Astro Equinox's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The recording looped all night. By morning Astro still could not pull the two layers apart. The counting rhythm sat on top like a wall. Behind it, the deeper message hummed, shapeless and buried. Astro turned the listening dial back and forth. The indicator rings climbed, but the counting beat bled into everything. No matter how Astro tuned it, the real reply stayed drowned in noise. Astro pressed three gray fingers to their temple. The sound tracker was built to catch a signal, not to split one apart. They needed another ear, one that knew machines like this. The lab door slid open. Jeta Halo stepped in, his green skin bright under the screens. He had helped wire half this building years ago, back when Astro first arrived. He carried a coil of cable over one shoulder and did not knock. He never did. "You've been awake two nights," Jeta said. "I can hear that thing from outside." "I can't separate the layers," Astro said. "The counting covers the message. The tracker won't cut it clean." Jeta set down the cable. He bent over the sound tracker and studied the spinning rings. "You're fighting the counting beat," he said. "Stop fighting it. Match it." Astro frowned. "Match it how?" "Feed the counting rhythm back into the dial. If the machine already knows that layer, it can cancel it. What's left is the part it doesn't know." Jeta tapped the polished dial. "You cancel the wall. You hear the room behind it." Astro stared at the device. The counting beat ran in their skull, steady and plain. They had memorized it over eleven days. They could play it back by hand. Astro set the dial to the counting rhythm first. The rings aligned. Then they keyed the capture again, this time holding the known beat against the recording. The two counting layers met. They folded into each other and went flat. Silence, for one breath. Then the deeper layer rose, alone and clear. It was not counting. It was not random. Astro leaned close, black eyes wide. The sound carried a shape, rising and falling in sets. A direction. The deeper reply pointed somewhere, turning in a slow sweep, the way a dish turns to find a source. "It's a bearing," Jeta said quietly. "That's not a message. That's a location." Astro's chest tightened. The thing on the ground was not just answering the sky. It was telling the sky where it stood. Astro played the clean layer twice more. The sweep repeated, steady and exact. Somewhere on this planet, a machine was broadcasting its own position. And now Astro could read it. "I know how to separate them now," Astro said. "But that's worse." Jeta looked up. "Why worse?" "Because now I know it wants to be found." Astro reached for the dial. "I have to reach it before the sky does."