Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2074: Identification Code

Lorna stepped in front of the cowering cadets.

"Enough," she said, and her voice was low and steady enough that the cadets nearest to her fell silent almost at once. "Look at me, all of you."

They looked at her.

"This outpost was built for exactly this," Lorna said. "Everyone in this room has trained for this moment. They know what they’re doing, and they will make the right decision. Your job right now is to stay calm, stay quiet, and stay out of their way. Panicking will not help anyone, and it will certainly not help you."

She held their gaze for a moment longer, looking from one face to the next, and slowly, the worst of the panic began to ease. The girl at the front was still pale, but her breathing had steadied, and the boy who had been muttering had gone quiet.

Ning stood among them and watched.

He had not panicked, and he had no reason to. If the object turned out to be a Mekharan vessel and the outpost failed to stop it, he could stop it himself before it came anywhere near the planet. Whatever happened in the next few minutes, nobody in this room was going to die.

He prepared himself for that possibility and kept his attention ready in case it was needed.

But he did not act yet.

He could have reached out and known instantly what the object was, what it carried, and whether the signal it was broadcasting meant anything at all. He chose not to. He wanted to see what the people here would do on their own, when the decision was entirely theirs and nobody was waiting to save them from it.

So he waited.

Beside him, Jason had gone pale.

At first, Ning assumed it was fear, the same fear that had spread through the rest of the cadets. But when he looked more carefully, he realized Jason was not looking at the central display, where the red marker drew steadily closer, nor at the officers arguing below.

He was staring at the secondary display, where the raw signal had been broken down into its jagged, irregular waveform.

His eyes were fixed on it with the same complete absorption Ning had seen in their dorm room whenever Jason bent over one of his old tablets, and his lips were moving slightly, as though he were counting something or tracing a pattern in his head.

"That looks familiar," Jason said quietly.

Nobody heard him.

The officers below were still arguing, the commander was still staring at the central display, and the cadets around him were too focused on the red marker to notice anything else.

Jason’s voice had barely risen above a whisper, and it was lost almost at once in the noise of the room.

Jason swallowed hard and took a small step away from the wall.

One of the soldiers posted beside the cadets noticed him at once and moved to block his path, but Jason was not trying to go anywhere. He was looking past the soldier toward the officer seated at the nearest communications workstation, a man whose display showed the same jagged waveform Jason had been staring at.

"Excuse me," Jason said. His voice was barely louder than before. "Sir, that signal, I think I’ve seen—"

The officer did not even turn around. He raised one hand without looking up from his station and waved it vaguely in Jason’s direction, the gesture of someone brushing away an insect.

"Not now, cadet. Get back against the wall."

Jason flinched and stepped back, his face flushing. For a moment, he looked as though he might simply let it go, fall back into the line of cadets, and hope that whatever he had seen did not matter after all.

Ning turned his head and looked at him.

He did not say anything. He did not need to. He simply met Jason’s eyes and held them, and in that look was everything Ning would have said if he had spoken.

Jason knew something that nobody else in this room knew, and keeping quiet about it now would be the worst thing he could possibly do.

Jason stared back at him, his expression torn.

Then Naysha leaned closer from Jason’s other side.

"If you know something," she said quietly, "you have to say it now. Not in a minute, not after they’ve decided. Now."

Jason looked from her to Ning, then back toward the central display, where the red marker continued to draw closer to Jalun.

Something in his expression changed.

He stepped forward again, past the soldier this time, who was too surprised to stop him. He walked to the edge of the tier overlooking the center of the room, and when he spoke, his voice carried across the entire command center, louder than Ning had ever heard it.

"Commander! The signal isn’t unreadable!"

The room went quiet.

Officers turned in their seats. The argument that had been raging between the tracking and communications stations stopped mid-sentence. Commander Ostrava turned slowly toward the far wall, her eyes settling on the thin, pale cadet standing at the edge of the tier.

"Explain," she said.

Jason’s hands were shaking, but he did not step back.

"It’s old," he said. "That’s why your systems can’t read it. It’s an identification protocol from before the teleportation matrices existed, the kind ships used when they still traveled between systems through open space. The transfer hub we visited on our first day here would have used it to verify incoming ships. I recognize the structure of the waveform. I’ve seen it before in my studies of past technologies."

Several of the officers exchanged glances.

"Modern systems stopped supporting those protocols a long time ago," Jason continued, the words coming faster now. "Once the matrices were built, nobody needed them anymore, so they were dropped. When your systems try to read the signal, they don’t recognize the format at all, so they treat it as garbage. But it isn’t garbage. It’s an identification code. It’s just one nobody uses anymore."