Chapter 11 · free to read
Forty light-hours out and forty back. Eighty hours for an answer, on a station that had four days ago held six people and now held one.
HALVARD REACH. DO NOT ANSWER ANY CARRIER ON BAND NINE. LOG NOTHING. COUNT YOUR PEOPLE DAILY. KESTREL-9 IS LOST. Nineteen words. He had cut it four times.
Hour nine. Hour twenty. Hour forty-four. He talked to the photograph, out loud, every hour, the way he had promised.
Eighty hours. Long enough for the whole thing to have been a fault in his own head, which was the version he had spent four days hoping for.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.