She had scarcely finished the sentence before Ty hauled off with the sledgehammer and brought it down with all his might on the steel plate. The result was a blindingly loud metallic ping, drowned out, as it faded, by a scream from Kathree, who sank to her knees in the sand with her hands clamped over her head.
“Better get her out of here,” Ty said—she could hear him through her hands. She felt Beled reaching around her from behind, crooking her in one arm below her breasts, heaving her to her feet. Which was welcome on one level. But she was tired of being the one who had to be carried, and so she unwound herself from him, turned her back on the sea, and marched up toward the belt of scrub that marked the limit of the beach. Ty gave her a respectable head start before shouting, “Plug your ears.” She did so, and a moment later felt another ping go through her like an icicle jammed into the base of her skull. A moment later came another and another, not in a steady rhythm, but sporadic. And by the time she had climbed up to a place where she could look down over the cove, fingers in her ears, and not suffer pain from each stroke of the hammer, she had made sense of what Ty was doing.
Each of the human races had its own set of cultural traditions that it traced back to its respective Eve. These were propagated from one generation to the next by social rituals, school curricula, and youth groups. Young Teklans learned zero-gravity gymnastics with a martial arts flair, competing on obstacle courses that reproduced specific maneuvers that Tekla had performed during the Epic. Julians competed on debate teams and went on lengthy retreats intended to symbolize their Eve’s exile and ordeal in the Swarm. And so on.
Young Dinans learned Morse code. It was used very rarely.
Moirans most certainly didn’t learn it, and so Kathree had no idea what message Tyuratam Lake was banging out into the deep.
Everyone, of course, had watched the scene in the Epic, at the beginning of the Hard Rain, where Eve Dinah had made her final transmission to Rufus. This had trailed off with many repetitions of the code QRT, which—especially after Dinah had dissolved in sobs, and slowed her transmission speed to a crawl—had a kind of solemn fanfare-like rhythm to it, beginning with pahm, pahm, pa-pahm. The letter Q. Kathree recognized that pattern, at least, more frequently than you would expect in normal English sentences. So, Ty was using ancient Q codes to shorten his message. But she hadn’t a clue what he was actually saying. He belted it out over and over again, a syncopated phrase of long and short strokes that started to get under her skin after a while. He stopped when Sonar Taxlaw waded out to the rock and assured him that, if the Pingers were about, they would surely have heard the message by now.
“How long now?” he asked. He was shouting over the rush of the surf and because he had probably gone deaf.
“Depends on how far away they are,” said Sonar Taxlaw. “Maybe a day. Maybe three.”
“Great,” Ty said, and looked up to catch the eye of Roskos Yur, who, following a timeless military instinct, pushed his sleeve back to check his timepiece.
Ty unlatched the lid of the box and began to take out pieces of equipment and to peruse instructional brochures. Kathree was too far away to see the details, and in any case it was getting dark. As the sky faded, she could see Ty sitting on the shore of the islet, facing out toward the sea, occasionally flicking on a small light and fussing with equipment. Perched next to him, swaddled in sleeping bags that Einstein had brought out to her, was the Cyc. She wore a bulky pair of headphones, occasionally turning her head toward Ty in an alert birdlike way to make some sort of comment. Esa Arjun paced slowly back and forth on the beach, just out of the waves’ reach, passing occasionally near Einstein, who just stood there gazing fretfully at his beloved. Hope had gone to ground in a small tent pitched a few meters higher up, on drier sand; a bluish flicker through its walls suggested he was working with a tablet, maybe trying to learn something about POTESH management.