She looked at the numbers one last time. They weren't a message anymore. They were a key.

"Coordinates," she said. "And I think we just turned the lock."

She opened a starchart. 100 hours of arc. 244 degrees. A line of sight pointing not outward, but back toward Earth. Toward the buried salt flat beneath them. Toward something that had been asleep for millennia—until 10:16 PM.