The Last Signal

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Day 3 The signal comes at 0347. You are the only one awake. That's not unusual - your shift covers the dead hours between 0300 and 0700, and on a normal rotation, you spend most of it running routine diagnostics, logging atmospheric readings, and drinking the last of the decent coffee before Torres finds it. But nothing about this rotation has been normal since Day 0, when the network went dark and Commander Adeyemi assembled all four of you in the briefing room and told you, in the flat tone of someone reporting weather data, that contact with Earth had been lost. Seventy-two hours ago. You have been running diagnostics since then. You have found nothing wrong with your equipment. Whatever severed the connection happened somewhere else - somewhere far away - and until it's fixed, you and your three crewmates are the only people in this quadrant of the galaxy. You're used to silence. You're good at it. Three years in Comms will do that to a person. But the signal is not silence. It arrives on a frequency you've never seen in active use - a banded quantum-carrier wave, the kind that predates the current relay architecture by at least twenty years. The kind they stopped using when…