The Echolock of Aurelia

The listening deck hummed like a living thing, a low, steady purr that matched the sway of Aerolith against the wind. Leena stood at the rail with a headband of microphones pressed to her temples, eyes closed. The air smelled of cold copper and ozone. Every pulse of the gas giant beneath them rose through the structure in gentle shivers. Aurelia was a world without ground, endless veils of cream and turquoise, and the city floated like a cluster of lanterns knotted to a sky-wide kite.

“Clip five,” she murmured. Pipelines and power threads sang in her ears. The array translated pressure tremors into tones. To Leena, the world became a choir—storm harps, whistling vents, distant lightning drums. She drew lines on her slate with a stub of wax, tracing harmonics like cartographic contour. This was her work and her refuge. When she was a child, her father had lifted her onto this very rail. “Every storm writes a letter,” he’d said. “You only need the patience to hear it.”

Patience came easy today. The sky had settled after a week of sharp shear. Clouds drifted in great braided ropes. Kites rattled far below like toys. Leena listened to the planet’s normal breath, cataloguing its familiar choruses: the bass-lapping of the lower rotors, the midrange of waste heat exchanging in the ribs, the high, fine hiss from the microfans that scrubbed the domes.

She was bending to scratch a note when the tone cut. It didn’t fade or waver. It vanished, as if a string had snapped inside the air. Leena froze. The hairs along her arms rose. The silence was too perfect. Wind continued to press against her coat. Metal continued to creak. But a band within the mix—one she had traced all morning—was gone.

She tuned her headband tighter. The gap sat over the north ventward quadrant, a notch carved out of the planet’s voice. The last time she had found a gap, she had been twelve. Her father had gone to check the lower anchors and never returned. The city had burned his name into the memorial ring and the storms had kept singing.

“Leena? Your interval’s long,” said Oleg, the duty engineer, through the deck comm. His voice crackled with static and tea steam. “You chasing lightning?”

“Not lightning,” she said, and swallowed. “I’m logging a full-band dead zone near Anchor Nine. I want eyes on the densifiers.”

“Near Nine? That’s company kit,” Oleg said, voice tightening. “We don’t fiddle there unless invited. You know the code.”

“I’m not fiddling,” she said. “I’m listening. And the planet stopped, Oleg. Part of it. That’s not supposed to happen.”

Wind blew a sheet of golden mist past the deck. Leena snapped the headband off and clamped it to the rail. Her boots clanged on ladder rungs as she dropped to the relay console. She pulled up the harmonic map. A clean white gouge cut across the graph like a bite. No natural storm made edges like that.

Her own breath sounded loud in her throat. She pushed the deck comm again. “I need to brief the council. Now.”