Donovan O'Niel's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Kira spread the burned map across a workbench inside the junkyard's repair shed. Donovan watched her wire an old oscilloscope into a battered tool kit, clipping leads to a salvaged antenna. A tuxedo cat in a blue jumpsuit nosed past her boots, sniffing the cables. "Hold this steady," Kira said. The screen flickered green. Numbers crawled across the grid. Donovan leaned in. The waveform on the glass matched the frequency notations along the map's burned edge, line for line. "That's not a record," he said. "That's live." Kira's mouth went thin. She tapped the dial. The signal pulsed again, steady as a heartbeat. Achilles stepped through the doorway, wiping grease off his hands. A red and white robobrain rolled in behind him, antennas twitching toward the oscilloscope. "Picked it up on the yard speakers," Achilles said. "Same pattern. Coming from under us." He nodded at the floor. "Dish ground. The buried one." Donovan's stomach dropped. The broadcast wasn't a recording left behind. Something inside the vault was transmitting right now, on the exact grid that had been killing every scout's gear for ten meters out. His worst theory had a pulse. "It's not a jammer," Kira said quietly. "It's a call." The robobrain swiveled its dome toward the sound, and the cat's ears flattened. Achilles set both hands on the bench. "Then something down there is awake. And it knows we're listening." Donovan folded the map and pocketed it. The shielded relay in his pack suddenly felt light, insufficient. Whatever was broadcasting had killed a man to keep its frequency a secret, and now it was singing to anyone with the ears to hear. The job had just stopped being a recovery. It was an answer to a call he hadn't meant to accept.