We'd been staring at the derelict for twenty minutes, and no one had suggested leaving yet. That probably said something about us.

  "So," Tavi said over the channel, voice bright with anticipation. "Are we boarding, or are we just going to look at it from here until our fuel runs out?"

  "Option three," Quinn suggested. "We collect sensor data, log the coordinates, and let someone else risk their necks poking around in sixty-year-old wreckage."

  "Where's the adventure in that?"

  "Exactly. No adventure. Just sensible resource allocation and risk management."

  I watched the derelict rotate slowly against the stars-a dark cylinder with open wounds and no lights. The sensor sweep showed what Mara had already reported: no power signatures, no life signs, nothing that suggested immediate danger. But sixty years of vacuum could hide a lot of problems.

  "Dr. Lira," I said. "What do we actually gain from boarding versus remote scanning?"

  Her response came back measured. "Remote scans can give us hull composition, rough internal layout, and broadcast analysis. Physical access would let us retrieve navigation logs, check interior equipment for anomalies, and collect samples that might explain the spatial displacement. If the derelict's System is intact, we might be able to extract its entire record-everything that happened before the crew abandoned ship."

  "And if it's not intact?"

  "Then we'll have gone to significant effort for very little return." A pause. "But those mathematical patterns in the signal-the same ratios we've been tracking-suggest something worth documenting. Someone went to considerable effort encoding them. I'd like to see what the crew experienced firsthand."

  Sira's voice cut in from Engineering. "The Ship's still humming. Louder than before. The hull's resonating at a specific frequency-matching the beacon signal's pattern."

  "The derelict?"

  "Or whatever's generating the signal. The structural vibrations correlate with the broadcast." She sounded uncertain, which was unusual for Sira. "Could be the Ship's architecture responding to the EM fields, or... something else. Either way, the resonance is strong."

  I drummed my fingers on the console and did the mental arithmetic everyone else was probably doing. Risk versus reward. Curiosity versus common sense. The responsible thing versus the thing we'd all regret not doing.

  "Limited investigation," I decided. "Four person team: me, Mara, Kellan, and Sira. Dr. Lira monitors remotely. Tavi on comms. Quinn coordinates security from here. We go in, look around, extract data if we can, and come back. If anything looks wrong-structure, atmosphere, unexpected systems coming online-we leave immediately."

  "Define 'wrong,'" Kellan said.

  "You'll know it when you see it. Mara, what's the boarding protocol?"

  "EVA approach," Mara said immediately. "Shuttle would be faster, but it commits us to a longer exit if things go bad. Suits give us mobility. Kellan and I go in first, secure the entry point, then Pilot and Sira follow."

  "How long for prep?"

  "Thirty minutes. We'll need to check seals and run equipment diagnostics."

  "Make it twenty. I want to be back before we lose good light." Not that light mattered in space, but it felt like the kind of thing a responsible captain would say.

  Tavi made a small noise of excitement. Quinn sighed audibly.

  "Everyone clear?" I asked.

  A chorus of acknowledgments came back, ranging from enthusiastic (Tavi) to resigned (Quinn) to professionally neutral (everyone else).

  I stood and stretched, joints popping. "All right. Boarding party, meet at the airlock in fifteen. Everyone else, monitor from your stations and be ready to pull us out if this goes sideways."

  "When has anything ever gone sideways?" Rafe asked, tone deliberately light.

  "That's not even a question worth answering."

  The System's voice cut in: "Pilot, I have logged boarding team assignments. However, Mara's safety guidelines from the Arkfield incident require secondary confirmation for anomalous-environment operations, but Sira's equipment protocols from last cycle suggest immediate deployment is preferable, and-" A brief pause, then the voice continued in slightly different cadence: "-?Tres says practicing safety vocabulary in Hispania builds neural resilience! Shall we-" Another pause. "Apologies. TresLingua interference resolved. Proceeding with boarding team preparation per Mara's requirements."

  I exchanged a glance with Mara. TresLingua usually waited for quiet moments to hijack the System, not operational briefings.

  "System stable?" I asked.

  "Affirmative. All systems nominal. Minor translation-layer conflict and guideline reconciliation delay. Resolved."

  "Noted. Everyone, fifteen minutes."

  The derelict looked worse up close.

  Sixty years of space had sandblasted the hull with micrometeorites until the surface was pitted and scarred like old bone. Radiation exposure had faded the original paint-cargo identification numbers barely visible under layers of cosmic weathering. The open cargo bay door hung at an angle, torn half off its track by whatever had damaged the ship decades ago.

  "Structural integrity?" I asked, mag-boots keeping me oriented toward the entry point.

  Kellan swept his scanner across the opening. "Bay door mechanism is shot, but the hull looks stable. No active leaks, no pressure changes. It's been cold for a long time."

  Mara went in first, rifle up and scanning. Her helmet light carved a cone through the darkness, illuminating cargo containers still strapped to the deck and a thin layer of frost coating every surface. "Clear. No movement. Advancing to interior bulkhead."

  Kellan followed, taking the opposite angle. Their lights crisscrossed as they moved deeper into the bay.

