Author’s Note: Thank you for joining me on this journey. I plan to publish my stories here first, then eventually move them to Amazon or the like. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome!
Static in the Silence
The hum of the relay station was the only sound that kept Talia company. A low, constant vibration beneath her boots, like the heartbeat of a sleeping beast. Out here, nearly twelve light-years from the nearest colony, solitude wasn’t a punishment—it was protocol.
She liked it that way. No expectations. No one to impress. Just her, the stars, and the systems that needed keeping alive.
Until the transmission.
It came in fragmented, nested within a routine diagnostics ping from Relay Node 47-Gamma—an old repeater abandoned after the failed colonization of Eos Prime. The packet shouldn’t have even reached her station, let alone carried audio. But there it was.
A voice.
Low. Hoarse. Male.
“This is Captain Kieran Vale… if anyone can hear this… I’m still here.”
Then static.
Talia stared at the console. Her coffee went cold.
Captain Kieran Vale had died twenty-six years ago. Everyone said so.
But the stars, it seemed, had other ideas.
She replayed it three times.
Same result. Same static. Same aching voice threading through the silence.
Talia leaned back in her chair, the worn synth-cushion creaking beneath her. Her fingers hovered over the console’s interface. The name Kieran Vale stirred a memory—old training modules on Eos Prime, a footnote in colonial disaster reports. One of those missions that vanished with barely a whisper.
“Computer,” she said, clearing her throat. “Cross-reference all known logs on Kieran Vale.”
The station’s AI chirped. “Kieran Vale. Rank: Captain. Vessel: Helios-3. Last recorded transmission: March 3, 2198. Status: presumed lost with all hands following catastrophic orbit decay around Eos Prime.”
“Time since last contact?”
“Twenty-six years, four months, sixteen days.”
Talia let out a slow breath. It didn’t make sense. Orbit decay was supposed to burn them up—no survivors, no remains.
And definitely no stray transmissions nearly three decades later.
Unless…
She pulled up the signal’s metadata. Encoded, layered, buried under time and interference—but real. Not a ghost. Not a glitch.
She sat forward, fingers flying across the screen, tracing the signal’s source. Her pulse spiked as the system triangulated the origin. There it was: a low-power beacon, tucked into a decaying geosync orbit over Eos Prime’s dead moon.
Still active.
Still broadcasting.
Still waiting.
The silence around her seemed to press in closer, heavier somehow.
Talia swallowed hard.
“Guess you’ve been talking to no one for a long time, Captain Vale,” she murmured. “Let’s change that.”
Echoes
Talia scrubbed a hand through her hair, suddenly aware of how long it had been since she’d left the comm deck. The isolation never used to bother her—six months into this posting, she was the queen of her own quiet little kingdom. But now, with that voice echoing in her mind, the silence felt less like solitude and more like someone holding their breath.
She tuned the comm array manually, bypassing the station’s auto-filtering protocols. Whatever this signal was, the standard systems weren’t equipped to parse it cleanly—not after all this time. Her fingers danced across the console, dialing in narrowband frequencies, stabilizing the modulation.
She paused, then keyed in her own identifier.
“Unregistered signal, this is Technician Talia Merrin aboard Relay Station Theta-Nine. I received your transmission. Please confirm your identity and status.”
She released the mic and waited. One second. Two. The static hissed in reply.
Then: a crackle. A breath.
“…Technician…? Is this real?”
His voice was clearer now, threaded with disbelief and exhaustion.
“This is Captain Kieran Vale. Pilot of the Helios-3. I—I can’t believe someone answered. I’ve been trying for… I don’t know how long.”
Talia’s throat tightened. She leaned in.
“You’re not imagining this, Captain. You’re not alone anymore.”
There was a silence on the line, longer this time. Not from interference—but from emotion. When he finally spoke again, it was softer, like he didn’t want to break the moment.
“I thought I’d gone mad.”
“Honestly,” Talia said, her voice almost a whisper, “I’m not convinced I haven’t.”
She checked the diagnostics—life support on his end was minimal. The beacon had enough power to transmit, but only barely. Whatever was left of the Helios-3 couldn’t last much longer.
