<< BACK TO RS001 LOG

QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Carina-457

Kovacs Station sent new orders. Survey contract
extended six months. And they want us to go back
to 438.

Not because of my reports. I filed the anomaly
per protocol and assumed it would sit in a queue
somewhere between budget requests and cafeteria
complaints. But a mineralogy team at Kovacs ran
the absorption data through their models and
got results bad enough to forward up the chain.
Bad meaning unexplainable. Unexplainable meaning
funded.

We don't have a lander. Kovacs knows this. The
orders say observe from orbit, run extended
sweeps, transmit raw data on a 6-hour cycle.
They want two weeks minimum. They're sending a
landing-capable ship but the earliest arrival
is nine months out.

Maret read the orders, put down her coffee, and
said finally. Which is not the response I expected
from someone who argued against spending a second
day there. She said she was arguing against
spending unauthorized time. Authorized time is
different. Authorized time has a rate.

Odelya didn't say anything. She went to the
spectrometer bay and I could hear her running
diagnostics for the next three hours. When she
came out she told me the instrument was in the
best condition of its operational life. Then she
went to bed.

It will take us 11 days to get back to 438.
We passed through 19 systems on the way out.
Gravel, gravel, vanadium, gravel, the twins,
gravel, the unknown. Reversing a survey route
feels wrong in a way I can't articulate. You're
supposed to move forward through these systems.
Each one gets a number higher than the last. Going
backward means the numbers decrease and the ship
starts to feel like it's rewinding.

Maret noticed it too. She put the Milda Station
flyer back up in the galley — it had fallen behind
the water recycler — and added an annotation in
red pen: RAIN CHECK. Underneath that, smaller:
they probably don't have real rain either.

I pulled up the 438 data again, openly this time.
No more pretending I was just reviewing survey
backups. The 19-hour periodicity is still there,
still unexplained. But I noticed something I
missed before. During the last two hours of our
original observation window, the amplitude was
increasing. Not by much. Three percent per cycle.
If that rate held steady — and there is no reason
to assume it did — then by now, five months later,
the signal would be roughly 900 times stronger
than when we left.

That number is almost certainly wrong. It assumes
linear growth in a system we don't understand at
all. But I ran it past Odelya and she didn't
correct me. She just asked when we'd arrive.

Eleven days. The spectrometer is ready. Deck four
is open. The ship echoes in a way that sounds less
like emptiness now and more like a held breath.

- thresh3, Silt Aria