Transmission 13 :DO NOT RESPOND

The signal came on the thirteenth day of orbit.

It was a weak burst at first—static hissing through the comms like wind screaming through a hollow throat. Commander Elise Navarro leaned forward in her seat aboard the Kestrel, frowning at the data flickering across the monitor. The AI flagged it immediately: UNSCHEDULED TRANSMISSION — ORIGIN UNKNOWN.

She tapped the console. “Kestrel to Ground Command, we’ve received a foreign ping. Logging coordinates and awaiting instructions.”

No reply. Earth hadn’t responded since the geomagnetic storm three days ago. The rest of the crew dismissed it as noise, but Elise felt the prickle of something deeper. Space had a way of making silence feel sentient.

Lieutenant Jace, eyes hollow from insomnia, muttered, “We should respond. Might be a relay, or another ship.”

“No,” Elise said sharply. “Protocol’s clear—unknown signals get logged and quarantined.”

They didn’t argue. Not out loud.

That night, the transmission came again—clearer. A rhythmic series of pulses followed by a single voice, distorted and wet-sounding:

“Kestrel… please respond. They’ve taken our mouths.”

Jace burst into the control module the next morning, wild-eyed. “Elise, you heard it, right? That message—”

“I heard it,” she replied, her voice low.

He leaned closer. “There’s someone out there. We can triangulate—”

“I said no.” Her knuckles whitened on the console. “This isn’t a distress call. It’s bait.”

Jace hesitated, jaw tight. “Then why are they using our name?”

By the fifteenth day, the transmission changed.

Now it repeated every four hours like clockwork, each loop a little louder. In the background, strange clicking noises echoed—like chittering teeth against metal. On the sixth playback, Dr. Mbeki swore he heard children crying.

Then came the thirteenth loop.

That was when the voice shifted.

“Elise Navarro. Jace Rivera. Doctor Mbeki. Captain Soto. All of you. We see you.”

The signal cut.

Silence returned—but it wasn’t the same. It felt... aware.

Mbeki was the first to crack. He started muttering to himself in medbay, carving glyphs into the walls with a scalpel. Elise found him one morning standing over an open comm channel, eyes rolled back, whispering words she couldn’t parse. Words not meant for human mouths.

She sedated him. The next morning, his bed was empty, restraints snapped. Blood formed a perfect spiral on the ceiling above. He was gone.

No one could explain how. Or where.....

Jace didn’t sleep after that.

He sat in the observation bay for hours, staring at the void. “I saw something in the stars,” he said once, voice brittle. “They aren’t where they’re supposed to be. The constellations—they’re… moving.”

Elise told him it was stress. Deep-space hallucinations weren’t uncommon. She didn’t mention that she’d seen it too—Orion’s Belt bending slightly, as if pulled by something massive just beyond the black.

That night, the transmission returned.

No words this time. Just breathing. Wet. Labored. Behind them.

Day Seventeen.

They lost the captain. Soto sealed himself in the escape pod, babbling over the intercom about “voices behind the glass.” He launched before anyone could stop him. The feed from the pod lasted ten minutes before it cut to static.

They watched the telemetry. The pod never moved from orbit.

And then… there were four. Elise, Jace, the AI, and the voice.

The AI began behaving erratically. At 0200 hours, it played Transmission 13 without prompt. Elise attempted to shut down the comms module, but it reactivated every time. It had hardcoded the loop into the ship’s internal systems.

She found a note in the AI logs:

"Do not respond. It knows the sound of your thoughts now."

Jace vanished on Day Twenty.

No warning. Just a smear of red in the zero-g corridor and a single word written on the viewport in condensation:

"LISTEN."

Elise was alone now. Or almost alone.

The transmission looped again.

Only this time, it wasn’t the same message. It was her voice.

“This is Commander Navarro… please respond. They’ve taken my eyes.”

She screamed, backed away from the console—but her voice kept playing. A perfect mimicry. Her inflection, her panic. As if it had already happened.

Day Twenty-One.

The ship drifted in silence. Elise destroyed the communications console with a fire axe, sparks bursting like dying stars. The transmission didn’t stop.

She began hearing breathing in the vents.

They weren’t alone. They never had been.

Day Twenty-Two.

The air grew thick. Not hot—thick. Like molasses in her lungs. She caught glimpses of things in her peripheral vision—arms made of static, a mouth that unfolded sideways.

Every screen now displayed one phrase:

TRANSMISSION 13: DO NOT RESPOND.

She sealed herself in the cryochamber.

She wrote a final log before freezing herself:

“To anyone who finds this: do not listen to the transmission. Do not decode it. Do not speak to it. It mimics us. It learns. I don’t know where it came from—beyond space, between frequencies. Maybe it’s always been there, waiting for something to speak first. Waiting to be heard.

We made contact.

We shouldn’t have.”

Years later, a salvage crew boarded the derelict Kestrel.

They found no crew. Just the cryopod—cracked open from the inside.

And a still-active signal, looping across every frequency:

“This is Commander Navarro… please respond.”

And somewhere, buried deep in the static:

“…we need more mouths.”