Forty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes. The angle of the distress beacon’s final vector before it was swallowed by the accretion disk of a dead star.
She slotted it into her suit’s reader.
Min closed her eyes. For three years, she had needed to know if Jae had suffered. Now she knew. She had been afraid. She had been brave. And she had been murdered by the very corporation that signed her paychecks.
Tonight, Min was done staring.
Min detached the data core and placed it in a shielded pouch over her heart. Then she activated her suit’s long-range transmitter.
Min had nodded, her face blank. But she didn’t go to the server room. She went to the airlock.
Behind her, the dead star pulsed a silent, red warning. Ahead, a single figure in a worn-out suit drifted toward the truth, carrying a twelve-second ghost and a coordinate that was no longer just a code. ATID-60202-47-44 Min
It was Jae’s emergency beacon. The casing was cracked, space-welded to a strut of twisted metal. Min pried it loose with a trembling hand. The data core was still intact, a tiny obsidian chip humming with residual power.
The silence of space was not silent. It was a pressure, a weight, a cold that chewed through her suit’s heating coils. Behind her, the Rake was a dull grey needle against the bruised purple of the nebula. Ahead, the graveyard.
The designation was . It wasn’t a name. It was a log entry, a line in a spreadsheet, a ghost in the machine. Forty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes
The recording was only twelve seconds long. Grainy, flickering. But it was her sister. Jae’s face, younger, wild-eyed, her lip split and bleeding.
47 degrees, 44 minutes.
She pulled the heavy insulated gloves over her hands, the worn fabric smelling of recycled air and old coffee. The Rake ’s captain, a woman named Sloane with a face like cracked leather, had given the order two hours ago: "Purge the old logs. We need storage for the new navigation maps." Min closed her eyes