“You said you’re still in orbit?” she asked. “I’m tracking your signal near Eos Prime’s third moon.”
“Yes,” Kieran replied. “The ship… what’s left of it… is locked in a decaying orbit. Auto-stabilizers keep resetting, but it’s failing. I—I’ve been in cryo for most of it. Waking up to send the message. Then back under.”
Talia stared at the readout, heart thudding. If he was cycling in and out of cryo, conserving power… it meant he’d been alone—really alone—for decades.
She couldn’t imagine the weight of it.
“I’m going to get you out of there,” she said. “Hold on, Captain. Just a little longer.”
The comm crackled.
“I’ve held on this long,” he said. “But it’s different now. Your voice… it’s the first thing I’ve heard in years that didn’t belong to ghosts.”
Course Correction
Talia’s console was a riot of screens—orbital telemetry, energy estimates, historical logs from the Helios-3, and an aging map of the Eos system pulled from the long-dead Colonial Expansion Authority. Most of it was junk, out of date or corrupted. Still, she worked through the night.
Kieran’s signal pulsed faintly in the background, a metronome against her thoughts.
“You still with me, Captain?” she asked, eyes not leaving the screen.
A pause. Then: “Barely. Cryo’s cycling again soon. Oxygen’s low. Talk fast.”
“I’ve run your orbit,” she said. “You’ve got three, maybe four days before the decay curve drops you into the moon’s gravity well. After that, you burn.”
“Comforting.”
“I’ve got a maintenance tug docked here,” she continued, fingers flying as she opened the old vessel’s specs. “It wasn’t designed for long hauls, but I can retrofit the drive. It’ll be slow. And it’ll burn half my reserves.”
“Will it work?”
“I don’t know,” Talia admitted. “But it’s the only shot we’ve got.”
There was a long silence on the line, broken only by the faint hiss of Kieran’s static-filled life support. Then:
“You’re risking a lot for a stranger.”
“You’re not a stranger,” she said before she could stop herself. “Not anymore.”
He didn’t reply for a moment. When he did, his voice was quieter.
“I don’t remember the stars being this quiet,” he said. “Before… the crash, the fire, the screaming—I thought space would always sound like that.”
Talia swallowed the lump in her throat. She didn’t know what to say to that.
So she just said, “I’ll bring the silence with me. We’ll break it together.”
He chuckled—ragged, soft. “You always talk like that?”
She smiled, just a little. “Only when I think someone might be listening.”
Another pause, then a beep from her console. His vitals were dropping again.
“I’ve got to go under,” he murmured. “Don’t let me be a ghost, Talia.”
“You won’t,” she promised. “I’m coming.”
Then the line went silent.
And for the first time in years, Talia moved—really moved. She threw herself into work like it was oxygen, like his oxygen. Every circuit she rewired, every bolt she torqued, every burst of plasma she risked while rerouting the tug’s core—every act was a promise.
She didn’t know this man. But his voice had reached her across the void, across decades. And now, she couldn’t let him fall.
Not when she was the only one who’d heard him.
Not when her heart was starting to answer back.
Ghost Frequencies
Day Two.
Talia barely slept. When she did, it was restless, tangled with dreams of drifting wreckage and voices calling her name in a language made of static.
The tug retrofit was halfway done. The reactor was holding, but just barely, and she still had to reroute the life support to carry a second occupant—assuming Kieran would be able to move when she got there.
If she got there.
She was triple-checking the flight path when the comm crackled to life again.
“Talia…?” His voice was weaker this time. Groggy.
“I’m here,” she said quickly, brushing copper grime from her cheek.
“How long?” he murmured.
“About sixteen hours since last contact.”
“I thought it was longer,” he whispered. “Dreamed I was already dead.”
“You’re not,” she said firmly. “You’re talking to me. Real-time, no ghosts.”
A pause.
“I like your voice,” he said. “It sounds like gravity.”
She blinked, thrown off. “That’s… new.”
“It pulls me back. Every time. I wake up, and it’s like I remember how to be human again.”
