Eaglecraft 12110 Upd -

Ibarra shook her head. “If we cut it blind, its feedback might lash out. It knows the lattice now. Sudden silence could be interpreted as attack.”

“Unscheduled approach,” Jalen said. “No traffic. Docking bay two lights offline.” eaglecraft 12110 upd

“We did.” She coughed. “Most left. I stayed to record it. To understand. And it kept sending energy—soft at first, then… realigned the lattice with something below the crust. It formed a pattern I couldn’t unmake.” Ibarra shook her head

Eaglecraft 12110 left UPD with its hold lightened of the buoy and its manifest unchanged except for one item: a single crystalline spool marked, in careful handwriting, “For listening.” Mira tucked it in the ship’s archive with other oddities: a cracked navigation compass from a voided colony, a seed packet that had sprouted in zero-g, a small brass token engraved with a shipwright’s sigil. They had not come to UPD for glory, but for a thing they could only carry away—knowledge and the memory of a planet that sings. Sudden silence could be interpreted as attack

“If,” Jalen finished. He filtered the encryption. “It’s a distress loop. Not from the outpost; from an object three light-hours off the new gravity well.”

“Why didn’t you evacuate?” Jalen asked.