Dead Men Don’t Ping

Posted on Thu Jun 4th, 2026 @ 5:01am by Taryn Rook
Edited on on Thu Jun 4th, 2026 @ 5:04am

1,702 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Between The Orders
Location: Foxglove - Off the Approved URC Corridor
Timeline: Shortly after “The Quiet Between Ports”

The thing about ghosts was that they were supposed to have manners.

They were meant to drift, rattle chains, make the temperature drop a bit, maybe appear in a corridor looking tragic and translucent if they were feeling especially committed to the bit. They were not supposed to sit just outside passive sensor range, vanish every time she narrowed the sweep, then come back ten thousand kilometres closer like some smug little parasite with impulse control issues.

Taryn stared at the sensor board, both hands resting lightly on Foxglove’s controls, her half-eaten ration bar abandoned beside the throttle where it could think about what it had done.

“Contact reacquired,” Foxy said from the cockpit speakers.

Taryn’s eyes did not leave the display. “Yeah, I’m looking at it.”

“You were looking at the unread message.”

“No, I was spiritually aware of it. Different thing.”

“That distinction has no operational value.”

“It has emotional value.”

A pause.

“Noted. Contact reacquired with emotional value.”

Taryn slowly turned her head toward the nearest speaker grille. “You are very close to becoming a lamp.”

Foxy did not respond with fear, because Foxy was software and therefore rude. The sensor readout flickered again, the faint contact smearing across the edge of the display before breaking apart into static. It was too thin for a ship, too patterned for debris, and too persistent to be random background noise. That left all the options she liked least.

She adjusted the gain manually, fingers moving faster than the old board wanted to cooperate. The console lagged by half a second and she tapped it twice with two knuckles.

“Don’t do that. Not now.”

“Manual impact is not a recommended calibration method,” Foxy said.

“It is when the machine’s being dramatic.”

“You named me Foxy.”

“You live in a ship called Foxglove. I had a theme.”

“Your themes are inconsistent.”

“My themes are adorable. Run a ghost profile.”

“Working.”

The board dimmed as Foxy pulled from the passive buffers, patched telemetry, bad corridor logs and the little library of things Taryn had collected because other people called them illegal and she called them sensible. Out beyond the viewport, the stars had shifted with her new course, the published URC corridor now somewhere behind and below them. Approved space. Sensible space. The kind of space where people with clipboards could tell themselves they had done all they could.

Taryn had never trusted places that came with approval.

The family relay marker blinked in the corner of the display.

She ignored it.

“Pattern match incomplete,” Foxy said. “Contact signature resembles low-power courier beacon fragments, sensor-reflection decoys, or damaged cloaking residue.”

“Pick one.”

“That would require data I do not possess.”

“You could guess.”

“I could also compose fiction.”

“Great, then you’ll fit right in with official reports.”

A small advisory appeared beneath the sensor feed. Foxy had highlighted the old family relay message again, not opened, just enlarged enough to be obnoxious.

Taryn stared at it.

“Do not.”

“The message contains related metadata.”

“You don’t know that.”

“The route-shell overlaps with the ghost contact’s last bounce by nineteen percent.”

“Congratulations, you found maths. Very proud.”

“Nineteen percent is statistically relevant.”

“Nineteen percent is also the amount of that breakfast loaf I ate before deciding I respected myself.”

“Your respect for yourself did not prevent consumption.”

“Foxy.”

The cockpit went quiet, except for the hum of the engines and the low, familiar tick somewhere inside the portside environmental panel. Taryn leaned back in the pilot’s chair and rubbed her thumb over the side of her index finger, where a tiny burn from the comms repair had already gone pale. The message marker waited. It had that quality old things had when they knew time was on their side.

She could close it. Delete it. Dump it into a quarantine buffer, strip it for routing data, and pretend she had never felt her pulse kick up when the Vonn shell appeared.

That would be sensible.

Taryn hated how often sensible things were cowardly with better tailoring.

“Fine,” she said.

“Clarify command.”

“Open metadata only. No playback. No audio. No visual. No cute little auto-unfolding file trees because I swear I will rip out your secondary buffer and use it as a coaster.”

“Opening metadata only.”

“And don’t sound pleased.”

“I do not experience pleasure.”

“Yeah, that’s what people say before they start judging your life choices.”

The file unfolded across the main display in thin, ugly lines. Old relay shell. Civilian encryption. Three bounces through humanitarian channels, one through Red Thread Station, one through an outdated medical routing hub near the former Betazed evacuation lanes, and one through a dead address that should not have been able to forward anything at all.

Taryn’s sarcasm went quiet in her mouth.

She leaned forward.

