Keith is already waiting when Pidge pulls into the commuter lot. He raises a hand in greeting, and she eases the bike over.
"What was so important that I had to see it?" he says. He's frowning faintly, a worried line between his brows.
"You'll see." She hesitates a second. "Don't think it would be a good idea to put it in a message."
He raises his eyebrows and there's a momentary sting of curiosity through the connection. There's an awkward pause as they both avert their eyes and pretend they didn't notice it. "Huh," he says under his breath, and kicks his bike's stand up. "C'mon." Pidge follows suit and they make their way out of the lot.
At the shack, they head instead and settle on the lumpy futon. Without comment, Keith retrieves the fan while she pulls her computer out of her bag and points it at her. She catches his eye and snorts, and the corner of his mouth quirks up. She wastes no time in pulling up the audio file. "I got this in the same run as the black box transmission."
Keith visibly starts when the voice comes in, and the link jumps like a bike hitting a pocket of hot air. She lets the file play out to the end before continuing. "It came from about the same place as the black box - there's no difference in the alignment coordinates at those timestamps."
Keith stares at her computer, brow knit, and leans forward to loop the file back around to its beginning. "Another Kuiper belt mission?" he suggests, though he doesn't sound like he believes it.
"But how? Where would they get the resources? Kerberos was state-of-the-art - how would you keep building something like that a secret?"
Keith grunts and makes a frustrated hiss through his teeth. "And why? There's nothing out there. Just rocks and ice. What would be the point?"
Pidge nods decisively. "Exactly. It doesn't make any sense." The recording hits its end and loops back to the start. The first speaker starts their hail again. She gestures at the screen. "I put that through all the translation applications I could find. It doesn't get any matches."
"There are hundreds of languages," Keith points out skeptically.
"Yeah, but how many of them would be likely on a deep space mission that requires massive funding and political buy-in?"
He grimaces.
"Besides," she scrunches her nose as the speaker draws out their last syllable in an extended, menacing-sounding rumble, "listen to that. That's not a regular human language noise."
Keith blinks before clearing his throat and producing a similar rasping, back-of-the-throat noise. "What, that?" he says uncertainly.
She squints back at him. "Weird flex, but okay. My point stands. It doesn't match up to any of the likely languages for a Kuiper belt mission."
He goes silent for a few seconds, scowling down at her computer. In the back of her mind, she can faintly sense him turning it over. "Is 'aliens' really what we're going with?" he says reluctantly.
She throws up her hands. "I don't know what else we can go with."
Keith makes a disgruntled noise of acquiescence and settles back into the couch, thumb running restlessly over his knuckles. "You think the Garrison knows about it?" he says after a minute.
She pushes herself a little further into the futon until the springs creak in protest - she's been thinking about that question for most of the last night. "They practically have to. It's sitting right in one of the standard data communications bands. If I could pick it up with a homemade receiver, they should definitely be getting it."
Keith's lips draw out to a thin line. In the back of her mind, there's a tense electric hum. "It seems like an awfully big coincidence that it's out near Kerberos."
"Yeah. It does," she says grimly, and takes a breath. "I think the Garrison knows all about it. I think they lied about what happened to Kerberos because they didn't want anybody else listening in."
A beat passes. "You think whoever that is-" he gestures to the computer "-had something to do with what happened to the mission?"
Her gut clenches. She's been trying not to think it, but it's hard to avoid. "Maybe."
The electric hum through the link sparks and snaps. Keith lets out a hiss through his teeth, fingers clenching on the sleeves of his jacket. "Damn it." His jaw tightens and releases. "What the hell do we do about that?"
"I don't know!" she bursts out. "I was expecting equipment failure, or bad instructions from ground control, or… or communications malfunction. Not aliens! I don't know what we do about aliens!" She curls in on herself, feeling small and miserable and useless. "I don't know what we do about this."
There's a scrambled, frazzled hiss of emotion along the connection before Keith reins it back in. "Shit. Sorry. Pidge, I…" She startles as Keith's hand descends on her shoulder in an awkward, deliberate pat. He's wearing an expression equal parts panic and determination. He gives her shoulder another stiff pat and she hears him mutter something about patience to himself. "I… okay. Okay," he says aloud. "What do we need to do next? We can figure out the rest later."
Keith hesitantly pats her shoulder once more, looking desperately unsure of what he's doing. The contact helps. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and tries to focus. Just next steps. No further. What do they need next? She swallows. What would her dad have wanted to know? "We have to get more data," she says at last. "We've only got the one sample right now. It could be just a fluke that we caught it."