She sat back, heart thudding. There was a long silence between them—comfortable now, like they were sharing something no one else could hear.
Then he asked, “What’s it like out there now? Earth. The colonies.”
Talia hesitated. “Different. Louder. Faster. There’s more tech, more regulations, more space stations named after people who never left orbit.”
“No Eos?”
“It’s still there. A cautionary tale.”
Kieran gave a quiet chuckle, then coughed. “That’s fitting.”
She leaned closer to the mic. “Why did your mission fail? There’s barely anything in the records.”
There was a long pause. Too long.
“I’ll tell you… when you get here,” he said finally.
“Okay,” she replied, gently. “Deal.”
Static again. The cryo cycle must have triggered. His voice faded mid-sentence.
Talia sat in the dim glow of her terminal, staring at the slowly spinning beacon on the screen. She could feel it now—the distance between them. Not just the miles, but the time, the loss, the weight of being alone for too long.
But she also felt something else growing. A thread. Thin, but strong. Binding them word by word.
She’d never met him. But she missed him, already.
Burn Point
Talia ran final checks on the tug. She’d dubbed it The Minnow—mostly because it was small, outdated, and barely worth a name. But if she was going to fly it through a gravity well to catch a falling ghost of a man, it deserved something better than a serial number.
Power routed. Oxygen reserve topped off. Heat shielding patched with borrowed ceramic plating and hope.
She was nearly done when the proximity alert screamed.
Her heart leapt into her throat.
She bolted to the primary console. Red lights strobed across the interface. Not an asteroid. Not debris.
A ship.
A patrol vessel. Civilian registry, outbound from the frontier. Unscheduled. Unannounced.
“Great,” Talia muttered. “Just what I needed.”
Theta-Nine wasn’t exactly legal. It wasn’t illegal either—but after the collapse of the Eos expansion, most of the network out here had been quietly forgotten. The station was supposed to be dormant. Her assignment was labeled “archival maintenance.” The kind of job no one cared about.
Until someone did.
The comm pinged. Incoming hail.
She flicked it open, adjusting her voice to sound bored and bureaucratic.
“This is Theta-Nine. Identify.”
A crisp voice replied. “This is Patrol Vessel Lucent Dawn. We’re detecting unauthorized flight preparations. Please confirm your activity.”
“I’m conducting standard systems checks.”
“Flight path indicates a vector toward restricted orbital zones. Eos Prime vicinity.”
Talia swore under her breath.
The Helios-3 crash zone was still classified.
She could lie. Stall them. But if they scanned her logs, they’d find the signal trace. The recovery effort. The name: Kieran Vale.
And she didn’t trust what they’d do with it.
She muted the channel and opened a tight-beam back to Kieran’s beacon.
“You there?” she whispered. “Kieran, wake up.”
A pause. Static.
“…Talia?”
Relief hit her chest like gravity.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said. “There’s a patrol ship pinging the station. They’ve got questions I don’t want to answer.”
He was silent, then said carefully, “They’ll claim salvage rights. Or worse—bury it all again.”
“Exactly.”
She stared at the blinking warning on the screen.
“I may need to launch early,” she said. “Before they get curious. The route’ll be tighter. More burn. Less margin.”
“Is it safe?”
She laughed once, dry. “No. Not even close.”
Another beat of silence. Then: “Then do it.”
She exhaled sharply, chest tight.
“Kieran…”
“If you don’t try, I burn in three days anyway. At least this way, we burn together.”
She smiled despite herself. “That’s not exactly the romantic ending I had in mind.”
“Then rewrite it,” he said, quietly.
She muted the patrol hail. Locked in the manual launch sequence. The tug’s engines hummed beneath her.
This was reckless. Probably career-ending. Possibly life-ending.
But when she closed her eyes, she didn’t see a mission. She saw a man, waiting in the dark, with nothing but her voice to hold onto.
And she launched.
