The Cold Trace

"It's back," Dr. Christofer said, voice a raw scrape against the ambient hum of the comms lab. He didn't turn from the main display, a shimmering aurora of data points that shouldn't exist. "Stronger this time."

Morgan, hunched over a diagnostics console, didn't bother to look up. "Naturally. Everything impossible here has a nasty habit of escalating. Why break a trend?" Her fingers danced across the holographic interface, the blue light reflecting in her tired eyes. The air felt thin, like an argument held too long, tinged with the familiar metallic static that always accompanied Christofer's more frantic moments.

Christofer sighed, a sound that carried the weight of too many sleepless nights and too much bad coffee. "No, Morgan. This is... different. The periodicity, it’s tighter. More deliberate." He gestured vaguely at the swirling data, a constellation of bright anomalies against the deep space background. Outside the reinforced viewport, the blizzard was a furious white wall, pressing against the station like a forgotten ghost.

Morgan finally pushed off her console, the swivel chair groaning in protest. She walked to the main display, hands shoved deep into the pockets of her oversized, faded parka. The cold in the station was a constant companion, a damp chill that never truly left your bones, regardless of the internal climate controls. It was winter, had been for months, a perpetual whiteout that bled into the very infrastructure of Station Cerberus. The data on the screen pulsed, a rhythmic, impossible beat. It looked like nothing she had ever analysed, not star-charts, not atmospheric feedback, not even the random noise of solar flares. It was… organised. Maliciously so.

"Deliberate implies intent, Doctor," Morgan said, her voice flat. She traced a pattern with a gloved finger on the glass of the display, watching the digital aurora shimmer beneath her touch. "Are we now theorising sentient interference from the void? Because last week it was 'gravitational lensing anomalies', and the week before that, 'unforeseen atmospheric interference from an undiscovered gas giant'. Pick a theory, please. My cynical capacity for belief is running low."

Christofer finally turned, his face a roadmap of exhaustion. Deep shadows clung beneath his eyes, and his usually meticulous hair was a wild, greying mess. He looked like a man who’d seen too much, or perhaps, not enough of anything comprehensible. "Zachary thought… Zachary had a different idea."

At the mention of Zachary, Morgan felt a familiar twist in her gut, a coil of resentment and something colder. Zachary, with his bright ideas and even brighter, more insufferable optimism. Zachary, who had vanished three weeks ago, leaving behind only the impossible signal and a faint, acrid smell of burnt plastic in his personal quarters.

"Zachary thought a lot of things, Doctor," Morgan replied, her gaze still fixed on the screen, avoiding Christofer’s haunted eyes. "Mostly, he thought he was smarter than the safety protocols. Remember the phase-oscillator incident? Or the time he tried to 'optimise' the hydroponics system and nearly flooded Level 4?" She felt a faint tremor in her right hand, a phantom static that sometimes accompanied the signal’s more intense bursts. She clenched her fist, pushing the sensation down.

Christofer flinched, as if she’d struck him. He looked away, back to the data. "This is different. His last logs… he was convinced it was a communicative entity. Not just a phenomenon. Something… responding." His voice dropped to a near whisper, lost amidst the station’s low drone and the blizzard’s relentless assault.

Morgan finally turned to him, a bitter laugh caught in her throat. "A communicative entity that pulled him into a dimensional rift, perhaps? Or transmuted him into a particularly stubborn patch of ice? Because that’s roughly what we’ve got. A signal, and a missing colleague. The two correlate, but causation… that’s a stretch, even for Zachary."

She walked over to Zachary's old workstation, still powered on, though the screen saver depicted a swirling galaxy, utterly irrelevant to their current predicament. Dust had begun to settle on the keyboard, fine grey powder that spoke of abandonment. Morgan tapped a key, bringing up the last active files. His notes. A chaotic mess of diagrams, equations, and rambling personal observations. Just like Zachary.

"He was obsessing over the harmonics," Christofer said, watching her. "The way the signal seemed to layer. Like a chord, not a single note."

Morgan scrolled through a hastily scrawled entry from three weeks prior. *“The resonance frequency is almost… familiar. A pattern in the noise. Not noise. Melody? God, this is insane. But the more I listen, the clearer it gets.”* She scoffed. "Melody. Right. From a sector of space that should be nothing but interstellar dust and vacuum."

"He wasn't wrong about the harmonics, Morgan," Christofer insisted, moving closer, his breath smelling of stale coffee and something sharp, like uncleaned metal. "Our long-range scans, after his disappearance… they show a local energy fluctuation in Sector 7-Gamma. A consistent, rhythmic pulse. It’s small, almost undetectable, but it's there. And it's synchronised with the signal we're getting here."

