What Answers Back

They woke the captain at 0800, which felt, in hindsight, exactly late enough to have been reckless and exactly early enough to have possibly saved lives — a balance Kofi would spend the rest of his career being grateful he'd found by accident rather than design.

Captain Osei listened to the pattern twice, asked four questions Kofi didn't have answers for, and gave the order that changed the next nine years as completely as the silence had changed the first nine: transmit back.

It took the bridge crew six hours to agree on what to send. In the end they sent the simplest thing they had — the Meridian's own signal-check pulse, the one built into every deep-space vessel since before Kofi was born, a pattern that meant, in the oldest and plainest sense anyone could construct: we hear you, and we are listening.

The reply came back in eleven minutes, far too fast for anything that should have been light-years away.

Not seventeen pulses this time.

Eighteen.

Priya went very pale, staring at the new pattern like it might vanish if she looked away. "That's not a coincidence," she said. "That's a response. Something out there just answered our answer, Kofi. In real time. Nothing should be able to do that from beyond the edge of the system."

Kofi looked past her, out the narrow viewport at the black between stars that the Meridian had crossed alone for nine years believing, the way you believe the ground beneath a house, that there was simply nothing else out there to find.

Eighteen pulses blinked steadily on the display, patient, deliberate, and — Kofi was almost certain, though he would not say it aloud until the data confirmed it — close.

Whatever had been counting down for nine years hadn't been counting down to nothing.

It had been counting down to them.