Science Fiction

The Vantara Station had been keeping itself alive through automated systems and sheer bureaucratic inertia for eleven years. Commander Asha Reyes was its only living occupant, posted there by a directive that no longer had a sender and sustained by supply drops that arrived eight months late on a good year. The relay dishes were her responsibility. She maintained them because that was her job, not because she believed anyone was still listening.

The dishes pointed at forty-seven different coordinates across two star systems. Most had been dark for the better part of a decade. Two had gone dark the morning Asha arrived, which she had taken as a bad omen. She had been right.

On the station's eleven-year anniversary — a date she had begun marking with a small notation in the log, because someone should — the most distant dish came alive. Not a carrier signal. Not a maintenance ping. Something structured, something deliberate, something that had been traveling for a very long time to get here.

Asha spent four hours running decryption protocols that had not been used in fifteen years. The signal resisted all of them. It was not encrypted, she finally concluded — it simply was not in any language she had ever encountered, which was different and, in some ways, worse.

She recorded it, looped it, reduced it to its constituent frequencies, and looked for patterns. There were patterns. They repeated on a twenty-seven minute cycle with small but consistent variations that felt deliberate — like someone speaking with care rather than speaking to be understood. She had spent enough years in isolation to recognise the difference.

What troubled her most was the source coordinate. She had plotted it three times using three different methods. The dish pointed at deep water — at the dark space between systems where nothing was charted. Nothing had ever been charted there, not because no one had looked, but because three separate survey missions had logged that region as surveyed and noted nothing. The signal was coming from a place that definitively had nothing in it. Asha sent a report to Command. She did not expect a reply.