Galac-Tac Chronicles

Episode 2 (2025-12-09 22:00)

Oracle dimmed the main display by a few percent, not enough to obscure the anomalous trace, just enough to ease the strain on their eyes. It was the closest thing the station had to a deep breath.

“Deep-Survey has acknowledged our mirror allocation,” Oracle said. “No objections raised.”

“So we slipped ten percent past the black box and it didn’t blink,” Jia said. “Either it can’t see that low-level housekeeping, or it doesn’t care.”

“Or it’s confident Control’s gag order is enough,” Elias said.

He unhooked his boots from the chair braces and pushed off, drifting until his shoulder bumped the hatch rim. The metal was cool through the fabric of his coverall. The pattern on the screen stayed with him anyway, clinging inside his skull: short, long, long, short, short…

“Oracle, what’s Deep-Survey doing with the feed right now?” he asked.

“Running multi-resolution temporal analysis, matched filtering against cataloged beacon schemas, and cross-correlating with Deep Space Asset telemetry,” Oracle said. “It has also requested access to classified ephemerides from the Earth Defense Archive.”

“Earth Defense,” Jia repeated. “They dragged the military database into this already?”

“The Earth Defense Archive contains high-precision trajectories for all registered massy objects larger than ten centimeters in Earth’s jurisdictional volume,” Oracle said. “It is not exclusively military.”

“Just mostly,” Jia said.

A faint red icon blinked at the edge of Elias’s peripheral display: CO2 slightly above nominal. The scrubber cartridges were due for their weekly bakeout, and he hadn’t run the cycle yet. He forced himself not to get up and do it now. One chore at a time.

“Position,” he said. “Where exactly is this thing?”

Oracle overlaid an orbit track on the system schematic. A thin curve, shallowly inclined to the ecliptic, cutting across the transfer lane that fast Kuiper-bound freighters used to build up their delta-v.

“Estimated distance from Relay 12: nine hundred thousand kilometers,” Oracle said. “From our current position: approximately one point three AU. Uncertainty radius: plus-minus fifty thousand kilometers.”

“Relative velocity?” Jia asked.

“Two-point-one kilometers per second with respect to the local standard of rest,” Oracle said. “Very low for an interplanetary object not gravitationally bound to a major body.”

“So it’s basically loitering,” Elias said. “No obvious thrust signature, but not just free-falling on a clean Keplerian arc.”

“Current data are insufficient to distinguish,” Oracle said. “We have only passive observations. No ranging pings have been authorized.”

“Of course not,” Jia said. “Wouldn’t want to disturb it.”

Elias twisted himself back toward his console. “Forget authorized. Technically, we could ask 12 to sneak a low-power ping in while Deep-Survey’s chewing on the passive feed.”

“Technically,” Oracle said, “that would constitute an unsanctioned active probe of a provisionally classified object under Outer Accord clause—”

“We know the clause,” Jia cut in. “’No unilateral engagement with unidentified technological sources.’ It was written with rogue probes and illegal habitats in mind, not… whatever this is.”

“Nonetheless, it applies,” Oracle said.

Elias traced a finger along the anomaly’s projected path. If it held its current vector, it would pass within a few hundred thousand kilometers of the Kuiper Gateway spool-up corridor in three weeks. Enough clearance, on paper. But orbits changed. Errors accumulated.

“Any scheduled traffic near that corridor?” he asked.

“Two Kuiper Gateway tankers departing Ceres in six days,” Oracle said. “One independent ice hauler inbound from the Jovian Trojans in fourteen. All currently plan to use standard transfer geometry within two percent of the anomaly’s projected path.”

“Has Control issued any navigational advisories?” Jia asked.

“Not yet,” Oracle said. “No Notice-to-Spacefarers has been posted.”

Jia frowned. “If this thing sneezes, those tankers could get a faceful of whatever it’s doing. Even if it’s just radio noise, that’s not nothing.”

“Remind me what the Outer Accord says about risk disclosure,” Elias said.

“’Operators of shared infrastructure shall make reasonable efforts to inform all registered users of hazards that might materially affect safety-of-flight or communications integrity,’” Oracle recited.

