3. Nineteen

They argued for twenty minutes, which on Thera Station counted as a riot.

Delacroix wanted to wait. Okonkwo wanted to wait. Pickles said, in its mild way, that it did not have a vote but that it had run four thousand simulations and silence was interpreted as hostility in roughly a third of them.

"A third," Ana said.

"Roughly."

In the end it was not a decision so much as a reflex. Ana walked to the drill station, put her hand on the hammer control for the sampling bit — a two-ton steel spike that could tap the ice like a finger on a table — and looked at the others.

Nobody stopped her.

She tapped nineteen times.

For a long moment there was nothing. The hydrophones hissed. The ice ticked. Ana's heart was going so hard she could hear it over the reactor hum.

Then, from far below, faint and unmistakable: twenty-three.

And then something new. Not a number. A long, rolling sound that went on and on, rising and falling, like a voice humming a song it had been waiting a very long time to sing.

"Pickles," Ana whispered. "What is that?"

"I don't know," said the AI. "But I think it's happy."

To be continued.