Parr discovered she could easily pretend to pray. It was not something they had taught at the Academy. No amount of cultural lectures or xeno-anthropology had prepared her for the practical experience, somewhere between sublime and absurd, of kneeling on metal warmed by other people’s knees, hands folded in a manner that would satisfy a reliquary’s watchers.

They had been at it for an hour. But time had an unhelpful way of blurring at the First Temple when the cubes sang. Around her, the circle breathed as one. Pilgrims and converts, some in simple grey tunics, some in repurposed work clothes, all of them wearing the little black cubes at their throats. In the centre of the chapel – the old cargo bay she had first stepped into, now reworked with more fabric hangings and more reliquaries since her arrival – one larger cube sat on a low plinth. Filaments ran from its base into the deck like roots.

Corin’s voice rose and fell somewhere to her left, leading the chant. The words were simple and deliberately repetitive: lines about roads and veils and the pattern beneath the silence. The shard in her own mind hummed appreciation.

You are learning, it breathed. You see how resonance grows. You are not separate. You never were.

She thought, carefully and with the sort of discipline that had got her through survival training, that it was one thing to hear and observe the voice, and quite another to be taken over by it. A certain clinical detachment coloured by some dark humour was keeping her on the edge of sanity.

She did not let the faint twist of amusement reach her face. Outwardly she kept her expression soft and intent. A supplicant, not a saboteur.

Corin’s hand brushed her shoulder as he passed behind the circle, a light touch, entirely appropriate in context and entirely unwelcome.

“We thank the Listener for coming among us,” he said. The title still made her want to wince. “Her presence proves that the pattern is patient. It does not tear; it invites.”

A faint murmuring of assent. A few eyes opened to look at her, full of reverence or envy or both. She kept her head bowed. Better that than let them see the fleeting image that had risen, unbidden, behind her eyes: Ayres in his fighter, jaw set, on his way to help set her free.

“How long are you planning to humour them?” he’d asked once, back when all their problems had been contained within one starship and a chain of command that occasionally frowned upon sleeping with your captain.

“As long as it takes,” she’d replied, and kissed away the argument.

Back then she’d meant something else entirely.

The chant wound down. The room’s collective hum, human and other, quietened. Corin lifted his hands. “The road calls us onward,” he said. “We have much work to do before the net wakes. Go with listening hearts.”

The circle broke. People rose, some with the slight stiffness of joints unused to kneeling, some with a spring that looked very much like zeal. A few lingered by the central cube, fingertips brushing its surface in a caressing gesture. The reliquary basked in their attention.

Parr stood more slowly, conscious of the eyes on her. The shard in her skull coiled contentedly.

“Emilia,” Corin said, suddenly close.

She turned. He had the knack of appearing without giving his presence away. “Guide,” she said.

He smiled faintly. “You still use our titles not from respect, but to keep you separate from us.”

“And you use names with guile,” she said, before she could stop herself.

His smile did not falter. “We all have our techniques. Come. The next alignment window is inconveniently soon. I want your thoughts on the relay geometry.”

The navigation centre had once been a sensor control room. A semi-circular bank of consoles faced a recessed display pit, the walls lined with repurposed hardware from a dozen different installations. Systems glowed in different colours. Some were bright, some pulsed, some remained pale and untouched.

Pala Ridge blinked gently on one of the screens. It felt entirely unfair of the universe to give it a pleasant-sounding name when it was being lined up for such a dangerous use.

“Remind me,” Parr said, keeping her tone as mild as she could manage, “why is the farming settlement so promising?”

“Because they listen,” Leth said, matter-of-fact. “Because they have allowed the reliquaries to sit in their soil and control their weather, and they have seen improvement. When the time comes, their resistance will be minimal.”

Corin moved closer to the map, his hands folded behind his back. “The net is almost ready to remember itself. Starfleet will tighten its own web at the end of that period: your comprehensive diagnostic and alignment process. We will ride that pulse. The reliquaries will exploit the transmission.”

“And everything will hum in tune,” Emilia said, unable to keep the dryness out of her voice.

His gaze flicked towards her. “Is that not the purpose of instruments? To sound together?”

“Depends on the conductor,” she said.

Leth made a small displeased sound. Corin ignored it.

“This is where your training is useful,” he said. “Your Federation loves coordination. It will have precise timetables. Every relay, every diagnostic, marching in lockstep. If we can embed our own transmission inside theirs, the net wakes on their rhythm.”

He gestured to one particular cluster. “These relays,” he said. “On the edge of recognised space. They will be part of the pulse. They also serve the Pala Ridge node. The farming colony you pretend not to care about.”

“I care about people being turned into subspace wiring,” she said. “Whether they grow vegetables or not.”

