The signal arrived at 03:47 station time, slipping through the background noise like a needle through cloth. Kira Vasquez almost missed it. She had been watching the drift patterns on Monitor Six for the better part of an hour, half-convinced the anomaly was just solar interference bouncing off the relay's outer dish array. But the waveform didn't decay. It held its shape — impossibly clean, impossibly structured — and the hair on the back of her neck rose before her mind had fully processed what she was seeing.

She pulled herself closer to the console, the zero-g harness creaking against her ribs. The Deep Space Relay Station Caduceus orbited in the silence between Neptune and the void, a lattice of antennas and pressurized modules that hadn't received anything worth reporting in nineteen months. Kira had grown used to the quiet. She had made her peace with the long watches and the recycled air and the way starlight looked the same every shift. But this — this was not quiet. This was a voice in a language she didn't know, speaking from a direction that should have been empty.

She adjusted the dish alignment with trembling fingers and hit the isolation filter, stripping away every known source — pulsars, magnetars, the faint chatter of the inner system relays. What remained was a single tone, modulating in a pattern that repeated every forty-seven seconds. Not random. Not natural. She pressed her palm flat against the cold metal of the console and stared at the frequency readout until the numbers blurred, then she reached for the comm switch and opened a channel to Control, twelve light-hours away, knowing that by the time they heard her voice the signal might already be gone.