Location: BZ-442.S / Belt Scatterfield
Date: 8892.201
> The capsule drops out of drift near an asteroid belt thick with carbon fog. Amidst the dense shroud drifts a massive, broken vessel--long, spear-like, and impaled through the midsection by a jagged chunk of asteroid. The wreck lists slowly, its hull split and venting silvery coolant in long arcs. The nameplate is partially legible: DEAD R__KONER.
>
> The capsule's proximity sensors register erratic power flickers deep inside the wreck, as if something is still trying to run. Occasionally, low-frequency signals pulse outward, more like echolocation than a distress beacon. The signals repeat, but they are not identical.
---
I cross the breach in a suit, mag-cable tethered to the capsule's airlock. The wreck is quiet. In the way old, forgotten places are quiet. No systems fire up to greet me. No guidance lights. Just drifting coolant, curling like breath in the low light.
The torn hull lets me into what was once a maintenance corridor, now shredded and exposed to hard vacuum. Past a half-collapsed bulkhead, I find the source of the pulses: a narrow black box, still clinging to a power source. It is ancient. Not built for communication, not really. It's a memory relay. It's playing something back, but the medium is damaged.
The playback skips and stutters, but fragments emerge. Voices warped by time and radiation. A litany of coordinates. Phrases like "not by chart," and "drifted out of knowing."
One word repeats, clearer each time: "witness."
A camera still mounted in the corridor's corner clicks softly. It pivots toward me.
I cut power to the relay. The pulses stop. The silence that returns is somehow louder.
I return to the capsule, the airlock sealing behind me with a hiss like relief.
