The ship’s receiver turned radio pulses into notes. Nara could hear them through her headset, though outside the hull there was only vacuum.
Three falling notes marked the ship’s own navigation signal. The transmitter sent them every twelve seconds. A reflected copy could return for up to forty seconds; beyond that delay, the receiver marked it as some other source.
Idrin had checked the timing before they left the harbour. He had also drawn a red line on their fuel chart.
“Past this line,” he said, “we don’t have enough reserve for the return.”
Nara tapped the chart. “I can read.”
“Then you’ll know why I’m asking you to stop.”
They were surveying old wreckage near a navigation beacon. Twenty years before, Nara’s mother’s expedition had vanished beyond it. Search ships had found a broken cargo frame and no people. Nara had kept a four-note fragment from the expedition recorder, the last sound in her mother’s message before the record cut off.
She had not told Idrin how often she played it.
The new tone came while they were turning home. Three notes fell as usual. Then, on a separate radio channel, four notes rose and stopped.
Nara gripped the headset.
“Again,” she said.
The four notes came again. Their spacing matched the old fragment.
Idrin opened the channel display. “That isn’t a voice.”
“I know.”
“And it isn’t a position fix.”
Nara moved the course marker beyond the beacon. The signal grew stronger there. She could think of only one thing: a recorder still running somewhere they had not searched.
Idrin kept his hand beside the fuel chart. “How far?”
“Until we can separate it from our reflection.”
“We can do that here.”
She wanted to go another mile. Then another. The display would always offer a place slightly farther ahead where the notes might be clearer. She knew that even as her hand stayed on the marker.
“Tell me your test,” she said.
“Stop our navigation pings. Wait longer than the longest return delay. Record both channels. If the three notes vanish and the four remain, the four aren’t the echo of our current signal.”
They held their position. Nara switched off the transmitter and watched the timer. At twelve seconds a faint set of three notes returned. At twenty-eight seconds another set arrived, weaker still.
Forty seconds passed. Idrin waited ten more before pointing to the display.
The three-note channel was silent. The other channel played four rising notes.
Nara saved the recording. She brought up the fragment from her mother’s last message and placed its timing beside the new one. The spacing matched. So did a brief break before the final note.
“It could be a loop from the expedition recorder,” Idrin said.
“Could it still have power?”
“Something is sending it. We haven’t found what. We don’t know whether the recorder is whole, where it is, or who last used it.”
Nara looked toward the black space beyond the beacon. No window could show her the difference between a signal from yesterday and a machine repeating twenty years of old sound.
The fuel reserve lay one narrow bar above the red line.
“One more pass?” she asked.
Idrin shook his head. “The reserve belongs to both of us.”
She set the course for home. Idrin restarted the navigation transmitter. Its three falling notes returned to the headset, separate from the four she had saved.
On the way back, Nara entered their position, time and receiver settings in the survey record. She wrote that the signal had continued after their pings stopped. She did not write that her mother was alive. She did not write that they had found a ship.
At the harbour, the receiver fell quiet. Nara sat for a moment with the headset still on.
Idrin unfastened his harness. “I’ll help make a request for a search with enough fuel.”
“I want that,” she said.
She took off the headset and held it out to him.
“Before the forms. Will you listen once more? To the old message and this one.”
He sat down again. Nara played the first recording, then the second, leaving the whole silence between them.
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