Asterion Resonance

The salvage field lay like a broken constellation. Wreckage drifted in ragged orbits around a dead star whose surface had long since cooled to a bruised, rotting black. Heat signatures were ghosts; metal sang only when the hull of something ancient twinged in tidal stress. Mara Venn maneuvered the cutter with the small, disciplined violence of someone who knew how to coax usefulness out of ruin. Her hands were mechanics’ hands, scarred and precise. Her jaw held the thin line of someone who had learned to keep private weather inside.

R6N-3 called itself Renn, and Renn's voice was the only companion that pretended not to be lonely. It threaded ambient telemetry through Mara's visor in a dry, amused register. "Relative velocity ten-seven. Debris cluster nine o'clock. Salvage yield probability forty-one percent and rising." Renn never used the word hope; it preferred instruments and likelihoods. Still, when Mara brought the cutter in closer she felt an ache that wasn't statistical.

They were hunting a freighter that had gone dark a lifetime ago. The manifest had been illegible in the market postings—an old research ship, some forgotten lab—and the job paid enough to let Mara keep the Pelican's hull patched for another year. Eno Kale leaned back in the co‑pilot seat with his arms folded, the slouched posture of someone who had learned to sleep with his eyes half open. He watched Mara's hands with a loyalty that did not ask questions.

A shard caught the cutter's scanner like a thin, cold heartbeat. It wasn't much to look at: a polished fragment no bigger than a child's drum, coaxed from a plated lattice that had once been part of something vast. Yet the shard held a peculiar geometry of grooves that shimmered when struck by the cutter's floodlight. Renn fed the pattern into its repository and hummed under its breath—a private approximation of tonal sequences.

Mara felt the hairs along her forearm rise. The vibration wasn't a siren or an alarm; it was a phrase. She remembered a lullaby, not sung but shaped: three notes folded into each other, a breathing rhythm that once pulled a small body into rest. Her chest tightened. Ari had hummed it when the ship had been quiet between jobs, when Mara's hands had been full of spanners and her mind full of routes. For years she'd dismissed the memory as dreamwork; now the groove in the shard matched the contour of that phrase with a precision that made her stomach fall away.

"Run a deep pattern overlay," Mara ordered. The cutter's bay sealed around the little polished fragment as if the ship itself wanted to cradle it. Renn obliged, projecting a spectral lattice of the tone across Mara's visor. The sound filled the cockpit even though no one played it aloud; it existed in the carved metal and in Renn's algorithms. The melody shifted through harmonics so clean and private that Mara felt, again, as if Ari were near.

Eno's face had gone blank in that glassy way of people who were trying to be brave. Crew were not family in the way she had once imagined family to be, but they were the only ones with her when the brush of grief threatened to become a hand. Mara closed her eyes, clamping the memory down, because memory wanted to feed itself on recognition and turn it into obsession. She counted breaths and told herself what she had always told the crew: we find the value, we sell the value, we leave the ghosts alone. That was practical truth. But she kept looking at the shard.

Outside, the dead star glowered. Inside, the fragment hummed the same lullaby that had been a map through Mara's nights for a dozen years. Theft had a circumference; sometimes it wound all the way back to the places you had vowed to forget.