The Ring That Sings

Lina Kovács pressed her gloved palm to the outer skin of the research ship Auriga and felt the hull’s quiet trembling. The suit’s haptics translated microvibrations into a soft pressure across her fingers, like the breath of a sleeping animal. Beyond her visor, the gas giant Gyre filled half the universe, banded in cobalt and milk, tusks of lightning dragging pale tatters through the upper storms. Between Auriga and the planet hung a thin ring of wreckage and intent: a derelict station called Vigil Arc, its broken struts shining with hoarfrost.

“Hold still,” Lina murmured, and her moth-shaped microdrone obliged, pinning itself with magnetic paws to the hull beside her. Moth’s wings flashed with quiet data glyphs, a private constellation just for her. Each pulse mapped sound into color. Copper for steady O₂ circulation. Green for coolant. Blue for the long purr of the ion thrusters. And beneath it, a thread of violet that shouldn’t be there.

“You hear that too?” Kade’s voice filled her helmet, full of grin despite the cold. “I’m reading a smear on the aft panel, but it’s not mechanical.” He was ten meters away, tethered to a handhold, boots digging into the hull plating like a climber testing ice.

“It’s not us,” Lina said. She leaned closer to Moth. Violet flickered. Three beats, a breath, three beats again. “It’s coming through the hull from outside. From long range.”

“Could be the ring shedding debris,” Kade offered. “Gyre flexes the metal, the metal sings. The usual romance.”

She shook her head, and stars jittered. “The pattern repeats.” She tapped a command on her forearm, and Moth’s wings hummed. The drone sent a narrow ping toward Vigil Arc, a careful fingertip on a sleeping shoulder. The return came with a faint whine that set Lina’s teeth on edge. Three beats, always.

Captain Rhee’s voice entered, crisp as a snapped thread. “Lina, Kade, wrap it up. We’re crossing the auroral shelf in two minutes, and I want you tethered to airlock A.”

“Copy,” Kade said, but Lina lingered half a heartbeat longer, hand splayed to feel the ship’s answering hum. Gyre rolled, and the light on Vigil Arc’s ruined rim flared and died, as if the station had blinked. The violet line on her display bent toward a whisper of life.

She reeled herself back to the lock, Moth skittering after. Air re-entered her ears as the outer door slid shut with a satisfied sigh. Frost melted from her joints. The scent of ship air—metal, citrus from the scrubber gel, a memory of coffee—seemed impossibly lush.

Kade popped his helmet and shook out flattened hair. “You look like you’ve heard a ghost.”

“I heard a heartbeat,” she said without thinking.

He sobered. “From Vigil Arc?”

Lina cradled Moth in her palms. The little drone warmed her fingers. “Something’s alive over there. Or something wants us to think it is.”