Countermeasures

Veld gave her one hour.

That was the language he used: gave. As if it were a gift instead of a negotiation with a woman who hadn't slept in nineteen hours and had spent the last four building a communication framework with something that pre-dated the pyramids by thirty-five thousand years.

The technicians began setting up the emitters in the central module while Holm sat in the sub-basement with Nadia and Eriksson and kept working through the seismic data.

"The geological record shows cyclic resonance events," Holm said. She had the kind of focus that came from being the only person in a room who had come for the right reason. "Every forty to sixty years: a sustained pulse in the 18.98 band lasting two to three months. You can see them in the sediment layers from the plateau ice cores." She swiped through images on her tablet. "This one, here — 1983. This one — 1941. This one — 1897."

"Natural events?" Eriksson asked.

"Or communication events." She looked at him. "We can't distinguish between the two from geological data. The entity produces the frequency. The geology also produces the frequency. We designed an experiment to interact with the geological process." She paused. "We didn't consider those might be the same thing."

Nadia had been thinking about the accelerating interval. The decreasing gap between responses. She had a calculation she didn't like.

"How much does the entity extend through the plateau?" she asked.

Holm was quiet for a moment. "Based on the distributed response pattern in the seismic data — the signal appears simultaneously across a roughly twelve-kilometer radius." She met Nadia's eyes. "It's not a creature in the way we'd typically mean. More like — a system. Distributed cognition, if cognition is the right word, across the acoustic properties of several hundred square kilometers of permafrost and ice."

"And the emitter at full output."

"Would be like running a fire alarm directly into the neural tissue of something that covers twelve kilometers." Holm's voice did not change. "I'm not being metaphorical."

Nadia stood up.

She had fifty-three minutes.

She took the recorder and went through the lexicon. She produced the interrogative structure Mafi had identified. She held the spectrometer and waited.

The response came in six seconds. The interval had collapsed almost entirely. The internal structure was the most complex she had seen — multiple interlocking modulation layers, more information than anything it had sent before.

Mafi leaned over the screen.

"It's asking something," Mafi said. "I can't tell you what. But it's asking."

In the central module overhead, the emitter technicians were doing their calibration tests. Short pulses, low amplitude. Each one sent a shudder through the sensor network. Each one produced a hiccup in the response pattern — a flinch, compressed and then resumed.

Forty-eight minutes.

Nadia looked at Eriksson.

"You know this station," she said. "Power distribution, main breaker, all of it."

He looked at her. Something crossed his face — the expression of a man who has been very carefully not deciding something and has just been asked to decide.

"Yes," he said.

"Where's the main breaker for the central module?"

He told her.