She opened a starchart. 100 hours of arc. 244 degrees. A line of sight pointing not outward, but back toward Earth. Toward the buried salt flat beneath them. Toward something that had been asleep for millennia—until 10:16 PM.
Dr. Mira Vasquez had seen plenty of strange data in her fifteen years at the Array—a sprawling deep-space listening post buried in the Atacama Desert. But this was different. The numbers weren't random noise. They were precise. Encoded. 10.16. 100. 244
Mira felt the air change. The desert night had always felt vast and empty, but now the silence felt watched. She opened a starchart
"100," she whispered. "244."
Mira pulled up the sequence on her own terminal: 10.16. 100. 244. A line of sight pointing not outward, but back toward Earth
The ground hummed. Not from generators. From below.
"Leo," she said quietly, "start the evacuation protocol."