When her alarm wakes Pidge for nine the next day, she spends a few seconds staring aghast at the time display before lurching out of bed and crashing into her closet. She's got her shirt halfway pulled over her head before she remembers she's not meeting up with Keith anymore, due to psychic bullshit. Slowly, she pulls the shirt the rest of the way down and sinks onto her bunk.
The day before feels hazy, not quite real. For a moment she wavers. Maybe it was just a weird dream or a touch of heatstroke. Maybe she and Keith just panicked themselves over a little dehydration and a series of mundane coincidences. She hesitates a long moment, and then bites at her lip and pokes tentatively at that back corner of her mind. Almost immediately, a phantom sun blazes along her neck and shoulders and she feels the grit of soil under boots she isn't wearing. There's a sharp jolt of alertness and a little genuine fear. She reels back at the same time Keith does and she's alone in her dorm again, heart pounding.
Definitely real.
She just sits there for a minute, feeling twitchy and creeped out. Whatever that had been had been totally different in character from the passive background awareness she'd recognized the day before. Is it because she's conscious of the connection now and paying more attention? Because Keith's conscious of it and paying more attention? Is is because she prodded at it deliberately? Is it going to keep doing that? She worries at it for a while, but there aren't any answers, just more questions and anxiety, so at last she blows out her breath and gets up, doing her best to firmly put it out of her mind. There's not much she can do about it, and if she's not headed out to the shack, she should probably shower.
By the time she's showered and eaten, it's almost ten o'clock. She dithers uselessly in her room for a bit, uncomfortably at loose ends, before deciding that since she's not going to meet up with Keith anymore, she might as well get a head start on recalibrating the receiver for the Garrison's coordinates. She still has to figure out what went wrong with the alignment yesterday anyways, and she could use the distraction.
It takes a little bit of searching to find a good place. She wants somewhere with a clear view of the sky where she can work uninterrupted without any other cadets or staff tripping over her. It's kind of a tall order at the Garrison, even on a weekend. But eventually, she finds an unlocked rooftop access in the engineering department on the other side of the building from the labs. She hauls her equipment up and gets a calibration cycle started before sinking down into the paltry shadow of an AC unit. She grimaces and wipes the sweat off her forehead. The engineering building roof will work, but it kind of sucks. Somehow, the sun bouncing off the concrete makes it even hotter than the shack's porch, and she thinks wistfully of the shadow under the eaves and the smooth, worn planks.
And that's all it takes. It's nothing more than a flicker of hazy, half-awake boredom in the back of her head and the by-now-familiar sense that if she glanced over to her right, she'd find Keith stretched out next to her. She and Keith both jerk back from the contact and she focuses ferociously on the rough feeling of concrete under her fingertips until she's sure it's gone. A minute goes by and she sighs and draws up her knees to rest her chin on them.
"How did we miss that?"
The question is mostly rhetorical. She's been catching those glimpses for weeks now, and she assumes Keith has too. She can't even pinpoint when they started. They hadn't seemed like anything sinister, and it had been easy to think about them as stress or distraction or just boredom. After a while they just kind of blended into the background. Now, she finds herself thinking she should have paid more attention. Telepathy is a pretty big leap to make, but it's a little frightening how easily she'd accepted those glitches in awareness as normal. And now she's broiling up here on the rooftop of the engineering building, and Keith is out in his falling-apart shack, and they're stuck there until who knows when. Until the psychic wiretap they have on each other wears off. Whenever that happens.
"This sucks," she mutters.
The receiver beeps out the end of its calibration cycle, and with a sigh she refocuses and unfolds herself to start debugging the alignment.
She spends most of the rest of the day on the rooftop anxiously monitoring for that sense of Keith's presence in between tweaks to the receiver's alignment routine. She lapses into the connection a few more times over the course of the afternoon, picking up odd flashes of the light and quiet of the desert and a breath of distant wariness and unease that don't belong to her. Each time, she and Keith both yank themselves away from it like they're touching a hot radiator. By the time she packs up the receiver for the night, though, the reflex to pull away from the connection is becoming so routine that the sheer repetition of it has her a little less on edge. It helps that Keith is obviously just as freaked out as she is. Despite that, the constant vigilance is an exhausting, nerve-wracking experience, like the mental equivalent of holding in a sneeze while trying to pour a glass of water. By the next day, she's looking forward to the distraction of classes.