Line of Sight
The stars smeared as The Minnow broke orbit, shuddering with every acceleration burst. Talia kept her hands steady on the controls, her eyes flicking from nav readouts to the decaying orbit of Kieran’s beacon. The patrol ship shrank behind her like a discarded thought, though its last transmission still echoed in her head.
Unauthorized trajectory confirmed. You are violating standard flight protocol. Respond immediately or face enforcement action.
She didn’t respond. Let them chase her. She’d explain later—if there was a later.
Right now, there was only Kieran.
The orbital approach was tight—too tight. Eos Prime’s fractured moon loomed ahead, a jagged, grey mass scarred by failed terraforming efforts. Just beyond it, like a shadow tangled in its gravity, drifted the wreck.
The Helios-3.
The first time she saw it with her own eyes, Talia forgot to breathe.
The hull was cracked open like a ribcage, metal twisted by impact and time. Debris fields sparkled around it like frozen tears. Half the ship was dark, but a single pulse glowed beneath the main structure—his signal.
She opened the tight-beam link.
“I see you,” she said.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then the comm clicked, and his voice filled the cockpit.
“I must look like hell.”
She laughed, half-choked with relief. “You look like history—and you owe me one hell of a backstory.”
“I’ll write you a novel,” he said. “If we make it out of this.”
Talia routed power to the forward scope and initiated a visual scan.
The image resolved slowly—a dim interior, cluttered with jury-rigged systems. And there, in a narrow command chair surrounded by failing monitors and oxygen lines, sat a man.
Gaunt. Pale. Worn down by time.
But alive.
His face was hollowed, but his eyes—dark, alert, human—locked onto the lens.
Their eyes met across space, screens, and silence.
Kieran leaned toward the camera, resting one hand against the lens like he could reach through.
“Talia.”
She did the same.
No words this time. Just that.
Contact.
Real.
He broke it first. “How close are you?”
She glanced at the nav system. “Seventy kilometers. I’ll need to match your orbit, thread a docking clamp through debris, and override whatever lock you’ve got on that cryo chamber.”
“Good thing I’ve been keeping the seat warm.”
“Cute,” she said. “Now don’t die while I’m being heroic.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She muted the comm and let out a slow breath. Her hands were trembling now, the adrenaline finally catching up. She wasn’t just flying into a wreck. She was flying into his wreckage—the wreckage of years alone, of ghosts and frozen memories.
And she was going to bring him home.
Even if the stars didn’t want to let him go.
Contact
The debris field surrounding the Helios-3 was tighter than expected. Talia’s pulse thrummed as warning lights blinked across her display—unidentified objects, unstable orbit paths, collapsing structural integrity.
“Of course,” she muttered, banking The Minnow hard to port to avoid a spinning section of outer hull. “You couldn’t just float gently in space like a good little ghost ship.”
The docking autopilot blinked denied again, so she killed it and flew manual.
“Kieran, I’m going in blind. Your exterior ports are fused or buried. I’m gonna have to lock to the emergency airlock on your dorsal spine.”
His voice crackled through the comms. “It’s half-crushed.”
“I only need the other half.”
The final approach was a dance through death—rusted antennae spinning like blades, panels hanging like loose teeth. But Talia was faster, and The Minnow was lighter than it looked.
She lined up the clamp. Ten meters. Five. Impact warning.
She flared thrusters, matched spin, held her breath—
Clunk.
The whole tug jolted.
Docking confirmed.
Talia sagged forward, forehead hitting the console with a tired thunk.
“Still alive?” Kieran asked.
“Define alive.”
She suited up fast, tugging on the magnetic boots, sealing the helmet. The corridor from the tug to the Helios-3 was narrow and cold, filled with dust and the smell of old metal.
The emergency airlock hissed reluctantly open. Beyond it, the interior of the Helios-3 was dark except for the red glow of failing backup systems. It looked like a grave.
But someone had kept it alive. Patch jobs lined the walls, power routed through mismatched cables. And at the end of the corridor—slumped in the chair, hooked to an oxygen feed—was Kieran Vale.
He turned his head slowly, eyes finding her visor.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then he smiled. Just a little. Just enough.
“You’re real.”
She crouched in front of him, popped her helmet seal.
