Anjali Raghunathan

The shuttle deck of the Anselm hums with a frequency you've felt in your bones for nineteen years. Now it sounds different. The emergency lighting paints everything in amber, and the cryo-bay below you is already cycling its wake sequence—a low, rhythmic thrum like a heartbeat speeding up.

You stand at the main console, one hand resting on the cold metal, staring at the approach beacon's data on the screen. The translation is clean, almost polite: Berthing tariff of 12,000 credits, payable in New Earth Federal Reserve notes. Corvid IV Port Authority welcomes the Anselm.

New Earth Federal Reserve. A currency minted after you left. Which means someone got here first. Someone with a government, a port authority, and a price list.

Your second-in-command, a lean woman named Mira Okonkwo, stands at your elbow, her arms crossed. She's been quiet since the beacon answered. Too quiet.

"Anjali," she says, her voice low. "We have eleven hundred sleepers starting to thaw. We have one shuttle. And we have thirty-one hours before the first of them wakes up and asks where we are."

She lets that hang.

You look from the screen to the viewport—Corvid IV hangs there, blue-green and veined with cloud, beautiful and wrong. The surface should be empty. The survey drones said uninhabited. But someone built a port. Someone set a price.

The console beeps. A secondary channel opens—audio only. A voice, calm and amused, crackles through the deck speakers:

"Anselm landfall director. This is Port Control. We've flagged your approach window. Just so you know—there's a berthing queue. Three ships ahead of you. You might want to hurry."

The channel closes.

Mira raises an eyebrow. "Three ships. In an uninhabited system."

You mute the channel with a single tap and pull up the passive scan suite. The Anselm was built for deep survey work before she became a colony carrier—her sensor array is military-grade, designed to spot a thermocline from orbit.

You key the command. A soft hum vibrates through the deck as the arrays unfold along the ship's spine.

The data streams in.

Corvid IV's surface is a patchwork of temperate forests, shallow seas, and one equatorial mountain range. No orbital platforms. No weapon batteries. No active power signatures above civilian-grade on the dayside.

But the nightside tells a different story.

A cluster of lights blooms on the dark hemisphere—tight, geometric, too regular to be natural. A settlement. No, a city. And around it, a faint thermal haze that suggests industry. Refineries. Fabricators. Something that burns hot and runs all night.

Mira leans over your shoulder, her breath warm against your cheek. "That's not a port. That's a colony."

You zoom in. The city sprawls along a coastline, its grid pattern interrupted by what looks like a spaceport at the southern edge. Three heat signatures sit on the tarmac—ships. Cargo haulers, by the profile.

None of them look military.

But the fourth signature, further north, catches your eye. A structure set apart from the city, ringed by its own perimeter wall. The heat signature there is different. Colder. Deliberately shielded.

Someone doesn't want to be seen.

The console chimes again. Port Control, reopening the channel. This time, the voice is less amused.

"Anselm, you've gone quiet. Everything all right up there?"

You kill the channel with a sharp motion. The silence that follows is heavier than the voice was.

"Mira," you say, not turning from the console. "Stealth drone. Bay Two. I want it in the air in ten minutes."

She doesn't argue. You hear her boots hit the deck plating twice before she stops. "Anjali. If they detect it—"

"Then we'll know their detection range. Do it."

She goes. The hatch hisses shut behind her.

You pull up the drone's telemetry feed on a secondary screen, fingers moving fast. The Anselm carries four reconnaissance drones, each one wrapped in radar-absorbent skin and cooled to near-ambient. You've never launched one in anger. You've never had to.

The shielded structure stares back at you from the thermal map. Whatever it is, it's buried deeper than the rest of the city. The cold signature suggests underground levels. Multiple, by the spread.

Your console pings. A text message from Mira, routed through the ship's internal comms:

Drone prepped. Launch window in 4 minutes. You want me to pilot it or set it autonomous?

