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days ago that Holsten had been under that stern gaze as he climbed into his suspension chamber, but when he probed his memories to determine just how many days, he uncovered an uncrossable grey area, a dim sensation that his sense of time was out of joint.
    Two thousand years will do that to you, apparently.
Every minute or so he was struck afresh by the revelation of how ludicrously lucky they all were just to be here.
Satisfactory
, as Lain had said.
    ‘Where’s it coming from, though?’ Holsten asked. ‘Is it where we thought it would be?’
    Guyen just nodded, his face composed, but Holsten felt a thrill of excitement go through him.
It’s there! It was real, all this time.
    The
Gilgamesh
had not just cast itself randomly into the void to escape the end of all that they had left behind. They were one step short of being quite as suicidal as that. They had been following the maps and charts of the Old Empire, looted from failed satellites, from fragments of ship, from the broken shells of orbital stations containing the void-mummified corpses of Earth’s former masters. Vacuum and stable orbits had saved them while the ice was scouring the planet below.
    And amongst the relics were the star maps, detailing where in the galaxy the ancients had walked.
    They showed him the signal, as it was distantly received by the
Gilgamesh
’s instruments. It was a relatively short message, repeating interminably. No busy radio chatter of a bustling extra-solar colony: that would surely have been too much to hope for, given the time that had elapsed.
    ‘Maybe it’s a warning,’ Guyen suggested. ‘If so, and if there’s some danger, we need to know.’
    ‘And if there’s some danger, what precisely do we do about it?’ Holsten asked quietly. ‘Can we even change our heading enough now, without hitting the system?’
    ‘We can prepare,’ Lain said pragmatically. ‘If it’s some cosmic event that we somehow haven’t picked up, and that somehow hasn’t destroyed the transmitter, then we might have to try and alter course. If it’s . . . a plague, or hostile aliens or something, then . . . well, it’s been a long time, I’ll bet. Probably it’s not relevant any more.’
    ‘But we have the maps. Worst comes to worst, we can plot a course for the next world,’ Guyen pointed out. ‘We’ll just slingshot past their sun and be on our way.’
    By then Holsten had stopped paying attention to him and just sat hunched, listening by earpiece to the
Gilgamesh
’s rendition of the signal, looking over visual depictions of its frequency and pattern, calling up reference works from their library.
    He adjusted the
Gilgamesh
’s interpretation of the signal, parsing it through all the known decoding algorithms that long-dead civilization had used. He had done this before plenty of times. All too often the signal would be encoded beyond the ability of modern cryptography to unpick. At other times there would be plain speech, but in one of those problem languages that nobody had been able to decipher.
    He listened and ran his encryptions, and words began to leap out at him, in that formal, antique tongue of a vanished age of wonder and plenty, and an appalling capacity for destruction.
    ‘Imperial C,’ he declared confidently. It was one of the more common of the known languages and, if he could just get his brain working properly, it should be child’s play to translate it now he’d cleaned it up. There was a message there, finally opening like a flower to him, spilling out its brief, succinct contents in a language that had died before the ice came.
    ‘What—?’ Guyen started angrily, but Holsten held up a hand for silence, letting the whole message play again and enjoying his moment of prominence.
    ‘It’s a distress beacon,’ he announced.
    ‘Distress as in “Go away”?’ Lain pressed.
    ‘Distress as in “Come and get me”,’ Holsten told them, meeting their eyes, seeing there the first spark of hope and