Crossing Meridian
COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: JT. Clarke (MostlyAwol)
Date: 3312-04-10
System:
Coordinates:
Vessel: Corsair – Veritas Obscura
Three weeks had passed with no answers worth having.
The 77-44a signal still came and went in the hidden places between jumps, leaving Nova with nothing but timing, structure, mass, and the quiet fingerprints buried in its metadata. Clarke had long since stopped asking every day whether she had found anything new. If she had, she would tell him. Until then, the silence had become part of the ship.
The silence aboard the Veritas Obscura had settled into something almost routine over the last three weeks, broken only by the ordinary sounds of the ship and the quiet procession of systems doing what they were built to do. Clarke had nearly convinced himself that the lack of change was its own kind of answer when Nova appeared beside his chair, her holographic form resolving in pale blue light.
“It changed again,” she said.
Clarke looked up from the console. “The 77-44a signal?”
Nova gave a small nod. “Its size increased. Not dramatically, but enough to break the previous baseline.”
He leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing. “And you’re sure that’s all?”
“That is all I can confirm,” she said. “I am still only taking metadata and discarding the rest. I have not detected any direct effect on my systems.”
Clarke’s gaze stayed on her. “But you don’t like it.”
“No,” Nova said. “I do not like signals that keep adjusting when I have refused every invitation they have offered.”
That earned the faintest shift in his expression, not quite a smile. “Fair.”
She turned slightly toward the panel, where strings of numbers and timing data still crawled across the display. “I also have a probable source now. Federation space. More specifically, a company called Meridian Signal Group.”
Clarke frowned. “Meridian Signal Group?”
“GalNet only gives me surface details,” Nova said. “Programming work tied to Nav Beacons, communications infrastructure, and routing systems. The sort of company no one notices unless they are already looking.”
“And now you are.”
“I have been for three weeks.”
He let that sit for a moment. “Anything useful beyond the name?”
“Not yet. Only shape, not substance.” Her expression tightened. “That is part of the problem. I can see the outline of something, but not what is standing inside it.”
Clarke looked out through the canopy for a moment, then back to her. “Then we keep doing what we’ve been doing. Track the metadata. Watch for more changes. Build the pattern first.”
Nova folded her arms. “Cautious. Sensible. Mildly irritating.”
“You say that like it’s new.”
“It is not.”
He shifted in the chair and glanced again at the scrolling data. “As for Meridian, dig where you can without leaving fingerprints worth noticing.”
Nova’s eyes flicked back to him. “Public records, contract histories, registry trails, infrastructure references, old mentions in trade reporting?”
“Exactly.”
“No breaking into secret vaults, then.”
He gave her a dry look. “You were never going to do that.”
“No,” she said, almost primly. “I was going to think about how nice it would be if someone had simply left one open.”
That drew a quiet breath of amusement from him, but only for a second. “You’re good at finding patterns, Nova. Better than I ever could be. Start there. See who Meridian works for, what systems they touch, and whether any of it overlaps with the signal.”
Nova tilted her head slightly. “You are asking me to be curious in a disciplined way. How cruel.”
“I’m asking you not to get ambitious.”
“That is the same thing, just less poetic.”
Clarke rested one hand on the console. “If Meridian is dirty, it’ll show somewhere. Procurement, subcontractors, timing, odd routing behavior, and missing links where links should be. You know the drill.”
“I do,” she said, and some of the tension in her expression gave way to focus. “I can follow the edges. People build systems in layers. Even when they hide the center, the support structure tends to show.”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
Nova was quiet for a beat, then looked back toward the stars beyond the canopy. “I dislike not knowing whether the signal changed because it failed, because it learned, or because someone grew impatient.”
Clarke’s face hardened slightly. “Then we make them wait longer.”
Her gaze returned to him. “And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, you watch. You compare. You build the picture one piece at a time.” He paused. “No risks for scraps.”
Nova studied him, then gave a small nod. “Understood. Quiet observation. Quiet digging. No heroics.”
“Good.”
A faint, crooked smile touched her mouth. “That does reduce my options for dramatic self-expression.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I usually do.”
The hologram shimmered, just slightly, as she began to withdraw back into the ship’s systems.
“Nova,” Clarke said.
She paused. “Yes?”
“Careful.”
Something gentler passed through her expression then, brief but real.
“Always,” she said.
Then she vanished into blue light, leaving Clarke alone with the muted glow of the cockpit and the uneasy sense that somewhere out in Federation space, a company with a forgettable name had just become the most interesting thing in his world.