Just a Blip

By Ben O’Hagan

“It’s just a blip,” I said. “You know you can only thaw me out a certain number of times before it starts to mess me up, right?”

I had been shuffled from the cryo-bays into the signals room expecting something catastrophic. The med-techs had told me it had only been two years since they put me under, and standing Company orders were for specialists to be decanted only if the crew’s own troubleshooting efforts failed.

I turned away from the ladar display screen. The actual sensors nearly covered the ship, all around the size of a single coin. They constantly beamed out micron-thick beams of light, which would be bounced back by even the tiniest chips of space-bound rock or ice. The overwhelming majority of return signals would be from fragments too small to damage a ship travelling at full phase shift with healthy repulsers, but my job was to make the final determination if necessary.

The ship’s Captain programme got the data and automatically transferred it to the ladar screen. The green and black grid lines had always made my head swim, but the technician kept pointing to a small ladar blip, the tiniest white dot on a screen defined by its tiny white dots.

“It hasn’t flickered like the rest,” the technician said. He was a small man, which made sense as it cost less in food and free space to keep the permanent staff small, literally, and only bring someone like me out for consults now and again. The cryo-solution was packed with what they insisted on calling nutrients anyway, so even if the trip took centuries, they probably wouldn’t have to splurge on a real meal for me until planetfall.

I shook off the last vestiges of thaw-fog from my blurry eyes and looked at the display again. It showed our craft, the HMSS Victoria, and an almost cartoonish map of the route to Darmon 231–our intended colonisation destination.

Along either side of the route map were white splotches, which slowly filled in for the planetoids and debris fields that we would be passing.

At phase-shift, they flickered in and out of the field of view depending on their size and the time it took to pass them. The ship’s Captain AI would be making constant soundings to adjust our course. This screen was there for our benefit, but they had always given me a headache to watch for any length of time, perfect for a Signals specialist. At the very bottom of the display, some way behind the Victoria, was a single white splotch, unchanging and unflickering.

I looked back to the technician; his name badge said Spence.

“It’s a blip, Spence,” I said, “probably a blown pixel, or our own phase-shadow reflected behind us.”

Spence didn’t look convinced, but did look relieved to have someone else to blame the error on if I was wrong.

“Wake me up in a year if it’s still there,” I said.

238 years till planetfall.

They woke me up after five.

The ship looked good, tidy. Mostly prefab slabs of walls and ceilings, of course, but that made it easy to keep clean. It was nice to see some folk swabbing decks or whatever career sailors call it these days. It had been built larger than strictly necessary to account for the extra crew that would be born. They were piping in a soft classical music piece through hidden speakers. I couldn’t place it, but it sounded soft, natural. Probably something French, meant to trick people into forgetting that they’re trapped in a metal can hurtling through the void just shy of the speed of light.

I saw a couple other warmed up specialists on my way to the signals room. Most gave me a bleary nod or wave. Easy to tell apart from the jumpsuits. Don’t know whose idea it was to dress us in bright green, but I suppose it doesn’t show the dried goo as much.

Technician Spence was stood by the ladar console; he had grown his beard out a little and looked more relaxed than before. Good for him, I thought, he was going to spend his whole life onboard, definitely any kids he had would as well, and their kids. And so on. I was glad it had started to feel like home for him.

“It’s the same blown pixel blip,” I said.

Confident Senior Technician Spence shook his head and pointed to the white blob. “It’s moved,” he said.

“It’s a route map,” I said. “They’re supposed to.”

“No,” he said, “it hasn’t moved like the rest; it moved towards us. It’s catching up.”

Well, damn. I took a closer look at the display, used a measuring spec to double-check, and he was right. The blip had moved almost a full millimetre towards the HMSS Victoria. Still stubbornly unflickering.

“You’ve checked the—,” I began.

“Full software and hardware checks,” replied technician Spence. “And we even took the display offline for three months a couple years ago to let it reset”.

