“Nothing disappears just because someone wanted it forgotten.”
My father used to say that.
At the time I thought he was talking about people.
The message found me in E02-IK.
There was nothing unusual about receiving encrypted traffic in Great Wildlands. The region has never belonged entirely to anyone, whatever the sovereignty maps might say. The Republic maintains its interests there. The Thukker move through it according to older roads. Capsuleers come and go. Pirates do the same. There are stations where a stranger can remain a stranger for years, provided she pays what she owes and does not ask too many questions.
For someone like me, it was a useful kind of place.
I was flying with the Caravan then. Exploration, courier work, salvage when the opportunity presented itself; the sort of work that sounds directionless only to people accustomed to fixed destinations.
The packet had no sender identification and no corporate seal. Its encryption was better than that used by most private contractors and considerably less theatrical than the codes preferred by the Angel Cartel’s ordinary agents.
That was the first reason I should have ignored it.
The second was the contents.
Coordinates.
A timetable.
Payment upon completion.
No explanation of what I was being asked to retrieve, and no indication of who would receive it when I was done.
Simple work.
My father had an opinion about simple work as well.
The most dangerous jobs, he once told me, are the ones you understand immediately.
I accepted.
The first coordinates led to a wormhole.
There was nothing remarkable about that either. Wormholes appear throughout New Eden, brief openings into places that obey the same laws as everywhere else but have spent long enough beyond ordinary reach to feel as though they should not.
I had passed through many of them.
This one led to Sleeper ruins.
The structures were old even by the standards of the empires. Some were intact, others broken open by time, scavengers or previous expeditions. Power remained in parts of the complex. Sleeper systems have a habit of doing that. Something can hang silent for centuries and then turn a weapon on you with all the enthusiasm of a machine that believes you arrived five seconds ago.
Someone else had been there recently.
That was apparent before I reached the first data structure.
There were beacon housings of Cartel manufacture attached to ancient pylons, power couplings fitted where no Sleeper engineer would have put them, and a Republic-derived control core connected to equipment that predated the Republic by an uncomfortable margin.
The installation had not been repaired.
It had been disturbed.
There is a difference.
Whoever had done it knew enough to wake pieces of the complex without waking all of it. The sentry systems were active. The main network was not. It left the site dangerous without making it impossible to enter.
Which, I later understood, was the point.
I went to work.
Capsuleers develop bad habits around information.
We learn very quickly that almost everything in New Eden can be assigned a value. Mineral composition. Navigation data. Military intelligence. Industrial research. The contents of a cargo hold. The identity of a pilot who crossed a gate six minutes ago.
Information is cargo that does not always appear on a manifest.
So when I opened the first archive, I copied more than I had been asked to copy.
Not much more.
Enough.
The system had been overwritten several times. Sections of the original archive were missing. Others had been deliberately corrupted. Most people would have considered the remainder useless.
Most people do not spend their lives digging through abandoned places.
Deleted data is rarely gone. It becomes fragments, references, addresses pointing nowhere. Given enough pieces, sometimes the absence itself has a shape.
I found a name inside that shape.
Halo Division.
I knew it.
Not well.
Years before, in a station whose name I no longer remember, I had heard two men discussing Halo Division beside a loading gantry. They lowered their voices when they used the name. One noticed me listening and stopped talking.
I had forgotten the conversation.
Or believed I had.
Nothing disappears just because someone wanted it forgotten.
There were more sites.
The coordinates led from one to another, sometimes through known systems and sometimes through transient routes that lasted barely long enough for me to use them.
At each location I found a beacon.
At each beacon I delivered part of the data specified in the contract.
And at each site I searched a little further than the contract required.
The fragments accumulated.
Some were technical records. Some were mission identifiers. Others appeared to be navigational surveys created long before the present operation.
One was different.
It carried the remains of a Thukker pathfinder log.
That stopped me.
The Thukker have crossed the spaces between other people’s borders for generations. Routes that appear empty on an empire chart may have histories known to families, caravans and clans who travelled them long before anyone bothered to register a stargate connection.
My father had been one of those people.
Not a famous one.
The Thukker have produced enough legends without needing to invent another.
He had simply travelled.
When I was young, he would tell me stories during long crossings. Most were about places. Some were about people. A few were about things he had found and later wished he had not.
Those stories often ended abruptly.
I used to think he had become tired.
Later I learned to recognize the difference between forgetting a story and deciding not to finish it.
Get Marcel Krause’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The recovered log was incomplete, but the coordinates were not.
I knew some of them.
My father had known them too.
After that, the contract changed.
Not officially.
The instructions remained the same.
Travel to the marked location. Retrieve the specified material. Deliver it into the waiting beacon. Continue to the next coordinate.
But I was no longer following the route because someone was paying me.
I wanted to know where it had begun.
And someone wanted to know how far I would follow it.
I first noticed the ship after the third site.
A reconnaissance frigate, operating under Angel Cartel identification.
It remained outside practical engagement range and made no attempt to communicate. When I moved, it moved. When I left a system, I would sometimes see it again several jumps later.
There are many ways to threaten someone.
Locking weapons is among the least imaginative.
The pilot never locked me.
That made the message clearer.
I was being observed.
For a while I considered abandoning the contract.
The sensible reasons accumulated quickly. The Cartel was involved. Unknown Sleeper technology was involved. Someone had taken considerable trouble to erase Halo Division from the surviving archives, while someone else was now paying me to retrace its movements.
And somewhere underneath all of it was a Thukker expedition connected to routes my father had travelled.
I continued.
Curiosity is often described as a desire to discover something new.
That is not always true.
Sometimes we continue because we are afraid we already know what we are going to find.
The last set of coordinates took me into low security space.
By then the Cartel presence was no longer being concealed.
The station where the route ended serviced enough Angel vessels that the smell reached me before I left the docking gantry: hot lubricant, scorched insulation and the particular residue left by engines that receive more maintenance than cleaning.
I knew that smell from years before.
I finished the contract.
Every packet was delivered.
Every beacon confirmed receipt.
Nothing remained outstanding.
The payment appeared in my account shortly afterward. There was no message attached. No congratulations. No new instructions.
The observing frigate disappeared.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead I returned to my ship and opened the copy I had kept.
I had been careful.
The material was isolated from the ship network, stripped of executable content and reconstructed from fragments across several separate storage systems.
What remained was incomplete.
But incomplete things can still tell the truth.
Halo Division had operated along the same chain I had just travelled.
The Cartel knew about it.
The Thukker had encountered something connected to it before them.
And my father had known at least part of the route.
I remembered all those unfinished stories.
For the first time, I wondered whether the missing endings had not been omissions at all.
Perhaps they had been instructions.
Stop here.
Do not follow.
Leave this thing where you found it.
Word travelled through the Caravan eventually.
It always did.
Someone knew I had taken Cartel work. Someone else knew about the Sleeper sites. A third person had apparently seen the reconnaissance vessel shadowing me.
By the time the fragments became a story, the story had acquired a name of its own.
Halo.
I heard what was being said.
She is walking too close to it.
Perhaps they were right.
There is an edge to every map, though not the kind drawn around regions or constellations. It is the point where knowledge stops being useful and begins demanding something from the person who possesses it.
My father reached that edge once.
Of that I am now certain.
What he found beyond it, I still do not know.
I used to believe his silence meant that he had left the answer behind.
Now I understand him better.
“Nothing disappears just because someone wanted it forgotten.”
Sometimes it waits.
And sometimes, years later, it sends coordinates.
