Margaret Blackwood stood in the doorway of the Navigation Room, a hard-shell specimen case in each hand, and tried to reconcile what she was seeing with what she remembered.
The last time she'd been here, she'd watched Starseed seize while alarms screamed and David shouted commands. She'd flown back to Scotland needing distance, needing her own work.
Now, three weeks later, the room was unrecognizable.
"Welcome to the BEEGL," Amara said, stepping past her to take one of the cases. "Bio-Electronic Evolutionary Grammar Laboratory. Susan named it."
Margaret smiled. "Darwin would approve. His voyage on the Beagle started all this, in a way. The Punta Alta samples."
"Susan's point exactly," David said, appearing from behind the monitoring station. He looked better than he had on their video calls—still tired, still carrying weight, but present. "Different ship, same journey."
Two detector arrays instead of one, separated by several meters, connected by fiber optic cables running through proper conduits. A new terminal station against the south wall. Everywhere, the aesthetic of intention rather than emergency—this room had been designed, not improvised.
"You rebuilt everything," Margaret said.
"From first principles. Every system that failed during K-Pg, we analyzed and redesigned."
The single navigator's chair was gone. In its place, nothing—just open floor space, as if they were waiting to understand what should go there.
"The dual …
