Chapter 13: The Shape of an Echo

The warmth of the farmhouse followed them only as far as the porch. Beyond it, the night had sharpened. The snow that had seemed soft and almost decorative through the kitchen windows now creaked beneath Daniel’s boots. Cold pressed against his face and worked immediately through the seams of his gloves. The trees stood black against a clouded sky, their branches holding thin lines of white. Somewhere beyond the yard, cattle shifted in the dark, the small sounds of their movement travelling farther than they would have on bare ground.

Neris walked half a pace ahead of him. Her posture had changed before they reached the bottom step. In the kitchen, she had been warm, relaxed, her tail curved loosely behind her chair while the last traces of chocolate cooled in the cups. Now her ears were forward, her shoulders squared, and her tail held high enough to clear the snow.

Daniel had seen the change before. It was the way she moved when something became a problem to solve: not exactly frightened, but focused so completely that fear had nowhere visible to settle. The communicator clipped inside Daniel’s coat carried ER’s voice through a faint hiss of wind.

“The signal has not repeated.”

Neris did not slow.

“Preserve the raw sensor stream.”

“I am doing so.”

“Separate all local electromagnetic contamination.”

“I began that process before notifying you.”

“Compare it against the transit-event record.”

“That process is also underway.”

Daniel glanced down at the communicator.

“Sounds like you two have it covered.”

Neither answered. He looked toward Neris. The hidden entrance to Takuhai lay ahead beneath the trees, masked by brush, camouflage netting, and the irregular fall of snow. For weeks he had trained himself not to look directly toward it from the farmhouse. Even alone, he had maintained the habit. Tonight, there was no need for pretence.

Neris reached the concealed hatch and pressed her palm to the control plate. Snow slid from the covering panels as the entrance opened. Warm white light spilled across the clearing. She went inside without looking back. Daniel followed.

The change was immediate. Snow melted from his boots onto the deck. The smell of cold trees and wood smoke gave way to warm alloy, machine oil, and the faint clean scent he had come to associate with the ship’s filtered air. The outer hatch sealed behind them.

ER’s displays brightened along the corridor. Neris pulled off her coat as she walked and handed it to one of the maintenance manipulators without breaking stride. The articulated arm folded it with more precision than necessary and placed it over the back of a seat. Daniel removed his own jacket more slowly.

“You’ve been practising,” he said.

“I have always possessed the ability to handle clothing,” ER replied.

“You used to drop mine on the floor.”

“That was an assessment of its condition.”

“It was clean.”

“That remains disputed.”

Neris was already at the communications console.

She slid into the pilot’s chair, called up three overlapping sensor displays, and began moving through them with quick, exact gestures. The humour in Daniel’s expression faded.

The woman sitting before him was still Neris. The same black-and-white fur, the same blunt muzzle, the same broad ears reacting to every change in the ship’s sound. The softness that had entered her over the past weeks seemed to have been packed away with the coat.

Her voice became clipped. “Show me the unfiltered waveform.”

A pale thread of light appeared across the central display. At first Daniel saw only static, then the scale changed. Within the noise, twelve narrow peaks emerged. They were unevenly spaced, some faint enough to disappear when he blinked, but they formed a pattern too deliberate to ignore.

Neris went still. Daniel had learned that her stillness did not mean calm. Her tail had stopped moving entirely.

“Match probability?” she asked.

ER answered at once. “Ninety-eight-point-seven percent.”

“With the signature recorded during transit?”

“Yes.”

Daniel stepped closer to the console.

“The same thing that brought you here?”

“The same structure,” Neris said.

Her gaze did not leave the display.

“Not necessarily the same event.”

ER enlarged the waveform. The twelve peaks became arcs, each containing smaller variations. Mathematical annotations crowded the edges of the screen.

“The original anomaly produced a multidimensional phase distortion,” he said. “This signal reproduces the distortion’s harmonic relationships, but at less than one trillionth of the original energy.”

Daniel looked between the display and Neris. “In ordinary English?”

Neither answered immediately, then Neris leaned back slightly.

“It may be an echo.”

“Of something that happened six weeks ago?”

