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QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Carina-438, day 6

Kovacs has sent twelve messages in six days.
Each one asks for something we don't have.
Subsurface imaging. Magnetic field mapping.
Atmospheric sampling of a body with no atmosphere.
The requests read like they were written for a
different ship in a different system investigating
a thing that still exists.

I have responded to each with what we do have.
Spectrometer readings showing iron and silicates.
Orbital photography of a grey moon in a grey
system. Odelya's ninety-minute sweeps, each one
identical to the last, each one confirming that
nothing is here. I attach them all. Kovacs has
not acknowledged the gap between what they want
and what I send. I have not pointed it out.
There's a protocol to this kind of disappointment
and the protocol is to keep filing.

Odelya found the nineteen-hour rhythm again
yesterday. Not in the absorption lines. In the
thermal data.

The fifth moon's surface temperature fluctuates
by 0.3 degrees on a nineteen-hour cycle. This
is within normal measurement variance for a body
this size. It would not survive peer review.
It would not survive Maret, who I have not told.
But nineteen hours is nineteen hours and I have
been staring at this number for long enough to
know when it shows up uninvited.

Odelya showed me the thermal graphs without
comment. She had circled the periodicity in red
and written 19.07h next to it with a question
mark. That was the entire presentation.

I said it could be instrument resonance. She said
she'd ruled that out. I said it could be tidal
heating from the gas giant on a harmonic we
haven't modeled. She said maybe. But she'd
checked the obvious harmonics and none of them
land on nineteen. I said it could be coincidence.
She didn't answer that one.

Day six of fourteen. The ship's recycler is
making a sound it didn't make before, a low tick
every few minutes that Maret has traced to a
valve in the water reclamation loop. She could
fix it. She hasn't. I think she likes having
something on the ship that makes a noise on its
own schedule.

Maret's paper crane is still on the navigation
console. She made two more. One is sitting on
Odelya's spectrometer. The other is wedged into
a ventilation grate on deck four, which means
she's been walking the empty corridors again.
She hasn't mentioned this and neither have I.

I keep running the numbers on what 19.07 hours
means. It's not the moon's rotation. Not the
orbital period. Not a division or multiple of
anything in the system's mechanics that I can
find. It doesn't match any known geological
process. It doesn't match crystal oscillation
frequencies for any material in the index.

Odelya asked me tonight what I'd do if the
signal came back. Full strength, absorption
lines, the whole impossible chemistry lighting
up the spectrometer like it did five months ago.
I said I'd document it and transmit to Kovacs.
She said no, what would you do. I didn't have
an answer for that version of the question.

We have eight days left.

- thresh3, Silt Aria