The Transmission
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