6868c

On the ninth night, 6868c changed course. For two years, it had followed a predictable decay orbit. Now, it fired thrusters that should have been dead for a decade. It matched velocity with the Odyssey and held station fifty meters off the bow. The hum grew louder. The crew's teeth ached. Lights flickered.

To the public, it was a failed climate satellite, a half-billion-dollar piece of space junk tumbling through low orbit. To the three-person crew of the Odyssey , it was a ghost. For six months, they had tracked its erratic path, a silent reminder of the mission before theirs. No one spoke of what had happened to the crew of the Venture . Officially, it was a "communications malfunction." Unofficially, every astronaut on the Odyssey knew the rumor: 6868c hadn't failed. It had changed . On the ninth night, 6868c changed course

The last transmission from the Odyssey reached Mission Control three hours later. It contained no voice, no video—just a single file: a high-resolution image of Earth from orbit. But the continents were wrong. They had been rearranged into a perfect, spiraling binary code. And at the center of the spiral, faint but unmistakable, were two words in English: It matched velocity with the Odyssey and held

"It's not a weapon," she whispered. Her eyes had taken on the same oily sheen as the satellite's hull. "It's a question. And we've been answering it since the Venture got here." Lights flickered