They’d also scrubbed the sensors on the outside of the ship (another frozen specialist had been decanted for the spacewalk) and triple checked the phase-engine to make sure it wasn’t throwing off extra shadow behind it.

“Well,” I said, “I’m a big enough person to admit when I’m wrong. Something’s following us.”

The signals room was torn on what it might be. Suggestions ranged from a supply ship sent from Nova Roma to replace the godawful food units to an asteroid dragged along in the Victoria’s wake.

“It can happen,” Piped up a particularly chipper junior assistant. “The USSS Twain paused mid route to fix their engines and—” she slammed a fist into her palm, “got splatted by a trail of meteors they’d been dragging at almost the speed of light.”

The crowd erupted into discussion on similar urban legends and sailors’ tall tales.

Lieutenant Hari had heard from a friend of her father-in-law that if the ship’s Captain AI made too many course corrections in the first few years, then it caused an accumulation of small particles to build up until they eventually formed a comet tail behind the craft.

Junior Technician Powell could barely keep a straight face as he told a story about his aunt, who had taken a spacewalk out of a skipper from Io and never been seen again. “Spacemaids got her,” he said.

“Spacemaids?” I asked.

The younger man nodded and continued. “Just like mermaids,” he said, “but in space.”

“How do they breathe?” I asked.

“They’ve got helmets, sir,” he replied, “and they broadcast enticing songs through the vox to lure starships into asteroid belts.”

“Wake me up in a couple of years if your blip moves again,” I said to Spence. “Or if the spacemaids come visiting.”

216 years to planetfall.

I was woken up and showered more quickly than the previous time. I didn’t recognise either of the attendants, but they were both young and likely hadn’t been old enough to be working when I’d been woken up last time.

They took me to the office of the chief technician and gave me a news-slate and a cup of piss poor coffee that still tasted like honey and salt mixed together to my parched tongue.

It had technically, biologically, been twenty-seven years since I’d eaten or drank anything that didn’t come intravenously. The lab nerds wouldn’t let me go back under until I’d expelled the waste, but it was worth a small reprimand on the file. It would be a very long time before anyone from headquarters was able to check in with us anyway.

The chief technician came into the office and slumped into his chair, his hair had gone grey, and his burgeoning beard had sprouted into a well-trimmed goatee.

“Technician Spence,” I said, “can I assume your blip hasn’t gone away?”

“You can,” he replied.

I was first struck by the change in his voice, not hoarse but weathered. Like a tree leaning with the wind. People must have been born on the Victoria by now who had never seen a tree.

He wasn’t wearing his engineering overalls anymore, and instead, wore a sober black suit with a small lanyard containing his picture and clearance code. The ship was run by its Captain of course, but unless things went irrevocably wrong, there was no point in bothering it.

The day-to-day operations were now run by department heads, such as the signals department which my friend Spence had managed to claw his way to the top of. Most of the department heads were original staff, though twenty-seven years is long enough for the novelty of the low gravity and piped-in music to wear off.

Politics is politics no matter what vessel you’re trapped on.

Behind him, a wooden panel withdrew to show the now familiar ladar display.

The route map had changed since I’d seen it last. We were through the first leg of the journey and out in the hinterland. Barely any corrections needed as the Captain program had found a course that took us through dark void for nearly a century before the ship would need to take proper soundings and adjust for debris fields.

The unflickering white dot had moved further towards the Victoria. Perhaps it had moved an inch or so since I had last seen it—twenty years before. Roughly speaking, that meant that it had gained on us by around thirteen million miles.

“People are growing concerned,” said Chief Technician Spence. He steepled his fingers in a gesture that no doubt provoked trust in others but seemed silly for me, who had seen him grow from a whelp in the space of a few hours.

“Has its trajectory changed at all?” I asked.

“Not even a wobble,” Spence replied.

I finished my coffee. My stomach was already reacting poorly to having to work again.

“So, what are you suggesting?” I asked. “Have the company sent any messages?”

It was difficult, but not impossible, for someone to get a photonogram to a moving ship.

