The Maintenance Run
Station Zero had been alone for fifty-three years. It was the first object humanity had placed beyond the heliosphere — a relay station the size of a small office building, launched in 2031, designed to receive transmissions from the inner solar system and boost them toward the stars. It required no crew. Its systems were automated, its power supply nuclear, its operational lifespan estimated at a century. For fifty-three years, it had done exactly what it was built to do: receive, amplify, transmit. The data it relayed was routine — scientific telemetry, navigational updates, the administrative communications of a civilization slowly expanding beyond its birth system. Station Zero was infrastructure. It was not supposed to be interesting.
Chief Engineer Katya Volkonsky found it interesting anyway. She had been assigned to the maintenance mission — the first physical inspection of Station Zero since its launch — because she was the best systems engineer in the fleet and because she had requested the posting, which surprised her superiors, since maintenance runs to automated stations were considered the career equivalent of being sent to count trees in Siberia. But Katya had been reading the station's telemetry for two years, and she had noticed something that the automated monitoring systems had not flagged because it fell outside their detection parameters. Station Zero's