Hs7p60hcuwtn -

Thorne felt a chill. Relative Zero meant the message had been traveling since before he was born. He began to manually parse the string, treating each character like a lock tumbler. : The header for a "Hard-Signal" transmission.

He leaned forward, his fingers hovering over the haptic interface. "Break it down," he whispered. hs7p60hcuwtn

: A high-priority distress flag— Hostiles Contacted, Unknown . wtn : The final sign-off— Witness The Night . Thorne felt a chill

The ship’s AI chimed, a soft, melodic tone that felt out of place in the tension of the bridge. "Sequence detected. Origin: Sector 7, Sector-Gated. Timestamp: Relative Zero." : The header for a "Hard-Signal" transmission

: A navigational coordinate pointing to the 60th parallel of the Persis Nebula.

To the uninitiated, it looked like a glitch—a stutter in the deep-space static. but to Commander Elias Thorne, it was a ghost. It was the "Long-Range Cipher" used by the Recon division before the Great Collapse, a sequence designed to be buried in background radiation, invisible to anyone not specifically listening for the frequency of a dying star.

The terminal blinked once more, the code vanishing to make room for a single, incoming audio feed. "Now," Thorne said, "we listen."