They would have to position the beam to intercept the ship’s sensor array with atomic precision, but if they’d sent another ship along the exact same route as we had, then it would be a pretty reasonable gesture on their part to do so.

“Not a word from the company,” said Spence, “and believe me, we’ve tried to ask.”

Spence leant forward. “It’s causing havoc with morale. People don’t have a huge amount to talk about, and it’s become a daily topic.”

Understandable. The skeleton crew was designed to fill out as older members died and younger members were born, but it was still a small ship as far as living communities go. Any sort of mystery would be dissected constantly as a distraction from the daily humdrum. Not everyone was so lucky as to be wheeled out whenever something interesting happened.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

The ‘plan’ was to burn the phase engines on full power for a few years to see if they could break the gravitic ties that were dragging the object along.

The prevailing opinion was that they were towing an asteroid or piece of space junk from Nova Roma and needed to cut the umbilical before the route got tricky and they needed to slow down. The stretch of dark void was perfect for letting the HMSS Victoria burn out for a good chunk.

“We wanted your opinion as a specialist,” said Spence. “How long can we run the engines at full phase?”

It took me a few moments to reply. The term specialist carried a lot of weight, but all it really meant was that a few people had been given a grounding in as much as possible and had a propensity for keeping calm and solving problems. The choice of who to wake up and when was left entirely to the discretion of the permanent crew.

“You know that’s not the area I work in,” I said.

Chief Spence sighed and ran a hand through his snowy mane. “I’ve known you most of my life,” he replied, “I wanted your opinion as a friend.”

Well damn.

“If the Captain is certain that there’s nothing in the way…,” I began.

“It is,” replied Spence, leaning forward in his chair with the enthusiasm of a younger man. “Checked and rechecked weekly for the last three years.”

I ran a few basic calculations in my mind.

“Then you should be able to go full burn for about fifteen years,” I said. “Maybe a little more if you can keep the drag down to an absolute minimum.”

Chief Technician Spence stood up and nodded, which I took as my cue to stand as well.

“I also just wanted to say thank you,” he said, “I know this probably seems like a silly problem to keep calling you in for, but…”

“But you’re generation one, and you don’t want things to go off the rails before we’re even a quarter of the way there,” I finished.

Spence laughed and held the door open for me.

“Before I go, just between me and you, doesn’t it bother you that you won’t get to see the planet itself?” I asked.

Spence grinned, and the years melted off him. “Not in the least,” he answered. “I’m agoraphobic.”

157 years till planetfall

No coffee waiting for me this time. I woke up to a gaggle of people I didn’t recognise staring at me as though I’d sprouted tentacles.

“Gammers awake then?” someone said.

“Told you it’d work,” said another.

They got me out of the cryo-tube and washed me up as the cryfog lifted, and I started to piece real thoughts together.

I was struck by the general condition of the ship.

Previously, the corridors and floors had gleamed, but now they were starting to show wear. The uniforms of the staff who hurried me along to the signals room had a little more give in them. A few patches of mismatched cloth and a general sense of ill fit. I didn’t know right away how long it had been, but clearly the rule of Dead Men’s Shoes was beginning to assert itself.

I did like the greenery though.

Almost every available space had been covered in trelliswork, creeping vines and ferns replaced prefab grey aluminium walls and ceilings. No doubt it helped the ship’s oxygen stretch as well.

The signals room was bustling, more people jockeyed back and forth than I’d seen on any previous trip.

A pair of women around my own age, my biological age that is, in grey technicians’ overalls stood in front of me wide-eyed.

“Gammers operational?” asked one.

When I didn’t reply, the other poked my shoulder. “Gammers yoke, keeps stum.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

The first woman nodded and spoke again, slowly as though to an elderly relative.

“Are you well?” she asked, her words precise and clipped.

“I’m well,” I replied. “How long have I been asleep?”

I’d been under for fifty-nine years since I last saw Chief Technician Spence. He was long dead of course, the job now shared by his twin granddaughters, Selene and Lunette Spence. They’d been amazed that the old gammer (me) was operational because no specialist had been woken up since the HMSS Victoria had gone to full burn fifty-one years before.

