Until the Aurora showed them who had left the note.
Outside the viewport, Earth hung like a blue teardrop. On its surface, stock markets were already in freefall. The Secretary-General had sent three emergency messages: Cut the link. Save the economy.
He grabbed her wrist. Not hard. Just… present. 2.1 gdps
Lia reached for the master override. “Aris, we’re bankrupting the homeworld.”
They paid it.
The meter ticked past for the 713th second.
“Shut it down,” he whispered, his voice dry as the Martian dust outside the habitat. Until the Aurora showed them who had left the note
Two point one giga-dollars per second . The meter had been running for the last eleven minutes.
For eleven more minutes.
The Aurora . Humanity’s first interstellar probe. It had taken thirty years and the GDP of a mid-sized continent to build. Two weeks ago, it had arrived at Proxima Centauri b and begun transmitting data that would rewrite every textbook from here to the Andromeda Galaxy.