The cheerful warmth of the feast faded into a mood of solemn, focused intensity as Arthur, Kira. Chief Szabo gathered around the main light-projected end-post in the Aethelgard’s command bridge.
In the center of the hololith, floating in stark blue vectors amidst the surrounding dimness of the room, was the raw, decrypted signal Kira had isolated from the ultra-low subspace frequencies.
Arthur had spent four hours routing the signal through the ship’s potion-made test matrix. He used a specialized ringing prism cut from the [Primordial Solar-Purified Amber]. The huge calculating power of the purified solar crystal had successfully stripped away thirty-two layers of leech-like interference, sky noise, and time degradation. It showed the clean core of the broadcast.
A high-urgency decryption dossier materialized across Arthur’s magnifying glass:
“The exact encryption protocol is fully unpacked,” Arthur said, his voice flat, steady, and carrying the cold weight of cold and exact certainty. “The signal was sent three hundred and twelve thousand years ago by the Ark-Vessel Shennong—the flagship of the Seventh Terran First-born Fleet.”
Kira leaned forward, her brow furrowed as she scanned the cascading lines of reconstructed tracking data. “Three hundred thousand years... Arthur, that predates all recorded human great realm on Earth. How could an ancient Terran fleet be broadcasting from the Kuiper Belt?”
