Tuning the Void

Talia Voss liked the hissing of the Aster Reach's maintenance bay the way other people liked rain on a roof. The sound was a language in which valves sighed their complaints, thermal conduits whispered about yesterday's stress, and the slip-core itself—an obdurate, heat-blued cylinder perched like a sleeping animal—exhaled in low, patient pulses. She crouched with grease darkening the knuckles of her glove and listened until the microtones sorted themselves into a pattern she could read with her hands. There was a rhythm to coax out: three soft wind-ups in the outer coils, a flat pressure across the braid, then a minute correction through the tertiary phasing taps. She moved her fingers the way a musician would touch keys, and the machine answered.

She talked to machines because they admitted no surprise. People surprised you. She loosened a clamp and the cotter pin chimed, a bright metallic laugh in the cavern of the bay. “Behave,” she told the core. The coil didn't behave, not really—coils had mood swings—but they were honest about it. She fed a tiny compensatory bias through the stabilizer and felt the hull let out a taut breath. Talia favored hands-on fixes. Digital correction had its elegance, but it was a brittle kind of prettiness: neat graphs, tidy reports, and protocols that assumed the universe read their charts. Real life made jagged noises and required pressure on the right gear at the right second; it preferred stubborn hands.

The bay smelled faintly of burnt citrus and oil—an odor that, to Talia, meant a job worth doing. From the mess deck three decks up drifted the smoky sweetness of cardamom algae cakes, the galley's specialty on long hauls. The Aster Reach's cook insisted that the ship's morale improved three percent for every batch he burned, a claim Talia neither confirmed nor denied, though she did take a slice with her tea when the work paused. Across the hangar, Lian Pekk was performing his morning rounds with the nervous energy of someone who believed schedules were moral law. He waved a datapad like a talisman and called, “Talia—if the core's planning a tantrum, tell it to behave. We can't have it sulking during warp.”

She didn't look up immediately; it was a habit, the way a surgeon didn't look at a clock while suturing. “It sulks in E minor,” she said, finally, and that was enough to make Lian snort. The banter was a buoy: small, bright, and almost embarrassingly human. She gave the tertiary coils a minute more patience, then hooked a diagnostic lead and listened to the telemetry. Numbers scrolled in delicate cascades on her wrist-brace like rain on a window. Everything on the Aster Reach read as ready, but something prickled at the edge of her sensors—an interference pattern in the lower sideband that didn't belong to any of their scheduled pulse trains. She frowned and pushed a manual filter in, fingers precise and steady, adjusting for harmonics with the kind of motion that had once been practiced into ritual.

At the far end of the screen a small dot bloomed—a scatter of telemetry that didn't match any registered friend or traffic. It had the jagged chorus of an object caught in frame drift: multiple brief transmissions overlaid with phase noise. Not a sharp distress signature, not yet, but enough to make the crew move from comfortable routines into attentive concern. Talia breathed in and felt, against the practiced apathy of an engineer who trusted calculations, a prickle of something else. It was curiosity at first, then that old, private habit of hers—sorting other people's chaos into questions she might answer. It was safer than hope, she told herself, and far more useful.