Dream d1077-s: The Gauge Drops Quiet

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the terminal station hummed its usual morning hum, but something in the pitch had changed.

I noticed it the way you notice a held breath - not the absence of sound but a thinning of it. The generator at the east wall was running slower. I put my hand against the casing and felt the vibration fractionally lower than it should be. The Weather Reader was already there, crouched beside the fuel gauge, her fingers hovering over the dial without touching it.

"How long," I said.

She didn't look up. "Three days. Maybe four if we run reduced load at night."

The beacon at center still pulsed. I watched it through the window - that slow blue-white beat against the stripped towers beyond, the post-light of the sky pressing down flat and pale. The network was alive. But the thing that kept it alive was running thin.

Lano came in from outside, nails clicking on the patched floor. He stopped near the generator casing, nose working the air. His ears went flat against his skull. He gave one short, sharp bark - not at any of us, just at the room in general - then sat with his whole body angled toward the door. Alert. Reading something we hadn't named yet.

The Builder was at the supply ledger when I found him in the far room. He had the pages spread across the table - salvage logs, material tallies, the careful record of everything we'd built from. He ran his finger down a column and stopped.

"We've been drawing on the same sources for eighteen months," he said. "The closer caches are gone."

The Wire Man appeared in the doorway. He'd heard. The Philosopher came behind him, and then the Beacon Network Specialist, and we were all standing around the ledger like it was something that needed witnesses.

The Listener pulled out the range maps. The Dreamer stood at the far wall, saying nothing, just looking at the beacon through the glass.

The specialist spoke first. "We can triangulate further out. If the relay on the ridge holds signal, we can guide a run."

"That's thirty kilometers," said the Builder. "More, depending on what the Weather Reader's models say about the roads."

Everyone looked at her. She had her notebook open. She was already calculating.

Lano pressed against my leg, warm and certain, and made a small sound in his throat. He turned his muzzle toward the window where the beacon light lay across the floor in its slow pulse.

"Lejos," he said, once. Quietly.

The network could reach that far. We didn't yet know if we could.