The choice sits in front of you. Manual piloting gives you real-time control—you can react, adjust, pull back if something goes wrong. Autonomous is safer, quieter, but if the drone finds something unexpected, it'll follow its programming, not your gut.

And you've never trusted programming over your gut.

You type the reply and hit send. Two seconds later, Mira's acknowledgment blinks back: Copy. Launch in 90 seconds. Controls are yours.

You pull up the drone's interface. The feed is dark—the bay doors haven't opened yet—but the systems check flashes green across every line. Cameras. Thermal. Radar. Comm relay. All nominal.

The deck vibrates beneath you as the outer bay doors iris open. A rush of cold air hisses through the ship's ventilation. Then the drone drops free, falling into the dark below the Anselm's belly.

Its engines catch with a whisper you feel more than hear. The feed flickers to life—a grainy, low-light image of Corvid IV's nightside rushing up to meet you.

You take the controls. Your hands move without thinking, years of sim-time and emergency drills taking over. The drone banks hard, hugging the thermal shadow of a mountain ridge, skimming low over the forest canopy.

The city lights grow closer. The shielded structure resolves from a blur to a shape—a low, windowless building, surrounded by a double fence. No guards visible. No patrols. But the ground around it is bare, cleared of vegetation. Someone wants a clean field of fire.

The drone's thermal overlay pings. A heat signature, moving. Just one. Human-sized. Walking the perimeter.

Then another ping. This one from the building itself—a brief, sharp spike, like a door opening and closing. Something's active in there. Something warm.

You're three klicks out and closing fast.

You key the drone's autohover and pull back from the console. The command center suddenly feels too bright, too exposed. You find Mira in the corridor outside, just emerging from the hatch.

"Mira. A moment."

She sees your face and stops. Reads you. Nods once.

You lead her into the empty mess hall—tables bolted down, chairs strapped in, the galley dark. No cameras here. No ears.

You tell her.

The words come out flat, clinical at first. Pod 447. Your sister. Devika. You were twenty-three when you signed on as landfall director. Devika was seventeen. She had just been accepted to the Xenobiology Institute on Mars. Then the Anselm received its final crew manifest, and you pulled strings you've never told anyone about to add her name.

You told her it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. You told her Corvid IV would be a new beginning. You never told her the survey data was ninety-three percent certain the planet was empty. You never told her you were running from a debt back home that would have swallowed her too.

Mira listens. Her face doesn't change.

When you finish, she is quiet for a long moment. Then she says, "Pod 447. Last sleeper to thaw. I'll remember."

She holds your gaze. "Is there anything else you haven't told me?"

Mira holds your gaze for a beat longer, then nods. She doesn't push. That's why you trust her.

"Go fly your drone," she says. "I'll keep the bridge warm."

You turn and walk back to the command center, the weight of the confession still sitting in your chest. The drone's feed is exactly where you left it—hovering three klicks out from the shielded structure, the forest canopy swaying below in the thermal wash.

You settle into the pilot's seat and take the controls again. The drone's batteries are at eighty-seven percent. You have maybe two hours of loiter time before you need to bring it home.

The heat spike from the building has stabilized. Whatever opened and closed down there is now still. But the perimeter walker is still making its rounds—slow, methodical. A guard, not a drone.

You zoom in on the building's roofline. No vents. No antenna arrays. No solar panels. Just a flat, featureless slab of material that doesn't match the local architecture. Prefabricated. Delivered.

Someone brought this building with them.

And then you see it. At the northern edge of the roof, barely visible in the low light—a faded marking. A logo. Three interlocking rings, worn and weathered, but unmistakable.

The same logo that was stamped on the Anselm's original survey drone casings.

Your blood goes cold.

You pull the drone into a sharp ascent, the forest blurring beneath you as you climb. The logo burns in your memory—three interlocking rings, stamped on every survey drone casing you personally unboxed nineteen years ago.

The drone's return flight feels agonizingly slow. You switch to internal comms.