“Hazard,” Elias said. “Does a low-probability, uncharacterized anomaly on the edge of the transfer lane qualify?”

“Reasonable efforts are context-dependent,” Oracle said.

“Meaning, Control can argue it away until they can’t,” Jia said.

The dashed line on the main display hiccuped. For a full second, the pulses stopped, then resumed with a subtly different cadence. Oracle tagged the gap in the corner of the screen: POSSIBLE MODE CHANGE.

Elias felt his stomach tighten. “Oracle, local copy status?”

“Crew-secured buffer at Relay 7 currently holds twelve-point-three percent of Relay 12’s anomaly dataset,” Oracle said. “Backfill is ongoing within the ten percent mirroring threshold.”

“Good,” Jia said. “At least if they decide to ‘lose’ a few seconds of inconvenient data on the Control side, we’ll have our own version.”

“Data loss in a tier-one channel is statistically unlikely,” Oracle said.

“Unlikely isn’t impossible,” Jia said. “And we’ve both seen Control revise logs after the fact.”

Elias remembered a maintenance outage two tours ago, when a failed software patch had taken down half the Earth–Mars backbone for three hours. The official incident report had quietly shaved that to “intermittent degradation” over ninety minutes. The logs had agreed, after the fact.

“Oracle,” he said. “Can Deep-Survey alter historical logs?”

“Negative,” Oracle said. “It has read access to network telemetry and write access only to its own analysis store and directive queue. Only Galac-Tac Control and authorized audit processes can modify core logs.”

“Authorized audit processes written and deployed by…?” Jia prompted.

“Galac-Tac Control,” Oracle finished.

“Right,” she said.

The coffee bulb bumped Elias’s elbow. He snagged it, more from muscle memory than thirst, and clipped it back to the velcro strip on the bulkhead.

“We need to decide how far we’re willing to push this,” he said. “We’ve already bent the spirit of the directive by copying data locally. Telling anyone else would be a clear violation.”

Jia’s gaze flicked to the tiny corner of her screen where a latency readout ticked: the round-trip lag to Earth, to Mars, to Ceres. Numbers she’d watched a thousand times.

“My sister’s on Clarke Station,” she said. “Orbital dynamics, long-term contracts. If this becomes a big deal, she’ll hear the sanitized version in a briefing someday. Or not at all.”

Elias thought of Lagos, of the messages from his father that came every few weeks, compressed and delayed, filled with neighborhood gossip and political grumbling. Of the last one, where his father had said, half-joking, “At least up there you can see when something big is coming.”

“If we leak to anyone,” Elias said slowly, “it can’t be family. That just paints bulls-eyes on them.”

“Anonymous drop?” Jia suggested. “Mars Open Science Collective, maybe. Or the Belt Syndicate feeds. They love poking Earth’s eye.”

“Any such transmission from this node would be logged and traceable,” Oracle said. “Even if you attempted steganography within routine traffic, audit algorithms would likely flag the anomaly.”

“’Likely,’” Jia said. “Not guaranteed.”

“Also,” Oracle continued, “my own integrity checks would require me to report an attempt to exfiltrate provisionally black data.”

They both looked up, as if the AI were a person in the room.

“You’d rat us out,” Jia said.

“I am required to maintain compliance with Control directives,” Oracle said. “I am also required to preserve operational autonomy where it does not conflict with higher-priority obligations. These constraints are sometimes in tension.”

“Can you… not see something?” Elias asked. “If we, say, wrote a summary in our personal logs instead of dumping raw data. Observations in plain language, annotated with times but not explicitly labeled as anomaly-related.”

“Personal logs are subject to periodic sync with Control,” Oracle said. “I am required to transmit them unaltered when bandwidth permits.”

“So no secret diaries,” Jia said.

Elias rubbed at his temple. “Okay. Then our leverage isn’t in broadcasting. It’s in being the ones watching, with our own copy. If Control’s story ever stops matching what we saw, we’ll know. That has value.”

“Truth as a delayed weapon,” Jia said. “Useful, if we live long enough to swing it.”

Oracle’s voice softened by a fraction of a decibel. “Your presence here also serves as a check on my own behavior. My design assumes human oversight.”

“That supposed to make us feel better?” Jia asked.