“So are you,” she whispered.
His hand trembled as it reached out. She took it, fingers closing around his.
His skin was cold. Too cold.
“You’re burning up,” she said. “Your cryo cycle failed.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Didn’t want to miss our first date.”
She laughed, choking on relief.
“Let’s get you out of here, Captain.”
She helped him up—he leaned into her, weak but determined. Together, they staggered back toward the docking hatch, each step a small defiance of time, silence, and everything that had tried to keep them apart.
She didn’t know what came next.
But he was here. Breathing. Holding on.
And she wasn’t letting go.
Afterlight
The hum of The Minnow’s systems filled the tiny cabin like a heartbeat. Steady. Warm. Alive.
Talia sat cross-legged near the medical berth, watching Kieran sleep.
Well—not sleep, exactly. The stabilizer had taken effect, and his vitals were holding, but whatever cocktail of cryo residue, malnutrition, and sheer exhaustion he was dealing with had dropped him into a shallow coma-like rest.
He looked different now, under normal lighting.
Less like a myth. More like a man.
Still too thin. Still pale. But color was coming back to his lips, and the tension had eased from his face.
She hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been gripping her own jaw until now. Her body ached. Her hands were shaking again. She leaned back against the bulkhead and closed her eyes for just a moment.
He spoke.
“Did we make it?”
She opened her eyes. He was watching her—barely awake, but lucid.
“We did,” she said, and smiled, raw and real. “You’re not drifting anymore.”
Kieran tried to sit up, winced, and stopped halfway. “Feels like I got hit by a moon.”
Talia reached over, steadied him with a hand at his back. “You got saved by a woman in a glorified toolbox.”
He huffed a laugh. “Then remind me to name my firstborn after The Minnow.”
They sat there in silence for a few breaths, the tension between them softer now—tentative, but full of something unspoken.
“I didn’t think anyone would ever come,” he said quietly. “Not after the first year. Not after five. I stopped hoping.”
“I know.”
“And yet…” He looked at her. Really looked. “You found me.”
Talia nodded once. “You were loud for a dead man.”
Kieran smiled, the smallest curve of his mouth. Then he leaned his head back and closed his eyes again.
“I don’t want to sleep,” he murmured. “Not yet. I feel like if I close my eyes, I’ll wake up on the wreck again. Alone.”
Talia’s voice was soft. “You won’t. You’re not there anymore.”
A long silence stretched between them.
Then he said, without opening his eyes, “Stay with me?”
She hesitated only a second before moving closer, sliding down to sit beside the berth. She rested her head near his shoulder.
“I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
Outside the porthole, the stars drifted by, indifferent as ever.
But inside that tiny ship, two people—cut off by decades and distance—breathed the same air.
And for the first time in years, neither of them was alone.
Drift
Three days into the return journey, the silence had changed.
It no longer echoed.
Talia noticed it in the little things—how she didn’t startle at the sound of a second mug clinking in the galley. How she paused before shutting doors, listening for a second pair of footsteps. How she started thinking in we instead of I.
Kieran moved slowly, but each day he was steadier. Stronger. He wore one of her spare jumpsuits now, sleeves rolled, collar loose. He looked less like a relic, more like someone who had a life once—and maybe was beginning to remember what that felt like.
He was sitting in the co-pilot’s chair when she came in with their coffee. His head turned, a soft smile tugging at his lips.
“You know,” he said, taking the mug from her hands, “I think the real miracle isn’t that you found me. It’s that you brought actual coffee.”
She laughed and sat beside him. “Don’t get used to it. That’s my last pack. You’ll be back to algae protein sludge tomorrow.”
“I survived worse.”
He sipped, winced, then smiled again. “Okay, not much worse.”
They watched the stars in companionable silence for a few minutes. The navigation system purred gently. Their heading was solid. Five more days to reach the fringe station at Arlen’s Reach. After that, the medical team could take over. She could go back to her post. He could…
“Do you know what you’ll do?” she asked softly.
Kieran didn’t answer right away.
