Nine Years of Silence

The Meridian had been alone for nine years, four months, and sixteen days — a number Kofi Adisa knew without checking, the way you know how long it's been since anyone said your name and meant it.

Earth's last transmission had arrived when he was eleven, a routine data burst about crop yields and a political election nobody aboard the ship would live to see the outcome of, and then nothing. No malfunction on their end. No error in the logs. Just an ordinary Tuesday that turned, somewhere around dinner, into the first day of a silence that had never once broken.

He was thirty now. Chief signal engineer, a title that meant less than it sounded like on a ship that hadn't received an external signal in nearly a decade. Mostly his job consisted of maintaining equipment built to listen for something that had, by every reasonable measure, stopped being there to hear.

He was running a routine diagnostic at 0300 ship-time — the hour he preferred, when the Meridian's corridors were dim and quiet and felt less like a shared coffin and more like a place a person could actually think — when the receiver did something it hadn't done in nine years.

It blinked.

Not the slow, patient pulse of the ship's own systems talking to each other. A different rhythm. Irregular. Urgent, in the particular way that only meant one thing to anyone who'd spent a career listening to static for a living.

Something was transmitting.

And it wasn't Earth's frequency.

Kofi sat very still for a long moment, hand hovering over the console, aware in some distant part of his mind that whatever he did in the next sixty seconds was about to become the most important thing he'd ever done — or the last mistake anyone aboard the Meridian would get the chance to make.