8. The Bureau Closes In

They had twenty-three minutes of quiet after sending the reply before everything broke apart. The alert came through the station's passive sensors, which Avery had rigged to monitor local traffic as a precaution: two vessels on approach, moving fast, no transponder signals of their own — which in this part of the outer system meant either military or Bureau enforcement, and practically speaking the distinction didn't matter much. "Time to go," Avery said, with the flat, unhurried calm of a man for whom this was not the first time he'd had to leave somewhere quickly. Declan was already packing. Kira killed the station's power draws, yanked the flex conduit from the distribution hub, and was back on the Riven Nail in under four minutes. She was moving fast enough that she bruised her shoulder on the airlock frame and didn't notice until they were already clear of the station and accelerating hard toward the outer ring. Behind them, through the aft sensors, the two pursuit vessels split: one holding position at the relay station, one giving chase. "They tracked the transmission," Kira said. "Of course they tracked it." Avery didn't look away from his instruments. "A deep-field transmission out of a decommissioned station is not exactly subtle. I should have factored that in." A pause. "I did factor that in. I just hoped we'd have more of a head start." "How long can you outrun them?" "I can't outrun them. Bureau enforcement ships are faster." He rolled the Riven Nail through a series of adjustments that shaved fifteen degrees off their trajectory and fed them into a debris scatter he clearly knew by memory. "What I can do is make the navigation difficult. The outer rings are complicated. They know that. They'll be cautious." "Will it be enough?" A slight pause before his answer, which was itself an answer. "Probably not." Kira sat down and thought very fast. They had the signal data. Three drives, all with her. They had Declan's archive. They had the decoded message, the translation, the reply they'd sent. They had, in other words, everything — but everything was only useful if it reached people who could do something with it. If the Bureau caught them and confiscated everything, the evidence would disappear. Declan's three years of work would vanish. The colony's message would be buried again. She needed to make copies. More copies. And she needed to get them somewhere that the Bureau couldn't reach. "Does this ship have an outbound burst-transmission capacity?" she asked. Avery glanced at her. "Limited. Short-range, broadband." "How broad?" "Far enough to hit any receiver within three million kilometers." "And would those receivers log the transmission automatically?" "Any registered relay would, yes." He caught her meaning. "You want to broadcast the data." "Not all of it. Enough. The waveform data, the translation, the colony's message, Declan's summary documentation. Compressed, encrypted, but broadcast wide. Too many recipients to suppress them all." Declan was already moving. "I can package the archive in ten minutes," he said. "Compressed it'll fit in a burst packet." "Do it." Behind them, the pursuit vessel was gaining. The debris scatter slowed it — Avery had been right about that — but not by enough. Kira could watch the gap closing on the aft sensor display with the same fascination and dread she'd felt watching the spectrograph line in the early hours of the morning that had started all of this. Declan worked. He moved through the data with the efficiency of a person who knew exactly where everything was because he had organized it carefully for exactly this contingency, even if he'd hoped never to need it. Nine minutes and forty seconds later, he handed Kira a transmission packet. She loaded it into the burst system. Set the target: broadband, maximum range, every registered relay in the coverage area. Added a header that identified the content: COLONY SIGNAL KEPLER-7D. FULL DOCUMENTATION. PROJECT LULLABY. AUTHENTICATED. She looked at Avery. "Any secondary consequences from broadcasting?" "Beyond the obvious?" He made a small, expressive gesture at the pursuit vessel on the sensor. "No." "Then I'm doing it." The burst transmission took four seconds. A pulse of compressed data spreading outward in an expanding sphere, hitting every relay receiver in range, logging automatically into their buffers, replicating across their sync networks. Once logged, it would be nearly impossible to purge entirely. Some of it would reach civilian networks. Some would reach independent researchers. Some would reach journalists. Declan's evidence and the colony's own words would scatter through the information ecosystem like seeds, and the Bureau could not un-scatter them. The pursuit vessel was close now — close enough that Avery stopped trying to outrun it. "All right," he said quietly. "We're being hailed." Kira put the remaining drives in her jacket. She straightened her shoulders. She thought, briefly, of the signal: forty-two second interval, never wavering, patient across the dark. Someone out there had been broadcasting for twelve days — maybe longer — and waiting for someone to hear them. She had heard them. She had answered. She had made sure the answer would not be buried. That felt like enough. "Answer them," she said. Avery opened the channel. "Bureau enforcement to unregistered vessel," said the voice on the other end. "Cut your engines. Prepare to be boarded." Avery looked at Kira. She nodded. He cut the engines. The ship drifted, silent, in the outer ring of Saturn's system, while two hundred years of secret history continued to scatter quietly across a thousand receiver arrays, and a planet twelve hundred light-years away kept on broadcasting its patient, insistent message into the dark.