The Broken Gate (The Aurora Run Book 6)
About
THE BROKEN GATE
The signal did not arrive.
It revealed itself.
Starfall had been running quiet for seventeen hours when Mercer first noticed the absence.
Not a gap in transmission.
Not a loss of data.
Something more deliberate.
A subtraction.
He replayed the sensor logs twice before calling it.
“Commander.”
Hale did not look up immediately. The bridge lighting was low, instruments steady, the kind of calm that followed events too large to fully process.
“What is it?”
Mercer hesitated.
Because there was no correct way to phrase what he was seeing.
“There’s a structure in the background noise.”
Hale turned then.
“All signals have structure.”
“This one doesn’t behave like one.”
A pause.
“Explain.”
Mercer adjusted the display. At first glance, it was nothing — the familiar scatter of deep-space static, a random distribution of meaningless returns.
But then he ran the subtraction model.
And the pattern appeared.
Not added.
Revealed.
Hale leaned forward.
“What am I looking at?”
Mercer answered quietly.
“Something that removes itself before it can be detected.”