View source for Comm-Link:The Lost Generation - Issue 7

If the gravity on Oso II weren’t so crushing, Tonya would have been doing some crushing of her own. On Senzen. With a rock or heavy stick. Instead, she was barely staying upright. Her environment suit hummed as it recycled the streams of sweat into her drinking pouch.

“What are you doing here?” Senzen inquired as he trudged through the underbrush toward her.

“How’d you find me? Was it Nagia?” She felt the early pulse of a rage-induced migraine coming on. “Did he plant a tracker on my ship? What?”

“Calm down, Tonya. You’ll pass out.” He reached out to pat her heavily on the shoulder as he lumbered past. She swatted his hand away and followed.

“Tell me.”

“What, I couldn’t have found this place on my own?”

“No.”

Senzen turned to look at her. Deeply saddened.

“That hurts my feelings.” A grin crept across his face. She wasn’t laughing. Senzen slumped down on a plant stump to take a breather before continuing. He brought up a scanner and played a file. It was silence at first, then a burst of digital distortion, disparate sounds and clicks of an audio reconstruction. Tonya instinctively leaned forward to hear — there was something buried in the chaotic signal, the static parting for fragments of moments to reveal words.

“….. damage ……. further ……. necessary ……… located ……… 2456.432.1234”

Senzen stopped the playback. Tonya looked at him, her rage suddenly displaced by curiosity.

“What was that?’

“That, Tonya, was Janus.” Senzen sat back, a satisfied smirk on his face. “Impressed yet?” She glared at him. “Part of his directive programming was to send status updates on both radio and FSO back to Earth. True, none of them ever made it, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t reach somewhere.”

“So how did you get it?”

“It’s very complicated, I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

“Senzen, I’m going to beat you to death.”

“Fine, fine.” Senzen laughed and threw up his hands in surrender. “The short answer, the FSO of that era beamed comms packets in infrared, so I started looking for dense patches of cryogenic gases between Earth and the path from Stanton to the Artemis’ original destination.”

“Cryogenic gases can slow infrared beams,” Tonya ran with the chain of logic. “But not for hundreds of years.”

“Apparently if it’s a dense enough concentration, it can. And by that, I mean after massive digital reconstruction and two frozen ships.”

As much as she would absolutely never admit it, Tonya had to give it to Senzen. It was quite a discovery.

“So, your turn.” Senzen sipped from his water supply.

“My turn for what?”

“How’d you get here?”

“Oh.” Tonya stood and started shambling away. “I guessed.”

Senzen hurried up beside her. Tonya stopped in frustration and looked at him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”