The dark had a sound to it, a truth Nikki learned at six when the power cut out in Olympia Undae, leaving her bunk silent without the recycler's hum or the atmospheric processors grinding at the colony's edges, just her heartbeat thumping against the Martian night leaning patient and huge into the dome.
That same quiet wrapped around her now.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, knowing that opening them would force her to face the corridor's dim amber emergency strips thickening the shadows, and outside the hull nothing at all except what the Odysseus cradled inside like a single match flickering deep in a cave.
Come on, Nik. You're twenty, four papers under your belt, Class-2 clearance longer than half these folks have even learned your name.
Still she lay flat on her back in the dark, palms pressed to the mattress for a solid forty minutes.
Her wrist-comm chimed soft and almost apologetic, blue glow pulling her eye open.
Dr. Cass – Briefing in ten. Main Lab.
She sat up.
The morning ritual flew by quick with no skipping steps: ambient panels all green first, then corridor lights steady through the cabin porthole, external feed loading on her tablet where she caught her reflection in the dark screen before it brightened—black hair never quite deciding what it was doing, loose tail at her nape already half-unraveled from sleep, grey eyes looking like they hadn't rested.
The feed came up showing the Odysseus's forward array sweeping the Kuiper Belt's lazy debris field, bits of ice tumbling past like they had places to be but no rush, and she lingered on that frozen black scattered with distant pinpricks of light before shutting it down and pulling on her clothes.
She left the portable lamp burning on her nightstand.
Dr. Emory Cass filled a room just by standing in it, Forty-seven standard years old with all angles and porcelain skin carrying low-gravity looseness around the jaw, eyes sunk deep like he'd seen too much, staring at the holographic projection the way a surgeon eyes an open chest—not awed but methodically noting what needed fixing.
The object spun lazily at the lab's center, asteroid-sized and rough with its surface a jumble of ancient regolith and ice blended into the Kuiper Belt's clutter over eons, though the mass scans whispered the real story hidden under that crust.
Nikki slipped in with the junior staff—two geologists, Halsey the spectroscopist, Pohl the engineer, and that systems specialist whose name kept slipping her mind—watching Cass's senior aide Darrows nudge the display forward without a word.
"Check the density profile," Darrows said, letting the annotated cross-section hang for a beat, "symmetrical voids that look deliberate, like someone planned it that way."
Someone let out a sharp breath and then silence crashed back in.
Intentional meant built, and built meant someone built it.
"We've ruled out natural formation," Cass said, "too regular inside with material comp anomalous—no geological match—and those isotope ratios from the surface samples putting a preliminary age estimate at fourteen billion years."
Nikki's hands went ice-cold.
Fourteen. Billion.
The universe clocked in at thirteen-point-eight, a brick wall at the end of everything she'd known forever like her own birthday, and here this thing drifted ten klicks off the bow as if time meant nothing.
"That's not possible," Halsey's voice came out thin and careful like she wished she could reel it back, her long pale blonde hair framing golden-brown eyes doing the math the same impossible way everyone else was. "Nothing survives a quantum evaporation horizon, nothing exists before the Big Bang."
"Then the data's wrong or our models are," Cass replied, "we can see the damn thing right there and the data checks out clean."
He turned to Nikki, who'd been half-praying he'd skip her.
"Vey, internal resonance frequencies—what've you got?"
She hadn't slept, wrestling that pattern through deconvolution runs all night as the signal bubbled up and vanished like something alive testing the water, her mouth cotton-dry now.
Just say it. Don't sound nuts.
"The voids aren't empty," she said, pulling her notes onto the secondary display where blue and green waveforms twisted and repeated, "they're putting out a low-frequency oscillation, structured like a carrier wave with something buried in the noise."
"Carrying what?" Pohl leaned in, stim-patch glowing on his neck.
"I don't know yet," her words came quieter than she meant, "but it's not noise, doesn't shift, every deconvolution spits out the same baseline, periodic and regular like a heartbeat."
Nobody laughed, and somehow that landed worse.
"Like a heartbeat," Cass echoed flat as ever.
"It's just an analogy," she rushed in, "could be structural resonance from the geometry inside—"
"Or it could be a transmission."
He dropped it plain with no fanfare and the room just ate it up.
"We're going in, EVA team launches in six hours." His eyes stayed on her. "Vey, you're with me—need your pattern analysis live when we breach the outer layer."
She blurted it before thinking: "Sir, I'm not EVA-qualified for—"
"You are now." Not harsh, not soft, just true. "Your work's our only lead, I need your eyes out there."
Darrows jumped in smooth: "Full escort, three security—you won't be alone."
Nikki nodded, her voice gone.
Cass rolled on with assignments, logistics, timelines, and the room buzzed back to life around him while she stood there pinned by the sharp divide between knowing what she had to do and wanting any part of it.
Pohl paused by her on his way out, stocky with ivory skin and black hair lying flat like it had never done anything else, brown eyes that had probably seen three ships before this one giving her that quiet look from sharing too many enclosed spaces.
"You'll get used to the suit," he said finally, "first time's brutal then it's just cold and weird and okay."
"I know," she said too quick, too brittle.
He nodded not buying it and kept walking.
Lab empty now, she drifted to the viewport where the Odysseus hung in its lazy orbit, the object just a shadow against the Belt's faint glow—another chunk of frozen junk easy to miss.
Except for what lurked inside.
She pressed her palm to the glass, cold biting in sharp and clean to anchor her from skin to ship to the void beyond.
Six hours.
She stayed until her hand went numb, then headed off to dig up her EVA cert files.