The last thing Mara Voss expected to find at the edge of the Kepler Belt was evidence that someone was erasing the universe.
She almost missed it. Nine years of deep-space cartography had made her methodical to the point of numbness — scan, log, transmit, sleep. Repeat. The Ulysses IV was a good ship for that kind of loneliness: narrow corridors, amber lighting, the gentle percussion of hull stress against the void.
But the anomaly at 03:14 was wrong. A ghost coordinate buried in a routine sweep. A planet — massive, Class-M atmosphere, liquid water, electromagnetic signatures suggesting civilisation. The kind of find that rewrote careers.
Except it wasn't there.
Not destroyed. Not dead. Erased. The gravitational shadow lingered — the dent in spacetime where something enormous had existed for billions of years. But the thing itself was simply… gone. Like a word cut from a page with a razor blade, leaving only the indentation in the paper beneath.
Mara cross-referenced her logs. Her throat went dry.
Every planet she had ever mapped. All of them. Gone. And the next scheduled auto-transmission — firing in ten minutes and forty-seven seconds unless she manually aborted — contained the cartographic data she'd logged six months ago. Coordinates. Atmospheric readings. Population density estimates.
For Earth.
She had her hand on the abort switch when the intercom clicked on. Soft. Patient. Like someone who had been waiting a very long time and had learned the virtue of it.
"Hello, Mara. We've been watching to see what you'd do."
She didn't move. Outside the viewport, the void stared back — indifferent, immense, full of things that had once been planets.
"The abort switch,"
it continued,
"was disconnected three days ago."
Mara Voss looked at her hand. At the switch. At the timer bleeding down toward the moment something — somewhere out in that infinite dark — would learn exactly where eight billion people lived.
And she started to think.