Whispers in the dark, p.1
Whispers In The Dark, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
What Comes Next
A Note to the Reader
About the Author
WHISPERS IN THE DARK
Wade Francis
Copyright © 2026 Wade Francis
All rights reserved.
For Sally,
who gave me the space to do this,
and for Ann and Craig,
who helped make it better.
Prologue
“Wait—just—“ A sharp inhale. A stutter of keyboard keys. “That doesn’t make sense. Look at the last radar imaging render.”
“Alright… lunar surface, standard topography… Hang on.” Pause. A frown. “That cavity, it’s deeper than expected. Almost a straight drop.”
“Keep looking.”
“Okay, sure, but—“ Silence stretches. Then—
“What the hell is that?”
“I thought it was a rendering artefact.”
“It has to be. There’s no—“ The voice falters. A chair scrapes. “You checked?”
“Five times. Merged from different datasets. It’s real.”
Silence again, measured now, disbelieving.
“We’re looking at something that shouldn’t exist.”
CHAPTER ONE
COOLING FANS WHISPERED through the empty lab, swallowing the last voices that faded down the hall. Most desks in the Swinburne University lab sat dark now. The glow of Logan James’ monitor cast pale blue light over his desk, illuminating a scatter of notes, an empty coffee cup, and the faint smudge of a fingerprint on his screen where he’d tapped a calculation in frustration earlier. A well-worn pen dangled from his lips, absently chewed as he scanned the results.
He rolled his shoulders, easing the stiffness that had settled in after hours hunched over his workstation. One more quick scan of his simulation results confirmed what he already knew. Better impact modelling to show potential intersecting paths with smaller bodies in space would be a good thing, but it still wasn’t the breakthrough he wanted.
Leaning back, he queued the final batch job, waiting for the data stream to initialise. A flicker crossed the screen—so quick he almost missed it.
Gone before he could focus.
He frowned, leaning forward. The preview buffer refreshed, blank again. Probably auto-filtered. He hesitated, replaying the last few seconds in his mind. Maybe a transient glitch, maybe not. The cursor blinked at him, patient and indifferent.
His pulse ticked up. He tagged the anomaly for review, eyes still on the spot where it had vanished, the echo of that flicker tugging at his concentration. Then he made himself breathe, forced his focus back to the task at hand. He sighed, twirling the pen before setting it down.
His gaze landed on the empty cup. Again. He didn’t remember drinking it. With a slight shake of his head, he confirmed the last scan config. The run would be an automated sweep against the most recent deep-sky data using the updated filters that he’d just built. They weren’t standard—designed less for elegant signal clarity and more for weirdness, catching reflected solar radiation at awkward angles and borderline-noisy returns. He’d tuned the filters to catch lopsided reflections and strange motion signatures—the kinds of blips most software threw away as noise, but that sometimes weren’t.
The kind of trace that might bounce off a tumbling asteroid or some icy object skimming just shy of a collision course. Maybe even another Sedna-class object, if he was stupidly lucky.
He set the system to hibernate and closed the window.
His phone buzzed—a short, high-pitched chirp from the scheduler. The system had just re-tagged the same anomaly.
He frowned, thumb hovering over the screen. “Error in data stream,” the alert read. He cleared it, told himself it was nothing, and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Still, as he stood up to leave the workstation, he could feel the faint echo of it—the reminder that something, somewhere, was still moving, just out of reach. With luck, the job would turn up something weird enough to look at Monday morning.
A side monitor down the row still glowed with a student’s long-running job. LJ tapped it dark as he passed, making a mental note to follow up later.
Most of the team didn’t need handholding anymore, just the occasional nudge. Working here came with trust. No micromanagement. Just space to chase the edges.
He unclipped his entry badge from its lanyard and slid it into his pocket. The small tag identified him as part of Swinburne’s R&D team. His role was more fluid than that, not just researcher, but mentor, occasional lifeline for students in over their heads.
He liked the work—the mentoring, the rhythm of shared ideas—even if it meant his own projects sometimes took a back seat. The lab’s collaborative pulse was what had drawn him here in the first place, and despite the frustrations, he wasn’t ready to trade it in yet.
He grabbed his beanie and gloves, then paused by the nearest whiteboard, eyeing the half-finished equations left behind by the day’s discussions. He capped the marker someone had abandoned, idly looking over the scrawled formulas. A half-formed thought tugged at the back of his mind—something about gravitational interactions he wanted to revisit—but it could wait. He turned away, tugging on his coat, pulling the collar up against the evening chill leaking through the building’s glass façade.
By the time he reached the door, the last few voices had faded, replaced by the quiet hum of fluorescent lights. He pushed it open, stepping from the artificial glow of the lab into the crisp, fading daylight. The shift was immediate. Cool air brushed against his face, carrying the scent of damp pavement and the lingering smokiness of a distant food truck.