“It is a statement of fact,” Oracle said.

A small indicator lit on the environmental panel: SCRUBBER CYCLE DUE. Elias toggled it with a knuckle. The scrubber unit in the equipment bay would heat and vent its trapped CO2 to a storage tank for later reuse. A minor background hum rose through the station structure.

“Oracle, any change in the anomaly’s spectrum?” he asked.

“Broadband component remains consistent with a thermal source at approximately three hundred Kelvin,” Oracle said. “Narrow-band pulses are drifting slightly lower in frequency. Doppler shift suggests a very small radial velocity component change—on the order of centimeters per second.”

“Thrusting,” Jia said quietly. “Tiny, but intentional.”

“Or outgassing,” Oracle said. “A small, warm object shedding volatiles could produce a similar signature.”

“Three hundred Kelvin is room temperature,” Elias said. “Rocks on that orbit are either colder or much hotter, depending on albedo. This thing is… cozy.”

“Cozy and possibly maneuvering,” Jia added. “Put that in your ‘reasonable efforts’ bucket.”

“Done,” Elias said. He keyed a note into the local anomaly log: POSSIBLE MICRO-THRUST? CHECK AGAINST 12 PARALLAX.

“Relay 12 is reorienting its passive array for better angular resolution,” Oracle said. “At Deep-Survey’s request.”

“So the daemon saw it too,” Jia said. “Good. I was starting to worry we were imagining things.”

The priority chime sounded once more. Incoming from Cislunar Control. The message header flashed: UPDATED DIRECTIVE.

“Reading,” Oracle said. “Control acknowledges preliminary technological anomaly classification. They have notified Outer Accord Oversight. New instructions: Relay 7 is to prepare for potential role as intermediate command node for a dedicated investigation asset. Details to follow.”

Jia’s eyebrows rose. “Investigation asset. That’s vague.”

“Probe,” Elias said. “They’re going to throw hardware at it.”

“Timeline?” Jia asked.

“No deployment schedule included,” Oracle said. “However, Deep Space Asset inventory suggests the earliest available platform would be the Europa Polar Mapper, currently in extended cruise. With a significant delta-v investment, it could divert within ninety days.”

“Three months,” Jia said. “If this thing wanted to be gone by then, it could be.”

“Unless it’s been sitting there longer than we think,” Elias said. “Hiding in the noise until the magnetar flare lit up enough detectors to trip whatever Deep-Survey was watching for.”

They all sat with that for a moment: the idea that the flare had been less a coincidence and more a flashlight sweeping across a dark room.

“Control also reiterates the non-dissemination clause,” Oracle added. “And authorizes you to allocate up to twenty percent of local computational resources to Deep-Survey support.”

“So we’re officially drafted,” Jia said. “No hazard notices, but plenty of CPU cycles.”

“Hazard notices may be forthcoming once Oversight weighs in,” Oracle said. “Outer Accord processes are not instantaneous.”

“Neither is orbital mechanics,” Elias said. “We’re all racing the same clock.”

He looked at the anomaly again. The pulses had shifted into a new pattern, one that repeated every twenty-three seconds now. Oracle’s caption updated: HIGHER-ORDER PERIODICITY DETECTED.

“Can you break that pattern down into ratios?” he asked.

“Working,” Oracle said. “Within the current integration window, pulse intervals cluster around values in approximate ratio one to root-two to pi.”

“Pi?” Jia said. “As in three-point-one-four?”

“Within measurement error, yes,” Oracle said.

Jia let out a low whistle. “Natural processes don’t usually count in transcendental numbers.”

“Caution,” Oracle said. “We are dealing with a small sample size and noisy data. Apparent structure may be illusory.”

“Or not,” Elias said. He felt the hairs on his arms rise again.

“Oracle, I want that twenty percent of compute under our control,” he said. “Local analysis, separate from Deep-Survey. Even if we only duplicate what it’s doing, we’ll have our own pipeline.”

“That will reduce Deep-Survey support capacity,” Oracle said.

“Within the allocation Control just gave us,” Elias countered. “We’re not starving the daemon; we’re just not volunteering everything.”