I nearly shat a brick when I heard that.

“I told Chief Spence that he’d get fifteen years max,” I said. “What the hell happened?”

“It kept working,” replied Lunette, “and the council decided to keep going.”

I shrugged. “I’m a signals specialist, not an engineer.”

They showed me the ladar display. The touchpad to activate it was worn smooth with the oil of countless fingertips.

The unflickering white dot had closed the distance by a third.

“We sped up,” said Selene, “and so did it.”

“We had the Captain make course adjustments about seven years ago,” Lunette said, “and the craft changed with us.”

“Craft?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

The twin technicians shared a look and gestured for me to follow them to their office. Of course it had changed since Spence was there, but I was oddly buoyed to see a small photograph of him along with some smiling children on the desk. Odd how attached you can become to someone you’ve known for less than a day.

Still no coffee. “So now we’re away from the rank and file?” I said.

Selene and Lunette had been in charge of the signals department since they were teenagers. During the extended period of dark void travel, the department had become significantly less relevant. It was a curiosity displaced by more important work like solar collection or stopping the phase engines from overloading and blowing the whole ship to shit on a solar shovel.

Selene and Lunette had inherited a quiet department with a lot of free time and had used it trying to work out what the persistent blip was. Initially, they had tried to calculate based on mass, inertia, etc. That lead them nowhere. Eventually, they hit upon the plan of leaving a probe in their wake, tied to the ship’s phase wake signature so it would stay in liminal space and not drop out of the path of the oncoming blip. It would only need to be active for long enough to take some basic readings and send a photonic data transfer back to the Victoria.

“The council was more concerned with hydroponics,” said Selene, “so they said as long as we didn’t take materials or manpower from anyone else’s department, then we would suit ourselves.”

“It took years and cost a fortune,” said Lunette. “Thankfully we had both.”

They had left the probe in the object’s path and settled in to wait.

“You mentioned a council?” I asked, “Last time I was up and about, it was department heads.”

“Last time you were up and about, there were half as many people in the permanent crew,” replied Lunette. “They got rid of the department heads ages ago. Now, we all choose reps from the different areas of the ship to speak for us.”

“It’s always the same old gammers though,” said Selene.

“It always is,” I said. “Doesn’t matter where you are, gammers will gam.”

They laughed. I must seem ancient to them, I thought. They were making such an effort to speak to me in a way I’d understand. Just like I remembered doing with my grandparents back on Cleo VII, avoiding slang.

“Well then,” I said, “I’m getting tired again, so best show me what the probe says.”

The twins looked at each other for a long moment before Selene produced a single sheet of photographic paper and passed it to me.

“We waited nearly a decade for the object to catch up, and then the probe managed to get this before it was destroyed by the pursuer,” said Selene.

“Before the gravitic forces destroyed a pretty flimsy probe,” said Lunette “We spent the time making sure it could report back to us; it was basically made out of cardboard.”

Selene huffed and pointed to the photograph. “Why don’t we let the specialist decide what’s more likely?”

I looked at the photograph and felt the blood rushing in my ears. My heartbeat increased, and I had the sick sensation of falling that accompanied a sudden drop in blood pressure.

The photograph showed a spacecraft of non-human design.

It couldn’t have been made by humans. Gossamer-thin strands of solar wire flared out from a central spoke, like a giant wheel in space.

The photograph was a miracle, to have been transmitted across light-years without losing total cohesion. I could make out the colours of the craft, silver and blue with an intensity that made me feel like it was pulsing. Like some deep-sea creature pushing its way through the void.

“You have absolutely got to be fucking with me?” I felt red-hot bile rise up in my throat. “You’re trying to tell me that aliens are chasing the ship?”

Lunette passed me a glass of water. I took a sip and winced—it had been recycled one time too many for my tastes.

“We were hoping you’d have another explanation, to be honest,” she said.