And the classes do help, somewhat. She makes an effort to actually pay attention to the lectures, something that she only does about half the time normally. She usually figures things out from the problem sets, unless the material is really interesting. But today she focuses on what the instructors are saying and does her best not to let her thoughts wander. It sort of works, in that the flashes of Keith's presence are a lot more obvious when she's trying to think about Bode plots. It doesn't work in that they don't stop happening.
It does mean she's actually paying attention for a change in Operations class, which is normally flight procedure and necessary-but-boring FAA rules and regulations.
"All right, listen up." The instructor raps on her desk and the hall goes quiet. "As you know, you're being assigned flight teams at the end of the semester. That means labs will run a little differently from here on out. Lab will take place in the sim hall-"
A murmur goes through the room, and the instructor knocks on her desk again, the corner of her mouth twitching up briefly before settling into a thin straight line. "Settle down, cadets. You will be using the simulators for this. You'll be working with students in the piloting and engineering tracks. The objective is to get you familiar with the sim stations prior to your permanent team assignments, so remember that your lab partners are not necessarily your final teammates. Don't get attached. Any questions?"
A smattering of hands goes up around the room, and something twists gently in Pidge's chest. Matt had talked non-stop about the simulator for a week the first time he'd been in one. She'd been all of seven years old and he'd been more than happy to fill her head with everything he knew about spaceflight. He'd been so excited when he'd been selected for Kerberos. He'd rubbed her nose in it for months that he was going all the way out to the Kuiper belt, promised to sneak her back contraband unofficial pictures of the edge of the solar system. Even her dad, who'd already been to the moon and Mars, had been quietly thrilled at the mission. Despite the fact that neither of them are here to see it, something in her still lights up at the thought of traveling to space, leaving Earth behind her, even if it's just a simulation for now.
There's a catch in the back of her brain at that thought, and something tangled and aching punches through her gut so fast she barely feels it before Keith wrestles it back in and kills the connection.
She freezes in place and lets out a painful breath and hopes that the link between them dies off sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, the link shows no signs of dying off as the week progresses. Now that she knows it's there, she's constantly aware of it. It's getting easier to tell when she's impinging on Keith's thoughts or he on hers. It's a hard feeling to describe. Like the subliminal awareness of another person standing at her side just past her peripheral vision, or a sudden stir of air in a still room. The moments of acute connection don't seem to have much rhyme or reason to them. Sometimes they trigger when she's thinking about something with some connection to Keith - the shack, the Knell, the upcoming sim lab. She catches a faint echo of the Knell on Wednesday, and that definitely sets it off - she's struck by a flare of Keith's hyperfocused presence and a resonance in the center of her chest that seems to linger even after they push themselves away from the connection. At other times, it happens when she's thinking of nothing in particular, trekking across campus or standing in a hallway waiting for class to start. The connections are always momentary and fleeting. A few drowsy seconds of sun creeping across the porch while she's in the cafeteria, a flash of highway noise and a thrill of adrenaline that jolts her upright during her electronics lecture. She catches sight of the tumbled rocks in the gully where they think the Knell lives on and off, mostly in the early mornings and evenings when it's half dark, and can guess that Keith is trying to track it down. Once, she gets the indistinct impression of another faint set of petroglyphs, high up on a rock face above Keith's head, along with a hazy, speculative interest in climbing up to see them better.
She thinks about messaging him a couple of times, but what would she say? "Sorry for accidentally spying on you, hope your search for psychic noises is going well?" Messaging feels kind of stupid when they keep bumping into each other's thoughts.
It does worry her that the contacts seem to be getting more vivid. She wants to think it's just that she's noticing more now that she's actually paying attention to them, but that feels like an excuse. There's nothing she can do about it in any case, and by the time the week draws to a close, it's settled into a weird, uneasy new normal, with no end in sight.
