The Other Side
On Station Aurelius, Chief Science Officer Tam Beoku had been asking questions that her mission parameters did not include. The station's charter was narrow: monitor the star, process the data, transmit the findings. There was no provision for curiosity about what lay beyond the stellar horizon, no budget for scanning the far side of KOI-7842, no reason to suspect that the vast burning sphere they orbited might be hiding something in its shadow. And yet. The thermal readings from the star's southern hemisphere were fractionally — almost imperceptibly — wrong. As if something on the other side were absorbing energy that the models predicted should radiate freely into space.
Tam had mentioned this to Commander Desai exactly once. He had listened patiently, reviewed the data, and explained that the discrepancy was within the margin of error for a star in terminal decline. He was probably right. Terminal stars were unpredictable. The models were approximations. A fraction of a degree across millions of kilometres of superheated plasma was, by any reasonable standard, nothing. But Tam had not become a scientist by accepting reasonable standards, and the discrepancy nagged at her the way a wrong note nags at a musician — not because it was loud, but because it was precise.
When the data leak hit Station Aurelius's systems, it arrived disguised as a sensor calibration update — the