Selene snorted. “We have to present our findings to the council soon,” she explained, “and our predecessor,” she pointed to the photograph of Chief Technician Spence, “always said you had a calm head on your shoulders.”

I looked at the photograph again and willed myself to ignore the weight of being the third person in existence to see actual proof of an extant intelligent species other than humanity in the Milky Way galaxy. Thankfully, they could put me back under the ice.

“I don’t have anything to add,” I said, “other than if you show this to your council, they’re either going to have you thrown in the brig or out the airlock.”

I stood and made my way out of the office. “If the engines aren’t broken, then keep them burning. Get as much distance as you can and send a message every day to HQ.”

I turned back to the twins, scowling at each other over the photograph.

“Wake me up before it gets here.”

51 years till planetfall.

They say it’s impossible to dream while you’re in a cryo-tube. The brain functions are reduced so close to zero that even if the synapses involved were able to fire off, there wouldn’t be any perception nodes in the brain able to process it. They also say that since a cryo’d person’s physical systems are running so close to zero, it’s impossible to be hungry or thirsty either.

Which didn’t explain why whenever they woke me up and decanted me from the tube, I wanted a coffee and a bacon sandwich and had the unerring feeling that my mind was trying to tell me something while I ‘slept’.

As it accumulated, the toll of being frozen and thawed starts to build, and it takes a little longer each time to come round and feel like a human being again. There’s a sluggishness that the IV fluids and hot showers struggle to shake.

It didn’t help matters that the next time I was woken up, it was practically at the point of a bayonet.

A man in grey fatigue robes and a badly shaved head half carried and half pushed me down the old corridors. They were still clean enough, a necessity for void travel, but most of the trelliswork had been taken down.

Every few meters we passed some scrawled graffiti, mostly seeming to show one of two spike sigils and a signature underneath.

The piped classical music had been turned off at some point, and the various mechanical noises emanating from the ship combined to form a background hum like the buzzing of bees from inside the hive.

My escort didn’t speak except to ask me to confirm who I was.

We went past the signals room, which had been boarded up with hazmat-patterned tape. The yellow bands faded with age.

The grey-clad man hustled me into a large chamber near the bottom of the ship. Some of the lead had begun to shift in my mind, and I could see that things had changed significantly since I was last up and about. The chamber must have been one of the redundant cargo bays. There were steel sheets for walls and a floor, the walls covered in more scrawled sigils that looked eerily like the potentially alien ship that Selene and Lunette had shown me.

 Two crowds of people stood in the chamber, desperately trying to avoid each other.

On my left, the people wore sashes of dark blue material around their waists or necks.

On my right, they wore emerald green overalls, sometimes clearly dyed.

The entire chamber reeked of stress, sweat, and restrained aggression. In front of them was a line of grey-clad folk armed like my new friend. He leaned toward me and whispered in a much kinder tone, “Keep behind the grey tide, gammer-man, or like get sponged if shift don’t sway?”

I nodded but chose not to try and parse it out.

They took me to a raised platform and blessedly let me sit down.

The grey crewmembers talked amongst themselves for a while and then sent one of their number forward to a small lectern just to my right.

“Chambers in session,” she said. There were some groans from both sides of the crowd.

“Speak real, gammo!”

“No chaff!”

And so on.

The officiant raised her hands for quiet, and the grumbling slowed down.

There was a burr in the accent that was new to me, a result of the crew shifting and expanding, along with its vocabulary.

Darmon 231 would receive an odd mix of frozen colonists and void-evolved crewmembers. If it received anything at all. I wasn’t holding out much hope that the tribalism on show was adding up to a well-run ship schedule.

“Got to speak proper so the old man understands,” she said, slowly like Selene and Lunette. As though it was someone not fully fluent.

A representative from each party moved forward and joined me on stage.

The blues sent a woman in middle age, clearly born on ship because I was the better part of two feet taller than her. She had greying hair and wore her blue sash around her neck. She held out her hand for me to shake.

“Pleasure to meet you,” she said. She spoke a little easier.