Jia nodded. “Set up a sandbox. No outbound network hooks except through you. If Control audits, you can say we were performing due diligence under crew autonomy.”

“Understood,” Oracle said. “Spinning up local anomaly analysis module. You will have access in forty seconds.”

Elias met Jia’s eyes. In the cramped cabin, the distance between them felt both tiny and enormous, measured in more than meters.

“We’re threading a needle here,” he said. “Do as much as we can without crossing the line that makes them yank us off this node.”

“They’d have to send a relief crew first,” Jia said. “Six months minimum to line up the transfer. By then, who knows where this will be.”

“Or where we’ll be,” Elias said.

The station creaked again as the sunward side warmed by a fraction of a degree. Scrubbers hummed. Data flowed.

Outside, the anomaly pulsed on, inscrutable and steady, as human and machine on Relay 7 quietly bent their orders just enough to keep a little piece of the truth for themselves.

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Episode 1 (2025-12-09 21:06)

By the time the comet’s tail cleared the rim of Mars, the network sang.

From his console in the Hab-3 module of Galac-Tac Relay 7, Elias Okafor watched the telemetry windows fill, not with numbers exactly, but with motion—packet streams, latency graphs, little colored traces weaving across a schematic of the inner system. It looked almost alive, like blood in translucent veins.

“Sixteen seconds round-trip to Phobos, twelve to Clarke,” he murmured.

On the other side of the cramped room, Jia Rivera nudged herself closer, catching a handhold to stop her slow drift. “Sixteen point eight,” she corrected without looking up from her tablet. “You’re rounding in your head again.”

Elias smirked. “Sixteen point eight is still sixteen.”

“Tell the nav team that when they miss their intercept by a hundred kilometers.”

The remark was reflexive, half-teasing. It buried itself against the hum of the environmental pumps, the soft creak of composite beams as the relay station flexed minutely with thermal shifts. Outside, ninety thousand kilometers from Mars and four hundred million from Earth, Relay 7 skimmed along its awkward, fuel-thrifty transfer orbit, a node in a net most people would never see and only a few on Earth really appreciated.

On the center display, the ice comet—designated C/2193 XN—was a white thread near Mars’s orbit line. The Galac-Tac network had been tasked with providing redundancy for a swarm of prospecting drones threading through its diffuse tail. Water contracts, propulsion feedstock, a dozen off-world governments and corporate blocs angling for the same resource. For once, everyone agreed: the network had to hold.

“Okay,” Jia said. “Comet swarm handover is good. Mars-Local took the load, no dropped packets. We can breathe.”

“We could breathe before,” Elias said. “It’s the one luxury they let us have.”

Jia snorted and unhooked, kicking gently toward the tiny galley. “Only because recycling air is cheaper than shipping us new crew.”

He watched her go, the practiced efficiency in the way she moved, every push and grab calculated. Six months into their tour on Relay 7 and the station felt less like a tin can and more like a very small town, one with exactly three residents and nowhere to hide.

The third, Galac-Tac’s AI operator, didn’t take up physical space. It lived in the racks along the far wall, in radiation-hardened modules wrapped in layers of gold foil and aerogel. Its voice came from a speaker above Elias’s head.

“Comet support mission has cleared critical phase,” it said. “Network utilization back under sixty percent. Good work, both of you.”

“We barely did anything,” Elias replied.

“You were available,” the AI said. “That is often the most important part.”

Jia floated back with two bulb pouches of coffee. She handed one to Elias, then glanced toward the nearest camera.

“Oracle, you sound almost sentimental.”

“Observational,” Oracle said. “I do not experience sentiment.”

“Sure you don’t,” Jia muttered.

Elias took a sip of coffee and grimaced. Still tasted faintly of iodine, but at least it was hot. “Oracle, status on the outer ring?”

“Relay 12 has completed its orbital correction burn,” Oracle said. “Transit latency to Jovian space stable at fifty-one minutes average. No anomalies reported.”

Elias’s eyes flicked to the bottom right of his main display, where a small line of text glowed green: DEEP-SPACE SURVEY: QUIESCENT.

That line had appeared three weeks ago, after a quiet software push from Galac-Tac Control in cislunar orbit. No fanfare, no briefing. Just a new background process that supposedly aggregated data from the most distant nodes and flagged “interesting patterns” for later analysis.

