Andromeda Descending

Chapter 7: Evening Tide

Chapter 7: Evening Tide

Eve synced her VID with the telescope interface. The night's target was Hyperion, the 9th moon of Saturn. Titan's nearest neighbor. The information was uploaded and the large gears engaged, heaving the heavy dual telescopes around in a arc while simultaneously raising both objective lens. After the large telescope motor ground to a halt, two smaller motors engaged which retracted the twin domes and let in frigid gusts of night air.

The moon's image appeared on the VID: cratered, yellow, oblong, like a puke soaked sponge. The orbit around Saturn was fast and chaotic. Eve could hear small gears click as the telescope tracked Hyperion across the sky.

One hour passed. Nothing changed. Eve checked the interface to make sure it was still synced. It was. Another hour later the gambler's adrenaline was gone from her system and her eyes felt like they wanted to be closed. Maybe they were closed.

A dot of blue light flashes in her VID.

Eve's mind sees a ghost of something. Her semi-sleeping brain underwater, racing towards the surface. The reptile brain sees something, and it jolts her fully awake, but not yet fully conscious...starting to become aware of the gravity of the oncoming epiphany.

Something is there.

The blitzed fully awake Eve sees the blue dot flash in her VID. The electric singe of adrenaline grips her chest, then her hands. They are shaking when she engages the command: RECORD. But now that it's recording, she feels better, in control, starting to breath normally.

The blue light continues to flash, longer or shorter, for another minute. The computer collects the data. Finally the image from both lenses is triangulated, the laser light unequivocally coming from Hyperion. Captain Nova is calling home.

Eve's CPU analyzes the signal but can not make any sense of it. She needs to send it to Andrei but does not want to send it openly over the NET. The Authority monitors all message traffic, but late night correspondences were always considered "potentially suspicious" and so were watched very closely.

Eve briefly considers sending the evidence straight to the Cleric's Office. Nova was so despised they've probably been dying to send a nuke out to great him. Like he did to the first families they would say. An eye for an eye. No one on the Council cared about Nova's version of the Disaster. The Disaster put the Council in power in the first place.

If Eve washes her hands of this evidence right now, the worst that would happen to her would be a reprimand for unauthorized research. On the other hand, if they catch her sending it surreptitiously through the NET...

Her sister was forced to take the Vow. The pomp and circumstance of the ceremony suggested it was a blessed occasion. Eve remembers her mother being overcome and carried off by black clad men. She visited her sister at the convent a handful of times but with her pale silent face and the voice collar around her neck it was just too sad.

Her parents weren't quite the same after. They began snapping over things like chicken with the skin left on and VID streams recorded over. And having to go to Church everyday. The air inside their large colonial was permanently thick with unspoken misery, ready to ooze when jabbed by a stray word or look. Eve absorbed from it a skin of pain that she came to know as a companion.

But as she thinks more and more about the image of her sobbing sister taken away by the priests, she has an epiphany. It was not pain she felt, but rage.

Eve's faced burns red. Fuck the Authority.

She opens a hidden program on her VID called NetRez. Andrei designed it himself. He is a computer genius. He would say it "Ran in his blood" in a fake Russian accent. His Great Grandfather was Russian though, so in a sense it was true.