Ping

She’d been on the station for two years and four months when the signal came through.

The station sat at a point of a planet no one had bothered to name yet. There was nothing out here except the listening arrays and the six people who ran them, and most of what the arrays listened to was debris. Micrometeors. Thermal expansion in the superstructure. The low hum of the planet below them, which she had long since stopped hearing as anything separate from silence.

The signal came in at 03:14 station time. She was the only one awake.

She almost missed it. She’d been reading, had the audio feed turned down, and the ping was quiet from years of travel across open space. Something in its rhythm made her look up from her book. A rhythm she recognized before she understood why she recognized it.

It was the recognition that scared her first, before anything else.

She turned up the feed and played it back. A voice, badly degraded, broken into syllables by whatever had happened to the transmitter over the years. She knew the cadence. She knew the particular way the vowels flattened in the second word. She knew it because she had grown up hearing recordings of herself.

The voice was hers.

She sat for a very long time with her headset on and didn’t move, then she pulled up the registry and searched for the transmitter ID. It was registered to the civilian survey vessel that had departed from its home station eleven years and four months ago. Crew of eight. Presumed lost after failing to make contact at the 180-day mark. No debris recovered. No further signals detected.

Until now.

She played the recording again. Her voice. Her exact voice at twenty-nine, which was how old she had been when the ship departed. She was forty now. She had not sounded like that for years.

She was not on the crew manifest of the ship. She had never worked for the company that ran it. Eleven years ago, she had been on its home station with a contract for a nearby array. She had watched the ship depart through the port window of the station cafeteria while she ate a bowl of rice. She remembered it clearly because she had been reading news about long-range signal attenuation and had looked up at exactly the wrong moment to see the ship slide past… or what she had always assumed was the wrong moment.

She isolated what she could from the signal. Most of it was too degraded to reconstruct. She pulled two phrases that were clear enough to decipher:

...don't come looking... Then, after a gap of almost thirty seconds ...she doesn't know yet.

She sat in the dark and looked at the words on her screen.

She thought about the ship and its eight crew members, none of whom had been her. She thought about the survey route, out past the heliopause, into the interstellar boundary, a route that should have taken less than four months. She thought about eleven years. She thought about how far out she could triangulate the signal's origin point, which was not in the interstellar boundary. Which was much farther than that.

She thought about the message.

Don't come looking.

She doesn't know yet.

She took off her headset and held it in her lap and looked out the port at the planet turning slowly beneath them, its storms moving in long patient spirals.

She thought, know what?

She thought, know what yet?

In the morning she filed the signal in the log under Anomalous Transmissions and listed the origin as unknown. She played it back one more time and wrote the exact words down on paper, in her own handwriting, and folded the paper into her breast pocket.

Then she pulled up the open posting board and started reading through their current survey contracts.

She didn't know yet, but she had decided she was going to find out.