Plucking it just once released a sudden throbbing pulse. A palpable wave of sound in the form of a clear harmonic chord!

I understood, at last, why it had seemed to be musically vibrating earlier!

Acoustically-oriented active fiber. It absorbs energy if you ride it along a downward slant, turning most of your falling energy into stored sound waves. Cached energy that you can later recover, sending you back uphill the way you came.

No wonder the Standard population feared flying predators. In a way, this sonic dive-in was more impressive than any mythology of vampires transforming into bats. Though… now that I thought about it, there could be easy technological countermeasures, if only the Standards knew about them.

Hurrying into the shabby room, I grabbed the candelabra and brought it outside, then stripped to the waist, removing my Alliance uniform tunic. Some of the woven-in circuits were torn and ruined, but many individual thread assemblies were intact. I removed one of the communications strips and chewed on the end to create a frayed contact-antenna that I then applied to the cable. With a little tinkering, I was able to create a probe that measured and tapped the stored sound… and I rocked back from a veritable cacophony! A powerful and complex mélange of waveforms swarmed and enveloped me till I felt wrapped in sound, like some kind of pod person. It took real effort to rip away.

Back inside, I worked on the Squidish leather jacket and protective “dog collar” I had bought earlier, creating a harness of sorts. One that could let me ride along the cable, if only I found the trigger codes. My guess was that it would take some combination of tone and rhythm to activate a traveling wave, something with the right phase and group velocity combinations to propel me up-and-out, along the slight incline… toward wherever Gala came from…

I avoided thinking about that while making final preparations. The important thing was that I was being dynamic again. Assertive. Whoever or whatever I found at the other side, they might be taken by surprise. And if they were Nomorts? Well, maybe, with any luck, I might have another special sneeze or two inside me.

Soon the contraption was finished. I fastened it to the cable, slid my arms inside and made sure several of the leather garment’s buttons were secure. Ready to go.

Indeed. I whispered that very word, urgently. “Go!”

But the tether only vibrated a little.

Well that wasn’t much of a trigger. Probably needed more tonality.

Making sure of the electro-sonic connection and pressing my throat mike close, I tried to hum an even note.

The cable shuddered in response. I hummed louder… then much louder, but that made no difference… So, volume wasn’t the key…

…nor was simply changing pitch. I had to stimulate self-amplifying waveforms. That would take complexity.

So I started to sing.