The installation was clean.
That was the first thing Kade noticed, and it was wrong. Everything else on Hwa was overgrown — the roads, the landing pads, the settlements that had been abandoned for two centuries. Vines had eaten the fences. Trees had split the pavement. The planet had taken back everything the people had built, except this one structure on the geothermal shelf above the valley.
The installation was a single building, low and wide, with walls of a material Kade couldn’t identify. Not concrete. Not metal. Something that had been poured or grown and had settled into the landscape without weathering. There was no dust on it. There were no plants growing against it. The moss that covered every other surface within a hundred meters stopped at the perimeter, as if it had been told.
Kaskall-SC-2B7E sat in orbit above them. Kade could feel the Navigator’s attention the way she always did — a pressure at the edge of her awareness, the sense of being watched by something that was also the sky. The Navigator had said the installation’s power draw was consistent and enormous. It had been drawing the same amount for as long as the records went back. The Navigator did not speculate about what the power was for. The Navigator rarely speculated about anything.
Kade walked the perimeter. Remi walked with her. Bira stayed at the ship’s shuttle, monitoring the atmospheric readings, which were normal. The air was breathable. The gravity was comfortable. Hwa had been a good world, once. The soil was rich. The climate was mild. Three hundred thousand people had lived here, and then they hadn’t.
There was an interface on the south wall. Kade had studied the survey notes on the approach and knew where to look. It was a panel set into the wall at chest height, with a screen and a keypad. The screen was on. It had been on for two hundred years.
The screen displayed a single line of text:
Messages in buffer: 1,247Kade pressed a key. The screen refreshed.
Messages in buffer: 1,247She pressed another key. A menu appeared. Options: READ, ARCHIVE, SEND. She selected READ. A list scrolled — names, dates, origin systems. The messages were sorted by arrival date. The oldest had been in the buffer for two hundred and three years. The most recent had arrived six months ago, routed through four intermediate Relay nodes from a system called Maund.
Six months ago. Someone on Maund had sent a message to someone on Hwa. They had sent it knowing it would take years to arrive. They had sent it knowing that no one on Hwa had spoken through the Relay in two centuries. They had sent it anyway.
Kade didn’t read the messages. They weren’t hers.
She selected SEND. The screen changed. A text field appeared, blinking.
She stood there for a while. Remi was examining the wall, running a hand along the surface. He looked at Kade and then at the screen.
“You going to say something?” Remi asked.
“To who?”
Remi shrugged. He didn’t have an answer. Kade didn’t either.
Three hundred thousand people were inside the wall. The power draw said they were there. The stable, constant, enormous draw of a system running at capacity, doing something, sustaining something. The installation was self-maintaining. It didn’t need anything from outside. It had never needed anything from outside. That was the point of it.
The people inside had walked in two hundred years ago and closed the door behind them. They had left the interface on. They had left the Relay node active. They had left a way to receive messages, but not a way to respond. Or not a way they had chosen to use.
Kade thought about that. Two hundred years of messages, sitting in a buffer, read by no one inside. Or read by everyone inside and unanswered. She couldn’t tell which was worse.
She typed:
This is the crew of Kaskall-SC-2B7E. We are on the surface. Your installation is functioning. We are leaving in two days. If you can hear this, we will monitor the Relay on the standard frequency for the next 48 hours.She looked at it. Then she erased it and typed:
We visited. Your world is beautiful. The trees came back.She sent it. The screen refreshed.
Messages in buffer: 1,248She stared at that number for a long time. Remi had moved on, walking the perimeter, cataloguing. The sun was moving. The shadows of the trees fell across the installation’s roof, which was clean and bare.
Kade waited by the interface for an hour. The screen did not change. She came back the next day. The screen had not changed. The buffer count was the same. She sat with her back against the wall and ate a ration bar and watched the sky through the canopy. Birds — or something like birds — moved through the branches. They had been living on Hwa for longer than the installation had been there. They didn’t know what was inside the wall. They didn’t care.
On the second day, before they left, Kade went back to the interface. The buffer count was still 1,248. No response.
She almost typed something else. A question, maybe. Are you happy. Are you alive. What is it like in there. She didn’t. The questions were for her, not for them. She didn’t know if anyone inside could read the buffer. She didn’t know if they cared. She didn’t know if the interface was a door or a gravestone.
She left. The shuttle lifted. The Navigator welcomed them back without words — just the subtle shift of the ship’s attention settling over them like a change in pressure. They departed Hwa two hours later. The installation stayed behind, clean and silent and drawing power from the planet’s core, doing whatever it had been doing for two hundred years, needing nothing.
The Navigator entered the Shallows. The stars went away. Kade did not look out the porthole. She thought about the 1,248 messages in the buffer, and the 1,249th — hers — sitting alongside them. She wondered if anyone would ever read them. She wondered if that mattered.
The trees had come back. She had told them that. It was true. She didn’t know if it was a comfort.