Echoes of the Lattice

Rin Vega woke to the protest of metal. Docking clamps sighed against the hull of the Artemia, and a chorus of coolant pipes pinged in tiny, regular Morse. The soundboard above his sleeping pallet vibrated with the ship’s memory: footsteps of a dozen crews who had slept and left, a whisper of resin glue in the workshops, the hollow, distant groan of a world being stripped for parts. Rin learned to read those noises the way others read letters on a page. He mapped the arc of the ship’s life by sound: the soft stutter that preceded a thruster burn, the nasal whine that meant an air recycler's valve was gummed with dust, the thin, brittle laugh of the salvage cranes when fog crept along the ring.

He dressed in the half-light of the salvage bay and let his hands remember the small rituals: the counterweighted motions that anchored gloves to wrists, the careful angle of a magspanner so it would catch to the right tooth, the way old copper tasted faintly of salt when you worked with connectors for too long. The Artemia smelled like a forgotten tool chest—oil, ozone, the faint iron tang of metal left too long bare to vacuum. Attached to his ear was a thin wire that terminated in an implant—cheap, older tech. He ran a fingertip along it as he moved, feeling the small warmth where his skin kissed polymer. He had patched that port himself after the last run through the Seraphic Wreckfield, after Lia.

Lia’s name always sat like a splinter in Rin’s chest. He had learned phrases to avoid—“missing” sounded like a bureaucrat’s shrug; “deceased” was a word that could not be carried home. He kept a smaller name for it, a private shape that fit into late-night tinkerings and the quiet ritual of mapping echoes. He had measured her laugh once, recorded it in a private slot, looped it until the sound bent the edges of memory. People warned him that listening to the past could become a habit. People who worked salvage were half relics themselves: addicted to the artifacts of what other worlds had left behind. But when you had been the one who saw a sister go into a hull with a gas leak and not come out, every stray signal that resembled a familiar cadence felt like a life preserver.

Rin checked the harvest log on the bulk-head screen. Routine pickups, one derelict out by the Mara Drift, a cache of antenna coils and a small hydrogen recycler. He should have signed for one of those runs and moved on. Instead, a little alert pulsed in the corner of his HUD: an unregistered ping on the scav-scan, a frequency signature from the south quadrant, faint and interrupted, like someone speaking through a broken throat. The pattern folded into the noise and back out again, but underneath—just for an instant—Rin could have sworn he heard a consonant shaped like Lia’s laugh. Fenn, the Artemia’s maintenance drone, hovered at the doorway and whistled. Its tone was designed to be companionable, programmed to lower stress responses. Rin ignored it and tilted his head toward the bay’s worn acoustic receiver. The world outside her hull was an infinite wash of old voice and static. For a single breath, the sound that came wrapped itself in the exact tilt of Lia’s cadence, as if the universe had chosen that broken frequency to test him. He was supposed to leave this to the salvage consortiums. He was supposed to file the ping and move on.

Instead he opened the slot that stored the memory of Lia’s laugh. He let it play once, soft and thin as glass. The ping answered, not with words but with a texture: an echo pattern that matched Lia’s cadence within a hair’s breadth. His teeth went cool. He tasted copper. Around him, the Artemia carried its daily creaks on as though nothing had changed. Outside, the ring of orbital hulks showed their dull teeth in the window: rusted frames and ragged solar sails that once fed colonies now served as substrata for lichen and nesters. For a man who lived inside sound, the world was often a ledger of absences. The ping had opened one of those ledger pages. The page hummed with risk and possibility. Rin slid his hand into the pocket where he kept a worn, illegal transmitter—small, scorched at one edge, it had belonged to no official vendor. He had taken it from a black run last winter, and in it he heard the faint echo of a promise.