Rising To The Challenge

The distress call arrived between two heartbeats of static.

Mara Voss looked up from the navigation console as the Caldera Nine shuddered through deep orbit, her boots lifting a finger’s width from the deck before the inertial dampers caught them. Outside the forward glass, the stars smeared into pale needles. A dead relay station rotated across the darkness, its antenna ring broken into a crooked halo.

“Repeat that,” Captain Ilyan said.

The speaker answered in a woman’s voice.

“ - Caldera Nine, do not - ”

The transmission snapped into a burst of numbers, then returned in a man’s voice.

“ - approach the relay. Your crew has already - ”

Static swallowed the rest.

Mara’s hand hovered over the receiver. The signal had no right to be there. The relay station had been abandoned for nineteen years, its reactor cold, its orbit decaying beyond the mapped traffic lanes. Nothing living should have been transmitting from it. Nothing powered should have been able to reach them through the interference belt.

She pulled the audio buffer onto her screen. “It’s repeating.”

“Then let it repeat,” Captain Ilyan said. He stood behind her, one hand braced against the console as the freighter rolled. “We’re three hours from the burn window. We don’t have fuel to chase every dead machine that calls our name.”

“It called the ship.”

“It called something.”

Mara isolated the waveform. Beneath the words ran a thin metallic pulse, steady as a tapping finger. The frequency shifted while she watched, climbing beyond the relay’s registered band, then dropping into a channel reserved for emergency beacons.

Her pulse tightened.

“Captain, the relay’s transmitting on our private maintenance band.”

Ilyan’s expression hardened. “That band isn’t public.”

“I know.”

“Could be a spoof.”

“Then I want proof before we leave.” Mara pushed back from the console. “A source trace, station logs, anything we can bring aboard. If someone is using that relay to reach us, we need to know who.”

The captain stared through the glass at the broken station. Its central spindle turned slowly, shedding glittering flakes of insulation. One of its solar wings had folded around the hull like a snapped arm.

“You want to board it.”

“I want to locate the source.”

“That is not what you said.”

“It’s what I mean.”

Behind them, the hatch to engineering clanged open. Joren Vale emerged with a coil of cable over one shoulder, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with coolant sweat. “If this is about the haunted station,” he said, “I vote we keep haunting it from here.”

Mara turned. “How long to rig a tether skiff?”

Joren looked at the captain. “You’re not actually considering this.”

“We need a source trace,” Mara said.

“We need a ship.” He dropped the cable beside the auxiliary console. “The relay’s navigation core is failing. You can see the orbit wobble from here. It could tumble into our hull before we finish saying goodbye.”

The station lurched across the forward display. Its rotation stuttered, stopped, then reversed by a fraction before resuming. A cloud of panels and antenna fragments drifted from its underside.

Mara magnified the relay’s docking collar. “There’s a service lock still intact.”

“There’s a service lock still attached,” Joren said. “Different thing.”

The speaker crackled.

“Caldera Nine,” the woman’s voice whispered. “Mara Voss - ”

Every sound in the cockpit seemed to contract around her name.

Joren went still.

Captain Ilyan’s eyes shifted to Mara. “Did you transmit your identity?”

“No.”

The signal broke apart, then reassembled in a voice that was neither male nor female.

“ - Mara Voss, crew manifest confirmed. Do not enter.”

The cockpit lights flickered.

Mara felt the old instinct rise - the urge to step back from anything that knew too much. She pressed it down. Fear was information, not instruction.

“Now we have proof,” she said.

Ilyan caught her wrist before she could reach the suit locker. “We have bait.”

“Then we find out what’s on the hook.”

“That is not a plan.”

“It’s the only one that gets us answers before the beacon changes again.”

As if summoned by the words, the transmission shifted. The tapping pulse accelerated. On Mara’s screen, the source trace jumped from the relay’s central spindle to the outer antenna ring, then to a point beyond the station entirely.

The coordinates flashed for less than a second.

Mara captured them.

The location lay inside the relay’s own orbit, but no object appeared there on the ship’s sensors.

“See?” she said. “It’s moving.”

Joren swore softly. “That station’s blind.”

“So are we,” Ilyan said. “Mara, you have twelve minutes. Get the source trace, retrieve a physical record, and return. No heroics.”

“I wasn’t planning any.”

“That’s when you’re most dangerous.”

The captain released her wrist. Mara crossed to the locker as the Caldera Nine groaned around them. The hull vibration traveled through her gloves when she sealed the suit collar....