Sera Valen watched the Ananke like a patient reading a wound. From the bridge of the Morrigan the derelict looked almost intentional: a research platform suspended in a scatter of shattered mirrors and frozen fuel. Its nameplate, once polished and bureaucratic, flaked beneath a skin of cosmic dust. Out here, names meant little against radiation and old grief; Sera kept hers like a coin at the back of her mouth, something to check the weight of. The Morrigan drifted on station-keeping thrusters, three small burns at her stern whispering against the void. Behind the glass the salvage crew moved in slow, efficient arcs—an old routine: scan, lock, cut, pry, get to the prize before the law or worse could arrive.
She had taken too many salvage contracts for the wrong reasons. Sometimes it was the money, sometimes the reputation. Tonight it was for a name she hadn’t spoken in seven years. Jonas. There had been no funeral, only a silence that had become a map. Most days Sera navigated that silence by measuring distance—how far she could keep herself from the point where guilt and hope overlapped. The Ananke promised something precise, some artifact that carried with it the kind of detail that could pierce silence. She told herself she would not confuse the instrument with the person.
“Tess,” she said, and her deck officer, lithe and opinionated, turned from the holomap. Tess’s face was lit by blue toner and the slow blink of an external relay. “We stick to the plan. Hard cuts on node five, zero overpressure. Watch for field anomalies. If anything smells like a weapon cache, we ghost.”
Tess inclined her head. No one spoke of how Sera folded space with her memory of Jonas. Practical orders would do. The boarding skiff peeled away from the Morrigan like a knife, its tether coiling, then locking. The platform loomed closer: windows like missing teeth, corridors collapsed into darkness. The Ananke had been a research outpost that had survived the first fracture of the old Nodal experiments. Scientists had left logs and unfinished formulas; somebody in the corporate registry had called it obsolete. Salvagers called it opportunity.
A shimmer of white dust shifted over a corroded airlock when their mag clamps kissed the hull. Sera felt the subtle vibration of metal surrendering to intent—metalalingua, she joked once; now it read like a pulse. When the lock cycled open the interior exhaled a frozen breath of old sterilant and a pressurized archive of absence. The board lights painted the corridor with the practical yellow of maintenance. Every step inside the Ananke felt like walking into a ledger with half the pages torn away. Her glove scraped against a handrail polished by shoes that would never return.