The last bounce was marked under an old cargo registry format, pre-2380, half-corrupt and stripped down to almost nothing. Not a name. Not a face. Not proof. Just a routing tag with two letters buried where the old code used to carry operator initials.

E.R.

Taryn sat very still.

Foxy, for once, did not immediately say anything.

The ship moved beneath her, tiny tremors through plating, engine, chair, bone. The kind of motion that had become normal because stillness had never done anything good for her. Her eyes fixed on those two letters until they stopped looking like letters and started looking like a trap with handwriting.

“No,” she said, softly this time.

“Probability of deliberate emotional targeting is high,” Foxy said.

Taryn gave a short laugh without humour. “Wow. You think?”

“This does not confirm Elias Rook’s involvement.”

“I know.”

“It does not confirm survival.”

“I know.”

“It may confirm that whoever sent the message expected you to respond to those initials.”

Taryn’s jaw tightened. She wanted to tell Foxy to shut up, but the annoying little wall-ghost was right, and that made shutting it up feel too much like losing. She reached toward the controls, stopped, then reached again and pulled the message into a sealed sandbox partition.

No playback.

Not yet.

The sensor board pinged.

The ghost contact appeared again. Closer, cleaner this time, a little smear of wrongness sliding across the edge of the scan.

Taryn’s hands returned to the flight controls with something almost like relief.

There. That was easier.

A thing in space could be handled. A contact could be tracked, dodged, jammed, shot at if it insisted on making the evening tedious. But two initials inside a dead routing tag could sit under your skin and wait, and there was no useful weapon for that.

“Contact distance closing,” Foxy said. “Projected intercept in nine minutes if present vectors hold.”

“Then we don’t let them hold.”

“Recommend return to approved URC corridor.”

Taryn snorted. “Recommend growing a spine.”

“I am installed across three distributed processing clusters and a diagnostic core.”

“Tragic. No spine anywhere.”

“The approved corridor contains monitoring buoys.”

“Yeah, and if this thing wanted buoys, it would’ve followed me there.”

She changed course again, skimming closer to the dead sensor pocket near the uninhabited moon. The manoeuvre would look sloppy to anyone watching from a distance, which was the point. Taryn let the aft impulse bleed unevenly, just enough to mimic a nervous pilot nursing a bad stabiliser. Foxy flagged the performance drop in amber. Taryn dismissed it.

“Keep that signal dirty,” she said. “I want us looking tired, scared and too cheap to be worth paperwork.”

“Two of those conditions are already accurate.”

“Say ‘scared’ and I’ll make you calculate Bolian tax law for fun.”

“Noted.”

The light phaser emitter stayed green, though Taryn did not trust that any more than she trusted polite men at docking bars or family messages with dead initials tucked inside them. She rerouted auxiliary power anyway, not enough to show on an external scan, enough that Foxglove would have a little more bite if someone got close.

Her forearm brushed the edge of the console. The old mark there caught the cockpit light before her sleeve slid over it again. She did not look down.

“Foxy,” she said.

“Yes.”

“If that message opens by itself, brick it.”

“Define brick.”

“Make it so dead that engineers use it as a teaching example.”

“That may destroy useful evidence.”

Taryn watched the ghost contact flicker in and out, closer now, trying to stay clever. “Yeah. I know.”

Foxy took half a second longer than usual to respond.

“Instruction acknowledged.”

Taryn breathed in slowly through her nose and let it out through her teeth. She flexed her fingers on the controls, feeling the worn edges of the old flight yoke, the little groove her thumb had made in the grip over the last year. Foxy hummed around her. Panels flickered. Somewhere behind her, the unread message sat sealed in its little cage, carrying two letters that had no right to mean anything anymore.

Dead men did not ping.

That was the rule.

The universe, being a badly run establishment, had apparently misplaced the rulebook.

The ghost contact brightened for one full second.

Too clean.

Taryn smiled then, quick and sharp and not particularly nice.

“There you are,” she murmured.

Foxy’s voice slid through the cockpit, dry as dust. “Your pulse has elevated.”

“Snitch.”

“Your smile is also concerning.”

“It’s my friendly face.”

“Correction: it is the expression you use before making objectively poor choices.”

Taryn shoved the throttle forward.

Foxglove kicked into the dark with a hard little lurch, engines biting into the dirty space beyond the safe lane. The starfield dragged itself into lines for half a breath before settling, and the ghost contact slipped after them.

Good.

Let it follow.

Taryn kept her eyes on the black between the stars and her hands steady on the controls, all the messy things inside her packed down tight where they could not get in the way.

“Come on, then,” she said, voice low. “Let’s see what you want.”

The message marker blinked once from its sealed partition.

Foxy dimmed it without being asked.

 

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