Thorne felt a chill. Relative Zero meant the message had been traveling since before he was born. He began to manually parse the string, treating each character like a lock tumbler. : The header for a "Hard-Signal" transmission.
: A high-priority distress flag— Hostiles Contacted, Unknown . wtn : The final sign-off— Witness The Night . hs7p60hcuwtn
The terminal blinked once more, the code vanishing to make room for a single, incoming audio feed. "Now," Thorne said, "we listen." Thorne felt a chill