“Wil! Wil, wake up!” Bennie is pounding on the door to Wil’s quarters.
Over the intercom, set next to the door frame, comes Wil’s voice. “Jesus, what? Hold on!” The door slides open—Wil is standing in the doorway, pulse pistol in each hand.
“Gross! Why are you naked?” Bennie screeches, stumbling backward, trying to shield his eyes.
“I was asleep forty seconds ago, you asshole! What’s wrong? Why are you banging on my door? What time is it?” Wil stumbles back into his quarters. Putting his pistols down on the desk set against one wall, he grabs a pair of sweatpants off a chair by his desk.
“Are you decent yet?” Bennie asks, peeking between two fingers.
Walking back to the door, Wil slaps him on the back of the head. “What did you want?”
“A message came in,” Bennie says, turning toward the lounge.
“Uh, okay. From?” Bennie doesn’t immediately answer, so Wil reluctantly follows him.
Xan is sitting on the sofa in the center of the room. She looks up from the PADD she’s holding and does a double-take when she sees Wil in his topless state. “My, my,” she grins.
Wil snaps his fingers a few times to draw her eyes to his. “Not okay. Eyes are up here.” He looks at Bennie. “A message?”
Bennie claps his hands and darts to the communications console set against the wall. “Right! The message!” He pulls up the communications log and sends the message to the main entertainment screen in front of the sofa. It’s a single word.
“Borrolo?” Wil reads. “Is this some weird Brailack joke? Like rickrolling or something?”
“Rick what-ing?” Bennie says, then shakes his head. “No, no. It’s from Gabe.”
Wil is wide awake now. He walks over to the communication console, standing next to Bennie. “Talk to me. What’s ‘Borrolo’ mean?”
“I was checking our message queue. Remember, Harrith owed us a few bounties, so I wanted to see if they’d paid. Then I saw this.” He gestures to the message in the list of messages.
“No sender ID,” Wil mumbles, mostly to himself.
“Right, that’s what caught my eye too. I assumed it was junk, but then it occurred to me—my message filters are pretty tight, no way something so clearly junky would make it through. So why was it here?”
“You can save the monologuing for Zephyr and Maxim. Speaking of— Computer, wake up Maxim and Zephyr, have them join us in the lounge.”
“Acknowledged.” Wil smiles; he’s missed the flat male voice that the system defaults to. Bennie has been messing with the voice and intelligence settings ever since he came aboard. Guess he got bored. Finally, Wil thinks.
“Only Gabe knows about my message-filtering settings. We talked about it a month or two ago, when he saw me updating the settings. Only he would know how to encode a message that wouldn’t get filtered out.” He jabs a little green finger at the screen. “It’s him. Has to be!”
Wil sighs. “Again, what does Borrolo mean?”
“It’s not a thing it’s—”
“What’s going on?” Maxim asks, as he and Zephyr enter the lounge, night clothes rumpled.
Bennie elbows Wil. “See, they sleep in clothes.” He sniggers until Wil shoves him off the stool. “Ouch!”
Wil walks to the sofa area, gesturing for everyone to take a seat.
“Bennie says we got a message from Gabe.” He holds his hand up to silence the questions and then points at the screen, still showing the one-word message.
“Borrolo,” Zephyr says. She looks at Wil, who shrugs.
“I don’t understand,” Maxim says.
“Me either,” Wil says. “I don’t know what language it is. Is it Brailack?”
Xan throws her short, furry arms up. “Seriously? Cute only gets you so far, you know.”
Wil and Maxim look at each other, blinking. Wil blushes.
The diminutive physicist continues, “Borrolo is not a thing, it’s a place. Well, I guess it’s both. It is a high-energy sensor array. It’s used to look for signals from other galaxies. It’s located in the Borrolo star system.”
“Like Arecibo,” Wil says.
“I don’t know what that is—but sure,” Xan says. “The Borrolo array is ten kilometers wide. There are sensors on it so sensitive they could spot you sitting in your house on your home planet from a thousand lightyears away.”
Zephyr whistles. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“No offense, but unless you’re into that sort of thing, I can understand why. It’s a big deal in scientific circles, but that’s about it. Any discoveries made out there are tightly controlled by the governing council.”
“Governing council?” Maxim repeats. “The GC Governing Council?”
“Borrolo is a joint effort between the GC Science Division, Farsight Corporation and Aug Industries, if I recall. Prathea might know more.”
Zephyr stands up quickly. “I’ll go get her.”
“And I’ll go get a t-shirt,” Wil says—much to Xan’s visible disappointment.