In the uncharted dark between systems, where comms drift like ghosts and navigation fails, we found her.

The USC Jacaranda wasn’t supposed to be here. Declared lost nearly a decade ago, it vanished during a black-site research mission somewhere past the fringe of explored space. No wreckage. No logs. Just a line item buried in a classified manifest and a few grieving families who were told not to ask questions.

We weren’t looking for her. Just another junk run. The Winterlight isn’t a ship built for heroics-just an aging salvage tug held together with luck, duct tape, and Tass’s twitchy flying. We chase signals, haul scrap, and keep to ourselves.

But this signal was different.

It was weak. Distorted. Looping. A distress call caught in gravity’s teeth, whispering across a dead sector like an echo refusing to die. Protocol said investigate. Salvage law said jackpot. So we docked.

Now I’m not sure we ever left.

The Jacaranda isn’t a tomb-it’s something older. A system. A memory. A recursive loop of lives and voices that don’t belong to us. Its halls shift. Its logs rewrite themselves. And it knows our names.

This wasn’t a mission.

It was an invitation.

And something here remembers why we came.