Her counterpart did not observe the same formalities. She was younger than me, although technically they all were, I supposed, and wore the green overalls covered in sigils.

The grey officiant passed the microphone over to me. “Well?” she said. “Who’s right?”

It took a while to get a clear answer out of them. As clear as the answer could be, but after a little back and forth, and while ignoring some sniggers from the crowd on what must have sounded to them like an archaic throwback, I found out why I’d been brought in front of the new ruling council.

I’d been left on ice for a little over one hundred and six years.

Selene and Lunette had shown their council the probe photo, and as I predicted, the entire ship went ballistic. The crew reacted to the news that not only life outside the cradle of humanity existed but that it was currently bearing down on them more or less like you or I would, or how I would have reacted if I hadn’t been able to sleep through the turmoil.

They went absolutely crazy for more than a year.

The grey-clad officiant told me that eventually the Captain program had been forced to collect some of the more grounded crew members together and form the Captain’s Guard. They wore grey to keep themselves apart from the opposing views that threatened day-to-day operations.

Broadley speaking, the blues were of the opinion that it was fantastic news that aliens existed and couldn’t wait to meet them when they caught up with us at Darmon 231.

The greens were of the opinion that it was catastrophic news, and the destruction of the Spence’s probe meant we should strike back now rather than wait to be captured and eaten.

The short-lived purples had thought that it didn’t matter either way but was a good excuse to let discipline slip and get hammered. I regretted that there weren’t any purples left to meet.

The Captain’s Guard had let them get on with it, content to keep the ship operating and occasionally break up some of the larger riots that flared up once or twice a year.

Most of the other specialists had been removed from cryo and questioned over the years, and some had chosen to join one or other of the factions and live onboard the ship.

“And so,” said the officiant, “since you are the only person who met both Founders, we wanted you to tell us what they said, in their own words.”

Founders, this was their name for Selene and Lunette Spence, apparent founders of the surviving factions.

The purples had been the only ones who were sensible. There was nothing to do until the pursuing craft caught up, so what was the point in worrying? Though since these two groups had been tearing lumps out of each other for over a century, I decided to take diplomacy, the coward’s route.

“Well, it’s possible my role in things has been exaggerated,” I said. “I only met the founders briefly, on the day they showed the council the photo.”

The crowd murmured. Nobody on board apart from myself and the Captain would have been alive to speak to their founders, and it must have felt as unsettling to hear as it was to say.

“But I think one thing they would want me to say to you all is that you have to work together,” I said.

It went down about as well as I’d expected.

Lots of sullen glances and whispered conversations. I gave the rest of my speech, and it wasn’t that bad as I had to think of it on the fly.

Lots of talk about the importance of unity and metaphors involving the crew of the HMSS Victoria and the early exploration crafts (most of whom had died horribly, as I understood it).

“How long until the craft catches up to us?” I asked.

“Once planetfall has been made, the alien craft will reach us approximately sixty-two standard years later,” replied the officiant.

“And how long until we make planetfall?” I asked.

“Approximately fifty-one standard years at current speed.”

“So, in other words,” I said, standing, “I might well be the only person in this room who’s alive to see them arrive and find out which one of you is right?”

“That’s why we were hoping you’d tell us who had it right now and save the ship the wait.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Being out of the tube for longer than an hour or so brought headaches.

“Well, I say I have it right,” I said, “and my position is that since we have absolutely no idea what they’ll do when they arrive, then we should be preparing for both possibilities and not wasting time arguing with each other.” 

I pointed at the blues. “You guys might well be right, in which case we want to try and find out more about them, make some more probes, and see what you can deduce.”

I pointed at the greens. “And you might be right too, so we’re going to need some pretty big guns and a plan to defend ourselves. Take the plans for the initial colony buildings and find a way to make them defensible.”

Both sides grumbled but shuffled out of the chamber to their respective sides of the ships.

“The Captain sends its thanks, specialist,” said a grey outfitted attendant. “Your cryo-tube is to be moved to the administrative section of the ship, to protect it from any more…crew instability.”

