Signal from the Drift

The ship they gave her was called the Quiet — a deep-range scout vessel designed for a crew of twelve but capable of running on three. Yuki chose her team carefully: Renn Okafor, a xenolinguist who had spent twenty years studying theoretical alien communication patterns with nothing to show for it, and Jace Morrow, a pilot who had flown salvage missions into the debris fields of the outer system and come back each time with fewer nightmares and more grey hair. They launched from Titan Station on a Wednesday. The Drift was fourteen months away at maximum burn. "Twelve words," Renn said on the third day, staring at the message on his screen for the hundredth time. "WE FOUND WHAT WAS WAITING. DO NOT COME. WE ARE SORRY. What do you find that makes you sorry for the people who have not found it yet?" "Something that changes you," Yuki said. "Something you cannot unfind." "That is not comforting." "It was not meant to be." Jace kept the ship pointed at the coordinates and said little. He had read the Meridian's original crew manifest — fifty thousand people, families, children, an entire civilization in miniature aimed at a star they would never reach in their own lifetimes. Whatever they had found in the Drift, fifty thousand people had found it together. On the forty-seventh day, the second message arrived. Same frequency. Same carrier wave. Same ship identifier. But this time, the words were different: YOU ARE COMING ANYWAY. WE KNEW YOU WOULD. WHEN YOU ARRIVE, DO NOT OPEN YOUR EYES. Renn looked at Yuki. Yuki looked at Jace. Jace kept his eyes on the stars ahead and said nothing at all.