Relaxing Respite

I found the calm soup and its random motion to be soothing, and released my hold in the meshwork, switching to soup mode. A random buffeting was welcome after the constant flow in the zone that I had departed. I fired up the synchro-drive with a slow swingshot pattern, and pulled away from the meshwork and set the Shorty adrift in the soup.

Returning the orbits around the Seven and it's Ones to normal, I dropped into an easy orbit around the Seven and relaxed. As the memory of the release monster that I had outrun and escaped faded, I drifted into a lazy Electron scan, absorbing the patterns and frequency shifts that bubbled through the noise of the One Eight Ones. I even turned off all of the filters, letting as the known spectrum wash across my orbit.

That's when I noticed the wiggle. Somewhere in the nearby soup, there was a source of energy that was tuned to the same frequency as my orbital path. It was not always there, and it was not random either. There was a long period between these weak pulses, but the period was quite regular, and highly synchronous with my own natural spin frequency — even if it was off by a count or two in a period — it still synchronized with the count in an uncanny way.