Morgan felt a knot tighten in her chest. "Synchronised? Within Cerberus?" This was new. Christofer had been cagey about the internal readings, attributing them to instrument malfunctions or power surges. Her cynicism warred with a prickle of genuine unease. The cold in the lab seemed to deepen, an insidious bite that went beyond temperature, a cold that felt like it came from inside the walls.

"Yes. A localised… resonance. Faint, but growing." Christofer pointed at a secondary holographic projection that popped up beside the main display. It showed a schematic of Station Cerberus, its labyrinthine corridors and labs. A small, pulsing red dot appeared in a section of Level 3, deep beneath the living quarters, near the decommissioned geothermal core access. A forgotten corner, rarely visited.

"Level 3? That’s… storage. And the old core access. Nothing but empty containers and dead ends down there." Morgan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the station’s abysmal heating. Level 3 was a dark, echoing place, prone to power fluctuations and strange drafts. It was the kind of place you only went if you had to, usually for forgotten equipment that wasn't worth the trouble of retrieval.

"Zachary was down there, often, in his last week," Christofer admitted, rubbing his temples. "Said he was 'chasing the echo'. I told him to focus on the external signature. He… didn't listen."

Morgan stared at the red dot, pulsing like a tiny, malignant heart. *Chasing the echo.* The phrase felt wrong, unsettlingly poetic coming from Zachary. She tried to recall Zachary's movements, his mannerisms, in those last days. He'd been withdrawn, yes, but also… strangely animated. A jittery energy that she'd dismissed as caffeine jitters and pre-breakdown enthusiasm.

"Did anyone else go down to Level 3 with him?" she asked, her voice hushed. The image of the swirling blizzard outside seemed to intensify, as if the storm itself was listening. The station's hum felt louder, more insistent.

Christofer shook his head slowly. "Not that anyone reported. He worked alone on his 'pet project'. He was convinced he was on the verge of… something. He mentioned a unique mineral deposit in the core access tunnel. Something that could amplify… anything."

Morgan felt a faint tingling on her tongue, like licking a battery terminal. She’d experienced it before, always when the signal spiked. A slight disorientation, a feeling that her vision was lagging behind reality by a fraction of a second. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. The lab looked normal. Just the flickering data, the grey-faced Christofer, and the oppressive white outside.

"A mineral deposit amplifying a communicative entity from deep space, manifesting as a rhythmic hum in a decommissioned tunnel, coinciding with Zachary's disappearance," Morgan summChristofered, her voice dry as a desert wind. "Sounds like a Tuesday to me. Shall we grab our Geiger counters and some very strong coffee?"

Christofer didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. "I've already sealed off the access points, for safety. But the signal is strengthening. It's almost… trying to get out." He shivered, a small, involuntary twitch of his shoulders. "And the environmental sensors in that zone are returning… abnormal readings. Temperature fluctuations. Gravitational anomalies. And… a constant low-level static discharge." His finger hovered over the red dot, a tremor running through his hand.

Morgan felt a sudden spike of static in her hair, making it stand on end for a split second, then fall flat. The metallic tang in the air sharpened, almost to the point of pain. It felt like being too close to a faulty high-voltage line, that uncomfortable prickle on the skin. "Static discharge? That's… not good. Especially not near the old core. Any idea what kind of energy it's drawing on?"

"That's the problem, Morgan. It's not drawing on anything we're familiar with. It's… generating. From within the anomaly itself. The energy signature is unlike anything in our database. It's almost... organic, but with a crystalline structure." Christofer finally met her gaze, and for the first time, Morgan saw genuine fear, not just exhaustion. "Zachary was convinced it was evolving. That it was learning."

Morgan’s breath hitched, not from fear, but from the sudden, chilling clarity that settled over her. Evolving. Learning. She thought of Zachary, his relentless curiosity, his tendency to push boundaries until they shattered. She thought of the silence that had followed his disappearance, a silence now punctuated by this impossible hum. The image of him, alone in that dark, cold tunnel, 'chasing the echo', suddenly felt less like reckless abandon and more like a terrible, deliberate act of engagement.

Her gaze drifted back to the swirling, complex patterns on the main screen, the deep-space signal that pulsed with a deceptive rhythm. It was a melody, Christofer had said, Zachary had thought. A chord. She closed her eyes, and in the sudden darkness, she could almost hear it, not with her ears, but with some deeper, more primal sense. A low, persistent vibration that resonated within her own skull, a feeling she had dismissed as stress, as too much coffee, as the perpetual low-frequency thrum of the station itself.

But it wasn't the station. It was something else. Something in the hum felt familiar. She’d heard it before, unconsciously, in the quiet moments before sleep, a faint, almost subliminal beat beneath the blizzard’s roar. A memory clawed at the edge of her awareness, a snippet of a tune from an old data-stream, something Zachary used to play on his off-hours, a forgotten pop song from Earth, decades past. It was absurd. It couldn't be. But the more she tried to deny it, the more the rhythm asserted itself, a ghost in the machine of her own mind.