That was welcome news; the temporal whiplash was beginning to wear at my nerves.

If they started waking me up every time there was a schism in the last fifty years of the voyage, then I’d be useless when the aliens—gods above what kind of life is it where a person has to even think that—arrived.

“Please thank the Captain for me. Tell it I hope this helped, but it might want to start piping the classical music in again. I think that helped keep things calm.”

I went back to my tube with a promise not to be woken up again until we made planetfall.

Planetfall overdue – seek advice from Captain program.

With that promise and a biscuit, I could eat a biscuit.

They turned me out into the ship again. This time it was in the Captain’s administrative quarters, and to their credit, I was given a significantly better cup of coffee than I’d gotten some centuries previously. This was surprising, seeing as the Captain was unable to eat or drink.

The grey outfits had gone, as had the blue and green tribes. The predominant colour now was purple. Which I liked and thought would have pleased the original purples who had drunk themselves to death decades before.

“We thought about what you said,” my attendant said. He reminded me of Chief Technician Spence, but he didn’t speak the same language as me, not really. We communicated via data slate, which picked up our conversation and translated it with extraordinarily little delay.

“I’m glad,” I said. “Things were heading down a bit of a dark path before.”

“It took a generation or two for things to really settle,” replied the attendant.

We walked down cleaned corridors, free of graffiti. The music was back, but it wasn’t anything I recognised. An original composition perhaps.

“But after the die-hards died out,” continued the attendant, “younger folk were eager to get back to something approaching normal.”

 I was led back to the old signals room, now fully open and seemingly bustling with a low-level cheer that brought a smile to my face. The coffee also helped.

A small crowd had gathered around the display screen, now protected behind a sheet of plexiglass. There was a small plaque beneath it. I didn’t get time to read it, but I saw my name mentioned at least twice.

An older woman with a purple headscarf and a wide smile slipped her arm through my own and led me to the center of the room. She wore a technician’s uniform of a different cut but clear lineage.

Her name badge read Spence with accents I didn’t recognise under the vowels. “We knew you’d want to be here for this,” the data slate chirped, robbing her voice of its obvious warmth. People stared at me and nudged their neighbours.

I was quite glad not to be able to pick up the actual conversation. They were looking at me with the same slightly wary mix of wonder and confusion that I would have given to someone the best part of four hundred years old as well I reckoned.

I looked at the display screen. It had been covered in decorative pictures showing the alien craft, spoked and glittering. “You have some more information on them?” I asked, “I can’t make out the ladar.”

New Spence laughed and turned me to face the other wall. “We haven’t needed to use that in years,” she said. The panel wall scrolled up to reveal a clear porthole, meters wide.

The crowd applauded, and my breath froze in my chest. The HMSS Victoria had dropped out of phase and sat waiting in the path of the alien craft, visible to us now by the phase stream it projected in front of it, like a wake in front of a seagoing ship. A bright blue blur on the black canvas of the void.

“They should be here in less than a day,” said Spence, jostling my arm. “Our wait is finally over.”

As it turned out, the shock didn’t kill me, but it did give me a moderate panic attack. I felt the same sinking feeling and rush of blood to the head that had accompanied my first sight of the craft. I dug my fingers into the meat of my leg and tried to focus on the sharp pain until I brought myself back round.

“What does the ship’s Captain say about this?” I asked.

My companion looked and cocked her head to one side. “What’s a Captain?”

After I got up from the floor, I had the signals team get me a data feed from the ship’s internal computers. It took me a couple of hours to parse through it, all the while my body’s natural rhythms were beginning to reassert themselves. The crew had been surprised when I kept excusing myself from the signals room, but they were forgiving of what they saw as my eccentricities.

I was the last specialist on board, kept in reserve for arrival.

It had been around eighty years before they’d woken me up this time, the two tribes, by then more like political parties, had reached a new agreement. They’d taken my advice and tried to draw up defensive plans for the new colony but had found that they just wouldn’t have the resources. If the alien ship really were hostile, then it could simply sit in orbit and use its own gravity to drag space rocks into orbit and watch as they pummelled us into dust.

