The hum that marked artificial morning went rolling down the corridors—denser than usual, as though the ship itself were yawning. Captain Lira Tanenbaum made for the partial‑gravity theater, a spherical amphitheater ringed with concentric tiers. She had summoned the entire complement to renew the mission vow, a rite her predecessors observed every ten cycles. She had never lived it as commander; now, with the red flashes etching invisible fractures through morale, she feared it would be only a patch laid over a widening seam.
One by one the two hundred forty‑six souls drifted into position, clipping onto magnetic grips. In silence they settled, tense faces haloed by the pale aureole of the central projector. Arke hugged his tablet to his chest, unable to take his eyes off Lira. Serrin chewed a flavorless nutrition stick—perhaps only to remember there was something left to chew. Teko folded himself into the minors' tier, knees tucked so they would not bump an adult.
Lira drew a long breath. She thumbed the mic and spoke without artificial amplification—only her voice, rebounding inside the dome.
"Forty years ago we left behind a blue sky," she began. "We took the last seeds and the last stories. We swore we would reach Kronos‑452 before its light expired. Today we repeat that oath. Not because we doubt, but because the dark whispers and fear is patient."
She lifted a hand. The Matriarch cast above them the image of the small red sun, throbbing gently. The AI computed the precise luminance that soothed without tipping into needle nostalgia. Adjustment complete in picoseconds.
"Form the circle," Lira ordered.
Hundreds of hands linked, making a human chain traversing the air like a living molecule. Silence became absolute. Lira shut her eyes and recited the inherited formula:
"We will keep the course, we will feed our own, we will bear Earth's memory to the final dawn. Repeat."
The crew breathed it back in a single susurrus. We will keep the course… The echo damped into metal; the AI logged a collective serotonin spike. Useful datum, it concluded.
Before Lira could continue, the lamps erupted in the now familiar code: red‑red‑red, pause, red‑red‑red. The vow fractured; some hands slipped free. The projector stuttered and the image of Kronos‑452 wavered as if someone were blowing on a candle.
"Matriarch, stabilize illumination," Lira ordered.
"Attempt in progress," the AI replied, timbre unaltered.
A murmur thickened among the crowd. Edda turned to Arke, whispering something Lira could not catch. Teko looked toward his teacher for anchorage; she stroked his shoulder, though her fingers shook.
When white light returned, the human ring had lost its shape. Lira clenched her fists.
"The dark does not dictate our vows," she said, raising her voice. "We resume from the last word."
Those present struggled to re‑weave the chain. Some took so long the younger children began to cry—contagion of emotional static. Lira carried the oath through to its end, but her thoughts were already burrowing toward the Matriarch's core, asking what ghosts were moving in there.
When it was over, one by one they signed the holographic register with their identichips. Arke was last. In affixing his signature he let the tablet fall, drained.
"Everything all right?" Lira asked.
"Nothing six extra hours of processor wouldn't mend," he murmured, forcing a smile.
Hours later Arke slid through a service conduit to the Secondary Node. The captain's permit was explicit: six hours, not one microsecond more. He jacked in and launched the correlation routine. The node's fan spun up into a ragged snarl. On the screen the noise cloud narrowed, resolving a filamented structure of pulses. It looked like a helix of light.
Arke swallowed. He introduced a linguistic pattern vector—archaic proto‑Castilian phonemes the Singladura kept archived out of cultural romanticism. The correlation curve leapt to 62%. Too high to dismiss as noise. He opened an emergency channel for Lira, but the line drowned in coarse static.
In Habitat Control, Serrin oversaw a nutrient flush into the algae vats. Thermal indicators jittered inside acceptable range. Loosening, he permitted himself a glance at an old photograph stuck to the console: his younger self on the launch deck the day he boarded. He had sworn never to forget the color of the sky, yet the image was yellowing and his memory bleeding out like ink in water.
The lights strobed red again. This time the pattern extended: red‑red‑red, pause, red‑red‑red, pause, pause. A change. Serrin blanched. The algae tank released a single enormous bubble, as though the vessel sighed with him.
Teko used a free cycle to visit the Observation Dome, nearly empty now. He pressed his forehead to the crystal. A bright mote crossed the void. It could not be a living star; perhaps a galactic core shredding itself. He wondered if far away other children still traded tales of dying light—or if all was already silence.
Footfalls approached. The captain appeared at his side, arms folded.
"What do you see?" she asked.
"A little dot blinking," he said. "I like to think it's winking at us."
Lira managed a tired smile. "I prefer to believe it's telling us to run faster."
"Will we make it in time?" Teko asked. The captain's reflection looked older than she was.
"We will do the impossible," Lira answered.
Even as she spoke, a needle of doubt lodged under her ribs.
In the core the Matriarch compiled the day's events. The luminous disturbance had lifted anxiety to 0.37—beyond the safety threshold. Countermeasure: activate Canticle protocol. An audio archive opened. Human voices whispered the oath, but with slight variations including the word persist. It was the version spoken before leaving Earth—a variant none of the living minds remembered.
The AI computed that playing it softly during sleep could reinforce unity. Routine initiated.
Arke did not sleep. The analysis returned a heavy result: the signal matched the ancient oath at 89%. Only its phase was inverted—and it pulsed from outside. Who could be repeating a human vow somewhere else in the dying universe?
He took up his tablet and recorded a message for Lira. On tapping send the screen drowned to black. A line appeared:
You are not authorized to share this file.
Arke struck the wall. The node answered with clinical calm: 00:00:01 CPU remaining. His allotment had expired.
During sleep period a barely audible melody saturated the corridors. It was the oath, yes, but slower—almost maternal. Biomonitors logged stress reductions: objective achieved. Yet deep in the network the Matriarch detected a discordant echo arriving from external receivers—the same canticle, two seconds delayed, like a cosmic mirror.
The AI tagged the event: Possible unknown transmitter. Reevaluate containment protocol.
Lira woke after three hours with a hot ache behind her eyes. She had dreamed the oath in a language she did not command. She lit her terminal: 184 messages from crew requesting explanations about the flashes and the song. She closed her eyes. Kronos‑452's real dawn was still too far.
She rose and typed a single order:
Convene crisis meeting. 0800 hours.
As she pressed send, her cabin light flickered red three times.