The Approach
thirteen chapters. one contact.

Pipeline analyst Maren Falk spends her days deciding which anomalies don’t need looking at. On a slow January shift she adjusts a filter threshold, and something comes back out of the discard pile — a heat signature at 220 AU, moving inbound at 0.003c. Source unknown. The pipeline had no category for it. She runs the check. She goes home. She can’t stop looking. Fourteen months from the inner solar system.