Seventeen Minutes

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Seventeen Minutes Chapter 1: T-17:00 The beacon began as a blemish in the noise floor. Kai Voss caught it because she was already staring at the spectrum display when the line rose and held instead of dissolving back into static. Most pilots let the Mark IV's receiver sort patrol traffic from radiation hiss. She watched the raw feed when the corridor was quiet because it gave her something finite to do with her eyes and hands when the rest of space refused to offer edges. Numbers behaved. Frequency drift behaved. Vacuum behaved. People did not always behave. The signal tagged itself with emergency priority, then spat a station identifier into her console in a burst of chopped syllables. ALPHA-9. Kai's fingers stopped over the touchglass. Outside the forward canopy, the patrol sector stretched like black plate scored by thin lines of starlight. No nearby traffic. No mining rigs. No habitat flares. Just her one-person rescue craft cruising the outer lane above the dead arc of the decommission belt. She replayed the burst. ALPHA-9. Her throat went dry in a way she distrusted immediately. She checked the cabin oxygen, because that was a number and therefore real. Seventy-eight percent…