Signals

Kate came running into the lounge.

Before I could even open my mouth, she shouted, “We have to go. Now. I think I know what the signals are.”

The words hit me sideways. “What? Now? Why do we have to go right now?”

She didn’t answer. Kate grabbed both Jeremy and me by the arm and pulled us toward the door.

“I’ll tell yo—”

The alarms cut her off.

The warning tone flooded the corridor, sharp and insistent. We broke into a run, boots pounding as we bolted for the elevator. By the time we reached it, Kate was breathing hard. She’d clearly been running the entire way to find us.

While we waited, I turned to her. “What do you know?”

“The signals,” she said between breaths. “They aren’t human. They’re… some form of communication.” She swallowed, then added, “I think they’ve been messing with our AI.”

The elevator doors slid open and we piled in, other crew members slipping inside with us as well. The halls beyond were controlled chaos, people moving fast toward stations or crew quarters, voices raised over the alarms.

The doors began to close.

Everyone shouted different decks at once.

“Officer priority,” I called over them. “Bridge first.”

The lift lurched into motion. I turned back to Kate as she caught her breath.

“I think whatever the signals are,” she said, forcing the words out now, “they’re connected to your coil pattern. Something is.”

The doors opened.

We pushed our way out onto the bridge, the noise and motion swallowing us whole. Whatever Kate had been about to say died on her tongue.

The bridge was chaos.

Every station was manned, every display alive with motion and alerts. Voices overlapped, callouts cut short, orders half-formed and immediately revised. The Captain moved past us without slowing, already focused on the second in command.

I followed her line of sight to the main display.

Weapons were hot. Every system was locked onto a single target.

It wasn’t human.

The object hung there without any obvious point of reference, sharp and smooth at the same time. Its silhouette reminded me less of a ship and more of a living thing, a beetle or flying insect caught mid-motion. The hull was semi-translucent, light passing through it unevenly, refracting in ways metal never should.

The forward structure drew my eye. It looked like a beak. Not avian. Something closer to an octopus’s beak, sharp and curved, rounded at the base, tapering to a hard edge. I couldn’t tell which direction it was facing, or even which side was up.

I couldn’t stop staring.

Questions crowded in all at once. Who were they? What were they? Were they trying to communicate, or were we already past that point?

Around me, much of the bridge crew stood just as still, caught between training and disbelief, waiting for the universe to make the next move.

This wasn’t how the mission was supposed to unfold.

Our mission was to travel toward the center of the galaxy, toward the black hole at its heart. Our drives wouldn’t, of course, carry us the full twenty-six thousand light-years required to reach it, but that was the direction we were heading. Every jump pushed us a little farther inward, away from the spiral arms and toward regions no human vessel had ever charted firsthand. Our goal was simple in statement, if not in execution: to explore deeper than any human had ever gone.

Our jump drive was invented just thirty-five years ago by Dr. Arnold Hysen. We call it the Hysen Fold Drive, or HFD for short. The technology was mature enough now to be trusted with a long-duration mission. The doctor himself was here on this mission, a gaunt man with gray hair and the permanent look of someone who slept in short stretches. Now sixty-three, he had designed the original coil architecture in his early twenties, back when folding space was still treated as theoretical hubris by half the physics community. He was joined by several geologists, biologists, and astrophysicists, specialists selected as much for their tolerance of confinement as for their credentials.

My name is Commander Gerald Younge. I am the engineering officer for the Constellation, a ship designed specifically for this journey. Every major system aboard her exists for one purpose: to survive repetition. The ship is equipped with the most advanced jump coils ever built, three independent fusion reactors, and the most robust field projector humanity has managed to assemble without tearing itself apart in the process. Redundancy isn’t a design philosophy here; it’s a survival doctrine.

