Arjun Sen On the midnight shift aboard the survey ship Asterion, Mira Basu listened for trouble the way a violinist listens for a string going flat. Engines purred, monitors sighed, and the hull ticked as heat bled into space. She drank coffee and watched the interferometer graphs crawl. At 01:17 ship time, the graph hiccuped. Nine pulses rose from the noise: three short, three long, three short. Mira set the cup down. Not radio. Not laser. A gravitational ripple—faint but structured. SOS, stitched into spacetime. She paged the bridge. “Basu. Interferometer anomaly, band G-seven. Structured, repeating.” Captain Volkov’s voice arrived…