Location:Seven Peaks — Formation Hall, Eastern Terrace
Date/Time:TC1856.06.12 (Evening)
The reply took four days.
Four days of degraded channels and stuttering transmissions and the specific anxiety of waiting for confirmation of something that changed the shape of everything. Four days during which the pulse held at six seconds — steady, patient, counting toward whatever it was counting toward — and the coalition continued building, training, preparing for wars it might not understand.
The data assembled at nineteen hundred. Cleaner than expected — the Observatory staff had learned to compensate for channel degradation, compressing and error-correcting with the efficiency of people who understood that each transmission might be the last.
Kairos read it alone. Then read it again. Then sat in the Formation Hall for twenty minutes before sending for Raven.
***
