Fenn Rask's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Fenn Rask had three words and no way to prove them. For fourteen months she had chased the alien signal, hunting a whole language she could one day speak back to whoever sent it. Now she stood in the tower's control room, staring at the same short burst on her screen. Three words decoded. The rest was noise she could not test. She needed more of the signal, and the signal had gone silent. She clicked her tongue and hummed a low note, the way the signal did. The last technician near her stepped away. Nobody stood beside her anymore. Symbols covered her cracked suit, each one cracked by her own hand. The one on her right shoulder had taken nine months. She could not verify her three words against nothing. Then a dog barked. It came from the sand pit below the tower windows. A lean Labrador with huge ears sprinted in circles, digging fast, flinging sand behind its stubby tail. Fenn watched it dig. The dog's paws struck something. It kept scratching, ears flat, barking at the ground. She went down. The dog danced around her, then shoved its nose back into the hole. Fenn knelt and dug with her gloved hands. Metal. A curved plate, half-buried, older than the tower. She wiped the sand away and froze. Symbols. Rows of them, pressed into the metal. The same shapes as the signal. Not a copy of the burst she already had. A longer string. Dozens of words she had never seen carried this way. Her hands shook. This was a second sample. A reference. She could line these symbols against her three decoded words and test them at last. She found her first word near the plate's edge. The next symbol matched too. Then a third. Her three guesses held. She read on, comparing shape to shape, and the plate began to give up more. A fourth word. A fifth. The grammar behind them opened like a door. The dog sat and watched her, tongue out. By the meaning she now read, her fear was right. The signal was a warning. But the plate said more than warning. It gave a direction. It named a place the message pointed toward, buried in symbols she could suddenly parse. Fenn sat back in the sand. She had wanted more samples. Now she had them pressed into ancient metal, and they proved her right about everything, including the part that scared her. She spoke her three words aloud for the first time. Her voice cracked on the last one. The dog's ears lifted. "There's more of it," she said. "Underground. And it's telling us where to look." She stood, brushing sand from her suit. The three words were no longer her whole world. She had a growing vocabulary now, and a place it aimed at. She had to find where the buried plates led, before she understood enough to speak the warning back.