Chapter 24: Pip Runs the Full Broadcast Package

The flag came at 09:17.

Pip was watching for it. She had been watching for it since she configured the relay at 06:40, sitting cross-legged on the port bench with her primary recorder in her lap and the secondary unit propped against the hull beside her, and she had spent the intervening two hours and thirty-seven minutes doing what she always did when she was frightened: she worked.

The relay configuration had taken forty minutes. Casca's network was not elegant — it had been built by signal technicians across three decades of post-Inundation salvage, stitched together from pre-Inundation marine radio infrastructure, repurposed sonar buoys, and the kind of jury-rigged repeater arrays that kept appearing on uninhabited ridge-islands in ways no one officially documented. It did not route through any Compact-controlled exchange node. It had a reach of, conservatively, every settlement that had ever traded with a signal technician, which was every settlement that had ever wanted to know whether the water outside their walls was going to kill them this week.