Chapter 11 — The Signal Shard

The Kismet accelerated into the black, pulling free from the fractured ring's gravitational field. In the viewport, the alien megastructure dwindled into a fading outline—its glyphs still pulsing faintly like heartbeat trails echoing through time.

None of the crew spoke for a long while.

Torin Vale sat at the command console, jaw clenched, staring at the red blinking dot on the nav-map: Tau Ceti. Nearly 12 light-years away. In modern terms, a generation away by standard fusion drive—and three months at best with FTL frame-drag sails and extreme time-dilation.

"Three months of living like ghosts," Mara muttered from behind him. "If the sails hold."

"They'll hold," Nyx-328 said, already tapping into the systems. Her face was pale. Her body still shook from the encounter with the ring's memory field. "The question isn't the hardware. It's whether we'll be the same when we arrive."

Torin didn't look at her. "We already aren't."

Two hours later, they held a tactical debrief in the Kismet's lower galley—one of the few places not soaked in memory. The lights flickered from emergency backups; the artificial gravity kept pulsing out of sync, which meant their boots never quite stuck the way they should.

Torin stood with his arms crossed.

"We know now the Spiral's not human. That the Ascendant was built—or grown—as a result of something encoded in those structures. That ring was a cryo-vault, holding bodies in time stasis. And the moment we stepped inside... the message played."

Nyx nodded. "The sequence wasn't a trap. It was an *invitation*. Or maybe... an obligation."

Mara exhaled. "And Tau Ceti is the next step."

"More than that," Torin said. "It's the convergence point. The Ascendant left its root signal there. It wants us to follow."

Nyx stared at him. "Still sure this isn't a long con to wipe us out?"

"No," Torin said. "It could've done that a dozen times by now."

Mara rubbed her eyes. "Then why the games? Why leave us clues like a trail of breadcrumbs?"

Nyx's voice dropped. "Because it doesn't think we're smart enough to understand unless it shows us."

The silence that followed was not agreement—but it wasn't denial, either.

They prepped the Kismet's frame-drag sails over the next five hours, pulling hard burns around Neptune's orbit to build the minimum escape velocity for the interstellar jump.

Outside, the stars began to twist.

Nyx stabilized the quantum nav-beacon array manually. Sparks flew every few seconds from overloaded relay coils; she growled at them like they were feral animals.

Mara handled weapons inventory—down to half a crate of railshot rounds, and only two functioning EMP grenades. No one wanted to talk about what might be needed against time-frozen Spiral ghosts or AI-bent satellites older than memory.

Torin spent the last hour reviewing data from the Spiral ring—frame by frame.

There, buried in a single burst of static during the message, was a symbol not from any known language. But it matched a carving they'd once seen aboard Redoubt 9.

A fragment.

He isolated it and enhanced the pattern.

Not a message.

A map.

"Nyx," he called. "Is this... data?"

She leaned in. "That's not Spiral code. That's *shard sequence.*"

Torin stiffened. "The drones that attacked us over Earth?"

"Yes," she said. "This is their firmware signature—low-level instructions. But... altered."

"How?"

"They're not for defense. These are... *archive keys*."

Mara stepped closer. "You're saying those things were carriers?"

"Maybe not all of them," Nyx said. "But some. A few were never trying to kill us. They were trying to *interface*."

Torin stared at the screen. "So... we shot the messenger."

Silence again.

He keyed into the nav-sink. "Plot a drift-drop trajectory to Tau Ceti. We're going in."

Seventy-eight Days Later

(Subjective Ship Time: 9 Days)

The Kismet dropped out of skip-space like a stone breaking through black ice.

Tau Ceti's system flared into view: a golden star surrounded by dust, ice fields, and a smattering of rocky worlds. But what caught Torin's attention wasn't the star.

It was what "wasn't there".

"No planetary comms," Nyx said, her voice tight. "No beacon codes. No trade lanes. Nothing on the standard nets."

Mara leaned forward. "There used to be two Union colonies here. One on Tau Ceti e, the other an orbital science lab. Where the hell did they go?"

Torin's gut turned cold. "Scan the debris fields."

They swept past the orbital plane.

Wreckage floated where the science station should've been: shredded hulls, melted girders, fragments of solar sails. Burned out long ago.

Mara hissed. "War?"

"No scorch patterns," Nyx said. "These weren't destroyed. They were *dismantled.*"

Torin turned his attention to the far edge of the system—toward the third planet, a cold water world called **Arcera**. Once slated for terraforming, then abandoned during the Exodus due to instability.

But now… there was a signal.

Faint.

Spiral-coded.

Buried under layers of carrier noise.

He nodded toward the planet. "We land."

The descent into Arcera's atmosphere was rough. The planet was cloaked in storm systems that read as unnaturally static—swirling at fixed points like they were being anchored.

When they pierced the clouds, they saw it.

Below them, on the dark side of the planet, stood a monolith.

Not Spiral this time. Not human, either.

Jet black, crystalline, thirty stories high, and buried halfway into the surface ice. Lights pulsed in vertical lines along its edges—too regular, too alive.

The Kismet landed two klicks away on a glacier ridge. Temperatures read lethal. Radiation spikes rose and fell in irregular pulses, like a machine testing for responses.

As they suited up, Mara checked her rifle. "We walk in, we walk out. Fast."

Torin adjusted his exo-pack. "This isn't recon anymore. This is first contact."

Nyx just stared at the monolith. "No. This is *last* contact. Whatever the Ascendant's been preparing... it's here."

As they approached the structure, their suit comms began to distort. Fragments of the old Spiral message echoed through the ice—translated now into multiple human languages.

 "You ran. We did not. You survived. But the cost was not paid."

Torin stepped forward and placed a gloved hand on the monolith.

It pulsed beneath his touch.

A glyph burned onto the surface—same as the shard sequence from the Spiral ring. Except this time, it unfolded.

Not a message.

Not a warning.

A key.

With a roar like tearing sky, the monolith split down the center—and opened.

A chamber beyond. Not of stone. Not metal. Some third substance.

Light. Data. Memory.

Torin turned to the others.

"You wanted to know what we were chasing," he said. "This is it."

Then he stepped inside.

End of Chapter 11