They had decided that since they had no chance to defend themselves on Darmon 231 itself, they might as well make their stand in the void.

If the alien craft were friendly, then they could travel on to the planet together and have a chance to build some rapport before the hardships of colonisation.

If they were unfriendly, then the HMSS Victoria had been subtly retrofitted to include an artillery battery that should be capable of destroying a craft the size of the pursuing force.

The Captain Program had been mostly sacrificed to run this battery. It had issued a formal protest but submitted to reassignment after that.

The crew had then stopped the ship and spent nearly an entire century preparing for the showdown, which included keeping me bottled. It seemed that one of the agreements made between the old blues and greens was that I was to be used as a kind of arbiter of last resort. To determine the status of the alien craft if it didn’t make its intentions violently clear.

We watched from the signals room as the ship approached. The entire crew watched, now numbering in the thousands, along with the decanted colonists who had been woken up before me and briefed on the situation. They were easy to spot, not just because they tended to be larger than the crew but also by the wide-eyed look of barely restrained terror that I shared with them.

The senior staff were in the signals room with me. The rest of them watched across the Victoria. Senior council members gave small speeches, but nobody listened. We all watched the bright blue smudge, which had started off as a simple white dot on a ladar screen, get bigger and bigger.

“Contact in 1 minute,” a hollow voice rang out across the ship-wide PA system.

I held my breath as it approached, willing it to just be over. The blur grew and shifted form. I could see the outline of the craft becoming hazy but visible. Dozens of spokes branching off the central hub, bound by a halo on its outer edge.

Would I be remembered as the one who broke bread with our galactic cousins? Or the one who fired the first shot of the first war in the heavens?

The noise of the crowd deafened me, and I could barely stand to keep my eyes open. My hand was on the microphone ready to shout orders down the gun battery if needed.

And then, the alien ship passed us by.

The HMSS Victoria rocked slightly with the eddy of the alien’s phase stream, and it was past us within seconds. Free of the slipstream, it appeared like a twinkling light that pulsed three times and then faded into the background of the cosmos.

At first, nobody said a word. Then, all at once, the tension erupted into a carnival of reaction. Had they even seen us? We were lit up with beacons. It shouldn’t have been possible for a phase-capable ship to ignore us. Were they trying to beat us to the colony? If so, then they’d have the same tactical problems that we had tried to work through. Unless they had some genuine military minds on board.

A thought hit me, now that we were behind them. We might be able to calculate their trajectory the same way they must have calculated our own centuries before.

“Computer,” I asked, and I received an affirmative chirp, “can you confirm the route of the alien craft is still Darmon 231?”

The administrative functions that were all that was left of the old Captain program worked in silence for a moment and then sent the calculations to my data slate as it read out the synopsis to the entire ship.

It had never been going to Darmon 231. The alien craft had already slightly shifted its course below the standard plane we’d both been travelling for more than four hundred years. If we had waited around a decade longer, then it would have disappeared from our ladar screens entirely. If we had followed the plan and gone to Darmon 231, then it would have been nothing but a spooky shipboard story to tell the colonists.

The senior crew looked to me as the crowd of people began to chatter and roil. I heard every reaction from hysterical laughter to deep, mournful sobbing.

“What should we do, sir?” asked new Technician Spence.

“Crew,” I said, get the phase engines back online as soon as practicable.” People bustled off to do just that.

“We’re heading for the colony?” asked New Spence.

I shook my head. “We’re heading after the cheeky bastards on that craft,” I said. “When we catch them up, I want to ask them what the hell they were playing at.”

I was going back into cryostasis, along with a few of the senior crew. The newly reinstated Captain said we could catch up to them before too long. Maybe a century.

Ben O’Hagan works in a Solicitors’ office by day and navigates the ever-increasing piles of books in his house by night. He lives with his cat in the North of England, in an area which was built on top of a network of abandoned and partially sealed off tunnels. He’s sure that won’t end badly.