Atid-60202-47-44 Min -

The designation was . It wasn’t a name. It was a log entry, a line in a spreadsheet, a ghost in the machine.

The debris field was a slow, silent ballet of broken dreams. Shattered solar panels turned like falling leaves. A frozen corpse of a ship, its name long since blasted away, tumbled end over end. Min’s suit jets hissed as she navigated the wreckage, her eyes fixed on her wrist-mounted tracker. The ghost signal of ATID-60202 pulsed, weak and ancient. ATID-60202-47-44 Min

"ATID-60202-47-44," she whispered into her suit’s comm, overriding the safety locks with a bypass code she’d spent six months stealing. "Min, initiating solo EVA." The designation was

47 degrees, 44 minutes.

Forty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes. The angle of the distress beacon’s final vector before it was swallowed by the accretion disk of a dead star. The debris field was a slow, silent ballet of broken dreams

She cut the channel and set a new course. Not toward the salvage vessel. Not toward the nearest spaceport. Toward the relay station on Titan, where a journalist was waiting for proof of the ATID cover-up.

She found it wedged inside the crumpled cockpit of a lifeboat. Not a drone.