The Absent Observer

That night at S-17-R there should have been no living thing and no instrument for a hundred kilometres in any direction. Something was watching anyway.

It stood on the far side of the absence. The snow within 30 centimetres of its feet was as smooth as if someone had just brushed it flat. In air at 46 below there was no white plume of breath, and the air around it sat as still as dead water. Spectra's sensor cloud layer holds 32 floating nodes above the Frozen Continent, S-17-R falls entirely inside their coverage, and the data returned in that moment did not contain so much as a pixel of noise. It stood in the blind spot of everything that could have seen it.

Then it raised its head. The direction was roughly 300 metres overhead, the lens of Spectra floating sensor node twenty-seven—a node that was offline at the time, in a region classed as a no-data zone, with the next automatic scan not due to trigger for another 3 months.

In 20 seconds that lens would be woken by hand from the far side of the Ice-Shadow Trench.

It waited there. The instant the lens came online, it faced the lens—it had no eyes, yet the posture was precise enough to be a returned gaze—and made one slow, unmistakable movement. It was a greeting. The man on the other end of the screen saw only the image stutter for a fraction of a second, and put it down to a dropped frame.

There was another pair of eyes on that same ice field. The Inkstone Conclave had long since posted a watcher at the edge of S-17-R, and when the underling reported in he said only "she is in position," then added that the man who came down off the airship had placed a ball at the boundary. Whether that watcher and this shadow on the snow are the same thing, no record anywhere can currently answer—one leaves footprints, files reports, eats the Conclave's rations; the other leaves nothing at all.

What is it? Who did it come for? Spectra's archive has no entry for it, and neither do the Bureau's old case files. When those 20 seconds of footage were pulled apart frame by frame afterwards, its posture was clean in every single frame; only the edge of the shadow shivered at the resolution limit, shivering out into a ring of grey.

Only one thing is known: it recognises the man on the other end of the lens, and it knows when that lens is going to be opened.