Wake cycle completed.
Six of us are awake. Medical reports no complications beyond the expected disorientation. We were under for 11 years, 8 months, 14 days.
Navigation says we arrived exactly where we were supposed to.
That is the problem.
There is nothing here.
K-91 should be directly ahead of us. The primary star, three inner planets, the gas giant and its moons. We checked against the original survey coordinates four times. There is no navigational drift. No computational error. No deviation from the mission trajectory.
The star is gone.
At first we thought the forward array had failed. Then the long-range instruments began returning objects.
Thousands of them.
Fragments.
Some are no larger than a building. Others are several hundred kilometres across. Preliminary composition suggests silicates, iron, frozen volatiles. Planetary material. They are spread across almost two billion kilometres, moving outward from a common centre.
Whatever happened here happened to the entire system.
There is something else.
At 06:42, Sato detected a repeating signal from inside the debris field.
It is weak. Extremely weak.
We assumed it was one of our survey beacons. It isn’t.
The signal repeats every 19 seconds.
Three pulses. Pause. Three pulses. Pause. Then a sequence we haven’t been able to identify.
We changed course twenty minutes ago.
As we got closer, the signal changed.
It is no longer repeating.
It is responding to us.
We have stopped transmitting, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Sato says there is an object moving between the fragments. Navigation says that is impossible because its velocity keeps changing without any detectable propulsion.
It has altered course again.
It is coming toward us.
We are waking the remaining crew.
If this transmission reaches anyone, do not attempt to follow our coordinates. Do not send another vessel into this system. There is something here and I think it has been waiting for