But as the final data packets began to unpack themselves on his screen, Silas realized the official story was a lie.
The third segment, 139445 , was an asset manifest number. Silas cross-referenced it with the black-market archives he kept mirrored on physical glass plates. The asset was listed as the Aegis-7 , an automated deep-bore survey ship that had gone missing during the corporate resource wars. Officially, the ship had been vaporized by a stray plasma torpedo. 488122.930_52b5daef_139445_ww
The first part of the string, 488122.930 , was easy enough to translate once he ran it through a basic astro-navigational parser. It was a time-stamped spatial coordinate pointing directly to the edge of the Oort cloud, logged exactly forty-two years ago. But as the final data packets began to
The last file in the directory was an audio log, heavily corrupted but still intelligible. A voice, brittle and terrified, filtered through Silas’s speakers. The asset was listed as the Aegis-7 ,