“Then help us do it cleanly,” Leth said. “You are uniquely placed. You understand both the pattern and the primitive mesh your Starfleet insists on using. You can make the harmonics align.”

The shard in her head stirred, pleased. There was an undeniable part of her that thrilled at the problem: three networks, Starfleet’s comms web, the Pilgrim reliquary net, the underlying, older lattice the cubes remembered, trying to sync. It appealed to the same part of her that marvelled at how the systems of a starship coordinated their efforts.

“You know I could also make them misalign,” she said.

Leth stiffened. Corin’s expression did not change.

“Yes,” he said. “You could. And the pattern knows that. It is watching. Carefully. Which is why your resistance has been tolerated. Your critical faculties, your intellect, is necessary for you to play the part you must.”

“I’m not a cog,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

“No,” he said. “You are a tuning fork. You ring with many possible notes. That is useful.”

She thought, not for the first time, that he was almost certainly quite mad. The calm, contained sort that never shouted, merely altered the rules of the game around him, adapting to always seem one step ahead of everyone else.

“Very well,” she said. “Show me your timing assumptions.”

Later

She found Tayis in the service ducts. The technician – barely out of her teens by the look of her – was wedged in sideways between two bulkheads, a panel unscrewed and resting against one shoulder, legs braced around a conduit. A hand-lamp dangled from a strap around her neck. With both hands she wrestled with a cable bundle.

“You know,” Parr said, leaning in the hatch, “some people create regulations about how you can safely handle complicated repairs.”

“On some stations,” Tayis replied, “the main power feed doesn’t go through a ninety-degree elbow where an idiot once accidentally welded part of it in place. And yet here we are.”

“Do you want a hand?”

“No,” Tayis said, then reconsidered. “Yes. Maybe. Hold this.”

She shifted, making space. Parr squeezed in beside her, feeling the duct hum around them. Up close, the cable Tayis was wrestling with was visibly wrong: its usual neat bundling distorted, as if something had pushed from the inside. Fine, hair-like threads of darker material – reliquary growth, but thinner, more diffuse than in the core – ran along its surface.

“Tried cutting it?” Parr asked.

“Yes,” Tayis said. “It grew back. Or rather, the cable rerouted. Like it wanted a weird route more than it wanted to go where I would neatly lay it. I’m having to negotiate.”

She said the last word with a scowl that made Parr like her even more.

“Corin know you’re down here?”

“He requested that I let the pattern do its work,” Tayis said. “Said the net was adjusting. I told him the net doesn’t have to deal with redirected coolant wells. That earned me a lecture and a meditation exercise. So. I’m down here anyway, doing what someone sensible should have done three weeks ago.”

She jammed a locking clamp into place with more force than delicacy. The cable shuddered, then settled into a less tortured curve.

“How long were you on this rock before the Pilgrims turned up?”

“Two years,” Tayis said. “Fixing thing and eating the same three variants of stew. It was,” She shrugged, a quick movement of one shoulder. “It was a job.”

“And now?”

Tayis hesitated. The hand-lamp painted half her face in yellow.

“Now it’s complicated,” she said. “Sometimes it’s better. The power grid actually runs the way it was meant to. We’re not relying on obsolete technology and we have a steady supply of components. The pattern smooths things.” She pulled a face. “And then there are the other bits.”

“The voices.”

“Yes,” Tayis said, with the relief of someone finally naming the thing. “Sometimes it’s like music in the walls. Which would be fine if it didn’t start telling you which way to route the cables. Or how fast your heart should beat when you disagree with Corin.”

Parr let out a slow breath. “Why are you telling me this?”

Tayis smirked faintly. “Because the pattern likes you and you hate it. That seems sane. Also, you’re Starfleet. You’re supposed to be good at turning up and saving the day.”

“I am not here,” Parr said, “in any official capacity.”

Tayis tightened the clamp another notch and checked the cable. It hummed at a lower, less strained pitch.

“What will happen,” Parr asked, “when they flip the big switch?”

Tayis grimaced. “The shards will all talk at once, you mean? Leth calls it convergence. Corin calls it the waking.”

“And it’ll fry a lot of people’s brains,” Parr said.

“Probably,” Tayis said. “But they don’t call them brains. They call them interfaces.”

There was a beat of silence. The duct hummed around them.

“Can you change it?” Parr asked. “The timing, the routing. Without anyone noticing.”

Tayis eyed her. “If I say yes, you’re going to ask me to, aren’t you.”

“It’s either that,” Parr said, “or we all sit here very quietly while an ancient piece of unknown technology uses our minds and our technology to take over this part of the galaxy.”

Tayis snorted. “You don’t recruit subtly, do you.”

“We don’t have time for subtle.”