Catching his reflection in the darkened glass of a nearby window, he pulled on his beanie. His hair was tousled from hours of unconscious raking, a too-long fringe that refused to behave. The initials LJ were embroidered on the side—Logan James—a gift from his mother. She was the only one who ever used his first name. To everyone else, he was just LJ. It had started as a joke back in uni, something about how ‘Logan’ sounded too formal for someone who fell asleep in lecture halls and subsisted on instant noodles. It had stuck, much like the hat itself, now slightly worn but still his go-to in the autumn chill.
His reflection stared back at him—tall, but not imposing, with broad shoulders that his coat only exaggerated. The occasional lock of hair stubbornly poked out from beneath the beanie, refusing to be tamed. His eyes, deep-set and sharp, were more often observing than engaging. A light dusting of stubble shadowed his jaw, the mark of too many early mornings and too few reasons to bother shaving regularly. He looked like he hadn’t stopped thinking in weeks.
Better rumpled than frostbitten. He smirked, stepped into the cooling air, and set off towards the Bridge Hotel.
The walk was a deliberate choice. He could’ve taken the train, but the half-hour on foot helped him shift gears, from the mental whirr of the lab to the quieter frequency of the pub and his friends.
His phone buzzed again, softer this time.
He stopped mid-step, checked it out of habit—same process ID, same anomaly tag. He thumbed the screen dark, shoved it away, and told himself to keep walking.
The city air felt cooler now, as if the night itself was holding its breath.
Amber lights spilled across the footpath, fractured by glass and passing cars. The skyline shimmered ahead, silver and steel against a charcoal sky, its towers lit like steady beacons. The scent of fried food and damp concrete clung to the air. Students drifted between tram stops, jackets tugged tight against the chill. His boots kept a steady pace, each step carrying him further from the lab’s hum.
He knew this route by heart. Far enough to be off the staff radar, close enough to reach without much effort.
He glanced up at the sky, where the first stars were beginning to sharpen against the deepening blue. His work was about seeing things beyond that sky, but lately, he wasn’t sure if he was seeing much of anything at all.
LJ walked through amber-lit streets, hands in pockets, mind still snagged on the simulation. He usually found solace in walking, but tonight it wasn’t helping. He tugged his worn navy jacket tighter around himself, the fabric having seen more meetings and late nights than he cared to admit.
His project had kept him up most nights, but it felt like it was going nowhere. He’d thrown himself into it with equal parts hope and obsession: more accurate modelling of small bodies in the solar system, asteroids and comets, their erratic trajectories and the ways they interacted with larger celestial bodies. If it worked, it could give humanity early warning for threats no one had ever caught in time before. But the results? Nothing new. Just drift. Noise. Doubt. And another line in the next grant report asking whether it was time to shift focus.
Too many late nights chasing noise and too few headline results had started to chip away at the justification for the work. He still believed it, maybe more than he should. But sometimes it felt like the universe was just too vast, and the ideas swirling in his head, brilliant as they were, kept slipping through his fingers.
He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to shake off the creeping sense of defeat. Reports waited at home, projects on hold, unsolved problems whispering from the edges of his mind. He tried to resolve himself to leave them all alone for one night. They’d still be there tomorrow; picking at them tonight was pointless.
“Excuse me, sir—tickets, please.”
The voice cut through LJ’s thoughts like a cold wind, snapping him back to the present. He’d been walking alongside the station entrance, lost in thought, when the voice came from just behind him. Instinctively, he reached for his wallet, fingers fumbling for his myki card before his brain caught up.
A low chuckle.
“Wow. You actually went for it.”
He turned sharply, already knowing who he’d find.
Tash was walking up the ramp from the station, scarf tucked neatly beneath her coat collar, a quiet smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. Her eyes, bright and sharp, locked onto his before he could fully turn, already mapping him like a familiar blueprint. The thick maroon knit of her scarf was practical rather than fashionable, her coat zipped high, her gloved hands in her pockets. A few wayward curls had escaped from under her beanie, swaying in the breeze like they’d snuck past her usual discipline.
She moved with purpose, every step deliberate, posture alert but relaxed, seemingly always two thoughts ahead. LJ’s focus turned inward, while Tash’s reached outward, observing and quietly storing what mattered for later.
She stopped just short of him, head tilted slightly.
“Dammit, Ms Sutherland, that wasn’t even a good impression.”
She lowered the scarf just enough to show the curve of a grin, eyes dancing with quiet triumph. “Ouch. Formal now? Didn’t have to be. You were a million miles away.”
Her gaze lingered for a beat longer. “What’s got you so lost in thought?”
He exhaled, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Nothing worth ruining a Friday night over.”
His gaze flicked back to the station ramp. “So, you bailed on the walk?”
Tash nodded, tucking her chin back into her scarf. “Better to be just tired instead of tired and cold.”