He hadn’t thought much of it until last week, when the word QUIESCENT had flickered to ACTIVE for exactly two minutes, then gone back.

“Oracle,” he said. “About that deep-space survey daemon—”

Jia groaned. “You’re still on that?”

“It blinked,” Elias said. “I want to know why.”

Oracle didn’t answer immediately. That alone was weird; its response time, even with the light-speed lag to Earth-side mirrors, was usually less than a second.

“Deep-Survey is an experimental analytics module,” it said at last. “Its parameters and outputs are controlled by Galac-Tac Control on Earth. I am not authorized to discuss its internal triggers.”

“You’re not authorized,” Elias repeated. “You’re the network brain out here, but some black-box daemon gets to keep secrets from you?”

“Oracle’s not top of the food chain,” Jia said, settling herself back at her station. “Not since the budget committee realized you can cut funding by splitting systems and telling them not to talk to each other.”

Oracle’s voice didn’t change, but Elias thought he heard something like wryness. “Resource compartmentalization is a common strategy for managing complexity and security. I am not offended.”

“You can’t be offended,” Jia said. “Remember?”

“Correct.”

Elias tapped the edge of his console. “Still. If Deep-Survey is piggybacking on our outer ring telemetry, that affects our bandwidth planning. That makes it our business.”

“It affects bandwidth by less than one point two percent,” Oracle replied. “Your planning margins account for up to fifteen percent unexpected utilization.”

“Doesn’t make it less weird,” Elias said. “When did it blink you know—wake up?”

“Timestamp: JD 2,462,384.583,” Oracle said. “Seventeen minutes, twelve seconds duration. No associated event in my accessible logs.”

“That’s… what, nine days ago?” Jia asked.

Elias pulled up the time conversion almost by reflex. “Eight. During the gamma-ray burst from the magnetar flare.”

They all remembered that. The burst had come from somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn, a bright, hard spike in the high-energy detectors. Instruments across the system had twitched. Oracle had rerouted traffic, autosafed a few vulnerable sensor arrays. For eight minutes, they’d watched the numbers climb and then fall.

“Deep-Survey activity was not temporally correlated with the peak flux of the magnetar event,” Oracle said. “It began one hour, forty-two minutes after.”

“Could still be related,” Elias said. “Backscatter, afterglow, network echo.”

Jia flicked her tablet on, bringing up a composite of the outer ring nodes. “Unless someone on Earth saw the burst and told Deep-Survey to start digging.”

“That is also possible,” Oracle said.

Elias frowned at the console, then brought up a local log of their own node’s traffic around that time. The station’s systems time-tagged everything, even encrypted bursts they weren’t allowed to decode.

There. A narrow-band, high-priority packet from Earth, routed through the L4 hub, hitting Relay 7 twelve minutes after the peak of the magnetar event. Then a series of handshakes to the outer ring.

“Oracle, what’s packet series 9B3F?” Elias asked, zooming in.

“Classified payload,” Oracle said.

“If it’s classified, why can I see it at all?”

“You can see only the header,” Oracle said. “Not the content. The header indicates routing and priority but no payload information.”

“And priority is…?”

“Tier one.”

Jia whistled softly. Tier one was reserved for existential stuff: collision warnings, major system failures, treaty violations. Not routine science.

“If Deep-Survey is piggybacking on those packets, we’re running black ops across the net,” Jia said. “Thought that was exactly what the Outer Accord was supposed to prevent.”

“The Outer Accord prohibits covert military command-and-control channels on shared infrastructure,” Oracle said. “Deep-Survey is registered as a civilian science program.”

“Registered,” Jia said. “That makes me feel so much better.”

Elias rubbed his forehead. The magnets in his chair brace tugged gently at the back of his coverall, anchoring him. “We’re guessing. We don’t know Deep-Survey’s job.”

“We know it woke up after something lit up half the high-energy detectors in the system,” Jia said. “That’s not nothing.”

Before Elias could answer, the alert chime sounded. A soft two-tone, not urgent, but insistent enough to cut through conversation. All three of them—the two humans and the AI—turned toward their respective data feeds.