The Constellation was stocked for endurance. Replicator supplies were calculated conservatively and backed by a hydroponics bay intended to cover extended system outages. As a final contingency, we carried cryogenically frozen mealworms, sealed in standardized nutrient blocks and stored deep in the hold. They existed for one reason only: if the replicators failed and the hydroponics bay followed, no one aboard would starve.

We also carried five additional sets of jump coils. Two were intended for deep exploration once we reached our operational limit, two were reserved exclusively for the return journey, and one remained untouched as a contingency.

Ensign Hollinger is the poor sucker who presses the button every four hours, initiating the two light-year jump our ship is capable of without overstressing what we are currently calling the lattice. I don’t envy him. Jump initiation is clean, automated, and statistically safe, which somehow makes it worse. After each transition, I run a standard diagnostic sweep, fine-tune a few power gradients that always drift just enough to be irritating, and verify coil integrity against projected decay curves. Then I head to the mess for coffee and wait for the next cycle.

Speaking of which, the next jump will be coming up soon.

Pre-jump sequencing began automatically, long before anyone announced it. Power distribution shifted as the reactors adjusted output, feeding the field projector and charging the coils along a profile we’d refined over dozens of transitions. Nothing spiked. Nothing lagged. The numbers stayed where they were supposed to stay, which was the only thing that mattered.

Hollinger would be at his station by now, monitoring the final checks. The jump control itself was mostly ceremonial; the real work happened upstream in the control logic and interlocks. Still, someone had to authorize the sequence, and tradition dictated a human hand on the trigger.

I set my coffee aside and brought up the engineering board. Coil temperatures were nominal. Field coherence sat comfortably inside tolerance. A few minor gradient offsets showed the usual drift, which was already compensating. If anything failed, it wouldn’t happen here during preparation. It would wait until we jumped.

That was always how it worked.

As I made my way to the bridge, I ran into Lieutenant Owens. She was the ship’s communications officer, tall, blonde, with gray eyes, and her hair pulled back into a tight bun. I’d gotten to know her well over the one hundred and twenty-six jumps since we’d left Earth’s primary space station. They’d named it Prometheus. It required more maintenance hours per week than any structure in orbit around Earth.

“Hello Kate,” I said while waiting for the elevator.

Kate looked around before meeting my eyes. “You know I don’t like it when you call me Kate in the passageways.”

I laughed, holding my hands up. “All right, Lieutenant, I was just messing with you.”

“I needed sleep, Commander,” she said, her expression softening. “I was up nearly thirty hours listening to a signal. It sounded like a World War II–era signal, but it might have been just background noise. Either way, it had a rhythm to it that didn’t seem natural.”

I thought for a moment about the reality of signals from World War II being detected right now. The distance, the simple fact that light took time, still managed to feel unreal, the fact that we are beating light to its destination.

“What,” I said, pausing a moment, “what makes you think World War II signals?”

She smiled. I liked her smile, the way her front teeth reminded me of a rabbit.

“I figured World War II because we are around 200 light-years from home. I am guessing, but back then, the radio signals they used would have survived this far out into space.”

The elevator finally opened. We were two decks down from the bridge. The mess was located next to the elevator, with the officers’ quarters one deck above it. Kate must have slipped past me to grab something to eat while I was still lost in thought; it was the only reason she was on this level with me.

The coils were drifting out of alignment. That part was inevitable. Every jump introduced strain, and no amount of calibration eliminated it completely. What bothered me were the microfractures forming after each transition. They weren’t random. The fracture lines repeated, subtle but consistent, spreading through the coil structure in a pattern that reminded me of ripples moving across the surface of a pond.

It wasn’t damage in the conventional sense. The coils were still within tolerance. But the pattern nagged at me. Systems didn’t behave that way without a reason, and whatever was causing it felt like a message I couldn’t yet figure out how to translate.

I motioned for her to enter the elevator and stepped in behind her. Lieutenant Commander Borne stood off to the left, hands clasped behind his back. He was a severe man, older, ex-Navy, his black hair cut high and tight, dark skin visible beneath the close crop along the sides. He was the tactical officer, and I wouldn’t want anyone else at that station if and when something went kinetic.