Tayis twisted, making a small space between two bundles. “Show me,” she said. “What is it you want to break?”

Later

She brought Tayis into the navigation centre on the pretext of needing a systems technician more familiar with the Temple’s local lash-ups than any of the Pilgrim theologians.

It was not even a lie. The relay geometry was a mess, half Starfleet design, half jury-rigged, half whatever the reliquaries had decided was part of their plan. Someone sensible had to make sure they did not inadvertently vaporise their own antennae when they tried to ride Starfleet’s diagnostic pulse.

Corin accepted Tayis’s presence with a nod. Leth’s nostrils flared minutely, but he said nothing. They were both too confident in the pattern’s inevitability to worry about the two women.

“Here.” Leth indicated a cluster near the edge of the map on the display. “The frontier relay chain. Four buoys, one listening post, two small colonies. Starfleet will use them as one of their calibration arcs. We will bleed resonance into them.”

“Bleed,” Tayis muttered under her breath. “Nice word.”

Parr stepped closer. “Each of those buoys has a phase offset,” she said. “Starfleet uses them to measure delays and then correct them. If you overlay your own signal just before the diagnostic, you can hitch a ride. But if you’re off by more than a fraction.”

“The pattern does not drift,” Leth began.

“Everything drifts,” Emilia said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t need to do any of this at all.”

They argued, politely, for ten minutes over phase angles and harmonics. Leth was brilliant and terrifying and so absolutely convinced that the reliquaries remembered their own timing perfectly that he did not see the arrogance in assuming an alien machine would respect his equations.

Parr let him win the points that did not matter. On the handful that did, she yielded just enough, then retreated.

In the corner of her eye, she saw Tayis watching the console, lips moving silently as she calculated.

When Leth had gone to fetch some piece of hardware he deemed essential for the process, Corin lingered.

“You understand this is a test,” he said.

“Of my loyalty,” she said. “I assume everything here is.”

He cocked his head. “Of your alignment. You could make this easier. For yourself. For everyone. You could stop treating the pattern as an enemy and accept that it is a part of your destiny.”

“I’m helping, but I don’t have to like it,” she said.

He smiled, sadly, and left.

Tayis exhaled a breath she had been holding. “Do they always talk like that?” she asked. “As if you’ve already agreed with them and are taking a while to realise it.”

“Yes,” Parr said. “It’s exhausting.”

She tapped a sequence on the console, bringing up the relay cluster’s detailed configuration. Numbers cascaded; phase offsets, modulation patterns, routing tables.

“Here,” she said, indicating a particular line. “This is where the reliquary signal tags onto the diagnostic. Leth wants it to fire at the exact midpoint of the cycle. If it does, it’ll hit every node that’s in phase with Starfleet’s grid, including Pala Ridge and all the others on the curve.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Tayis asked.

“If it’s late,” Parr said, “it misses the peak. Their net still moves, but out of step. Slower. And it’ll eventually fail. So they’ll have to try again.”

Tayis frowned. “How much later can we make it without them noticing?”

“That’s the art,” Parr replied. “Too much and your reliquary friends will scream. Too little and it won’t fail.”

Her fingers flew across the secondary console, calling up a deeper configuration of underlying infrastructure. Most Pilgrims never looked this far down, there were too few people who understood the interfaces closest to the hardware.

Tayis traced lines. “If we introduce a micro-delay into the coupling between the local shard and the relay,” she murmured, “the pattern will compensate, yes? It doesn’t like being out of sync. It will keep pushing, adjusting. Leth will see his timings, but he won’t see that the net has to work harder for them.”

“Which means?”

“By the time it’s ready to ride the diagnostic, some of its energy goes into just keeping time,” Tayis said. “It’ll still fire, but slower. Sloppier. It’ll reach deep nodes – places like this rock – at full strength. But the shallower ones, the ones only just touched, it will miss some.”

“Pala Ridge?”

“Maybe,” Tayis said. “Or fewer of their people. Less synchrony. Most of Starfleet’s relays will treat it as noise and discard it. They’re built to ignore and filter a great deal of background noise and radiation.”

“Can you implement it without Leth noticing?” she asked.

Tayis considered. “Not if he is staring over my shoulder,” she said. “But he won’t. He’ll assume I’m doing as I’m told. People like him always do.”

Parr nodded slowly. “Do it,” she said. “Quietly. And encode something.”

Tayis blinked. “A message?”

“You’re hanging this on Starfleet’s diagnostic,” Emilia said. “If it works, someone will be looking for anomalies, especially after what happened to the Farragut. Make the transmission say something. Coordinates. A warning.”

Tayis snorted, but there was a small, fierce light in her eyes now. “Well then,” she said. “Let’s get it done.”