6868c -

"They didn't fail," Elara said. "They were the first to answer. The satellite asked, 'What are you?' And the Venture replied with fear. With violence." She pointed to scorch marks on the smaller unit. "They tried to kill it. But you can't kill a question."

Commander Elara Voss was the first to see it up close. A routine spacewalk to repair a solar panel turned cold when her tether snagged. She twisted, helmet lights sweeping across the void, and there it was—drifting only fifty meters away. 6868c wasn't dark. Its hull shimmered with a faint, oily iridescence, like a soap bubble filmed over metal. And it was humming. Not a mechanical vibration, but a low, subsonic thrum she felt in her molars.

When she returned to the airlock, her crewmates, Park and Dmitri, noticed nothing unusual. But that night, Elara stopped sleeping. She stared at the bulkhead, tracing patterns only she could see. The hum had followed her inside. "They didn't fail," Elara said

WE ANSWERED.

To the public, it was a failed climate satellite, a half-billion-dollar piece of space junk tumbling through low orbit. To the three-person crew of the Odyssey , it was a ghost. For six months, they had tracked its erratic path, a silent reminder of the mission before theirs. No one spoke of what had happened to the crew of the Venture . Officially, it was a "communications malfunction." Unofficially, every astronaut on the Odyssey knew the rumor: 6868c hadn't failed. It had changed . With violence

Park wanted to evacuate. Dmitri wanted to shoot it down with a jury-rigged EMP. Elara said neither.

"It's not a weapon," she whispered. Her eyes had taken on the same oily sheen as the satellite's hull. "It's a question. And we've been answering it since the Venture got here." A routine spacewalk to repair a solar panel

"Odyssey, I've got visual on 6868c. It's… active."