LJ let out a soft, amused breath and nodded, falling into step beside her. The wind tugged at the edges of her scarf, the tail flicking against his arm as they walked. He glanced at her sidelong, her usual sharp energy was still there, but her shoulders looked less rigid, her posture looser than it had been all week.
“Long day?” he asked.
“Oh, you have no idea,” she said, drawing out the words with exaggerated exhaustion. “I spent hours listening to men with too much confidence and not enough sense insist that the sensor glitch was a software problem. Hours, LJ.”
LJ winced in sympathy. “And it wasn’t?”
“Of course not.” She turned, walking backward a few steps so she could properly throw her hands up in mock outrage. “Wasn’t the code. Two circuits too close, interfering. Moved them apart and boom. Problem solved. But nooo, let’s keep debugging the software indefinitely because obviously that must be it.”
LJ smiled, exhaling a quiet laugh. “You tell them ‘I told you so’?”
“Tempting. But no, I let them figure it out themselves. They’re less defensive that way.” She flashed a grin. “Besides, I was too busy basking in my own genius.”
They were old hands at this now—enough years in the trenches to trust their own instincts, even when the data felt noisy.
LJ shook his head, amusement tugging at his mouth. “Dangerous thing, your genius.”
“Deadly,” she agreed, falling back into step beside him.
LJ smiled faintly. “At least this time the fix didn’t blow half the lab’s thermal budget.”
Tash groaned. “Don’t remind me. That uni lab never quite forgave us for that one.”
“We were thrown in the deep end. They should’ve known better.”
“You were the one who said it was a ‘learning opportunity.’”
“Hey, if you’re gonna make mistakes,” he said, “you might as well make the memorable kind.”
Their smiles met and held, comfortable in the way only long history allows.
Tash thrived on this kind of problem-solving. As one of the lead engineers on the university’s instrumentation team, she spent her days designing and troubleshooting the delicate hardware that made their research possible—infrared sensors, spectrographs, the kind of tech that let astronomers pull secrets from the distant dark. She wasn’t an astrophysicist, not like LJ, but she built the tools that let the researchers work. And when something wasn’t working, it was usually her job to figure out why.
She took a breath, letting the quiet satisfaction settle. There was always another problem to solve, another puzzle to pick apart, but not tonight.
Ahead, the familiar neon glow of the pub sign cast a warm flicker across the pavement while the buzz of conversation and clinking glasses spilled onto the street. LJ rolled his shoulders, trying to shake the last of the week’s tension. Tash nudged him lightly with her elbow.
“Hey,” she said. “Whatever you were brooding about earlier, you can pick it back up after drinks. Deal?”
He huffed, but there was no real fight in it. “Deal.”
Tash was right. Brooding away from the lab wouldn’t solve anything.
His phone buzzed. A quiet system ping from the scheduler. Tucked away. Easy to miss.
He debated flagging the alert, maybe dropping it into the shared queue.
But he could already hear Nate’s voice in his head: “Run it twice. Baselines lie. You know that.”
LJ sighed through his nose and opened the config window. Added a second pass. Slapped on a control filter.
Trust but verify. Nate’s unofficial motto—and, annoyingly, a habit LJ had picked up.
The average signal strength from the latest sweep had started coming in just above baseline.
Not by much.
But enough.
He’d seen traces like this before, half-formed promises that dissolved under scrutiny. But this one itched at him.
A symmetry, a shape just out of reach. Different from the usual ghost.
He told himself it could wait. It should wait.
Monday would be soon enough. He silenced the alert and pocketed the phone.
The signal remained unanswered.
CHAPTER TWO
THE PUB’S GOLDEN glow spilled onto the pavement as Tash and LJ approached, the hum of conversation and the clink of glasses filtering through the doorway. Just as they reached the entrance, someone from the outdoor seating area took an unsteady step back. LJ twisted slightly, catching the edge of their coat as they bumped into him.
“Oh—sorry ‘bout that,” the stranger mumbled, regaining their balance.
“No worries, mate,” LJ replied easily. Tash shot him a look, amusement flickering in her eyes as she leaned in just enough to mutter, “Someone started a little early.”
LJ snorted, pushing open the door and gesturing for her to step inside. The moment they crossed the threshold, the cold loosened its grip. Warmth enveloped them, carrying the scent of wood polish, old beer, and something fried. Tash unwrapped her scarf, shaking out her curls as she exhaled into the cozy atmosphere.
They paused just inside, scanning the room. A quick, familiar nod to the bartender, who acknowledged them with the smallest tilt of his head. The place was busy but not packed, a comfortable Friday night crowd.
“Table outside?” Tash suggested, her voice deceptively casual.
LJ gave her a flat look. “Don’t even think about it.”
Her lips twitched with barely concealed amusement, but she didn’t argue. She knew the wind had picked up on the walk over, and neither of them had any intention of braving it longer than necessary. The outdoor heaters did their best, but they weren’t miracle workers, and the people huddled around them were still wrapped in coats, drinks held close more for habit than comfort.
