The observatory cupola smelled like ionized metal and bad coffee — the honest kind humans drank when their instruments asked impossible questions. Dr. Isolde Verran kept a paper notebook tucked under her arm like contraband, a small rebellion against the telemetry that lived in every corner of Penumbra-IX. Her ocular lattice flared pale cobalt as it pulled the latest deep-scan into focus; the overlay dragged across her vision with the gentle brutality of a tide.

On the holotable the thing resolved into a wireframe that made her stomach do something she hadn't felt since she was nineteen and first watched a nova bloom on a friend's monitor: wrong, enormous, and impossibly quiet. Geometry repeated across scales — panels folding into panels, a lattice that ate the light around it and spat back a reflection that matched no alloy she'd cataloged. Her neural interface labelled it Void-Keel by reflex before she could veto the name.

She set the coffee down and watched the projection. The scan metadata scrolled down the side of her view: range, phase-offset, signal-to-noise, and then the line that shouldn't have been a line at all — estimated extent: 3,500,000 solar units. Her hands went numb around the cup. Numbers were fingers on a ribcage; they kept the body honest. This one kept trying to convince the universe to be something else.

“Repeat sweep,” she said aloud, not because the station needed to hear but to keep the ritual. Her voice echoed in the small room and the array replied with the polite, rigid hum of engineering certainty. The hologram re-resolved. The object stayed patient and indifferent to being looked at.

On the far wall, a strip of old stickers — places she'd been, stations that smelled of different kinds of dust — stared back at her. She ran her thumb along the scar on her forearm without meaning to; the motion was an old calibration, the human equivalent of checking the seals. The scar was from a simpler, nastier mistake: a miswired probe when she was younger and arrogant. It had taught her patience. The Keel taught her a different kind of humility, one that buzzed behind her eyes.

Telemetry returned another oddity: the reflectance curve. Not thermal. Not plasma. Not any of the spectral fingerprints they ran against cathedrals of matter in the database. The curve sat like a smudge of question marks.