Eaglecraft 12110 Upd Better

Ibarra’s eyes drifted to the lab’s central lattice: an array of crystalline filaments that shimmered faintly. “We traced a harmonic anomaly—something resonant in the planet’s crust. We thought we could harvest it. It… answered. Not in words, not in noise we could measure, but in structure. It shook the lattice in a pattern. We adapted. It adapted back. Then it tasted our machinery. The lattice began to sing on its own.”

“If,” Jalen finished. He filtered the encryption. “It’s a distress loop. Not from the outpost; from an object three light-hours off the new gravity well.” eaglecraft 12110 upd

The last recorded file was a solid minute of overlapping data: harmonic spikes that no instrument in Mira’s registry could classify. Then, silence. Ibarra’s eyes drifted to the lab’s central lattice:

Eaglecraft 12110 had a reputation that outlived its registration number. It was one of the few medium freighters that could make the jump without an escort, and it wore its history in scrapes along the cargo hold and the faint, polished dent near the stern that looked like a smile. The ship’s name—only ever spoken in half-joking reverence—made Mira imagine a bird at the prow, wings spread to catch the current of the vacuum. It… answered