“Of course,” she panted, strapping herself into her seat as the ship rattled.

“We’re gaining mass!” she shouted. “No—Earth is increasing its pull on us !”

Her blood went cold. She retyped: CL1NT. Replace the 1 with I. Rearrange. T-C-L-I-N. No. L-I-N-C-T. LINCT —Latin, to lick . No.

The anomaly was no longer a passive sliver. It had used CL1NT’s template to build its own field—a counter-gravity well, but tangled, knotted, wrong. It was pulling on everything at once, from different directions.

V.24-6-CL1NT was the answer. A phased array of twenty-four orbital emitters, each one capable of projecting a calibrated gravity pulse. The pulses would cancel out the interference, lock the Earth’s gravity back to its original frequency. A planetary tuning fork.

But as she turned away, her console flickered. A single line of data scrolled past, too fast for anyone but a physicist to catch.