“I’m wet; I’m winded; and I’m bally freezing, but I’m here.” Some static, some rustling, and the lump in Matt’s throat eased as she clearly settled into whatever was her new location. He could hear the rustle of wind, what sounded like a seagull’s cry. The girl was running like a damn deer trying to keep him on the airwaves. “Look, I remembered something from your original transmission, at the very end. As your ship was going down, you were putting out as much information as you could for any friendly forces—you were breaking up badly, but I heard something about a timing and coordination signal that kept coming up a minute or so before each disruption that hit the area.”
“The disruptions to our encrypted channels?” Matt sat up straighter.
“Right. You mentioned that just before each disruption hit and played hell with all comms and radars, you picked up this timing and coordination thing. Can you—I don’t know, go looking for that in advance?”
Matt was already ahead of her. If he could dig the T/C signal out of the noise floor before the first disruption fired off, maybe he’d have the chance to warn his ship to go Quick Quiet on all radars and comms . . . “You might be on to something, Lady Rose.”
“I don’t think we’ve got anything else, frankly. We’ve been through it all with a fine-tooth comb.”
Matt felt his hand tighten on the transmitter. “What if it’s not enough? What if I can’t dig the T/C out, and my ship goes down and World War Three kicks off?”
“You’ll find it.” Lily’s crystalline voice kept going, steady as a pulse. “I don’t know how. I could describe how I’d do it, but your machines are eighty years ahead. But I can find any signal, if I know it’s out there. You can do the same.”
“If they’ve got spooky new tech to hide behind, I might not be able to.” Matt knew he was good. He didn’t know if he was that good. If anyone was. He could feel his heart climbing into his throat.
“No.” Lily’s voice sheared through the choking doubt. “See, they taught us something in Wimbledon.”
“What?” he asked tiredly. “An overhand serve?”
“A listening training course, you arse. Where they taught us that human usage isn’t perfect. There are always mistakes. There are always traces. No matter how good the—the tech is. You just need to listen for them.” A pause, and he could imagine her on her cold wind-whipped beach somewhere, under a pier or huddled in the shadow of a dock, pushing salt-flecked dark curls out of her face. “I’ve got ears like a bat, and so do you.”
“Lily . . .”
“Matt. The enemy’s out there. You’re heading into their teeth, and there’s nothing we can do to stop that. So you find them. Because that’s what we do, our kind. Listen hard and dig that signal out. Because I’m not doing my bit to win this war on my end, knowing that it’s all going to hell eighty years down the line.”
He lay down again, clutching the transmitter, fear still choking him. You can’t put this on me, he thought, but it wasn’t like she had a choice. Her ears had found him through eight decades of frequency static—just him. And she couldn’t help him with it. She had her own war to fight tooth and nail, her own victory to win.
He looked at the tattooed lines on his forearms, and didn’t realize he’d said them aloud until he heard Lily’s “What?”
“‘Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; the signal moon is zero in their voids.’ Dylan Thomas. I got it tattooed on my forearms when I became an ST. The poem doesn’t really have anything to do with the kind of work we do, but to me those lines do.”
“Chasing the signals through the void,” she answered. “Chasing away doubt and nerves.”
“Yeah.” Matt rubbed his smarting eyes, tattooed lines nearly burning on his skin. “Do me a favor?”
“Anything.” Lily’s voice wasn’t crystal now. It was steel.
“I’ve got three hours before I need to catch my train. Talk to me, Lady Rose. Just talk to me.”
2023
Aboard the USS Colin Powell
Hey, wanna get some chow?” Matt’s supervisor called, but Matt waved him off with a half-eaten Pop-Tart. He was down the rabbit hole, and he wasn’t coming out.
“What’s up with the FNG?” he heard the other STs on the Colin Powell asking behind his back—ever since he’d come on board, he’d hardly been out of his headphones long enough to grab a few hours of sleep or a mushy banana for breakfast, much less have a conversation with anyone. He’d gotten permission from his chain of command to stay on station as long as he wanted to, after feeding them some carefully edited bullshit of how he heard there could be some unknown signal operating in the area. It sure as hell didn’t help with him being named the weirdo Fucking New Guy, but they were happy to have someone willing to stand as much watch as possible, given the situation.