Pidge tackles the alignment problem again on Saturday. She's got it narrowed down to something happening in the guts of the motor driver and has a tedious afternoon lined up of pushing artificial values through it until she finds the right one to make it give the wrong output. It's a boring task, made even more boring by the blazing, sterile landscape of the engineering building's roof. She quickly decides she's not up for doing it manually and spends the first couple of hours banging out a script to sweep the inputs and flag anomalies in the outputs. After that, it's just a matter of waiting. With a sigh, she settles into the lee of the AC unit to start working through the problem set for her electronics class, resolutely not thinking about how much she would rather be doing this on the shack's porch.
By mid-afternoon, she finds and fixes a rounding error and sets her script to rerun. It comes back clean this time, and the next day she recalibrates for good measure and points the receiver at the Europa station she'd been trying to track before. A couple of hours later, it's still tracking correctly, and with a cautious thrill of excitement, she points it to a target a little farther out - a Titan satellite this time.
Over the course of the day she walks her mark further and further away from Earth. The targets get sparser and it takes longer to tell with each step, but by the time she's finished, well after nightfall, she's as certain as she can be that the alignment is performing as it should. Kerberos has already set by now, so she can't go any further tonight, but she stares up into the sky for a long few breaths and tries to imagine how far away the probes she's watching are, how much further away Pluto and its satellites are.
Technically, there's a curfew on Monday. She's been playing it safe up until now, being careful not to call attention to herself, but Kerberos is only in the sky for a precious few hours and she's so close to getting answers. She doesn't have to think twice about lingering in the engineering building stairwell after her last class while security locks up the classrooms. If she gets caught, she'll deal with it. It's worth the risk. When the coast is clear, she creeps up to the roof and points the receiver to where Kerberos is due to cross the horizon. She sits on her impatience as best she can, and waits until about an hour after Kerberos has risen to check the data.
She finds a distinct series of highs and lows, right where it should be in the spectrum, a clear digital signal. Her chest goes tight and suffocating, and she flops back on the roof, hugging herself tightly and staring up at the stars.
At the edge of her consciousness, there's a sudden tinge of presence and concern from Keith and she realizes some of that must have leaked through to him. It fades as quickly as it usually does, but it brings her back to herself a little. She takes a breath and pulls out her phone, even though it feels a little ridiculous to text him when her brain insists he's right there.
found it
There's another quick spike in his mental presence and a short pause before he begins typing.
the black box?
think so. haven't really looked at it yet, but that's got to be it
She frowns and considers.
decoding it might take a while
you'll figure it out
yeah
His typing starts and stops several times before the next message shows up.
good work
She snorts, feels a smile pulling at her lips. It's a very Keith kind of congratulations. She stays there for a while, watching the dark sky while the receiver logs its data, phone clutched in her hand, the space under her ribs crowded with something a little like grief and a little like hope. They're finally getting somewhere. She might finally get some answers. Keith is a faint electric hum at the edge of her awareness, steady and familiar. And maybe it's dumb and a bad idea, but she doesn't pull away from it for a little while and neither does he.
She has to wait until the next evening to really look at what she's got. The data is clear as day, an obvious cyclic transmission originating from Kerberos' coordinates, repeating on an hourly basis. To her surprise, she picked up something else as well. There's a distinct analog signal hiding in the logs, nothing like the digitally encoded Kerberos transmission. It's sitting well above the noise floor of the measurements and it definitely looks like a real signal. She puzzles over it for a few minutes and then puts it aside as a curiosity to look at later - an instrument from one of the early unmanned Kuiper belt probes maybe, or some kind of weird local radio source. Interesting, but not important.
She's much more interested in what the black box transmission can tell her.
Decoding it would have been difficult before she'd enrolled at the Garrison. Without context, it's an undifferentiated series of packets stuffed with ones and zeroes. She could probably have made something of it eventually with a couple of good guesses about header contents, but fortunately, she doesn't have to. All it takes is lingering after class in the comms lab and digging through a dusty cabinet of manuals on the pretext of an extra-credit project. That nets her a definition for the standard instrumentation transmission protocol. She's betting that there's no special encoding for black box transmissions. If there is, well, she'll figure it out.