I turned toward the door and looked up, the way I always did when addressing the AI. It was a small habit, a leftover reflex from earlier systems that needed directionality, even though I knew I could just speak into the air and the AI would understand I was talking to it. It always did. The system had an uncanny sense of intent, which, to me, made it some of the finest software humanity had ever produced.

“Bridge,” I said.

The elevator doors closed with a soft shik. The inertial dampeners engaged, eliminating any sense of movement, and a moment later, the doors opened onto the bridge.

I stepped out and nodded to Captain Elizabeth Doyle. She was a redhead, around fifty, though it was difficult to be certain. Her freckled skin was smooth, free of crow’s feet or other obvious signs of age. I had always assumed cosmetics played a role, but with enough money and the right treatments, living to a hundred and forty was no longer unusual.

I made my way to my console and immediately fell into my routine, pulling the sensor drones back into their bays and redirecting the maintenance drones for one final pass. They rode the ship’s magnetic field along the hull, inspecting it one last time before I docked them as well.

I then checked the power output and the projector’s integrity, confirming both against their expected ranges before turning to the captain.

“Captain, the drive—”

I paused, eyes flicking back to the console as fresh data populated the display. Everything is still nominal. Within tolerance. Exactly where it was supposed to be.

I finished.

“—is ready for the next jump.”

The captain nodded, as she had done more than a hundred times before. At this point, it was all routine. The console lit up as it always did when she settled into her chair and tapped her pad. Capacitors read at one hundred percent across the board.

She lifted her head and said what she always said.

“You may engage the HFD ensign.”

The hum in the ship’s hull ramped up just before the consoles blanked out. The main screen went dark, and the emergency lighting flared red. Then, one by one, the systems came back online. The lights returned to normal, and the main display resolved into a new starfield.

The nebula that had once been little more than a speck now filled the screen, a broken amoeba of gas and dust. It glowed blue, edged in purple where denser clouds folded in on themselves. I had seen some spectacular things on this journey, and I never grew tired of it.

I scanned the consoles quickly, data still flooding in as peripheral systems came back online. Some subsystems lagged a little behind the rest, but that was normal after a jump. I focused on the drive coils.

This was jump one hundred and twenty-seven, and for the first time, they were no longer just drifting. They had crossed the threshold. Replacement was unavoidable.

I felt a quiet satisfaction at that. The coils had lasted nearly twenty percent longer than anticipated.

“Captain, the coils need to be replaced. I estimate nine hours before we can jump again. May I also request that I be allowed to examine the coils once they are out?”

The captain turned and tapped on her pad for a few seconds before looking back at me.

“Might I ask why you’d want to inspect the coils, Commander?”

“The coils,” I started, glancing back down at the fracture map on my console, “they have an odd fracture pattern I’d like to visually inspect.”

Her eyes flicked down to the screen as she tapped her pad, her brow tightening.

“That pattern’s unusual, Commander. I haven’t seen it on coils before.”

She looked back up, decision made.

“Granted. Have the Doctor examine them as well, if he isn’t already in engineering.”

“Aye, Captain,” I said. “I have a few things to finish here, then I’ll head down immediately.”

She nodded and stood. “I’ll be in my office.”

After releasing the drones to their tasks and adjusting the power gradient, I sent a message to the on-duty engineer to begin the coil change. With nothing left to do on the bridge, I glanced up at the ceiling and spoke.

“Monitor this for me, Constellation.”

A moment later, the AI replied.

“Aye, Commander. Monitoring your station.”

I took the elevator to Deck 8 and started down the long spine toward Engineering. As I stepped onto the deck, someone called out, “Officer on deck.”

Work stopped. Heads turned. A few hands came up in reflexive salutes.

I shook my head. “We’re not military,” I said, waving them back to their stations. “And I’m just another engineer. Carry on.”

