"It's not random expansion. The pattern is deliberate. Something is pushing through from the other side."
Aura's hand finds my shoulder. Her grip is hard enough to bruise, and I'm grateful for it, the pain a sharp point of focus in a moment that feels like the floor is dissolving.
On the screen, the anomaly's readings spike again. The tear widens. The biosignature resolves.
Not something.
Someone.
The door is opening, and someone is coming back, and every readout I can see tells me the same thing in a language older than the stars.
Whatever walked through that anomaly twenty years ago is not what's walking back.
Chapter 17
Aura
The anomaly is breathing.
I watch it on the main sensor display, that wound in space pulsing like a living thing, and every readout on the board is climbing. Energy signatures doubling, tripling, spiking past thresholds we set last week and rewrote yesterday and are already obsolete. The waveform on my secondary screen looks like a heartbeat accelerating toward cardiac arrest, each peak higher than the last, each trough shallower, the intervals compressing until the whole pattern is just a scream of data none of us can interpret fast enough.
"Expansion rate is up fourteen percent in the last six minutes," I say, and my voice comes out steady, which is a small miracle. My hands are not steady. I press them flat against the console and will them still. "Whatever's happening in there, it's accelerating."
Beside me, Ethan's eyes are locked on the tactical overlay. Every ship Veridian-7 has is repositioning on that screen, moving from patrol routes and mining escorts into defensive formations that look like a fist closing around the station. Corvettes forming a perimeter. The heavy frigates pulling into a secondary line. Even the civilian transports arebeing shepherded behind the station's mass, tucked into the electromagnetic shadow where they'll have the best chance if this goes wrong.
If. Like there's a version of this that goes right.
"Fleet's in position," Zane says from the command chair. His voice carries that particular quality it gets when the situation has graduated from concerning to existential, something past calm, past controlled, into a register so flat it sounds automated. I've learned to read that tone over the past weeks. It means he's already run the scenarios in his head and none of them ended well, so he's stopped bothering with optimism and moved straight to execution. "All stations report ready. Point defense is hot. Kinetics loaded."
"We don't know it's hostile," Talia says from his right side. She's standing close enough that their shoulders nearly touch, her tablet forgotten at her side, her eyes on the same display mine keep drifting to. The anomaly. That rippling, expanding gash in the fabric of everything we understand. Her voice holds something I can't quite name. Not hope. Something rawer.
"We don't know it's anything," Zane replies. "That's the problem."
He's right. Forty days of watching this thing grow, studying it, theorizing about it, arguing about it in briefing rooms that smell like stale coffee and recycled fear, and we still don't know what we're looking at. A door. A wound. A weapon. A tomb. Every model we've built has contradicted the last. The only thing consistent is the growth, that relentless expansion, and now the energy readings climbing like something on the other side is pushing through.
I check the sensor arrays again, cycling through frequencies. Electromagnetic normal, if you can call anything about this normal. Gravitational flux within the range we've come to accept as baseline. Tachyon emissions spiking in patterns that almostlook structured, almost look intentional, like a signal being transmitted through a medium that shouldn't be able to carry one.
"I'm getting something on the tachyon band," I say. "Structured emissions. Could be interference, could be communication."
"Can you clean it up?"
"I'm trying."
My fingers move across the console, isolating the frequency, filtering out the noise of the anomaly's own electromagnetic signature. Ethan shifts beside me, and I feel his hand find mine beneath the edge of the console. Warm. Solid. His fingers lace through mine and squeeze once, and I squeeze back without looking away from the screen.
Whatever this is, I'm not facing it alone. That knowledge sits in my chest like a stone I'm choosing to carry, heavy and warm and mine.
The signal clarifies. Not much. Enough to see a pattern. Repeating bursts. A rhythm that doesn't match any natural phenomenon in our databases.
"That's deliberate," I say. "Someone is transmitting."
The command center goes quiet in that specific way a room goes quiet when every person in it stops breathing at the same time. Twenty people at their stations, all the ambient sound of fingers on keypads and murmured status updates and the constant low hum of the station's ventilation system, and for three full seconds, nothing. Just the pulse of the anomaly on the screen and the knowledge settling into every one of us that something is coming through.
Zane breaks the silence. "All stations, battle alert. Weapons free on my command only. No one fires unless I say so."
The lights shift. Not an alarm, not yet. Just that subtle change in the command center's ambient lighting that meansthe station has moved to its highest readiness state, the overheads dimming slightly, the console displays brightening, every screen prioritizing tactical data. The color of the room changes from the tired blue-white of a standard shift to something cooler, harder, like the station itself is bracing.
I pull my hand from Ethan's. I need both of them now.
