“Maybe,” Mira said. “But her pod’s still transmitting. Let’s find out why.”
“Approaching the object,” Dex said. “Visual in ten seconds.”
Mira fired the maneuvering thrusters, a short burst that sent the Rocinante gliding toward the thermal anomaly. The ship’s hull groaned softly as it adjusted to the new vector. Through the forward viewport, she could see the distant glitter of P5-7’s solar arrays, but something was wrong. The arrays were askew—one panel twisted at an unnatural angle, as if something had struck it with tremendous force. And there were no running lights. No beacon. Just a dark, lifeless structure spinning slowly in the void.
“You saw it,” Mira said. Her voice was flat, but her mind was already running through the failure tree, branch by branch. Carrier fail could mean a dozen things: a solar flare, a debris strike, a power collapse, or something worse. Something deliberate.
Her copilot, a burly engineer named Dex, leaned over from the jump seat, his pressure suit creaking. “Say again?”
She froze, mid-drift. “What?”
Just silence.
“Already did. No match. And… Mira, it’s moving.”
