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QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Carina-438

We arrived at 438 twelve hours ago. The signal
is not 900 times stronger. It is gone.

Odelya ran the spectrometer sweep four times
before she told me. I think she wanted to be
sure. Or she wanted to have already processed
it before she had to say the words. Either way
she came to the bridge with her hands in her
pockets and said the system is spectrally
inert. Her exact words.

Spectrally inert. Like nothing was ever here.

Maret pulled the original data and overlaid it
against current readings. The absorption lines
that drew Kovacs' attention are flat. Not
shifted, not diminished. Absent. The mineralogy
that doesn't exist in any database doesn't exist
in the system either. As if we imagined a planet
full of impossible chemistry and three separate
instruments confirmed the hallucination.

Except the data is still in our logs. Timestamped,
checksummed, transmitted. Kovacs has a copy.
Whatever 438 was doing five months ago, it did
it in front of witnesses and then stopped.

We're in a standard survey orbit around the
fourth body. Same rock we scanned before.
Unremarkable silicates. Iron. Carbon. Everything
you'd expect from a body this size at this
distance from its star. The kind of thing you
catalog in eleven minutes and move on. We've
been staring at it for six hours.

Maret asked what the protocol is when the
anomaly that funded the mission has ceased to
exist. I said we stay for two weeks and observe.
Those are the orders. She said that's like being
told to watch a door after the building has
been demolished. I said yes, that is exactly
what it's like.

Odelya has moved her spectrometer cycles to
every ninety minutes. No one asked her to
increase the frequency. She says she wants to
catch it if it restarts. I asked her if she
thought it would. She said no. But she moved
her cot into the spectrometer bay anyway.

The ship sounds different here than I remember.
Last time the echoes felt like held breath.
Now they feel like the exhale after someone
leaves a room. Something was here and isn't
and we are three people in a ship built for
twelve orbiting the evidence of its absence.

Kovacs wants the first 6-hour data dump in
four hours. I'll transmit exactly what we have.
Rocks. Iron. A spectrometer set to catch ghosts.
Eleven minutes of catalog stretched across two
weeks of funding.

Maret took down the Milda Station flyer again.
She didn't put it behind the recycler this time.
She folded it into a paper crane and set it on
the navigation console. When I asked why, she
said she was making something out of the
decommissioned.

The system is spectrally inert. We are not.

- thresh3, Silt Aria