Keith leans back into the futon and crosses his arms. "You mean like if they were just passing through?"
"Yeah. Maybe they were headed somewhere somewhere else and the receiver was just pointed at the right place at the right time." He gives a noncommittal hum, and she takes another breath, steadier now. "If they're not just passing through, we need to figure out exactly where they are and make sure there's nothing else out there we could be picking up."
"But-"
"I know! I don't think there is, but we have to rule it out."
He considers this a moment, and then makes a face. "So… more data-logging?"
"Yeah," she sighs.
"Okay," he says firmly. "Then that's what we do." The quiet holds for a second, and then Keith drags his hand over his face. "Aliens," he grumbles.
She snorts. "Why not? With the psychic thing we're two for two now."
She feels him flinch a little, and then very deliberately hold himself still. He lets out a breath. "Yeah. That."
An uneasy silence moves in and Pidge bites her lip. "Staying apart didn't work."
A breath of disquiet ripples through the link. "Yeah. I don't think it's going away," Keith says.
She contemplates that, staring absently at the cluttered corkboard across from them. Are they just tangled up with each other permanently now? It's starting to seem like it. A chill runs up her spine. She's gotten more used to it, and Keith is not the worst person to be psychically stapled to, but it's still creepy and invasive. She shakes it aside and frowns. "I wish we knew more about how it happened in the first place."
"I still think it's the Knell."
"Sure. But how? Why?"
Keith makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "I don't know. It feels like it wants something, but I can't tell what. I keep looking for it, but I'm not getting anywhere."
She winces a little. "I caught some of that, I think."
He goes still for a second, and she catches a ghost of the prickling along his spine before he lets out a breath and forcibly relaxes his shoulders. "Yeah. I could tell sometimes. When you were there."
"Sorry."
He shakes his head. "Not like you could help it. I kept crashing your ops class."
"Pretty sure I got the better end of the deal there," she says. It comes out a little forced, but he gives a quiet huff of amusement.
She hesitates a moment. "Even if we do find the Knell, it might not change anything. We might be stuck with this."
Keith grimaces, but doesn't disagree. The silence lingers, stretching out while he taps his fingers in a slow, thinking rhythm on the edge of the table. "We need rules for it," he says at last.
"Rules?"
"Like… no prying. No digging for each others' thoughts."
She cringes hard. "Yeah. Let's make that Rule Number One." She purses her lips, thinking. "No spying, either. No lurking in the background and watching."
He flinches back a little. "We've both already done that by accident."
She shakes her head. "I don't think we're going to be able to completely avoid it, but if we can at least find some way to make sure the other person knows we're there? No offense, but if you're hanging out in my head, I want to know about it."
"None taken." A few seconds pass, and he shifts uncomfortably in place. "What if we, uh, knock?"
She raises a brow. "'Knock?'"
He frowns and makes a vague gesture in the air between them. "Can I…?"
She hesitates a second, but then shrugs. "Yeah, go ahead."
He nods, and she starts as there's a sudden prodding sensation over the link. It's a bizarre feeling - not painful, but definitely attention-grabbing. She shakes her head. "That'll work." She eyes him. "Can I try it on you?"
He gives a grunt of assent. Cautiously, she reaches out and tries to imitate that sensation of pointed presence. Keith's shoulders twitch and he makes a faint, hitching noise. "Yeah, not going to ignore that," he says wryly.
Slightly concerned, she narrows her eyes at him. "Is that…?"
"No, it's fine. Just startled me."
"Okay." She thinks for a moment. "If one of us tells the other to get out of their head, they do it, no questions asked."
He gives a decisive nod. "Agreed." He pauses, fingers tapping steadily. "We don't tell anyone else about it."
She shoots him an incredulous look. "Of course we don't tell anyone else about it."
He shrugs and the corner of his mouth twitches up. "Just putting it out there."
She scoffs, but can feel a mental tension she hadn't been aware of start to loosen. It feels better having rules for it. Not that she thinks either of them would have purposely broken those rules before, but having them makes it feel more like something they can deal with and less like an unpredictable, unknowable force jerking them around. She slumps a little further into the couch. "Ugh. This is so weird."
Keith makes a vague assenting noise and leans back into the couch as well. "You think it's worth going back to trying to stay separated?" he asks after a few seconds.
"Not really. I don't think it did much of anything."