  "We're coming in," I said, pulling myself through the opening behind Sira.

  The cold hit immediately-not through the suit, but through the silence. Dead ships had a specific quality to them, a kind of absence that made you aware of how much noise living ships made. No hum of life support. No rattle of ventilation. Just us and the dark and the frost.

  "Power's out across the ship," Sira said, checking a wall panel. "Emergency batteries failed years ago. We'll need to find manual access to any systems we want to check."

  "Can we pull logs without power?"

  "Depends on whether the System's memory cores survived. If they're intact, we can extract them directly." She moved toward the interior bulkhead door. "But we'll need to open a lot of sealed hatches manually."

  Mara had already positioned herself at the door. "On your word."

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I glanced back at the open bay door, our exit point, then forward into the ship's interior. This was usually when things went wrong-right after you committed to going deeper.

  "Open it," I said.

  The manual release took all of Mara's strength and Kellan's help. The door groaned, frost cracking away from the seal, and swung inward with the kind of resistance that came from decades of disuse.

  The corridor beyond was dark and narrow, lit only by our helmet beams. Frozen condensation covered the walls like thin ice. Somewhere deeper in the ship, the hull creaked-thermal contraction, probably, or just old metal settling into shapes it wasn't built for.

  "Comms check," Tavi's voice cut in, distorted but clear. "We're reading you. Dr. Lira says she's getting good sensor data from your suit feeds."

  "Copy," I said. "Proceeding to the bridge. Sira, where would the System's primary core be on a ship this old?"

  "Bridge or Engineering. Probably bridge-these old haulers kept everything centralized." She consulted her datapad. "Two decks up, forward section. There should be a maintenance shaft we can use."

  "Lead the way."

  We moved through the ship in single file, Mara and Kellan alternating lead positions while Sira navigated and I tried not to think about how many things could go wrong in a dead ship with no power and no backup systems. The maintenance shaft was exactly where Sira said it would be-a vertical tube with ladder rungs that had been perfectly good sixty years ago and were now coated in frost and questionable structural integrity.

  "I'll go first," Mara said, testing the first rung. It held. She pulled herself up, moving slowly and deliberately. "Rungs are solid. Follow my path exactly."

  We climbed in silence, suits scraping against the shaft walls. Somewhere below us, something metallic groaned and settled. Above, Mara's light played across the hatch at the top of the shaft.

  "Bridge level," she announced. "Opening now."

  The bridge was smaller than I expected-four stations arranged in a tight semicircle facing a viewscreen that had cracked decades ago. Control panels dark and dead. Captain's chair empty, still strapped down like someone had left in a hurry and never come back.

  "Creepy," Kellan muttered.

  "Functional," Sira countered, moving to the central console. "This is the System access point. If we're lucky, the memory cores are intact. Give me a minute."

  "And if we're unlucky?" Kellan asked.

  "Then we'll have made a very long trip to look at frost and regret. Like that time Rafe's lasagna froze in the secondary hold." Sira paused. "Actually, the lasagna smelled worse."

  She worked quickly, popping access panels and running diagnostics with a handheld scanner. Mara and Kellan took up positions at the entry points. I examined the captain's station, looking for anything that might tell us what had happened here.

  The logbook was still in its holder-an actual physical book, which spoke to how old this ship was. Paper. In space. Somewhere, an archivist was weeping with joy and a safety inspector was weeping for different reasons. I pulled it free, frost cracking away from the cover, and flipped to the last entries.

  The captain's handwriting deteriorated page by page.

  Day 47: Standard cargo run. Nav systems reporting minor drift inconsistencies but within acceptable parameters.

  Day 52: Drift inconsistencies increasing. Recalibrated three times. Instruments show impossible readings-position data doesn't match stellar references.

  Day 56: Something's wrong with the space outside. Can't explain it better than that. The stars look right, but the distances are wrong. Or the distances are right and the stars are wrong. Navigation can't reconcile it.

  Day 58: Emergency beacon activated. System can't plot a jump-says every destination is simultaneously too close and too far. Crew getting nervous. I don't blame them.

  Day 60: We're abandoning ship. I don't know what's happening to the space around us, but staying here is suicide. Lifeboats launched. If anyone finds this-don't try to fix the navigation. There's something out here that doesn't want to be measured.

  The entry ended there. No signatures, no final log. Just empty pages after that.

  "Sira," I said quietly. "How's it coming?"

  "Good news: memory cores are intact. Bad news: they're encrypted with a protocol I haven't seen before. I can extract them, but decryption will take time." She glanced up. "There's also something weird with the backup logs. They reference... hold on."

  She pulled up a display on her scanner. Partial text scrolled across the screen, corrupted but readable in fragments:

  -position divergence forty thousand klicks-

  -spatial fold detected but no gravitational source-

  -beacon signal exhibiting mathematical ratios, cause unknown-

  -the song the song the song the-

  The text cut off into corrupted data.

  "The song," Sira repeated softly. "Same phrase from the captain's quarters notes."

  I felt the hairs on my neck stand up, which was irrational because we were in suits and nothing could actually touch us. But the pattern was too consistent. Too deliberate.

