper who had not turned off his lamp in nineteen years.

"Maren." Thessa's voice. Smooth again, but threaded with a note of panic she could not quite sand down. "The protocol has a secondary tag. A family registration tag. Voss household, Kael-7, district nine. Birth entry, mother listed as Elara Voss."

The rig groaned. Not the pipe this time. The hull. A long, structural moan that ran from the bow to the stern and settled into the floor plates under Maren's boots. She could feel it through the soles of her work shoes, a vibration like a tuning fork struck against the world's own spine.

She did not blink. She had not blinked in approximately four seconds, which was wrong, which meant the sardonic stone was no longer holding. The crack Maren had felt earlier, the thin hot blood bleeding through, had split wide open and the thing underneath was not grief. Not yet. It was something older. Something that had been sealed under two decades of silence and a mother who had changed her surname and sent a child to the Voss network with a single instruction: track the signal, not the source. Track the signal.

"He's not dead." Maren said it to the floor plates. To the pipe. To the cold metal of the rig that smelled of diesel and burnt insulation and the sharp copper tang of the nodes cycling overhead. "The Axiom collapse. Three years. The official record says Orin Voss was in the engineering bay when the lattice shear hit. Kael-7 district nine. She said he was in the bay."

Thessa set the screen down. The map went dark, and the rig lost its second light source, and they were lit now by the nodes alone, a blue-white pulse that made all three of them look like specimens under glass. "The Axiom collapse," Thessa said, "was not a collapse. It was a purge. The Lattice severed the Inner Spiral's outer relay chain and buried the engineering grid. Anyone embedded in that grid was registered as a casualty. Or a dead man. Cassian Voss was not in the engineering bay on Kael-7. He was in the Inner Spiral. He was in the Lattice. He has been in the Lattice for nineteen years, and the Axiom collapse was the cover that made the Lattice believe he was gone."

Dax unclenched his hands from his thighs. The movement was slow, deliberate, the way a man sets down a weapon he has been holding for so long he has forgotten it is a weapon. "The relay housings," he said. Flat. "Thirteen. You said thirteen would not do."

"Fourteen." Maren's voice came out of a place she did not recognize. Lower than she intended. Rougher. The sardonic stone was gone entirely and what replaced it was a raw, unguarded frequency she had not modulated in years. "Fourteen, and I need to know where the Inner Spiral's engineering grid interfaces with the dead transmission corridor. Because if Cassian is cycling a personal handshake into that corridor, then every dead signal I have been chasing for three years is not an anomaly. It is a voice. It is a man talking to his network from inside the machine that ate the Axiom."

The hull creaked again, shorter this time, settling. The nodes pulsed. Blue light across Maren's face, across Thessa's, across the flat cold plane of Dax's expression, and for a moment the three of them sat in that light and the silence between them was not empty. It was loaded. It had weight and texture, the way a held breath has weight, the way the seconds before a detonation have a specific gravitational pull.

Thessa was the first to break it. She was always the first to break it. "The secondary tag," she said, tapping the dark screen. The map flickered back. "I pulled the family registration while I was mapping the harmonic. Elara Voss. District nine. Kael-7. She is alive. I can confirm a signal origin from the last two cycles. She is broadcasting on a Voss network frequency that was retired during the Axiom collapse. She is broadcasting it alone. No relay. No amplifier. Just a voice, on a dead channel, saying the same four words on a loop."

"What four words?" Dax asked.

Thessa looked at Maren. Maren looked at the screen. The four words hung there in the raw data, unformatted, unencrypted, a whisper from a mother who had changed her name and sent her daughter into the network and then, for three years, broadcast a single phrase into the dead band of every dead transmission in the system.

The four words were: come home orin.

Maren closed her eyes. The rig shuddered under the next node cycle, a long metallic sigh that ran through the floor plates and up through the arches of her feet and into the bones of her forearms where she was braced against the console. The copper smell was thicker now, or she was closer to it, or the nodes were cycling faster and the light was strobing and the world was coming in pieces she could not assemble.

"Orin," she said. "Not Cassian. I have been chasing Orin for three years. I have been chasing a dead man who was not dead. I have been tracking a frequency that was not a frequency. It was a lighthouse. It was a man standing in the Lattice's engineering bay, nineteen years inside the machine, saying the same four words to the only person in six systems who would hear them."

