The hull of the Pelican Array thrummed with a patient, low polyrhythm that you could feel in your teeth if you pressed your molars together. Nova Jeong did that without thinking as she rode a swivel stool toward the listening console. The array’s arc bent around the pale gas giant below like a silver parenthesis, its spindly spires studded with micromics—gravitational microphones tuned to the murmurings of rings and field lines. Outside, reflected light came off the ring plane in slow sheets, pearly and cold. Inside, the control module smelled faintly of ozone and boiled tea.
“Who left green leaves in the signal dryer?” she called, sliding her palms across the interface. Holographic amplitudes rose in beats. She shunted a channel to her left ear and another to her right, coaxing a phase map from the numbers with a light touch.
Leo’s head appeared in the hatch, a mop of copper hair under a grease-smudged cap. He lifted a mesh bag of herbs as if it were contraband. “Tashi says a touch of sage keeps the dampers polite. Old station trick.”
“Tell Tashi the dampers can learn manners from the manual.” Nova grinned despite herself. The interfaces liked her today. Angular white lines softened into a valley of soft blue, then a fine ridge of gold. The ring particles were in chorus—icy grit rattling through magnetic ribbons, the planet’s magnetosphere stretching and snapping. She played those moans every morning, a ritual. Some people watched dawn; she listened to tides that had never seen sun.
Leo pushed off the hatch frame and drifted to a handhold near her shoulder. “Kwan asked if you pulled the long-baseline from the outer spire. He wants a clean read by lunch rotation.”
“Already pulled,” Nova said, tapping through to the high-band filters. Thin whistles, like distant kettles, scribed the glass. “The outer spire isn’t happy. The bunching in sector J-Six crossed threshold.” She flicked a segment and watched it fatten.
Leo whistled back, soft and off-key. “We could ask Interstellar Minerals for a tuning fork. They love sharing.”
“Don’t say that like the station won’t bite you,” Nova said. She reclined, letting the harness take her weight. Her gaze drifted to the viewport. The ring plane gleamed with frosts. A shepherd moon stamped its path like a sheepdog heading off strays. Beyond, the gas giant’s aurora braided with itself in slow, luminous loops, green-edged and rose in the core. The Array huddled against that celestial weather like a small metal bird refusing to be blown away.
“Lunch?” Leo asked.
“In a minute.” Nova shot him a look. His grin had a shameless tilt that made trouble seem like a recipe. Some days she admired that; some days she wanted to staple his shirt to the bulkhead.
The waveform hiccupped—a skip that wasn’t static. Nova froze, then wound the record back by five seconds and listened again. In the right channel a faint, staccato pattern rose, then fell. Not natural. Not quite. She isolated it, filtered the low bands, cut the smear. The sound stepped closer to the human range and brushed her jaw with a sensation like cool breath.
“Leo,” she said, very quietly.
He floated closer. “What am I hearing?”
“Something we didn’t schedule.” She leaned in until her hair almost touched the console glass. The staccato pattern repeated, regular but not mechanical, with tiny irregularities like a heartbeat. Not a distress ping. Not a navigation trunk. A call, but not on any channel she knew. She reached for the recorder without taking her eyes from the waveform. “Pelican Array to Sector Watch,” she said calmly. “This is Nova at Listening One. I’ve got an anomalous pattern in J-Six high-band. Request a second set of ears.”
Leo’s grin faded. “That’s not the spire being impolite.”
“No,” Nova breathed. “It’s someone out there telling us the rhythm.”