Chapter 2: What the Shard Whispers at 0300

The crate went into the cargo safe at 0127, station time.

Farro had held out until then — sitting with it in the bunk bay, watching it, not touching it through the insulated gloves he had eventually set aside because the gloves felt like theater. Whatever the crate was doing to the air in the room, it was not stopped by thermal insulation. It came up through the floor of the ship. It came through the soles of his boots. A low resonance that had no frequency his instruments could measure because he had stopped trusting his instruments somewhere around 0100, when the cargo scanner's passive monitor had displayed a faint hash of static across three seconds of its idle screen — a pattern he had stared at too long, trying to determine whether it repeated.

It did not repeat. Or it repeated too slowly for him to catch.