  "Dr. Lira," I said into the channel. "Are you seeing this?"

  "Yes." Her voice was tight with focus. "The spatial displacement matches what we calculated. Forty thousand kilometers is exactly what I predicted based on local geometry drift. And the patterns-the derelict's System was documenting the same ratios we've been seeing. It's all connected."

  "So this ship experienced what we're seeing now. Decades ago."

  "Correct. Which suggests the phenomenon is persistent, not a one-time event. This region of space has been behaving oddly for at least sixty years."

  Sira had gone very still. "Pilot."

  "What?"

  "The Ship's hull. It's matching the beacon frequency now. The structural harmonics have shifted to align with the signal."

  "Matching how?"

  "Same as before. The architecture responds to these frequencies." A pause. "I don't know if it's learning the pattern or if it always could and we're just noticing now."

  That was, officially, the moment when responsible command dictated we should leave. We'd found the logs. We'd confirmed the phenomenon was real. We had data to extract and analyze. Staying longer was pushing our luck.

  But there was one more place I needed to check.

  "Captain's quarters," I said. "Sira mentioned hand-drawn charts. I want to see them before we go."

  Mara gave me a long look through her helmet visor. "How long?"

  "Five minutes. Then we extract the cores and leave."

  "Copy. Kellan, watch the corridor. Pilot, make it fast."

  The captain's quarters were one deck down and aft-a cramped compartment barely large enough for a bunk, a desk, and a wall locker. The desk was covered in papers, frozen and brittle but still legible under my helmet light.

  Charts. Dozens of them. Hand-drawn on whatever paper the captain could find, covered in annotations and mathematical scrawl that I couldn't parse without Dr. Lira's help.

  But I could see the patterns.

  Star positions plotted in three dimensions, with lines connecting them that shouldn't exist. Distances marked and crossed out and marked again. Notations about "fold points" and "resonance zones" and "spatial drift vectors." One chart had nothing but the sequence written over and over, filling every margin.

  At the center of the largest chart, the captain had drawn a symbol I didn't recognize-concentric circles with radiating lines, like a stylized sun or a speaker cone. Underneath it, in careful letters:

  THE SONG MAKES SPACE MOVE

  I photographed everything, hands moving on autopilot while my brain tried to process what I was seeing. This wasn't just a crew that had experienced navigation problems. This was a captain who had tried to understand the phenomenon and had come to some kind of conclusion about it.

  Space wasn't just moving. It was being moved. By something.

  By a song.

  I stood there for a moment, holding a dead captain's obsessive charts, looking at the words THE SONG MAKES SPACE MOVE, and thought: this is either the most important discovery I've ever made or the universe is trolling me personally.

  "Pilot," Sira's voice crackled over the channel, urgent. "We need to leave. Now."

  "What's wrong?"

  "The derelict's System. It's trying to boot up."

  I was moving before I fully processed the words, launching myself back toward the bridge. "That's impossible. No power."

  "Tell that to the System. It's pulling power from somewhere-maybe our suits' EM fields, maybe something else. But it's activating and the Ship is going crazy."

  I reached the bridge to find Sira yanking cables out of the console while Mara and Kellan covered the exits. The central display was flickering-not with light, but with something like afterimages, text scrolling too fast to read.

  "Cores extracted?" I demanded.

  "Got them." Sira shoved two small modules into her equipment pack. "But the System's trying to communicate. It thinks we're a maintenance crew. It's running pre-shutdown diagnostics."

  The display stabilized for a moment. A single line of text appeared:

  SOMETHING IS SINGING. PLEASE ADVISE.

  Then it flickered out and went dark.

  "Out," Mara said. "Everyone out, now."

  We didn't argue. The climb down the maintenance shaft took half the time the climb up had, and we practically sprinted through the corridors to the cargo bay. Behind us, the ship's hull groaned and something deep in the engineering section made a noise like metal tearing.

  "Is it coming apart?" Kellan asked.

  "Structural failure from the failed reboot," Sira said, breathless. "The System tried to draw power through degraded systems. Destabilized some stress points. We need to be gone before the cascade spreads."

  We tumbled through the open bay door and pushed off toward the Discordia, mag-boots disengaged and thrusters firing. The derelict receded behind us, dark and silent and full of questions we'd barely started to answer.

  "Everyone accounted for?" Mara asked, running a quick headcount.

  "All present," I confirmed. "Tavi, tell Dr. Lira we're coming back with the cores and about three hundred new questions."

  "She's already preparing her analysis station," Tavi said, voice tight with excitement. "Also, Quinn wants to know if you found anything worth the structural damage to your cardiovascular systems."

  "Define 'worth.'"

  "She says, and I quote, 'information that justifies the inevitable medical bills.'"

  "Tell her we'll find out when Dr. Lira decrypts the cores." I glanced back at the derelict, still and dark against the stars. "Also, you're going to want to hear what the Ship's been doing while we were gone."

  "Already briefed," Tavi said. "It's audible through the entire ship now. Crew's calling it 'the humming.' Some people find it soothing. Others are filing noise complaints."

  Perfect. Because things weren't already weird enough.