Alteea had stopped talking mid-word.
That was the part Kori kept coming back to afterwards — not the alert tone, not the cascade of amber errors across the screens, but Alteea going silent in the middle of a sentence about Eon frequencies. She'd crossed to the nearest access terminal with her reading glasses still pushed up in her hair and stood in front of eleven metres of glowing readout with her arms folded, watching the number in the fourth column, fortitude, change, and change, and change.
"That's not a fault," she observed, saying it out loud before anyone asked.
"It looks like a fault-"
"Faults are so stupid. They give you a null, or they give you the same wrong numbers forever, or they give you a noise pattern." Her finger tracked the column. "This isn't noise. Every one of those values is internally consistent. The array is measuring something twelve times per second and getting twelve confident, different answers in the same second."