The deck came back to life immediately.

I made my way to the left and up the stairs to the coil room. Massive cables, each nearly the thickness of my leg, ran along the far wall into the platform where the coils were mounted. Following the cables to the right revealed an enormous bank of capacitors, their housings layered and reinforced, the conductors terminating in connectors made from a gold-based alloy designed to survive extreme discharge. Those capacitors fed the coils directly, shaping the energy required to establish the fold pattern.

On the opposite side of the platform, another set of heavy lines carried that pattern onward to the field projector, where it would be imposed on space itself.

Dr. Hysen was already there. A team of engineers rolled in a cart fitted with a cradle designed specifically for the coils. Once removed, they would be transferred to storage immediately. The exotic matter they were grown from was stable under normal conditions, but significant damage to the crystal lattice could destabilize it, and, in the worst case, lead to catastrophic failure.

I leaned in to examine the coils, studying the fracture lines and their repeating patterns before a voice broke my concentration.

“Sir,” one of the engineers said. He wore thick gloves, and I could barely make out his face behind the tinted shield of his helmet. “You know you’re not supposed to touch it while it’s still connected, right?”

I chuckled softly. I glanced down at the man’s name tag, then back up.

“Yes, Steven, I’m aware,” I said. “Once you’ve got it out of here, I want to take a closer look with Dr. Hysen.”

Dr. Hysen looked up at the sound of his name and gave me a brief nod.

“You see it too, then?”

“I do,” I said. “Something about it doesn’t make sense.”

Dr. Hysen turned his attention back to the coil, studying the fractures for a long moment.

“I think I have an idea what that is,” he said at last. “Let’s go to my office.”

I followed Dr. Hysen to his office. It wasn’t far; Hysen rarely worked far from the machinery that defined his life’s work. I crossed to the opposite side of the room and sat. Hysen picked up his coffee, took a measured sip, then looked up.

“You’re familiar with the lattice, yes?”

I lifted a hand, making a small, noncommittal gesture.

Hysen straightened slightly. “Good. Then let me try to put it into clearer terms.”

He set the cup down.

“The lattice is the structure that general relativity operates on. Not gravity itself, but the framework that warped space occupies. The drive works by coupling the coils to that structure. We imprint a pattern, send it to the projector, then modify it to establish a second endpoint as far out as coherence allows, always in a straight line.”

He paused, then continued, more carefully.

“I believe the lattice is influenced by gravitational waves as they propagate through space. In practical terms, it isn’t space that’s flat or curved. It’s time. We perceive that curvature as gravity.”

“I believe,” he continued, “that the waves interact with one another and ripple spacetime, the way disturbances overlap on the surface of a pool. General relativity is the water. What we observe, lensing, curvature, fracture, is the pattern that forms beneath it.”

He glanced back toward the door, toward engineering.

“That pattern is becoming more pronounced the deeper we move into the galaxy. Whatever is propagating out there, the lattice is carrying it.”

“That said,” the Doctor continued, leaning back, “we’re going to need some kind of lens. Something to counteract the distortion, to help flatten space as the wormhole opens. Think of it like adaptive optics on a telescope, correcting the wavefront in real-time.”

I considered for a moment, then shook my head.

“That sounds complicated, Doctor,” I said. “Can we even build something like that with what we have on the ship?”

The Doctor leaned forward, resting a hand on his coffee cup.

“I think we can,” he said. He picked it up and stood. “I made sure we had enough material onboard to make changes while we were out here.”

I stood with the Doctor. “How long do you think it would take?” I asked. “A rough estimate, so I can brief the captain.”

Dr. Hysen considered the question for a moment.

“About a week,” he said. “A day to install the lens, then a couple more forming test wormholes and reading the results. The jumps will probably get rough before we finish. There’s a good chance we end up dead in the water well before the lens is complete.”

“Very good,” I said, turning to follow Dr. Hysen out. “I’ll inform the captain.”