14 Hours After Launch – Low-Earth Twilight
Minuet's prime-beat beacon pulsed through the spent plume trail, clear-thread dish catching scant photons and something stranger—a backwash of dream-band scintillation the Loom scholars had never measured so high. Ground teams from Reykjavík to Rio logged the signal with sleepy amazement. To them it was perfect white noise book-ended by twin eighty-three-second drop-outs. To Aiden, listening from Mojave PrimePad's control bunker, the drop-outs were luminous gaps shouting his name.
"Dish telemetry clean," Maya reported, adjusting her cracked goggles. She hadn't slept, eyes blood-ringed yet sparkling. "Power budget nominal. Onboard chaos generator stable."
Cassie cradled her lantern as if nursing a fledgling star. Each prime lull sent a ripple through the lens—peach then clear then peach again, like a heartbeat learning humour.
Lin Xi rested one hand on a portable Spiral Stone array, helping the bunker's staff ride the low pressure of the desert storm outside; every gust synced with Minuet's off-beats, as though wind had joined the rehearsal.
Nephis leaned against the observation slit, cloak fluttering under conditioned airflow. "Clear-thread watchers still there," he murmured. Only he could sense them—indigo meeting translucence at the edge of perception.
First Reply
At 03:19 local, Minuet's beacon hiccupped—a gap two primes long, one-hundred-and-sixty-seven seconds. Then a return pulse arrived: not from Minuet, nor from earthly infrastructure, but from somewhere behind the satellite, beyond orbit. It washed across every listening post: a single tone so transparent it registered as cyber silence but carried embedded coordinate math—distances in fractions of the speed of dream.
Maya's console froze, overlaying a moving fractal that spiralled toward a fixed point outside the Moon's path. "The clear-thread wants rendezvous," she breathed. "Apogee at two-hundred-fifty-thousand—beyond Luna's orbit, near the Earth–Moon Lagrange 2."
Aiden felt Dawn-Core ping in his chest, matching that impossible distance with eager cadence. "They're asking Minuet to follow."
"L2's a parking lot of telescopes and junk," Cassie said. "They'll see it."
Lin Xi shook his head. "They will dream it, not see it. Clear-thread interacts on the space between photons."
Nephis lifted his hood. "Then we must follow as well."
Scramble for Horizon
Within an hour the Guardians were airborne in a borrowed scramjet, courtesy of an aerospace start-up dazzled by the prospect of cosmic jazz. Instruments hacked by Maya panned dish arrays to track Minuet's silent burn. Ground crews would handle PR—call it a 'deep-space calibration manoeuvre'.
At eighty thousand feet Aiden stared out at curvature splitting night and dawn. Cloud tops shimmered under aurora residue. He felt the dual-core nested against his ribs grow lighter, as if trying to tear forward.
Cassie touched his shoulder. "Let the baby go, Parent-Thread. Minuet has its own lullabies now."
He smiled, tension easing. "Afraid the universe will grade our homework."
"Imperfection gets you extra credit," she reminded.
In the cockpit Maya overrode a flight ceiling. "Scram to ballistic. Next stop L2 rendezvous ship." She glanced back. "If clear-thread built the meeting point, we'll need a vessel that can ride nothingness."
Nephis produced a data crystal: scans of that translucent spindle above the atmosphere. "Blueprints in code. We carve a hull of absence."
Lin Xi closed his eyes. "And fill it with breath."
Loom Stirring
As the scramjet pinned them to seats, Dawn-Core pulsed to a new metre—five, eleven, seven. Another prime added. Everywhere, dreamers turned in their sleep and felt a stirring beyond storybooks: a road of clear glass arcing past the Moon, lined with notes no composer had heard.
The Guardians grasped hands—five points in a storm of potential. Somewhere ahead, Minuet drifted toward an invisible harbour where silence would speak truer than any song yet sung.
Aiden closed his eyes, riding G-force and wonder, and braced for the next bar of cosmic jazz.