Chapter 3: Transmission from a Dead Star

The signal came back at 3:47 a.m.

Not voice. Not yet. A fractured burst transmission, the kind a damaged array would produce — structured enough to be intentional, compressed enough to mean someone was being careful. Marcus had been sitting with the radio for two hours by then, not waiting exactly, because he had learned to be honest with himself about which vigils were productive and which were just a particular form of suffering he had chosen not to name. He had the eighteen names in front of him, mapped against the three routes and the cache location, cross-referenced against known Kree patrol patterns in the northern sectors. He had been working. The radio had been on. These two facts had coexisted for ten years without contradiction.

When the display on the secondary receiver lit, he looked at it for three full seconds before he touched anything.