The Same Old Song

The job board could wait.

That was the plan, anyway—spend a day or two letting Glimmer’s collective grief settle, let the dock crews finish their work on the Night Heron’s hull, maybe let Jakob’s hands heal enough that he could grip something without swearing loud enough to remove paint. There was no shortage of work in the Outlands for a crew willing to get their boots dirty. Something would come up. Something always came up

What came up was the music.

It started the way it always did: faint, sourceless, drifting through the Night Heron’s aft corridor like smoke from a fire nobody could find. The phantom melody that had haunted the ship since Cal bought her with stolen property and a certain amount of optimism. None of them had ever identified it. None of them had ever entirely gotten used to it, either—it was simply part of the ship, the way the port engine’s occasional stutter was part of the ship, the way the coffee maker in the galley only worked if you hit it twice on the left side was part of the ship. You accepted it. You moved on.

But this time it didn’t stay faint. This time it grew, note by note, filling the corridors with a resonance that buzzed in the fillings of your teeth and raised the hairs on your arms. And then the comm board lit up, and the same melody was coming through on an incoming signal, and the two sounds—ship and signal—locked together in a harmony that had no business existing.

Cal was the first to see it on the scanner. A vessel, dropping out of FTL on their doorstep, completely dark. No running lights, no transponder ping, no power signature beyond the absolute minimum. Dead in the water. And broadcasting, on repeat, the same song the Night Heron had been humming to itself for as long as any of them had known her.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Io said: “Does anyone believe in coincidences?”

Jakob said nothing, which meant he agreed.

Cal placed her hand on the iron shard at her throat. “I swear upon the iron,” she said. “We find out where that signal comes from.

The vow hung in the air for exactly as long as it took Io to remember something. “Scavengers,” she said, already moving toward the pilot’s seat.

Glimmer’s scavengers were a fact of life in the orbital, the way rust and recycled air were facts of life—inevitable, pervasive, and faintly unpleasant if you thought about them too hard. They monitored frequencies. They watched the scanner returns. They knew what a derelict vessel meant, legally and practically: whoever reached it first held the salvage claim, and trade law in the Outlands was one of the few things that was actually enforced, because commerce required it. The scavenger fleet would already be spinning up their engines.

Io had spent years running salvage shuttles out of Glimmer. She knew every pilot on that frequency by name, by callsign, by the particular blend of profanity they favored when someone cut them off. She fired up the Night Heron’s engines and got on the comm to station control.

“Glimmer Station, this is Night Heron at bay fourteen, requesting emergency undock clearance, we have a—”

“Night Heron, you are not scheduled for departure and there are three vessels in the—”

“Deeply sorry, really, please pass our apologies to everyone, undocking now.”

She undocked. To traffic control she was rather more brisk: a single-syllable acknowledgment that could generously be interpreted as an apology if you were in a forgiving mood. The Night Heron swung out of the bay on her maneuvering thrusters and immediately found herself in a crowded lane of scavenger craft already angling toward the derelict—small, fast ships whose pilots knew these approaches the way Io knew them, which was to say extremely well.

She went through them anyway.

The Night Heron was not a small ship. She had no business threading the gaps that Io threaded her through, and she did it anyway, and Io narrated the whole thing over open comms at a volume that carried.

“Morning, Fetch—sorry about your paint. Dekker! Still flying that garbage barge? Move it. Oh, Ruso, hello, remember when you shorted me on that coolant manifold job? Move.”

Cal gripped her armrest. “Io—”

“I see them.”

She did see them, mostly. What she didn’t see, in the moment she jinked sideways to avoid Ruso’s ship, was the small cargo hauler sitting exactly where she needed to be. The impact rang through Night Heron’s hull like a struck bell and knocked everyone sideways, leaving a noise in the port quarter that would need looking at later.

Cal glared at Io.

Io pointed at the derelict, now filling the viewport directly ahead of them, close enough to see the individual hull plates. “We’re first,” she said.

Cal snorted, but she stopped glaring.

Over the comms, a chorus of extremely colorful objections rose from the scavenger fleet behind them. Io gave them a cheerful and anatomically inventive farewell and cut the channel.

The ship was a twin to the Night Heron—or near enough to make the skin prickle. Same silhouette, same general proportions, the accumulated asymmetries of a vessel that had been repaired and modified over decades until the original design was more suggestion than blueprint. The differences were there if you looked: the hull plating ran in slightly different configurations, the sensor array had been relocated, the docking collar sat a few degrees off from where it should have been. But the family resemblance was unmistakable.

Along her hull, barely visible from any distance, small blue lights pulsed in a slow, irregular rhythm. Not navigation lights. Something else.

Io matched velocity. Cal extended the docking tube. The three of them suited up, said the usual things to Benny—behave, don’t touch anything, call if something happens—and crossed over.

The airlock opened without resistance. Inside: air, breathable if stale, and darkness, and silence. Not the comfortable silence of an empty ship at rest but a deeper quiet, the silence of a place holding its breath. The phantom music didn’t follow them through the docking tube. Here, the melody existed only on the radio, thin and scratchy through their suit speakers, and the ship itself offered nothing back.

The interior was strange in ways that compounded gradually. The corridor curved where it should have been straight. The walls were covered in magnetic plating—not unusual for a ship designed to operate in zero gravity, but the Night Heron had never been refitted that way, and seeing the familiar layout dressed in unfamiliar skin was disorienting in a way that was difficult to articulate. Like meeting someone who shares your face.

They made their way to the bridge by instinct and dead reckoning, navigating a layout that was and wasn’t the one they knew.

The moment they crossed the threshold, the music stopped.

One moment the signal was there; the next there was nothing but static and the sound of their own breathing in their suits. The silence it left behind was different from the silence that had greeted them at the airlock—this one had texture, the particular quality of something recently ended.

Io pulled up her scanner and went to work. She was thorough, which took time, and the others waited in the dark and didn’t rush her. When she looked up, her expression was complicated.

“The transmission wasn’t automated,” she said. “Or—it might have been. But it wasn’t coming from a beacon or any discrete system I can find. The signal was being generated by the ship. The whole ship.” She paused. “I can’t tell if it’s a recording or something else.”

Cal had moved to the bridge consoles while Io worked. Her hands found what was there by feel and habit, navigating menus in the dark until something opened that shouldn’t have, an unlocked partition, a file left accessible as deliberately as a note slipped under a door.

A video. She played it.

The woman on the screen had been badly hurt. That was the first thing and the most obvious thing, and neither detail improved upon acquaintance. She spoke in fragments, her voice dropping in and out of coherence, addressing people who weren’t there—names, maybe, or maybe just words that meant something to her that they couldn’t follow. The message looped back on itself. She talked about a place. She talked about something that had happened.

“Don’t try to find us,” she said, looking directly into the recorder. Her eyes were clear for a moment, clearer than the rest of the message, as though whatever was happening to her had stepped briefly aside to let her say this one true thing. “Leave now.”

Then she was gone—slumped, or worse, the frame holding on her still form for several seconds before the recording ended.

The three of them looked at each other in the dark of the unfamiliar bridge.

Then Benny’s voice came over the comms, tight with something that wasn’t quite panic but was in the neighborhood.

“Guys,” he said. “Why are you firing up the engines over there?”