Lightspeed Requiem

The signal arrived on Generation Ship Caracara's two-hundred-and-fourteenth year in transit, decoded by the communications array during the third watch while most of the ship's four thousand inhabitants slept in the slow, scheduled rhythms of a society that had long since replaced the concept of "day" with rotating shifts of artificial light. Navigator First Class Isabela Fuentes was the ranking officer on duty, which meant she was the first to read the words that would, within hours, dismantle the purpose that had sustained the ship since launch.

The message was from Nueva Esperanza — the colony they were travelling to build. It existed. It had existed for one hundred and ninety-seven years. A faster-than-light drive, developed on Earth sixty years after the Caracara's departure, had carried a second expedition to the same star system in a fraction of the time, and the colony was now a thriving settlement of eighty thousand souls with its own government, its own culture, and its own space programme. The message was polite. It welcomed the Caracara. It offered docking coordinates. It expressed, with the careful diplomacy of a civilisation that understood the cruelty of what it was communicating, its hope that the journey had been "meaningful."

Isabela read the transmission three times, then locked the communications console and walked the length of the ship's central corridor— two kilometres of brushed steel and hydroponic gardens and the accumulated life of seven generations who had been born, grown old, and died in transit to a destination that no longer needed them. She passed the school where her daughter was sleeping in the dormitory. She passed the memorial wall where the names of the dead were etched in metal. She passed the observatory where the target star, still years away, burned its steady, indifferent light. Then she returned to the bridge and began composing the announcement that would end the world as her people knew it.