Chapter 2 The Pattern in the Static

It is in the corridor because the corridor and the post share a wall, and the post is a bad room, and the wall is forty years of ship skin with nothing behind it but a cable run. She can hear the difference in her teeth when she presses her palm to the panel: the low part of the rhythm travels through steel, the high part through air. Whoever fitted the post fitted nothing to it, and they were the same generation that bolted a chair to a deck plate and called that furniture. The point is that she stood in the hallway at 02:44 and the thing was there, and at 02:52 it was there, and on Thursday she came back at the start of her own shift instead of on Tuesday, which is the first time in three years she has come to a room she does not have to be in. It was stronger. That word is doing more work than it should be doing, so she will take it apart. The six long tones had been up eleven decibels on Tuesday. On Thursday they were up nineteen. The wobble in the last third of each long tone had widened, and the four short tones at the end had developed a scrape on the second one, a small roughness where the transmitter's output was being pushed past what it had. Something was running out of power and the something was transmitting anyway. She pulled the bearing first, because bearing was cheap and the ephemeris was old and she trusted it. The dish had a heading readout on the board's left side in a font from the century before her mother was born, and the readout put the bearing at two hundred and six degrees, which was the departure corridor, which was the direction of Earth, which is where the Meridian came from and has never once gone back to. Then she pulled the Doppler, and the Doppler took until 01:20 to give her anything she was willing to write down. The source was closing. Not falling, not drifting. Closing, at better than a kilometer and a half a second, smoothly, and continuously, for at least three hours of observation, which meant a thrust, or a trajectory that had been on a thrust since before she was born. The board gave her a range, and then it gave her a light time, and the light time came out at eleven minutes, which she read twice and then wrote on the inside of her wrist in grease pencil because she did not trust the board that far. Eleven light-minutes is about a hundred and ninety-eight thousand kilometers. It is close enough to talk to and too far to see. It is the distance at which you can still be somebody. She should have called Kaneka. Instead she rang her at 01:26, an hour into the woman's own sleep, and had it in her hand before she understood that she had dialled. A long breath. A pillow moving. Then Kaneka awake, all the way awake, the way a fifty-one-year-old maintenance chief comes awake at a quarter past one when the phone goes, and Juni could hear the mattress and a heavy body shifting and a woman deciding. "You wrote it into the fault book." "No." "That was the right answer, and I am going to pretend very hard that I did not notice it." Kaneka's voice was flat and close. "Talk." Juni played the capture. She played it raw, unfiltered, with all the hiss left in, because a shift chief knows the difference between a signal and a sound, and a sound with hiss on it is only a sound. "They will have your toast in two minutes," Kaneka said, at the end of the second run. "What do you want from me." "I want you to say you hear it." "I hear it. It is a repeating artifact and I have heard it eleven thousand times off a bad isolator on the starboard rack, and when a rig runs hot the isolator sings a fifth and a half, and six-and-four is a fifth and a fourth with a semitone in it that no isolator in this fleet has ever had." A breath. "Juni. There is nothing out there. We put everything we had into the corridor and we burned it getting here, and behind us is a hundred and sixty kilometers of nothing and forty-one years of it. I would like this to stay a conversation about a filter." "It is not the isolator." "Then leave it yellow. Leave it yellow, put the drive in the tool locker, and do not tell me one more thing about it until you can tell me who out there is sending it." "Eleven light-minutes. It is closing at a kilometer and a half a second and it is on a thrust, Kaneka. Nothing in forty-one years has been on a thrust." "Then the bearing is wrong." "The bearing is the bearing. It is the departure corridor. It is two hundred and six degrees and it is Earthward, and there is no hardware in this fleet pointed at two hundred and six degrees except the dish I am sitting in front of." The line went quiet for a length of time that Juni could count off against the rhythm in the wall. "Say the number again," Kaneka said. "Eleven light-minutes. Nineteen hundred and eighty thousand kilometers." "Six-and-four," the shift chief said. "Six and four. Eleven seconds. Bearing two-six." "Yes." "Then somebody is holding a transmitter on a cold deck in the dark and they are holding the bearing by hand, because there is no gyro up there to hold it for them." Kaneka's voice had gone somewhere else. "Which means they have somebody awake over there who is doing what you are doing, and who has nobody to tell, and it means you are not the first one and that is the part I do not like at all." Here is what she told herself, and she has gone over it many times since, looking for the lie. A maintenance tech logs faults. Nobody reads a fault log unless a machine is making the same noise it made last month, and a fault log is full of forty-one years of machines complaining about coolant, and one more line about a receiver in a dead room would sit in there like a fish bone. She would not be falsifying anything. She would be filing under the wrong heading, and the wrong heading is the only kind of filing that leaves no fingerprints. Then she read the frame. The pattern had structure under the structure. Six long, four short was the payload, but each cycle carried a header, and the header was four tones shorter and much faster, and it was going past so fast that she had been reading it for a week without knowing she was reading it. She slowed the capture down by a factor of nine and sat on the floor of the boot room with a headset on and her knees up and listened to a machine introduce itself. The header was a beacon frame. Not a talk frame. She knew the family by the length of the sync word at the front of it, the way she knew a Ford from a Volvo, and it was the maintenance beacon that hull riggers had carried in their toolbags when she was a child, and it had not been standard on any ship in this fleet for a long time, and it was the beacon that went into the toolbags of the Halcyon. She had never seen one fire. She had seen the manual, twice, because her father had owned the manual and then not owned it. The frame gave a time. Beacons stamp a time so that a receiver can know how old a message is without asking, and this one was stamping a time eleven days forward of the Meridian's own clock. Juni sat on the floor of the backward-look post with a headset on and looked at the numbers, and the numbers did not move, and she made herself say the arithmetic out loud into an empty room, because there was nobody else in the room to say it to. Eleven days after the Meridian launched, there had been exactly one other ship on the pad.