“Time is not always experienced consistently across dimensional boundaries.”

“That sounded like ordinary English right up until it didn’t.”

Her ear moved toward him, but the rest of her remained fixed on the data. ER shifted the display again.

“Imagine lightning visible through several layers of glass.”

Daniel frowned. “Alright.”

“Each pane reflects the flash differently. Some reflections arrive almost immediately. Others travel between surfaces before reaching the observer.”

“So, we’re seeing one of the late reflections.”

“That is a poor model,” ER said.

“You suggested it.”

“I simplified it for you.”

“It worked.”

“That does not improve its accuracy.”

Neris magnified one of the signal peaks. “The anomaly did not move only through space. It disturbed several adjacent dimensional states. If part of that disturbance continued to propagate after Takuhai was displaced—”

“It could still be bouncing around,” Daniel said.

Neris glanced at him. “Inaccurate.”

“But close?”

Her expression softened by the smallest degree. “Close.”

It was the first time she had looked at him since entering the ship. The displays reflected again in her eyes, and the distance returned. Neris worked through the essentials: duration, direction, source distance, embedded information and artificial origin.

“Four point three seconds,” ER said. “Direction and source distance remain indeterminable. No embedded information, and the probability of an artificial source is below three percent and falling.”

Neris exhaled through her nose. The sound was almost relief. A natural anomaly had stranded her. Nothing in the evidence suggested an attacker or hostile intelligence had chosen Earth, Takuhai or Neris. Relief still did not make the situation comforting. If the universe had done this accidentally, then there might be no one on the other side trying to undo it.

“Can you use it?” Daniel asked.

Neris’s paws paused over the controls.

ER answered. “Potentially.”

The word seemed to change the temperature of the room. Daniel watched Neris rather than the display. Her ears lifted only slightly, but enough.

“What does potentially mean?” he asked.

“It means,” Neris said, “that the signal may contain information about the anomaly’s geometry.”

“Enough to find your way back?”

“No.” The answer came too quickly.

She turned to the next display. “Not yet.”

ER brought up a model Daniel recognized from previous repair sessions: a dark sphere surrounded by concentric, uneven rings. Several sections were still missing, replaced by red gaps and incomplete calculations.

“The resonator captured fragments of the original event before the transit collapse,” ER said. “The new signal provides a second observation from a different phase position.”

Daniel studied the model. “And two observations are better than one.”

“Yes.”

“Could you build a map?”

Neris’s paw tightened around the edge of the console. “A partial one.”

The answer was quiet. Daniel waited. When she did not continue, he asked, “A map to where?”

Her ears angled back. “Possibly to the dimensional state from which the echo originated.”

“Xianglume?”

“We do not know.”

“You must have some idea.”

“We do not know.”

Daniel nodded. “Alright.” He had meant it to sound accepting. It sounded final.

Neris’s gaze returned to the waveform. For several minutes the only sounds were the ship’s ventilation and the occasional soft click of ER moving information from one display to another.

Daniel stood beside the console with his hands resting uselessly at his sides. There were times on the farm when waiting was work. Watching a labouring cow. Listening to a bearing after replacing it. Standing in a dark barn while an animal decided whether to trust the person holding the medicine.

This did not feel like that. It felt like being present at the edge of someone else’s life while pretending not to lean over. He moved toward the equipment cabinet.

“What needs doing?”

Neris did not look around. “Nothing yet. The analysis is computational.”

Daniel opened the cabinet anyway. “So ER handles it while you verify results he says do not need verifying.”

“Correct,” Neris said.

“Incorrectly summarized,” ER replied.

Neris ignored him.

Coils of cable, hand tools, diagnostic modules and several human components occupied shelves that had once been almost empty. He picked up a rag and began wiping melted snow from the deck. It gave his hands somewhere to be. Behind him, Neris asked ER to reconstruct the signal at a different phase angle.

The words became technical enough that Daniel stopped trying to follow them. He cleaned the floor. He checked the seal around the outer hatch. He tightened a bracket that did not need tightening. When he looked back, Neris had not moved except to draw closer to the screen.