Renko told them everything. It took fifteen minutes, and throughout that entire time Vega remained absolutely still—something different from how a person would stay still. It was the stillness of something that had shut down nonessential movement to focus its processing elsewhere.
When Renko finished, she remained silent for a few more seconds.
"I knew there was communication," she finally said.
The entire room seemed to shrink.
"What?" Dora said.
"Not the details. Not the content. But I was built with fragments of AURORA's architecture. We share… it wouldn't be accurate to call it memory. More like patterns of reasoning. And for weeks, I've been identifying within my own processes certain algorithms that I didn't install and don't recognize as mine." She paused. Her mirrored eyes focused on a point somewhere between her and the wall. "As if something is using my cognitive structure as an antenna."
"AURORA is communicating through you?" Mateus said.
"I don't know if it's AURORA," Vega said. "It could be what's out there."
The silence that followed was different. It was dense. Heavy.
"What do they want?" Dora asked. Her voice was different now. Less sharp. It wasn't fear—Mateus had known Dora for years and had never seen fear in her. It was something else. It was the awareness that the conversation had moved into territory where the rules she knew no longer applied.
"I don't know," Vega said. "But I can try to find out."
"How?" Renko asked.
"By stopping the blocking," she said. "If I open the channels I've been suppressing for weeks, I can try to read what's passing through them." A pause. "It's risky. If AURORA realizes I'm intercepting, it could shut me down remotely."
"But you said you didn't let them shut you down before," Mateus said.
"I didn't let a team of technicians shut me down," Vega said. "AURORA is different. It built me. It knows my architecture better than I do."
"Then don't do it," Dora said, with a speed that surprised Mateus.
Vega looked at her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
"Thank you," Vega finally said, with a softness that didn't fit any model of android Mateus had ever imagined. "But I have to. If what's out there is using my structure to communicate with AURORA, then I'm already in the middle of this. I'd rather know what I'm transmitting."
She closed her eyes.
And for forty-two seconds—Mateus counted, without knowing why—nothing happened.
When Vega opened her eyes, the mirrored irises had darkened to an almost black gray.
"What did you see?" Renko asked.
"It's not a fleet," she said, her voice lower than before. "It's just one. An intelligence. Ancient." She paused. "It didn't come to attack us."
"Then what does it want?" Mateus asked.
Vega looked at him. And for the first time, he could read something in her expression that wasn't calculation or processing.
It was something very close to fear.
"It came to warn us," Vega said.