Rook Vasquez knew the Kalephas probe. She knew it the way deep-space analysts knew all the probes they'd worked with long enough — not personally, not sentimentally, but with the specific familiarity that came from years of processing its telemetry, interpreting its sensor feeds, writing the analysis reports that went to people more senior than her and were filed in systems she never saw again. She had processed Kalephas data for four years, from initial deployment through the point of failure.
She had written the failure report. She knew what had ended it: a cascade failure in the primary power cell, non-recoverable, the kind of ending that was so complete it didn't leave anything to argue about. The probe had gone dark on March 14, 2147, at 23:04:17 ship time. She had been the analyst on shift when the signal stopped.
That had been forty years ago. She had been twenty-six. She was now working her third deep-space contract for Meridian Systems, processing data from probes she had never touched, with instruments that would have been science fiction in 2147.
And a signal had come in, at 04:12 station time on a Tuesday, from Kalephas probe designation K-7, from a region of space where Kalephas was no longer.
She read the incoming data twice before she flagged it as an anomaly. She then re-ran the verification three times, because the alternative to the verification was that she was receiving a signal from a probe that had been dead for forty years, and that was not a category of event that her training or her experience had equipped her to process.
The verification confirmed it.
Rook sat at her station in the analysis bay — empty except for her at 04:15 in the morning, which was not an accident; she had developed, over three contracts, the night shift habit of a person who found deep quiet preferable to company — and looked at what the signal was.
Not noise. Not hardware artifact. Not a ghost echo from some other probe in a similar orbit band. The identifier was specific, matched across seventeen independent verification points, and included the authentication signature that K-7 had been programmed with in 2147.
The signal contained three things: a set of coordinates, a timestamp, and a message.
The timestamp was six weeks in the future.
The message was seven words: *THEY ARE COMING. DO NOT LET THEM.*
Rook read it four times.
Then she reached for her coffee, found it cold, and drank it anyway.
---
By 06:00 she had built a preliminary analysis document and was staring at it with the specific feeling of someone who has done everything right and arrived at a conclusion that cannot possibly be right.
The coordinates mapped to a point in the outer system — not in deep space, not in the kind of nothing where you'd expect a dead probe to resurface, but to a location in the transit corridor between the third and fourth planetary bodies, approximately eleven million kilometres from the station. Within, in other words, the kind of range that something physical could actually reach in six weeks.
If something was coming.
She thought about the seven words.
*They are coming.* Who? Coming where — the station, the coordinates, the system? The phrasing was urgent rather than specific, which was unusual for probe telemetry, which was designed to be precise. If the signal had been programmed into K-7's message architecture before it was launched, the programmer had done it in a hurry or had expected the recipient to understand context they hadn't thought to specify.
If the signal had not been programmed into K-7 before launch — if something had accessed K-7's communication architecture in the forty years since its failure — then the *what* of how and the *who* of who and the *why* of why were all considerably more serious questions.
She needed to tell someone.
She opened the reporting structure in her terminal and looked at the chain. Her direct supervisor was Dr. Ansel Cord, who was competent, careful, and had worked for Meridian Systems for thirty years. Above him was the station director, Leora Massev, who had the specific personality profile of someone who managed a deep-space research station well and would manage an anomalous signal from a dead probe extremely badly. Above Massev was a corporate structure that Rook had learned, across three contracts, to regard with professional caution.
She thought about the last time she had logged an anomaly through the proper channel. She thought about what had happened to the data. She thought about a report she had written and the way it had been revised three levels above her and what those revisions had changed.
She saved the preliminary analysis in four different locations and went to find coffee that was actually hot.
---
The station's common area was beginning to come alive with the day shift turnover — researchers and support staff moving through with the unhurried efficiency of people who had been in isolated space long enough to stop performing their morning competence. Rook had been on the station for eighteen months and had reached the same comfortable efficiency. She got coffee and sat in the corner with her mug and looked out the observation panel at the stars.
The stars were, as always, beautiful and completely indifferent. She found this comforting on most mornings.
This morning she was looking at them differently.
The coordinates she had mapped were not toward anything she could identify on current stellar cartography. They were in a gap — a region of the outer system that was logged as "low survey priority, no significant bodies, minimal transit use." The kind of region that existed because no one had had a reason to look at it closely.
Kalephas had been in the outer system. K-7 had been the third probe in the Kalephas series, deployed to survey exactly those low-priority regions.
She thought about what K-7 might have found, forty years ago, in the kind of space that no one had a reason to look at.
"You're thinking too loud."
She looked up. Jin Maris, the station's systems engineer, was standing three feet away with her own coffee and the slightly too-perceptive expression that Rook had learned to take seriously.
"Early morning," Rook said.
"You've been out here for twelve minutes. You haven't touched the coffee." Jin sat down across from her, not making it a production. They had been, over eighteen months, the closest thing to friends that Rook permitted herself in isolated environments. Jin was observant, non-intrusive, and had once spent three hours helping Rook dig through archival telemetry at 2 AM because she thought the methodology question was interesting. "What did you find?"
Rook looked at her for a moment. She thought about the reporting chain and the saved analysis files and the question of who to tell.
"I'll know more in a few hours," she said.
It wasn't an answer. Jin knew it wasn't an answer and let it stand.
"Buy me another coffee when you do know more," Jin said.
Rook looked at the stars and thought about six weeks, and a timestamp, and seven words that assumed the reader would understand what *they* meant.
She hoped the analysis would tell her something.
She was not confident it was going to tell her something she could act on alone.
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The Dead Signal — Chapter 1 of Signal From the Edge | Novelosity
