First Contact
The first deliberate transmission between the two stations was not a greeting or a declaration or a demand for explanation. It was a question, sent by Yael Ortiz on an open channel at 14:00 station time, three days after Fenn had decoded the initial signal: *How long have you been here?* The response took eleven minutes to arrive, bounced around the star's magnetosphere on a path that the physics team said should have been impossible. It came from someone named Tam Beoku, and it said: *Eleven years. Same as you, I think.*
Yael convened a meeting of the full crew in the station's common room, which was the only space large enough to hold all eleven of them and still leave room for the weight of what she had to say. She told them everything: the signal, the data packet, the personnel roster from a station called Aurelius that mirrored their own in every detail. She watched their faces as they processed it — the disbelief, the anger, the slow dawning recognition that everything they had assumed about their isolation was wrong. Petrova, the engineer, was the first to speak. She asked the question that Yael had been avoiding: *If the colonial fleet put two stations here and didn't tell either one, what else didn't they tell us?*
The answer, when it came, arrived not from the colonial fleet but from the star itself. KOI-7842 was dying faster than either station's models had