Echoes in Witchspace

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: JT. Clarke (MostlyAwol)
Date: 3312-02-02
System: Eupaify EY-T c19-1
Vessel: Corsair – Veritas Obscura

The 77-44a signature hit again mid-jump.

Witchspace was its usual stretched-star tunnel, FSD humming along, when Nova flagged another spike in the side-band noise, same narrow band, same off-beat rhythm as the first time. The pulse lasted less than a second, just long enough to light up her anomaly filters and leave a neat little scar in the logs.

That makes several detections now, all too similar to be random FSD turbulence, too structured to ignore, and too brief to hand-wave away as “just noise.” As soon as we dropped back into normal space, I asked Nova for her latest take.

“Nova,” I said, unbuckling as the cabin lights settled back to normal, “we’ve been picking up more of those straight witchspace signals matching the 77-44a hit from a month ago. What do you make of them so far?”

“Short version?” she replied. “They’re cousins of the original. Same odd rhythm, same little spike of coherence, just as unwilling to behave like turbulence. Not perfect copies, though, tiny phase shifts, slight timing drifts. Like someone humming the same tune under their breath. I’m past coincidence, Commander. Give me a bit more data and I may have to admit something is deliberately poking at us.”

I watched the residual traces scroll down the holo. “These signals are clearly not static or a mistake,” I said. “A few times you’ve said they look human-made. Could it be a message? I’ve never heard of anyone actually sending messages through witchspace. It all gets jumbled. Think someone found a way?”

“When I said ‘human-made,’ I was being polite,” Nova answered. “The structure looks intentional, repeats that feel more like speech than physics, modulation that looks like someone trying to cancel out witchspace distortion instead of just shouting into it. That should be impossible; witchspace turns messages into alphabet soup. Yet these pulses survive the jump envelope just enough to stay coherent. So yes, it could be a message… from someone who understands witchspace far better than our best FSD engineers.”

I leaned back, letting that settle. “What if we aren’t the target and are just in the way?” I asked. “We’re on Distant Worlds 3 with thousands of commanders all around us.”

“Nice theory. Statistically tidy,” she said. “Unfortunately, the timing hates it. I cross-checked the last few hits against DW3 relay traffic: thousands of ships jumping, but the structured pulses only appear within milliseconds of our own transitions. Nothing similar on nearby ships, even on nearly identical vectors. If we’re ‘in the way,’ the universe has very precise aim. My working guess? Either it’s a blind broadcast we’re uniquely able to hear… or whoever’s sending it keeps lining up exactly where we are.”

I stared out at the star ahead, its light still shimmering on the canopy from the jump afterglow. “All right, Nova,” I said quietly. “On the next hit of the 77-44a signal, I want you to record it completely and see what you can make out of it.”

“Understood, Commander,” she replied. “Next time it twitches, I’ll grab a full-spectrum capture—raw waveform, harmonics, phase drift, FSD sidebands, everything. No filters on the first pass. Then I’ll start rebuilding it and see what shouldn’t survive witchspace at all. And if it really is a message…” She paused, as if choosing the right line to cross. “I’ll push the laws of physics right up to the warning labels to work out what it’s trying to say.”