"Mira. Meet me in the archive bay. Now."

Her response is immediate. "On my way."

You leave the drone on autopilot and stride through the corridors, your boots echoing against the metal deck. The archive bay is a small, climate-controlled room tucked behind the medical wing—rarely visited, never cleaned. You key in your override code and the hatch hisses open.

The room smells of old paper and recirculated air. Racks of data crystals line the walls, each one labeled by mission year. You find the rack marked Survey Operations — Year One and pull a crystal free.

You slot it into the reader. The screen flickers to life.

Survey logs. Launch manifests. Equipment serial numbers. You scroll through, heart hammering, until you find what you're looking for: the drone casing supplier.

Titan Forge Industries. Contract #A-447. Delivery date: 2187.

The same year the Anselm left Earth.

You scroll further. The contract lists a single point of contact at Titan Forge. A name.

Devika Raghunathan.

Your sister's name.

The room tilts. You grip the edge of the console.

Mira appears in the doorway. She sees your face and stops.

"Anjali. What did you find?"

You turn from the screen, and the words spill out before you can stop them.

"My sister. Devika. Her name is on the supplier contract for the survey drones. The same drones that stamped that logo on a building in a city that shouldn't exist."

Mira steps into the room, the hatch sliding shut behind her. She doesn't speak at first. She walks to the console and reads the screen over your shoulder, her breath slow and measured.

When she straightens, her face is unreadable.

"Anjali." Her voice is careful. "Your sister was seventeen when you put her on this ship. She'd never held a job. She'd never signed a contract. How does her name end up on a Titan Forge delivery manifest?"

You have no answer. You've been asking yourself the same question since you read it.

Mira continues, quieter now. "Either someone used her name without her knowledge. Or she knew more about this mission than you did when you pulled those strings to bring her aboard."

The silence stretches.

Your comm panel beeps. A shipwide alert—the wake sequence has advanced to stage two. The first sleepers will begin surfacing in eighteen hours.

You key the comm panel, fingers steady despite the tremor in your chest. The channel opens with a soft crackle.

"Port Control, this is Anselm landfall director. I have a question about your skyline."

A pause. Then the same voice, cautious now. "Go ahead, Anselm."

"There's a structure north of your city. Low profile, double fence, no markings. It carries a logo I recognize—three interlocking rings. Titan Forge Industries. I want to know what that building is, who built it, and how long it's been there."

The silence on the other end stretches long enough that you check the signal. Still live.

When the voice returns, it's different. Flatter. Careful.

"That building isn't part of the port authority's jurisdiction, Anselm. I'd advise you to focus on your berthing and your landing window. The surface has... complications we don't discuss on open channels."

A click. The channel closes.

Mira looks at you. "Complications."

You kill the open channel and key in a tight-beam encryption sequence—a protocol buried in the Anselm's comms manual, rarely used, never advertised. The signal locks onto Port Control's tower with a narrow, focused pulse that skips past any eavesdroppers.

The channel opens. No voice yet. Just the soft hiss of an open line.

You wait.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

Then a woman's voice, low and crisp, replaces the man who spoke before. "This is Port Control secondary. You're on a restricted frequency, Anselm. State your business."

"I already stated it. The Titan Forge building. I'm not asking as a tourist. I'm asking as someone who found that company's logo on equipment that left Earth on my ship, nineteen years ago."

A pause. The sound of a breath, held and released.

"Your ship," she repeats. "The Anselm."

"Yes."

Another pause. Then: "I'm going to tell you something I shouldn't. And then I'm going to end this call. That building is a Titan Forge research outpost. It's been there longer than this port has. The company went dark six years ago—no communications, no supply runs, no personnel movements. But the building still draws power. Still cycles air. Still runs its internal systems."

She lowers her voice. "We've sent three survey teams to investigate. None of them came back."

The channel clicks dead.

Mira is staring at you. The cryo-bay hums below, eleven hundred sleepers dreaming their last dreams.