February 2079
Once, just once, as Venus drifted in the dark of the cupola, she picked up a strange signal. It appeared to be coherent, like a beam from a microwave laser. She used her space-borne telescopes to triangulate the signal, determining that it wasn’t anywhere close. And she passed it through filters to render it into audio. It sounded cold and clear, a trumpet note, far off in the galactic night.
If it was a signal it wasn’t human.
She listened for two years, all the way to Earth III. She never heard it again.
She said nothing about this to Holle and the others.