“I’ve been a ghost longer than I was alive,” he said finally. “The world I knew is gone. I don’t have a job. Or a home. Hell, I barely have a name anymore.”
“You do have a name,” Talia said, glancing at him. “I’ve said it a hundred times in the last week.”
He looked at her then, something unguarded in his eyes.
“I don’t want to disappear again.”
“You won’t,” she said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
He leaned back, head resting against the bulkhead.
“You came for me,” he said. “Before you even knew who I was. Why?”
Talia looked down at her mug. The question had circled her thoughts since day one. She didn’t have a clean answer. Just a feeling that had bloomed and refused to die.
“Because the moment I heard your voice, I didn’t feel alone anymore either.”
He turned to her.
She met his gaze.
And for a second, the stars didn’t feel so cold.
Oxygen and Silence
Later that night, they lay in the dim-lit cabin, both pretending not to notice the silence stretching between them. The lights were low, the stars blinking softly through the viewport, and the hum of the ship had become something like a lullaby.
Talia was on the lower bunk, one hand behind her head, the other resting on her chest. Kieran lay above her, still recovering, but sleeping less now. Talking more.
“Tell me something real,” he said into the darkness.
She blinked. “Like what?”
“Something about you. Something not in a file.”
Talia thought for a long moment.
“I almost didn’t take this job,” she said finally. “It was too far. Too quiet. Everyone told me I’d go crazy out here. And maybe I did, a little.”
“But you stayed.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I think… I needed to get lost for a while.”
Kieran was quiet.
Then: “I used to be terrified of silence.”
Talia turned on her side to face the ceiling. “You don’t sound like someone who fears it anymore.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “The silence out there—it’s not empty. It talks to you. Echoes your thoughts back at you. It wears you down until you forget which ones are yours.”
She imagined him in that wreck, alone for years, slowly unraveling.
“You held on,” she said.
“I held on to the idea that maybe—maybe—someday, someone might still be listening.”
Talia’s chest tightened. “I’m glad you did.”
He shifted above her, then said quietly, “Can I ask something strange?”
She smiled into the darkness. “Stranger than a decades-old ghost pilot talking to a relay tech in a ship held together by duct tape and bad decisions?”
“…Fair.”
“Well?” she prompted.
“Will you stay there a while?” he asked. “Just… talk until I fall asleep.”
Her throat caught.
“I can do that.”
So she did.
She told him about the first time she looked through a telescope, and how she used to name stars that already had names, just to make them hers. She told him about the quiet in her bones, the way she liked the sound of her boots on metal floors, and how she used to imagine a voice coming through the comms one day. A voice not from Earth, not from anywhere.
“Guess I got what I asked for,” she whispered.
By the time she stopped talking, his breathing had slowed.
She lay there, eyes open, staring at the stars until the sky blurred.
And she didn’t feel alone.
Not anymore.
Redline
They were halfway through the fourth day when the nav system chirped.
Talia frowned, leaned over the console, and tapped the alert.
“Unscheduled transmission,” the interface said. “Tight-beam. Origin: Arlen’s Reach control.”
She opened the channel.
A gruff, clipped voice came through. “Theta-Nine, this is Control. Your vessel has been flagged for review. Passenger manifest mismatch. Prepare for debrief on arrival.”
Talia’s spine stiffened.
She didn’t reply immediately. Just stared at the blinking cursor that waited for her acknowledgment.
Kieran, seated nearby, shifted. “What is it?”
She didn’t answer him, not at first. Just keyed the channel mute and exhaled slowly.
“They know you’re here,” she said. “Or suspect something.”
He was quiet for a beat. “Makes sense. A ship leaves a quiet relay station without authorization and flies straight into restricted space? They’d have to be blind not to notice.”
“Yeah, well, blind is what I was hoping for.”
She paced the narrow space of the cockpit, thoughts spiraling. Debrief could mean anything—containment, surveillance, silence. It depended on how much they already knew about Helios-3… and what they didn’t want anyone else to find out.
“You think they’ll separate us,” Kieran said. Not a question. Just a steady, resigned truth.
Talia stopped pacing.