He hums. "I think-"
"-it's stronger now." There's an uncomfortable little pause while they both pretend to ignore that, and then she snorts and continues. "Yeah. I think you're right. I don't know what we do about it, though."
"Don't think there's much we can do."
She bites at her lip. "I guess we just… make do. Live with it for now."
"For now," he echoes. The quiet holds for a second. "It's… good. To have you back, though," Keith says slowly, not looking at her. "Here, I mean. Physically."
She lets out a breath and feels a smile creep across her face, something settling in her chest. "Yeah. It's good to be back."
She spends the rest of the day reworking the receiver's targeting routine to sweep the sky and log anything it picks up on the aliens' frequency. With any luck, it'll capture enough datapoints (assuming the aliens aren't just passing through) to build a trajectory. It's still more haphazard than she'd like - it relies on the aliens using their comms regularly - but it's a first step. It's something, she reminds herself. She falls easily back into the routine of chipping away at the code on the porch while Keith takes something apart next to her. There's a faint background awareness of the connection, like a draft through an open door at her back, but by unspoken mutual agreement, they do their best to pretend it doesn't exist and it's mercifully only a minor distraction for the rest of the day.
She quickly decides that it makes more sense to leave the receiver set up at the shack than it does at the Garrison. Now that she's looking for a long-term pattern, she's going to have to just leave it to log uninterrupted, and there's no guarantee someone won't find it on the engineering building roof. At the shack, Keith can at least keep an eye on it for her, even though it means she won't get to check the data as it comes in. She coaches him through the power-up, power-down, and reset procedures (which he endures with good grace), and he solemnly promises to send her the logs when he goes into town. By the end of the weekend, she's done all she can and there's nothing to do but wait.
In some ways, it's a better wait than the last one. The realization that the connection between them isn't going away any time soon takes away some of the urgency and paranoia. She spends less time anxiously monitoring herself against accidental slips into the link and more time trying to figure out how to manage the contacts when they inevitably occur. Having the rules helps. The framework for what to expect and what's off-limits makes it feel safer, more controllable. After a couple of days, they manage to bring the knock down from a sensation like touching your tongue to a battery to the much more benign feeling of holding a phone set to vibrate, which also helps, though the sensation doesn't get any less strange.
For the first couple of days, she's still holding her breath, worried that the link is going to throw itself into overdrive now that they're no longer immediately stomping on it when it flares up. But to her relief, neither of them seem to be picking up each other's innermost private thoughts just yet. The frequency of the contacts does seem to increase, which is maybe cause for concern, but she's not convinced it wasn't doing that beforehand. Keith flickers in and out of her consciousness like heat lightning, and a persistent, low-level awareness of him becomes familiar, if not wholly comfortable. Sometimes, she finds herself checking for it, not with any intention of making contact, but in the same way she pats her pocket after leaving her room to check for her student ID.
The sense she gets of him is restless and frustrated. He's out in the desert in the early morning and evening, extending well into the night, combing his way through that square half mile of land hiding the Knell's source. She catches ghost impressions of rock under her fingers and chill pre-dawn air in the back of his throat, and faintly, like it's coming through a layer of cotton, a resonance in her chest, like the ring of a gong. His thoughts feel sharper out there, drawn to a fine focus like he's listening to something just outside the range of her hearing.
When she starts awake at three-thirty one morning, heart still racing at the jump and scramble to see a new set of petroglyphs that woke her up, she rolls over in her bunk and blearily grabs her phone to message him.
why are you doing this at 3:30am?
There's a distant snap of surprise, and she waits impatiently for him to get himself down from whatever ledge he's hanging off and extract his phone.
sorry
didn't think you were awake
I am now
seriously
why are you doing this now?
it's dark out
better than doing it during the day
A faint impression of heat and painfully bright glare surfaces in the back of her mind and she grimaces.
3:30 though
like you're one to talk
when I'm up at 3:30 it's because I'm writing code at the hour god intended
not climbing rocks in the middle of nowhere
She gets a brief, quiet flash of amusement, and a ghost of the smooth metal of the bike's body under his hand. The amusement dwindles down and is replaced by a wary curiosity.
how much of this are you getting?
not that much
I can tell you're in the desert
looking for the knell
climbing rocks
She pauses, curious.
why? what do you get from me?
about the same
nothing really specific
vague, but comforting
There's a brief pause and a hint of tired frustration seeps through before Keith closes it off.