She's still got work ahead of her. The protocol tells her the structure of the transmission and the encoding of the bitfields it contains, but she still needs to translate it. It's a lot of data, and she definitely doesn't trust herself to do it by hand. It's too important to risk a mistake. She makes the executive decision that her electronics lab report can wait and writes a decoder application over the next night.
She comes out with a fifty-eight percent on the lab report, but it's worth it. To her relief, the data breaks down cleanly along the lines of the instrumentation protocol and she comes out with a document that details (among other things) the Kerberos lander's fuel levels, engine vector and throttle, relative pitch, roll, and yaw coordinates, and environmental sensor data, taken at fifty millisecond intervals over the course of its last registered acceleration event.
It looks… fine. Normal. The system error register has a NOFAULT code. She's not a pilot, but the acceleration and attitude look smooth, no wild swings or sudden spikes. The final bump in acceleration where the lander must have touched down is barely present. She combs through it over and over, looking for anything out of place, a cold weight settling in the pit of her stomach, before sending it off to Keith. He's a pilot. He knows what a landing's supposed to look like. Maybe he can see something she's missing.
She's not sure if she wants him to find something or not.
She swallows. If he doesn't, it doesn't answer what happened to the crew. If there was no crash, they'd have had enough water and oxygen to keep themselves alive for a little while. Surely they would have called home. If they didn't… She squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on keeping her feelings to herself.
She gets a sharp jolt of attention when Keith gets the log, and then things go quiet for a while. She tries futilely to concentrate on her homework, doing her best to keep her thoughts away from that distant sense of focus in the back of her mind, but she just winds up reading the same page over and over again, putting new toothmarks in her pen. A little over an hour later, her phone buzzes, startling her out of her daze.
there's nothing wrong with it
She bites her lip.
you're sure?
no big changes in acceleration. no major course corrections. weight on wheels at the end
there's no crash
it's bullshit
they're lying to us
There's a snap in the link like a dam giving way. Keith is suddenly there, a churning, pressurized knot of emotion that feels a hair's breadth away from boiling over. Alarmed, she reflexively reaches out to him before she can think better of it. She doesn't get back anything coherent, just an overwhelming mental impulse to action and a spike of awareness of her presence. His attention abruptly snaps onto something else, and after a second, she recognizes the phantom grip of a bike's handlebars. Keith shoves a wordless push of get out of my head over the link, and the connection cuts.
Pidge is shocked back to herself, alone in her room. "Damn it."
She draws in a shuddering breath, holds it and lets it out again, puts her pen down before she snaps it. Maybe Keith has the right idea. She just feels mad and tired, too wrung out to really think about anything. She picks up the pen again and digs the point of it into her notepad, leans into it until the paper dents. This shouldn't be hitting her so hard. She'd already known the Garrison was lying and that her dad and Matt were gone. It's not new information.
"Stupid," she mutters venomously, and scrubs her sleeve across her eyes.
She spends the next while trying and mostly failing to do the most mindless homework she has because she doesn't know what else to do, but she can't do nothing. Maybe Keith's need to just do something set something off in her brain. She catches indistinct impressions off and on of the bike in the desert, too quick to register as more than a messy sense of acceleration and speed. It's several hours later before her phone buzzes again.
sorry
She lets out a breath, relieved. If she concentrates, she can feel the background sense of Keith's presence still wound taut, but there's less of that suffocating pressure to it now. She hesitates a long moment before replying, but then does it anyways.
you okay?
A few seconds go by before he replies.
yeah
you?
Is she okay? She's not sure.
as okay as I'm going to be
He starts and stops typing several times, but nothing else comes through, and after a few minutes, she puts the phone down.
Pidge wakes up the next morning somehow numb and mad at the same time. The Garrison is lying to them. Her dad and Matt are gone. Shiro is gone. They probably died cold and frightened on some lonely, dark chunk of ice at the edge of the solar system, and somebody here decided to hide that from her and her mom and Keith and everyone else they'd known. Somehow, she is going to take the Garrison apart piece by piece until she she knows who made that decision and why. Keith is a restless itch in the back of her head in fits and starts, a series of sharp, jagged impressions of the bike's acceleration and rock under his fingers. She's not sure which of them keeps firing up the connection. It's probably both of them. Trying to keep it from happening doesn't really seem worth it at the moment.
