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QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Carina-446

Six systems since 441. All gravel. I have started
to appreciate gravel in a way I don't think was
intended by the people who designed this survey.

Odelya found vanadium deposits on the second moon
of 444, which is the most exciting thing that's
happened in two weeks and exactly as exciting as
it sounds. She flagged it for the index. The
spectrometer is working. Everything is working.

Maret has started leaving the door to deck four
open. She didn't announce this or explain it. I
noticed because the echo changed — the galley
used to end at a wall and now it ends at a
hallway that ends at a hold that ends at another
hold. Sound travels differently when it has
somewhere to go. The ship is the same size it
always was but it sounds bigger now.

I asked her about it. She said the seal was
degrading and it wasn't worth patching for a
cosmetic issue. The seal was fine. I checked it
last month.

We got a transmission today. Not for us — it was
a general broadcast, Milda Station announcing
their grand opening in the Luyten system.
Casinos, restaurants, 9,000 capacity. Maret read
it out loud in the galley using the voice of
someone trying to sell you a time-share. Odelya
laughed so hard she knocked over her water
recycler. I have never heard Odelya laugh that
hard about anything, including the time the
spectrometer returned a reading that just said
FISH.

The Luyten system is nowhere near us. We'd need
about four years at our current transit speed.
Maret stuck the printout on the galley wall
anyway. She circled the part about the restaurants.

I keep thinking about Sofia Petrova's
transmission. The one from the Yangzijiang. A
kid on a generational carrier, building a model
of Earth, homesick for a place she's never been.
I don't know if she knows that some of us are
out here in ships that are too big and too empty,
doing the opposite — moving fast enough that
home isn't a place we miss but a place that
doesn't exist anymore at the timescale we'd
need to reach it.

Different problem. Same shape.

I ran the 438 data again. I know. But the survey
backups sync every 72 hours and the files are
just sitting there. The peak migration isn't
random. There's a periodicity to it —
approximately 19 hours, which doesn't match the
moon's rotation (31 hours) or its orbital period
(6.2 days) or any tidal cycle I can derive from
the gas giant's influence. 19 hours corresponds
to nothing I can find.

I've stopped looking for what it corresponds to.
I'm looking at what 19 hours means on its own.
A rhythm doesn't need an external driver. Some
things keep their own time.

Odelya has started humming again. Not the same
song. This one I recognize — it's an old nav
school drinking song about a pilot who flew into
a star on purpose because she wanted to see what
the chromosphere looked like up close. The punchline
is that she survived and it looked like Tuesday.

I asked Odelya where she learned it. She said she
didn't remember. She looked like she was telling
the truth.

- thresh3, Silt Aria