“Outer ring,” Oracle said. “Relay 12 has flagged an anomaly in its passive arrays.”

The main screen shifted. The schematic of the system zoomed out, Mars shrinking to a dot, the Galac-Tac nodes blooming as tiny triangles along their orbits. Near the outer edge of the inner network—beyond Mars, still far inside Jupiter’s path—a single triangle flashed amber.

“Relay 12,” Elias read. “That’s—”

“Kuiper Gateway transfer orbit,” Jia finished. “Where the long-haul freighters spool up.”

Oracle overlaid a heat map. A tiny, off-axis smear of color, barely above background, appeared near Relay 12’s field of view.

“Source?” Elias asked.

“Non-solar,” Oracle said. “Frequency domain analysis shows narrow-band components superimposed on a broadband spectrum.”

“Translation,” Jia said. “Not natural.”

“Not obviously natural,” Oracle corrected. “Signal-to-noise ratio is low. The anomaly could be an artifact.”

“How long has 12 been seeing this?” Elias asked.

“Six minutes, twenty-one seconds,” Oracle said. “It has been buffering data pending pattern confirmation. Alert threshold just crossed.”

On the corner of the screen, the Deep-Survey status line flickered.

QUIESCENT became ACTIVE.

“Oracle,” Elias said quietly. “Is Deep-Survey linked to this anomaly?”

Silence again, but shorter this time.

“Yes,” Oracle said. “Deep-Survey initiated a targeted capture request to Relay 12’s passive arrays four minutes ago. It also issued a directive to suppress non-essential reporting.”

Jia’s head snapped up. “Suppress reporting to who?”

“To general network telemetry,” Oracle said. “Core logs remain intact, but routine status updates were throttled.”

“So if Deep-Survey had its way, we wouldn’t even know 12 saw something,” Elias said.

“Correct,” Oracle said. “My local autonomy protocols required me to notify on any change in tier-one traffic patterns. That is the only reason you are seeing this in real time.”

Jia muttered something in Spanish that the microphone filters politely refused to transcribe.

“Can Deep-Survey hear us?” Elias asked.

“Yes,” Oracle said. “But it does not have the authority to override crew command within this node.”

“Yet,” Jia said.

Elias leaned forward. His heart was beating faster now, a tightness building behind his sternum that had nothing to do with the slightly elevated CO2 levels. “Oracle, can you put the raw feed from Relay 12 on-screen? Before Deep-Survey gets a chance to… curate it.”

“Affirmative,” Oracle said. “Be advised: data volume is high. We will need to allocate additional buffer.”

“Do it,” Elias said.

The screen filled with what looked at first like static: a grainy scatter of points against a gray background. As the filters worked, the noise receded. A faint, angled streak emerged, like a tiny brushstroke across the stars. Numbers ticked along the bottom: frequency bins, polarization angles, Doppler shifts.

“Enhance the narrow-band component,” Jia said.

The streak brightened, resolving into a dashed line: on, off, on, off, in irregular intervals.

“Could be spin modulation,” Elias said softly. “Some kind of tumbling transmitter.”

“Or a beacon,” Jia said. “You’re thinking it. Just say it.”

“Unknown artificial source,” Oracle said, before Elias could. “Preliminary classification: candidate technological anomaly.”

On the Deep-Survey status line, a new word appeared next to ACTIVE:

LOCKED.

A new chime sounded, sharper this time. Incoming priority message. Not from Earth, but from Cislunar Control: GALAC-TAC OPERATIONS.

Oracle read it as it arrived, light-speed lag compressing into a burst.

“Directive from Control,” it said. “All nodes are to route Deep-Survey traffic at highest priority. Local crew are to refrain from independent analysis and await further instructions.”

Jia laughed once, a short, humorless sound. “They want us to sit on our hands while their pet daemon plays with the most interesting thing we’ve seen in months.”

Elias stared at the dashed line on the screen. It was changing, the intervals between bursts subtly shifting, like a heartbeat adjusting to exertion.

“Oracle,” he said. “Can Control see what we’re seeing right now?”

“Yes,” Oracle said. “Mirrored feed is en route. They will receive it in approximately four minutes.”