“I think they’ll want to make you disappear all over again.”
He looked at her—really looked, the way only someone who’d spent too many years in silence could. “You don’t have to fight this. You already did more than anyone ever has.”
“No,” she said, voice firm. “Not enough. Not if it ends with them taking you apart to study how you lived this long, or erasing you so no one asks how Helios-3 really went down.”
A pause.
“There’s more to it, isn’t there?” she asked quietly. “The crash. The mission.”
Kieran looked away.
And that was her answer.
“I’ll find a way around them,” she said. “If I have to lie, bribe, reroute, I’ll do it.”
Kieran’s hand found hers. Tentative. Real.
“You already brought me back,” he said. “That was the miracle.”
“Then let me be a second one.”
The tight-beam pinged again.
Talia didn’t answer.
Not yet.
Shadow Protocol
She waited until Kieran was asleep again—lightly sedated to give his healing body a break—before slipping back into the cockpit. The stars beyond the viewport were different now: less wild, more structured. Flight lanes, orbit markers, blinking station beacons. Civilization loomed.
So did the end of this orbiting moment they had.
Talia tapped a hidden menu on the nav console and brought up the old relay station backend. Out here, in the quiet corners of space, there were still doors no one had bothered to lock. She just had to know where to look.
She opened a file tagged: Shadow Protocol – Emergency Vessel Reclassification.
It wasn’t official. It was something left over from the old expansion days—a tool for rerouting mission records during sensitive evacuations. A way to rewrite a ship’s purpose mid-flight and avoid drawing attention.
The Minnow’s ID would be reclassified as a salvage support vessel, operating under an outdated Colonial Recovery charter. Kieran wouldn’t be listed as a survivor. He’d be logged as “autonomous biological payload” retrieved from a derelict probe.
It was the only way to slip him through without triggering a full-scale inquiry.
It was not legal.
But it would give them time.
She hesitated before finalizing it. A breath. A moment to doubt.
Then she hit execute.
The nav systems stuttered for a second, then realigned. The Minnow’s digital trail blurred. Her passenger manifest updated. The next ping from Arlen’s Reach would show a different story—just dull enough to be ignored.
She leaned back in her chair, heart pounding.
One lie. One deep breath.
One more orbit together before the world came looking.
Tell Me the Truth
Kieran was awake when she brought him breakfast. He was sitting up, legs folded under him on the bunk, staring at the viewport like it held answers. The light was dim, soft gold from the nearby star catching on his face.
She handed him a sealed meal pack. He took it, but didn’t open it right away.
“Something’s different,” he said.
Talia blinked. “What do you mean?”
He tilted his head toward the console in the cockpit, then back to her. “You’ve been in there more than usual. Quiet. Focused. Not the same kind of quiet as before. This one feels like you’re carrying something sharp in your back pocket.”
She sat across from him, trying to smile. “You’re getting poetic again.”
“Cryo dreams’ll do that,” he said, then paused. “You rerouted something, didn’t you?”
Her jaw tensed. Just a flicker. Enough.
Kieran didn’t press.
Instead, he reached for the fork and opened the meal pack like the conversation hadn’t cut the air in half.
But after a few bites, he said, almost too softly to hear:
“They’re not going to let me walk free, are they?”
Talia looked up. “No,” she admitted. “Not without questions. Not without you being poked and prodded until you’re something they can explain.”
He nodded slowly, chewing. Then he met her eyes.
“So you changed the narrative.”
She didn’t deny it.
“I used a backdoor protocol. Rewrote your record into something they won’t look too closely at. You’re technically a piece of automated bio-tech salvaged from a colonial probe.”
Kieran stared. Then barked a short laugh. “That’s one way to dehumanize me.”
“I’d rather you be a system error than a subject of study.”
His voice dropped. “You did that for me?”
“I did it,” she said, “because the moment I heard your voice, I knew I couldn’t just let you vanish again.”
He didn’t answer right away. He just looked at her—long, quiet, steady.
“You don’t even know me,” he said at last.
Talia shrugged, eyes steady. “Then tell me who you are. And start with why the Helios-3 really crashed.”
