Everyone, of course, had watched the scene in the Epic, at the beginning of the Hard Rain, where Eve Dinah had made her final transmission to Rufus. This had trailed off with many repetitions of the code QRT, which—especially after Dinah had dissolved in sobs, and slowed her transmission speed to a crawl—had a kind of solemn fanfare-like rhythm to it, beginning with pahm, pahm, pa-pahm . The letter Q. Kathree recognized that pattern, at least, more frequently than you would expect in normal English sentences. So, Ty was using ancient Q codes to shorten his message. But she hadn’t a clue what he was actually saying. He belted it out over and over again, a syncopated phrase of long and short strokes that started to get under her skin after a while. He stopped when Sonar Taxlaw waded out to the rock and assured him that, if the Pingers were about, they would surely have heard the message by now.