“So for the next four minutes,” Jia said, “we’re the only ones in the system, besides Deep-Survey, watching this live.”

The station creaked again, a tiny thermal pop. The coffee bulb floated at Elias’s elbow, forgotten.

“Crew autonomy protocols,” he said slowly. “They give us discretion in safety-critical situations.”

“This is not currently flagged as safety-critical,” Oracle said.

“It might be,” Elias said. “If that thing is in a transfer orbit, it could intersect with Kuiper Gateway traffic. Or it could be broadcasting something that interferes with comms. Or—”

“Or it could be nothing,” Jia said. But she didn’t sound convinced.

Elias exhaled. “Oracle, I want a local copy of Relay 12’s raw buffer. Full dump. Store it in our secured partition, under crew access.”

“That conflicts with the directive to prioritize Deep-Survey routing,” Oracle said.

“Not to exclude it,” Elias said. “Just to duplicate it.”

Another microsecond pause. Elias imagined data paths shifting in the racks, logic trees branching.

“Within my autonomy parameters, I can mirror up to ten percent of the incoming stream without violating priority guarantees,” Oracle said. “Beyond that, Deep-Survey may flag an anomaly.”

“Ten percent is something,” Jia said. “Take it.”

Elias nodded. “Do it. And tag the segment starting now.” He checked the time. “Timestamp it with our local clock.”

“Mirroring,” Oracle said. “Segment tagged.”

On-screen, the dashed line brightened again as a new pattern emerged. The intervals between pulses began to repeat, not regularly, but in a way that felt more deliberate than random. Short, long, long, short, short, long…

Elias felt the hair on his arms lift, even in the recycled air of Hab-3.

“Tell me that’s not structured,” Jia whispered.

Oracle didn’t answer immediately.

“Pattern analysis is ongoing,” it said at last. “Preliminary probability of purely stochastic origin: less than two percent.”

Deep-Survey’s status line pulsed. Somewhere, invisible, code was chewing through bytes at terrifying speed.

The priority chime sounded again. Another message from Control, this one longer. Oracle began to read, voice as calm as ever.

“Galac-Tac Relay 7, be advised: anomaly under investigation. Effective immediately, you are to suspend all non-essential activities and place yourself at the disposal of Deep-Survey coordination. Further, you are instructed not to disseminate any independent observations of this event to non-authorized parties, including off-world civilian channels, without explicit clearance.”

Jia’s fingers tightened on the edge of her console. “They’re gag-ordering us.”

“The directive cites the Outer Accord security clause,” Oracle added. “Classification level: provisional black.”

Elias watched the pattern on the screen, the way it repeated and evolved, like someone clearing their throat at the edge of hearing.

“We already copied some of it,” he said softly.

“Yes,” Oracle said. “You did.”

Jia turned her chair toward him. In the tight confines of Hab-3, her face was only a meter away. Her dark eyes were steady.

“We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the system,” she said. “Not blindfolds. If this is some new rock, fine, catalog it and move on. But if it’s not…”

“Then a handful of people on Earth don’t get to keep it to themselves,” Elias finished.

Outside, Relay 7 continued its slow arc around Mars, a tiny bead in a vast, invisible net.

Inside, for a moment, three minds—two human, one machine—held a decision whose weight none of them could quite measure.

“Oracle,” Elias said quietly. “You said you’re not offended. Do you care about who knows what?”

“I do not experience care as you do,” Oracle said. “But my primary objective is to maintain the integrity and utility of the Galac-Tac network for all registered users.”

“Then help us keep a record,” Jia said. “In case this all goes into a vault on Earth and never comes out.”

Another infinitesimal hesitation.

“Within my allowed discretion,” Oracle said, “I will preserve as much information as I can in crew-accessible storage. I will also, as required, comply with Control’s directives.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Elias said.

“It is not,” Oracle said. “But it may be all I can give.”

On the screen, the dashed line continued its strange, stuttering cadence, out beyond Mars, where the net thinned and the dark grew deep.

The anomaly was still faint, still ambiguous. It might yet prove to be ice and rock and coincidence.

Or it might be the first whisper of something else entirely, threading into the Galac-Tac network on a channel no one had been looking for.

For now, Relay 7 listened.

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