The silence of the asteroid belt was a physical thing. It was a pressure, a presence. For Kaelen Voss, it was the only thing that felt like home.
Her boots magnetized to the deck plating with a soft clunk as she moved through the cramped cockpit of the Scrap-Jumper. The ship was a patchwork beast of salvaged parts—a habitation module welded awkwardly to a mineral processing rig, all powered by a reactor that hummed a constant, anxious note. To anyone else, it would be a claustrophobic nightmare. To Kaelen, it was a perfect, self-contained universe. Her universe.
A proximity alert chimed, a soft, melodic tone she'd programmed herself. No jarring beeps in her quiet. She slid into the worn pilot's chair, its leather sighing in familiar protest.
"Display," she murmured.
A holographic screen flickered to life, painting the endless star-dusted blackness outside her viewport. A field of tumbling rocks drifted lazily across the display, their trajectories traced in calm, predictable green lines. One of them, designated AS-77, glowed with a soft blue halo. A high-yield platinum-group asteroid. Her target.
"Plot intercept course, minimal thrust," she instructed the ship's AI, a simple program she called 'Chip.'
> Course plotted. ETA 47 minutes. The text scrolled across a secondary screen.
Kaelen leaned back, her eyes scanning the readouts. Everything was nominal. The only sound was the hum of the life support, the faint whisper of the recyclers, and the thrum of her own heart. This was the peace she'd carved out for herself, five years after fleeing the chaos and noise of the Core Systems. Out here, in the bleak beauty of the Ceres Belt, there were no demands, no memories, and certainly no people.
Just rock, vacuum, and silence.
Her hand drifted to the small, metallic locket sealed under the console. She didn't open it. She never did. But its cool, solid presence was a touchstone.
The Scrap-Jumper's thrusters fired in a short, precise burst, nudging her into a gentle drift toward AS-77. This was the easy part. The meditation before the labor. She began her pre-mining checks, her hands moving over the controls with a mechanic's grace. Plasma torch power levels, magnetic grapple integrity, ore containment field stability…
A new alert chimed. Different. Sharper.
Kaelen frowned. It was a broad-spectrum scan alert. Not her scan. Someone else's.
> Unidentified sensor ping detected. Source: Unknown. Chip reported.
Her body went rigid. Company was unheard of this deep in her claimed sector. Her fingers flew across the console, pulling up the passive sensor array. "Analyze. Filter out background radiation and commercial traffic lanes."
The system whirred, sorting through the cosmic noise. For a long moment, there was nothing. Then, a flicker. A signal so faint it was almost a ghost.
> Signal acquired. Non-standard configuration. Low power. Origin appears to be… within the field.
That was impossible. Her field. She knew every rock, every chunk of ice, every piece of debris for a million klicks. There was nothing there that should be broadcasting.
"Magnify sector seven-beta," she ordered, her voice tight.
The main viewer zoomed in, enhancing a seemingly empty patch of space between two large planetesimals. At first, there was nothing. Just more starry black.
Then she saw it.
Not a rock. The silhouette was all wrong—too straight, too angular. It was tumbling slowly, end over end, and it was big. It didn't show up on standard scans because it was cold. Dead.
A ship.
Her first instinct was to turn away. A derelict meant salvage, yes, but it also meant trouble. Trouble meant people would come looking. It meant noise.
But her second instinct, the one bred into every scavenger and miner, overruled the first. A prize that big… it could be worth a decade of platinum mining. It could be her ticket to never needing to speak to another soul again.
"Chip, abort intercept on AS-77. Plot a new course. Approach vector on the unknown contact. Full passive sensors only. No active scans, no signals."
> Confirmed. New course plotted.
The Scrap-Jumper pivoted silently, its nose aiming toward the dark, tumbling shape. The familiar, comforting green trajectories of the asteroids vanished from the screen, replaced by a single, ominous red dot.
The silence in the cockpit felt different now. It was no longer peaceful.
It was waiting.