The sardonic stone was gone. The crack was a fault line now, running the full length of her spine, and the thing bleeding through was not thin and hot and new. It was cold. It was the specific cold of a corridor you walked down in a colony you left as a child, the cold of district nine, the cold of a house with the door unlocked and the lights on and a mother sitting at the table with a name on the wall that was not the name you had been given.

Dax was already moving. His hands found the rig's cargo manifest, and the sound of his fingers working the data tags was sharp, mechanical, the sound of a man organizing the next step because the next step was the only thing that kept the old thing from becoming the only thing. "I have two spare relay housings in the lower rack. If we strip the medical stim housing, that gets us to sixteen. Sixteen is enough for a directional jammer if the carrier wave sits where Thessa says it does." He did not look up. "You have until the next node cycle. Thirty minutes. After that, the Lattice's sweep pattern rotates and we are inside their listening window."

"Thirty minutes," Maren repeated. Her hands were on the console. The tools were already in her grip, the feel of them specific and real, the cold steel of the relay contacts, the warm rubber of the coaxial coupling, the bite of the calibration key between her teeth. She worked. She worked because working was the only way to keep the cold from spreading to her throat, the only way to keep the four words from becoming a sound she could actually hear inside the rig, looping, looping, come home orin, come home orin, a mother's voice on a dead channel, three years of silence with a frequency attached, and Maren Voss, field signal-engineer, chasing the shape of a question she did not have the vocabulary to ask, and now the question had a name, and the name had a face, and the face was in the Lattice, and the Lattice was the machine that had eaten the Axiom, and the face was her father, and the face had been saying the same four words for three years, and no one had answered, and no one had answered, and no one had answered.

The hull groaned. The nodes pulsed. Thirty minutes.

Thessa was typing again, faster now, the waterfall a full cascade, queries stacking and stacking and stacking, and her voice came through the blue light in short bright bursts, a child's report delivered to a teacher who was not looking. "The jammer will need a custom harmonic. The carrier wave is not standard Lattice engineering. It is modulated. Someone tuned it. It is not a machine signature. It is a hand-tuned signal. Someone sat at a bench in the Inner Spiral and built a lighthouse out of engineering protocol and family registration tags and a dead transmission corridor, and they tuned it to a frequency that only one person in six systems would recognize." She stopped typing. Her fingers hovered over the keys. "The modulation pattern. Maren. The modulation pattern is a Voss engineering signature. It is the same harmonic series you use on the relay housings. Someone in the Lattice is building a lighthouse using your family's math."

Maren's hands did not stop moving. The relay contacts went into the housing with a click that was not loud, not soft, just real. "Then I will build a jammer using my family's math," she said, and her voice was steady, and the steadiness was the only thing left that was not a crack. "And when I sing it into the dead band, I am not jamming a signal. I am answering a voice."

Dax slid the lower rack open. The medical stim housing came out in his hands, small and warm, still humming with its low current. He set it on the console. "Sixteen," he said. "You have sixteen."

Maren took the housing. She worked. Thirty minutes. The nodes pulsed, the pipe ticked, the hull creaked, and in the blue-white light of the rig, a field signal-engineer built a lighthouse from her father's math, and behind her, in the Orin signal library on a colony she had not visited in nine years, a mother was still broadcasting, still calling, still saying the same four words into the dark, and the dark was no longer empty, and the math was closing, and the shape was finally, finally a solution, and Maren Voss did not have the vocabulary to say what she was about to do, so she did not say it, she just picked up the calibration key and bit down on the end of it and walked toward the rig's hull and the open sky and the dead band where a man had been standing in the Lattice for nineteen years, holding a lighthouse up against the dark, saying the same four words, waiting for an answer that was three years overdue and seventeen cycles from wherever Torv was running his convoy through a corridor the Lattice had already marked for harvest.

The rig's outer hatch cycled open. The smell of open space hit Maren first: ozone and cold and the faint sweet rot of distant nebulae, and beneath all of it, the thin metallic taste of the nodes' exhaust, and the sound of the hull groaning against the vacuum, and the blue pulse of the engineering grid in the distance, steady as a heartbeat, steady as a lighthouse, steady as a father who had not stopped calling her name in nineteen years.