Chapter 13: Pip Finds the Compact's Broadcast Archive

Pip had been awake for thirty-one hours when Casca finally called back.

She knew the exact count because she'd logged it — a habit from the early years of the network, when her father had insisted that every signal technician keep a running operational clock. *You lose track of time, you lose track of yourself, and then you make a mistake someone else pays for.* She hadn't spoken to her father in six years but she still kept the clock.

The call came through on the tertiary relay, the one routed through Ark Pellas and two intermediate bounce stations, which meant it had taken four times longer to arrive than a direct ping would have. Casca didn't do direct pings. Casca didn't do anything that left a traceable frequency signature, which was what made her useful.