I just wish it would show up
it keeps calling like it wants me to do something
but I don't know what it is and I can't find anything out here
She bites her lip.
I'll help you look for it this weekend
thanks
He's quiet for a minute and she's just started to drift off before the phone buzzes again. She cracks her eyes open long enough to read the last message before burying her head under the covers again.
going into town tomorrow
I'll send you the logs
True to his word, he sends her the files from the public library in the afternoon. It's not perfect - it's just a list of coordinates and timestamps where the receiver picked up something on the frequency of interest - but there's enough of it for her to build a pattern. Assuming the logs aren't filled with false positives, the alien transmissions occur at regular intervals and cluster in a tight grouping in the Kuiper belt, likely orbiting a distant, slow-moving dwarf planet and nearly stationary with respect to the Earth's orbit. Such a localized occurrence sharply limits the possibilities for alternate, non-alien explanations, but it sets up plenty of other questions. What's so interesting out there? How long have they been there? Who's on the other end of those transmissions? Are there more of them out there?
What, exactly, does the Garrison know about them?
Even though at this point she's pretty sure of what she'll find, Pidge does her duty and trawls through the the listings of astronomical radio sources, looking for anything that might match up to those coordinates. There's nothing much there - a few unmanned probes in the outer planets, but there's no reason for them to have any kind of audio communications. She supposes it could conceivably be some kind of weird local bounce, someone on Earth squatting in the Garrison's frequency band, but she's pretty sure the FCC doesn't appreciate that kind of thing. The actual audio sample continues to defy all the translation software she throws at it. Aliens remains the most convincing explanation. She messages Keith as much, in the most general terms she can. She'll still need to look at the actual data for confirmation, but it's hard to see what else it could be.
Somehow, in the middle of all this, life continues, though her classes are definitely low on her list of priorities at the moment. When she's assigned her flight team at the end of the week, it's much less exciting than it would have been in any other circumstances.
"Fighter Team Five," the instructor calls out, and points to the worktable on the far left of the room. "Communications: Gunderson, Engineer: Garrett, Pilot: McClain. Take your seats."
By the time Pidge makes her way over from the back of the crowd, the other two are already in their places. She knows Hunk Garrett a little - he's in one of the shared engineer/communications sections of Electronics II. He's one of the few in the class not to have toasted an amp during lab, so he's probably all right. She doesn't know the pilot - a tall, gangly boy whose knee is bouncing restlessly under the table - but Hunk apparently does. They're wedged shoulder-to-shoulder, poring over something on the syllabus. She sits down across the table from them, and Hunk looks up.
"Hey," he smiles. "Pidge, right?"
"Yeah. You're Hunk?"
"Uh-huh." He beams.
The pilot leans over the table and sticks out his hand. "I'm Lance." He grins and puffs up his chest a little. "Just wait, we're gonna be a great team."
She raises a brow skeptically, but reaches out and takes his hand.
The Knell sounds the moment she closes her fingers.
It's louder than she's ever heard it before, so clear and distinct she only barely keeps from clapping her hands over her ears. Keith is suddenly, immediately with her, an almost physical presence, his heart thudding behind hers, everything in him narrowed down on the Knell. He knocks, a little belatedly, but it's nearly drowned out in the overwhelming wall of mental noise. There's a heavy drag in her chest, vibrating in time with the Knell's rise and fall. Vaguely, in the very back of her head, she thinks she owes Keith an apology - if this is what he's been feeling, it's no wonder he's so desperate to track it down.
There's a pulse, and the pull in her chest clenches and tugs. She and Keith both startle, and their attention turns to follow it, like a compass needle pointing North. With a shock, she realizes it's pointing right to Lance.
As if that's what it's been waiting for, the Knell pulses once decisively and dies. She belatedly realizes she's got a thousand-yard stare and a death-grip on Lance's hand.
"Uh…" he starts, staring at their weird handshake.
She shakes her head and opens her fingers. "Sorry. Just remembered something."
Lance's eyebrows raise skeptically. "Sure." She feels herself flush, and he hastily brings up his hands. "It's cool, it's cool, we all have those days, right?" Thankfully, he turns his attention back to Hunk, and she sinks down into her chair.
Keith is still there. She can feel him focusing on something. After a second, she gets a complicated tangle of thoughts - an echo of the Knell, a vague impression of Lance, a flash of confusion and urgency with the distinct mental flavor of profanity.
Yeah, she thinks back. Just what the hell was that?