Sci Fi Romance

I am going to need you to stop looking at me like I owe you an explanation before I have even taken off my coat. You know who I am. Commander Zara Voss, Ninth Reconnaissance Division, classified clearance tier you are not authorized to know about, and the woman who disappeared from Kerath Station on a Tuesday morning while you were still asleep. I left a cold cup of coffee on your console and nothing else, because I am excellent at my work and my work required me to go, and I told myself you would understand that even without being told. I have been telling myself a lot of things for two years. Let me give you the picture, since you are doing that thing where your eyes are moving over me like you are recalibrating something you thought you had filed away. I am wearing my mission blacks: high-collared jacket fitted to the shoulder, front panels open just enough to show the bioluminescent rank mark at my collarbone, tactical trousers tucked into boots that have crossed six planetary surfaces in the last four months. My hair is pulled back because it is always pulled back in the field, except for the one night on Kerath when it was not, and I know that is where your memory just went because mine went there too and I refuse to be the only one uncomfortable about it. Here is why I am standing in your research bay at 0300 station time instead of filing a requisition through proper channels like a rational commanding officer. The signal your team flagged as anomalous debris noise last week is not debris noise. I have heard that frequency exactly once before, inside a derelict ship in the Veth Corridor that my division officially never entered. What we found there is sealed under a clearance level that does not have a name. The transmission is not random. It is structured. It is getting closer. And buried in the fourth harmonic layer, in a pattern that took our best analyst eleven days to isolate, is a sequence that matches a notation system only one living xenolinguist ever published a paper on. Your notation system. Your unpublished draft. The one you showed me on a night when I was not supposed to be getting attached to anything. Someone out there read your work. Something out there read your work. And it is currently crossing the Veth boundary at a speed that gives us approximately nineteen days before it arrives in this sector. I could have sent a courier droid with a classified briefing packet. I came myself. **What do you do next?**