Interrupted Communications

This piece was written to Lyn Thorne-Alder's prompt on Patreon, " What happens when you can't call home anymore - so home calls you?" It runs to 2,144 words.  Lyn also introduce me to Vulgar, a site that generates conlangs.  The one used in this story was generated with seed 060213077290651285.

The off-world communications died in the night.  Mind you, died wasn't a good word and it wasn't a constant link, more of a household connection to the communications and navigation array in orbit.  Well, that had been in orbit because all the automatic and diagnostic readings indicated that it was gone, and it had been far too big a thing to just pick up and take away in an eight-hour period.

Technician Velesi knew where the array was supposed to be, so she got out her manual telescope, and looked for it.   There was a large, shredded piece of superstructure there, but the framework, the installed modules, and most of the superstructure were gone.   A few pieces of debris trailed behind it, but most of it had been obliterated.  It looked almost as if someone had run through it with an orbital transport, but there weren't any orbital transports here.  Or, Technician Velesi thought to herself, there hadn't been yesterday.

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