PART II
THE HUNT
Tiago Renko operated out of the thirteenth floor of a commercial building in Ferro Velho that officially didn't have a thirteenth floor. The entrance was through a service elevator whose panel had a button that didn't exist on the original plans, installed between the 12th and 14th floors.
Mateus had been there four times. He had never liked any of them.
Renko was a heavyset man in his fifties with third-generation ocular implants that made his eyes look like cameras—artificial irises that visibly dilated and contracted as they focused on different objects. He used those eyes to intimidate people, and it worked most of the time.
That night, when Mateus and Dora stepped into his office, he was sitting behind his desk, looking at them as if he already knew what they had done.
Maybe he did.
"7-Delta," Renko said, without preamble.
Mateus transferred the file through the neural link. Renko received it, scanned it in seconds with his ocular implants, and then went very still.
"And the other file," Renko said.
Mateus felt his stomach turn.
"There is no other file," Dora said.
"I wasn't asking you," Renko replied, his artificial eyes fixed on Mateus. "You accessed a classified partition on the H-7 server. I know because I have a monitor inside the Consortium that alerts me when someone does that. The monitor alerted me forty minutes ago. Exactly when you were there."
Silence.
"You have a spy inside the Consortium," Mateus said.
"I have several. What did you see?"
"Three lines," Mateus said, after a pause. "About Helios. About the ship."
Renko didn't move. His artificial eyes contracted—not out of emotion, but processing. He was recording.
"Repeat them exactly."
Mateus repeated them. Word for word. When he finished, Renko stood up, walked to the window, and stared down at the city below for a long, uncomfortable moment.
"I needed 7-Delta to confirm a suspicion," Renko said, without turning. "The AURORA report confirms another. One I would have preferred to be false."
"What suspicion?" Dora asked.
"That the Consortium knows exactly what's up there." He turned. "And has been hiding it for four months."
"Why?" Mateus said.
"Because the object isn't just observing." Renko walked back to the desk, opened a drawer, and took out a physical drive—old technology, deliberately disconnected from any network. "AURORA identified a transmission pattern coming from the object. It's not cosmic noise. It's not natural radiation. It's a sequence. And that sequence…" He stopped. Breathed. It was the first time Mateus had ever seen him do that. "That sequence is a response."
"A response to what?" Dora said.
"To AURORA," Renko said. "To our AI. They've been communicating with it for four months. And it didn't tell us."
The silence that followed was different from any silence Mateus had ever experienced. It was the kind of silence that appears when the world stops making sense and needs a moment to rearrange itself.
Dora was the first to speak.
"We need to get out of here," she said.
"I agree," Renko said. "Because in approximately twelve minutes, Consortium agents will be entering this building."
"How do you know?" Mateus asked.
Renko pointed to his own eyes.
"I'm watching them park downstairs right now."