Draft a short story from a premise

**Arc** - *Introduction* — Vesna keeps the beacon on Tolle, a moon nobody lands on any more. Her work is maintenance and log-keeping; the shipping lanes moved twenty years ago. - *Rising action* — A carrier signal resolves out of the noise. The ship identifies itself as the *Auger*, departed a hundred and three years ago and long since written off. - *Climax* — The message is not a distress call. It is a routine position report, sent on schedule, by a crew who do not know how long they have been gone. - *Resolution* — Vesna answers it in kind: a routine acknowledgement, the beacon still lit, nothing said about the century. **Story** The beacon needs turning by hand in the cold months, and Vesna turns it. Frost has crept into the gear housing again, a white lace she scrapes back with a thumbnail. Below, the sea that is not a sea moves in slow plates. Nobody has landed on Tolle in eleven years. The signal comes in on a channel that should be dead. It arrives the way weather arrives — first as texture in the static, then as shape, then unmistakably as a voice reading numbers. Vesna sets down the scraper. She listens to a woman recite a position, a fuel state, a crew complement of nine, all healthy. The registry answers in half a second. The *Auger* left dock a hundred and three years ago and was entered as lost after the fourth silent year. Vesna reads the entry twice. The voice is still going, unhurried, working through the checklist in the order the manual gives, and it does not sound like a woman who believes anything has gone wrong. She could tell them. The channel is open and the words are simple. Instead Vesna keys the acknowledgement, reads back the position, confirms the beacon lit and the lane clear, and signs off with the station code. Then she goes back out to the gear housing, because the frost does not wait, and because someone has to keep the light on for a ship that is still, as far as it knows, on time.