Because he was such a space fan, they buried McAiden next to the satellite domes, sending his body to whoever was in the future. Maybe they'd think the equipment was a shrine.
It took a week to get the Sentinel up and running. Marinakis spent much of the time inside the dome, sitting next to the antenna, basking in the milky light filtering through the skin. The material kept the elements out but was transparent to radio waves. Most importantly for her, the material was only weakly translucent to visible light. The sky was at bay, safely beyond the white enclosure. She found herself often pondering the interface between opacity and transparency, how things can exist in one part of a spectrum but not in others.
They organized a little party to celebrate turning the antenna on. CAM-3 had plenty of canned goods and, as it turned out, Brent was a fairly good chef.
After eating a hearty meal they gathered in the control room. No digital displays. Just analogue buttons, lights, and oscilloscopes. She pushed the button to turn it on. The radar scope illuminated. Outside, the Sentinel spun and sent out probing beams, sweeping them in great arcs; northward to the sea, southward to the ruined cities. There were no returns. Even the sidelobes were dead. What had they expected?
The LF and HF antennas stood ready for a signal, the start of an interlink to whatever was left of the world. Somebody would come to find them. And if not, they’d always have the shortwave.
With the mission completed, Marinakis sighed and walked out of the control room, then out onto the ice. The wind was absurdly cold. The sky was glowing with otherworldly colors. She wandered over CAM-3’s snow-covered gravel and walked in front of one of the secondary radars.
Lowering herself onto the snowdrift, she leaned back against a truss and stared southward, pondering the horizon line that separated her world from the one above.
She heard crunching. Brent sat down beside her.
“Mind if I sit?”
“You already did, so sure. It's a great sight.” She snorted. Technically he was still her second in command. She could play nice. Although, she knew that—in some sense—she blamed him for the mass casualty event.
“So what do we do now?”
“Now we wait…” she left the last syllable flat, undefined. There wasn’t much to see on the horizon, thankfully, but she found herself unable to make eye contact. Instead she slumped more against her truss.
Brent picked up the thread, “... and see what the next world brings.”
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