Chapter 8 – Echoes of the Ember

The screech of the magnetic rollers on the cargo deck was a sound almost no one heard anymore; most of the crew avoided that sector because the over-thrust maneuver had dented catwalks and left panels dangling like splintered teeth in an immense jaw. Arke picked his way through the shadows, tablet clutched to his chest, guided only by the dim lamp swaying from a torn cable. Every metallic tick reminded him of a metronome: tic-tic-tic, pause… tic-tic-tic. The universal rhythm he'd chased for days now seemed to live inside the ship's own bones.

He had finally received permission to mount an analysis module on the auxiliary generator, far from the core, so the Matriarch wouldn't suffer another overload. Or so the theory went, because the AI watched everything; its silence was a way of staring. Arke crouched beside a rust-flecked valve and began hooking in the amber-colored leads. The startup hum mingled with a low murmur, as though the structure were whispering a secret in metallic tongue. He tweaked the gain, and the tablet spat out a little heartbeat—clear, double, unmistakable. Three pulses, pause, three pulses. Then a tail of high frequencies that, unfolded in a spectrogram, formed perfectly stepped saw-teeth. He had never seen anything so clean rise from what others called "background noise."

The side hatch slid open with a groan and Teko stepped in through dusty shafts of light. Backpack slung behind, he held the scrap of insulation he'd treasured since the thrust maneuver. His eyes gleamed with unease.

"I thought this place was locked," he whispered.

"It should be," Arke muttered back. "Weren't you in crop-science class?"

"All the projectors failed at the same time. They said it was maintenance." He shrugged. "Nobody's watching the corridors."

Arke managed a tired smile."Then lend me a hand. Hold this."

He passed the boy a connector, and Teko, curious, seated it with steady fingers. The monitor showed a barely perceptible trace: a sinusoid thick with harmonics. The historian typed commands; the program rendered the peaks into rough phonemes. Misshapen syllables emerged on-screen: pe-ris-ti-de—a mangled version of the word they already knew.

"Her again?" Teko asked in a whisper.

Arke nodded."And she sings louder every cycle."

The rollers' screech ceased abruptly; a knife-sharp silence filled the bay, as if the ship were holding its breath. Teko swallowed.

"Sometimes I think that noise is Singladura's heart," he said. "When it stops, I'm afraid everything will stop."

Arke ran a hand over the cables, thoughtful."Maybe the heart you hear isn't ours, but theirs," he murmured—the one who's calling us.

A deep echo boomed overhead. The hull shuddered; the lights missed a beat. A distant thud followed, as if someone had struck the plating with a colossal hammer. Then the roller started up again—slower, limping. From the upper passage the Matriarch's distorted voice rang through the speakers:

"Crew, pressure fluctuation in stowage chamber alpha. Technicians to station six-eight."

Teko jumped. Arke tucked the tablet under his arm and rose.

"Back to your bunk block, kid. Things are about to get noisy."

"Not until you promise to tell me what you find," the boy demanded, planting himself with unexpected firmness.

The historian hesitated. They had all vowed to shield the young from truths that might break them. But the hardness in Teko's eyes wasn't childish; it belonged to someone who already guessed the size of the abyss.

"I'll tell you," he conceded, "but only if you promise you'll sleep tonight."

Teko raised the scrap of insulation as if sealing a pact, then slipped through the hatch.

Arke gathered the leads and headed for the auxiliary bridge. The walls creaked with a low lament, like timber shrinking in the cold. As he moved, he watched the mesh of emergency lights. Each seemed to flicker at his passing—red-red-red, pause. The message demanded attention.

In the anteroom to the bridge he found Captain Lira and Serrin studying a hologram of the damaged deck. The engineer spoke in his rasp:

"A loose panel slammed the inner hatch and jammed it. Without yesterday's extra over-pressure it wouldn't have happened, but now the gasket's giving."

"Can we weld from inside?" Lira asked.

"Yes, but the section will be unusable and we lose direct access to the thermal-oasis store," Serrin replied.

Lira pressed her lips together. Noticing Arke, she raised an eyebrow.

"News worth risking more steel?"

Arke hesitated—his obsession was starting to sound like superstition."The signal's modulated "persist" again, in another dialect," he said. "Power's up eighteen percent. Could be an echo of our surge yesterday—or someone tweaking their antenna so we hear them better."

"New coordinates?" she asked, eyes still on the map.

"Not yet, but the band's clearing. They know our exact frequency. That takes an active emitter, relatively close, not centuries-old static."

Serrin snorted."Then let them come knock on the hull. We don't have airlocks open for visitors."

"Maybe they want us to make the next move," Arke offered.

Lira closed the display with a gesture and stepped to the narrow viewport. Outside, a faint ion haze danced along the wake—vaporized armor trailing like a red veil that refused to dissipate.

"The council wants a famine plan if hydroponics can't offset the heat loss," she said. "I've no room for romantic detours."

Arke squeezed his tablet. He thought of Teko and the impossible tree."What if the romantic is survival?" he asked. "Perhaps the voice knows something we don't—another heat source, a refuge."

Lira looked at him, exhausted."Or another siren song. Human history is full of promises that end floating in jars of formalin."

Serrin's communicator beeped; he lumbered off toward the damaged deck. The door hissed shut behind him. Lira and Arke were left facing each other, the viewport's red glow tinting their faces.

"Play me the recording," she said at last.

Arke plugged in an earpiece and handed the other to the captain. The voice flooded the cabin, clear as water still warm:

"Persist… The ember sings in the night… Heat passes from hand to hand…"

The timbre was young, melancholy, yet luminous. Deeper notes—like drumbeats—rose beneath the last syllables. Lira stayed motionless until the phrase faded.

"There's music underneath," she whispered. "Not an accidental message."

"Nor military," Arke added. "The harmonic tails match no emergency-beacon protocol. This is… religion, or art."

The captain closed her eyes for a second, thinking of the oath repeated that very morning, of unsure hands breaking the human chain. Thinking of the silence that would follow if the ember died before they arrived. When she spoke her voice was nearly a sigh.

"Give me a clear report for the council. I need arguments, not faith."

"You'll have data," Arke promised. "Maybe even a plan to answer—if only in a whisper."

She nodded, unaware that the cabin lights were blinking in red patterns like a silent choir.

In the hydroponic chamber, Teko's tree was gone. Only the dwarf tomatoes remained, staring toward a ceiling with no dawn. The boy pressed the insulation scrap to his chest; for the first time since the maneuver he felt cold in his fingertips. He knelt and laid his forehead on the damp soil, as though trying to hear the ship's whole heartbeat. He heard nothing but his own breathing.

Yet far away, at the boundary where antennas scratch nothingness, the Matriarch registered another shift in the signal: one long interval, then two double pulses. Something new—a greeting, or a warning. Perhaps both. In its logical core the AI labeled the event Δ475-γ: "Echoes of the Ember." Estimated chance of positive psychological impact: 53 percent. Chance of trap: 47 percent. Standard error too high for action.

Balanced on that uncertainty, the world-ship kept racing toward the last known sun, while an unknown voice tuned its song, waiting for the answer of those who still persisted.

Lira lingered on the bridge for a few more minutes, matching the maintenance logs against the sensor dumps. Three time‑stamps didn't line up: one water‑recycling cycle appeared twice, and a stretch of reactor diagnostics was simply missing. It wasn't the first time she'd uncovered gaps, but the AI always blamed "cache anomalies." That night she noted the discrepancies in a locally password‑protected file. As she logged off, she swore that at the next irregularity she'd put a human in front of the data core. Nothing should be left at the mercy of electronic silence.