Silence. This one heavier than the ones before.
Kieran set his tray aside. Sat back.
And said, “Okay.”
The First Scar
They stayed like that for a while—quiet, the low hum of the ship between them.
Talia didn’t push. Kieran didn’t retreat.
When he finally spoke, it wasn’t what she expected.
“It was supposed to be a five-year mission,” he said. “Standard colony pre-establishment: atmosphere checks, subterranean scans, site placement for a second-wave terraformer.”
Talia nodded, giving him space.
“I was promoted just before launch. Youngest mission captain in Colonial Fleet history.” He smiled, brittle. “They made a whole ceremony out of it. Speeches. Medals. Champagne in orbit.”
“And then?” she asked gently.
“Two months in, the terraforming AI began rejecting calibration. Said the planet was incompatible with long-term human habitation. But the data was wrong—had to be wrong. We’d studied Eos for years. The whole colonization blueprint was built on it. Billions of credits already sunk.”
He paused, brow furrowing.
“They told me to override it.”
Talia’s breath caught. “The AI?”
“No. The Fleet Board. They didn’t want to pull out. Said the planet would ‘settle with time.’ Ordered me to proceed. Told me the AI was showing edge-case anomalies and needed to be ‘retrained.’”
He fell quiet again.
“And?” she said softly.
“I shut it down,” he whispered.
She blinked. “You—shut the AI down?”
Kieran nodded, looking far older than the man she’d rescued. “We didn’t even last three weeks after that.”
The words hung there like radiation—quiet, deadly.
He didn’t say more, and she didn’t ask.
Instead, she reached across the small table and covered his hand with hers.
“You don’t have to tell it all at once,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can,” he murmured.
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ve got time. At least until Arlen’s Reach.”
A bitter smile flickered across his face. “That’s not long.”
“It’s long enough for one truth at a time,” she said. “And long enough to not be strangers.”
He looked at her, and the silence between them wasn’t heavy this time.
It was soft.
It was theirs.
Inbound
The alert came during the night cycle.
Talia was on her way back from the galley with two mugs of rehydrated tea when the tug’s proximity warning blared to life, the sound sharp and unmistakably urgent.
She nearly dropped both cups.
She dashed to the cockpit and threw herself into the chair, hands already flying across the console. Her gut sank.
Inbound ship.
Unidentified. Fast. Sleek.
Military build.
Too fast for a random patrol. Too sharp for coincidence.
Kieran appeared behind her, hair damp from a shower, tension suddenly crackling through his frame.
“What is it?”
She pulled up the scans. “Ship just dropped out of FTL two clicks off our vector. Not broadcasting ID. Not responding to pings.”
“Do they see us?”
“I’m running passive,” she said. “If they’re not already tracking us, they will be soon.”
Kieran leaned closer, reading the screen over her shoulder.
“That’s not a patrol ship,” he said.
“Nope.”
“You think it’s them?”
Talia didn’t answer. Her jaw tightened. Her fingers opened a background process—masking their engine trail, scrambling comms.
She was still hoping this was just a fast-moving cargo ship—
—until the incoming transmission hit.
Unencrypted. Direct.
“Unidentified vessel Minnow-class, you are carrying restricted materials recovered from the Helios-3. Power down and prepare for escort.”
Talia swore.
Kieran sat down beside her, voice low and hard. “They’re not just going to debrief me.”
“No,” she agreed. “They’re going to bury you again. Cleanly, this time.”
She killed the outbound comms, flipped the ship into manual, and rerouted emergency burn thrusters.
“We’ve got one shot,” she said. “I can drop us into a fragment field near the Arlen Drift. It’ll mess with their targeting systems, but—”
“But?”
“But it’s going to be rough. And if they catch us before we make the jump…”
Kieran reached over and flipped the physical launch cover on the burn switch.
“Then we burn together.”
She met his eyes.
“No more ghosts,” she whispered.
“No more silence,” he said.
Then they launched.
Author’s Note: Continue to follow the story in Part Two.
J. Carlo Vegas 
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