The ship graveyard stretched for miles, a tangle of rusted hulls and shattered glass reflecting the dim glow of Mu Arae’s distant sun. Theo Guzman, an ex-archivist turned salvager, carefully navigated the wreckage with his drone.
A deep-space shuttle, intact but dead, loomed ahead. Inside, he found stillness—until a voice crackled. “Help me.”
The distress call looped from an old pilot’s interface. Its logs dated back seventy years. No bodies, no signs of life—only a flickering hologram of an engineer, endlessly trying to send a warning no one would hear.
Theo hesitated. He could wipe the system, claim the ship’s core. Instead, he spent hours restoring power, setting its beacon alight once more. Someone had been lost here, speaking into the void.
As he left, the signal pulsed through the wreckage, a voice finally reaching home long after the speaker was gone.
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