4. Conversations in the Dark Between Stars

Neither of them spoke for two hours. This suited Kira perfectly. She needed the time to think, and thinking was difficult when people were talking at her. She sat wedged between two reinforced cargo crates containing what the manifest said were hydraulic regulators, and she turned one of the three data drives over and over in her fingers like a worry stone. The ship was old — not dangerously so, but the kind of old that was honest about its age. Panels that had been repaired rather than replaced. A ventilation system that wheezed faintly on the starboard side. The cockpit instrumentation lit the forward cabin with an amber glow that made everything look like late afternoon in a room without windows, which, of course, it was. Torin Avery flew the way some people drove — with most of his attention elsewhere, as though the act of piloting were simply a background process running beneath more important thoughts. He hadn't asked her another question since they'd cleared the Callisto traffic corridor, and he hadn't explained how he'd come to be docked at the station at exactly the right moment, on exactly the right schedule, in exactly the right kind of ship. Kira decided to ask. "Who sent you?" He didn't turn around. "Nobody sent me. I had a scheduled freight run." "Convenient." "I thought so." "Someone sent me a message," she said. "Anonymous. Told me to leave tonight. I assume that message and your presence in berth nine aren't coincidental." A long pause. The ship's engines settled into a lower, steadier register as they passed beyond the inner debris field and entered open space. The stars were very bright out here, very cold, very still. "There's a man," Avery said finally, still not turning around. "He goes by Declan. No last name, for my purposes. He reaches out occasionally with freight work. Off-the-books, mostly. Reasonable rates. He has never asked me to do anything I found morally objectionable, which is a higher bar than most of my regular clients." He paused. "Three days ago he told me to position myself at Callisto Station and wait. He said someone might need transport. He said if they got on my ship, I should get them to Ganymede without any detours and without talking to anyone along the way." "And you just... did that?" "He paid upfront. And honestly," Avery said, with the tone of a man who had learned something about the world by losing arguments with it, "the fact that somebody needs to leave a place quietly is not, in my experience, automatically a bad thing. Sometimes it's exactly the opposite." Kira thought about that. She thought about the three drives again. She thought about the signal, repeating its patient forty-two-second pulse somewhere across a distance so vast it made her feel physically small just to contemplate it. "What else did he tell you about me?" "Nothing. He doesn't know it was you specifically. He said: someone might need transport. That was it." "He knew about the signal," Kira said. "He knew I'd found it." Avery did turn around then, just slightly, enough to look at her over his shoulder. His expression was careful. "He knew about a signal?" "A transmission. Coming from a planet that's been silent for two hundred years." She held his gaze. "You're not going to ask me which planet." A long moment. "No," he said. "I'm not." Something shifted in the atmosphere between them. Not exactly trust — too early for trust — but the preliminary acknowledgment of a shared category of knowledge, the kind you acquire by living adjacent to dangerous truths for long enough. "You know something about this," Kira said. It wasn't a question. Avery was quiet for so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer. Then: "Three years ago, I was contracted to transport a research team. Private charter, confidential client. The team was heading out past the belt, to one of the deep-field relay arrays. Standard science work, officially. Atmospheric analysis, they said. I didn't ask questions." He paused. "Two members of that team never came back. The other three stopped talking about the trip publicly about a week after we returned. One of them had a car malfunction six months later. Officially ruled an accident." The ship hummed around them. "I reported it," Avery said. "Filed everything properly. My JTA liaison told me I was misreading the situation. My license review was moved up three months early. Six weeks later I was cited for the protocol breach." His jaw tightened. "So. I know a little bit about signals that shouldn't exist and the kinds of things that happen to people who notice them." Kira let the silence sit for a moment. Then: "And yet you're still flying." "I'm still something," he said, which wasn't quite an answer. She looked out through the forward window at the stars, which offered no opinions on the matter. "There's someone we're going to meet in Ganymede," Avery said, after another long pause. "The man who sent me. Declan. He said if you made it this far, he needed to talk to you in person." He glanced back again. "You can say no. I'll drop you anywhere on the station you want, and that's the end of it." Kira turned the data drive over once more in her fingers. The signal had been repeating for twelve days — or at least that was how old the transmission was when she'd received it. How long it had actually been broadcasting, she had no way of knowing. It could have been broadcasting for years. It could have been building to something. It could be a cry for help or a warning or something she had no framework to interpret. But it was real. And somewhere in her chest, beneath the fear and the exhaustion and the low hum of adrenaline that had been running since 4:17 a.m., there was something else: a conviction, clear as the stars outside the window, that she had found this signal for a reason. That she was supposed to follow it. "Tell me about Declan," she said. Avery settled back in his pilot's seat, and outside, the Jupiter corridor stretched ahead of them into the luminous dark.