She takes the coward's way out and calls out sick to her classes. She's not going to be able to concentrate anyways.
Instead, she picks through the black box log again, and then again, looking for any tiny inconsistency, anything that might hint at some kind of subtle, imminent equipment failure. It looks just as innocent as it did the night before. She goes back to the instrumentation protocol and her decoding application, combs through those looking for any conversions she might have fudged, any fields she might have misinterpreted, but that's rock solid as well.
She'd spent so much time on the receiver, so much painstaking effort to calibrate and align and decode, that it seems unfair that the black box transmission can't tell her anything new. That it can't give her some reason for what happened.
She even goes back to the raw transmissions, looking for anything she's missed, anything hiding in the intermessage gaps. It's grasping at straws and she knows it - there's no reason for the black box to be transmitting anything outside a standard periodic message frame - but she can't let it go by without checking. She flips through frame after frame, looking for something out of place, and comes up with absolutely nothing.
She pages to the next file in the directory and halts, frowning.
It's the weird analog signal. The one that isn't part of the black box transmission. It's probably nothing, just a lucky coincidence catching a transmission from one of one of the old probes.
But it's the only thing she's picked up that sticks out.
She bites carefully at the edge of her lip and takes a closer look. It still looks like a real signal - there's none of the random fuzz that she associates with noise or instrumentation artifacts, and it's pegged dead-on a frequency sitting at the lower end of the Garrison deep-space band. In fact, it's so dead-on that frequency that it looks kind of like an AM signal. She blinks and knocks out a few lines of code to strip out the carrier wave. She's left looking at a sparser, but still recognizable signal. It's broken up into chunks, which she supposes could be some kind of packet. They're not uniform in size, but that doesn't necessarily rule it out. The amplitude within a packet is variable, and so is the frequency. It might be some kind of encoding scheme, but neither really varies by much and it seems like a really fragile way to encode data. In fact… She selects a few packets and checks their average values.
"Huh." There are two distinct frequency modes present. The packets seem to alternate between them.
She squints at the screen and shakes her head slightly, trying to dispel the ludicrous idea creeping up on her. It doesn't back down. She hesitates a second, and then does a quick conversion to audio and opens it in her music player. She shifts the headphones slightly off her ears and hits play, holding her breath despite herself.
The first few seconds are just a slightly crackly silence. Then the tracker hits the first packet, and there's a recognizable voice in her ears.
She bolts upright and slams the stop button, heart pounding. Keith is suddenly acutely present, tense and worried. Need to focus, she shoves at him, and he backs off, a distant, watchful hum on the edge of her awareness. She swallows and drags the tracker back to the start. That was a person.
She hits play again, and this time she listens through to the end. It's two people, exchanging clipped, precise words in a language she doesn't recognize. There's no mistaking it for anything else. She feels cold all over. There's no other manned mission anywhere near Kerberos. There can't be. Kerberos was a three-year, cutting-edge effort with government funding and technological contributions from twelve separate international research institutions. There's no keeping an endeavor like that a secret.
She double- and triple-checks the receiver's log. It's not an alignment error.
Somebody is out there.
Keith is still hovering at the edge of the link, watchful and concerned. She reaches for her phone to message him, but pauses, eyes darting to the transmission playback on her monitor.
If it really is what she thinks it is, it doesn't seem like something that she should put in a message. Maybe it would be fine, but there are a lot of things she's second-guessing about the Garrison right now. Leaving a record in writing suddenly seems like a terrible idea. There's the obvious alternative, but she and Keith have been trying to stay out of contact for a reason.
She bites at her lip. On the other hand, staying out of contact doesn't really seem to be helping with their psychic problem. Frankly, they haven't managed to do a great job of staying out of each other's heads even when they're trying. If anything, the connection feels stronger.
Screw it, she thinks, and picks up the phone.
you're going to need to see this