Seventeen Minutes
by ReadersBase Author
Twelve years after Alpha-9 was declared destroyed, a rescue pilot answers its beacon and spends her return reserve to reach the survivors. The people who kept them alive also kept secrets. Hard science fiction.
Read an excerpt
T-17:00 The receiver marked Alpha-9 as a dead asset and offered to suppress its emergency tone. Kai Voss took her thumb off ACKNOWLEDGE. A narrow line stood above the noise on the spectrum display. It weakened, returned, and held long enough to deliver a station identifier. The Mark IV-7 had already opened the corresponding public file beneath it: forty-seven confirmed dead, station unrecoverable, no authorized inhabitants. She disabled suppression. “Validate the carrier. Keep the raw packet.” The tone stopped when she routed it into her headset. In the cabin the circulation fan became audible again, a dry rattle behind her left shoulder. She hooked a foot under the restraint bar and brought the spectrum closer. Alpha-9 lay in the decommission belt. Twelve years ago a fragment had struck its habitation ring during a maintenance shift. Kai knew the image used in training: a wheel broken at Section Seven, the rest of the structure apparently intact. The lesson had been that an intact silhouette told a rescue pilot very little. “Origin coordinates consistent with Alpha-9 orbital track,” the ship said. “Deviation point-zero-three percent. Carrier integrity ninety-nine-point-one…
Created with AI writing tools on ReadersBase. Read our editorial policy.
This static book page is emitted at build time so social crawlers and search tools receive the book title, description, canonical URL, and available cover metadata before the ReadersBase app hydrates.