Spectrum

I returned to the bridge after spending two hours examining the coils with Doctor Hysen. He left shortly after, already absorbed in planning the lens. The frame, he explained, would need to be positioned, welded in place, and powered directly from the projector.

When I finally reached the bridge, the relief crew had begun rotating in. I briefed the Captain, and she ordered the primary crew off for a period of rest and recovery, leaving the watch in the hands of the relief team.

Kate was still at her console, one hand cupped over her headset as she leaned in close. Her display was filled with a spectral analysis I couldn’t begin to interpret. She tapped the console and the image vanished. A frustrated grunt, a few sharper taps, and it returned—then split into multiple traces, each clearly different from the last. How she could track all of that, see it and hear it at the same time, never failed to impress me.

I thought about telling her I was heading to the lounge, but her focus was absolute. I let it go. If she pulled herself away long enough to notice I was gone, she’d just ask Constellation where I was.

On my way to the elevator, I passed the second in command. I had to consciously recall his name, despite how often I’d seen him since the mission began. Commander Frederick Trevino struck me as competent enough, and the Captain trusted him, which was reason enough. He slipped into her office, and the door closed behind him.

As I entered, I looked around the lounge. People were scattered about, talking about who knew what. I recognized most of them. Many belonged to the research teams, though I spotted a couple of engineers across the room as well, arguing with exaggerated hands over some conduit problem. I only caught that much because the word conduit slipped through the music and overlapping conversations.

As I passed the bulkhead, I noticed someone had added a plaque. Lounge Two—Please place your drinks down during pre-jump preparations.

I made my way to my usual spot, the couch closest to the virtual window. I knew the view was nothing more than a hyper-realistic, stereoscopic rendering of the space outside the hull, but I treated it like it was real anyway.

It wasn’t long before Kate joined me. She had two drinks in her hands. One was a Jack and Coke, clearly meant for me. The other was a margarita. She passed me my glass and slid onto the couch beside me.

“What took you so long?” I said, mock-looking at a watch I wasn’t wearing.

“I was listening to the signals again,” she said. She looked confused. “I am beginning to think they aren’t from us. Maybe something in space?”

I paused for a second. “Did you run it through a spectral analysis program?”

“I did,” she said, “but the AI says it’ll take somewhere between two and five and a half hours.” She hesitated, then went on. “The complexity is what threw me. That’s why I kept thinking World War II at first. Space is full of signals — pulsars, neutron stars — and a lot of them are patterned. But this doesn’t sound like that. This sounds like communication.”

I took a sip of my drink and turned back toward the window. “So it still could be World War II,” I said. “I don’t see what’s changed that makes you think it isn’t.”

She shook her head. “No. World War II signals would be much simpler. These are… more complex.” She hesitated. “I mean, it still could be. Maybe mixed in with the other things I mentioned. I’ll know for sure once the spectral analysis finishes.”

“You know what,” I said, standing up, “let’s dance or something. Or play a little pool.” I gave a small shrug. “We could both use a break. Between the fracture patterns and the signals, I’m starting to feel a little creeped out.”

“The fracture patterns?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “What fracture patterns?”

I shook my head. “Nope. That’s a problem for the professor.” I gave a small shrug. “He seems to understand why it happened to the coils, so I’ll let him solve it.” I nodded toward the floor. “Come on. Let’s go dance.”

She sighed, glancing toward the dance floor. “You know I still can’t dance,” she said. “You keep insisting I’ll get better, but I never will.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re getting better.”

I crossed to the console and queued up some classical music. Get Lucky by Daft Punk was well over a century old now. I mock-sauntered onto the dance floor and thrust my hand out toward Kate. She laughed at my ridiculousness and joined me.

We fell into something that barely qualified as dancing, a loose imitation of moves neither of us really understood. Arms swung, feet shuffled, and every now and then one of us would commit too hard to a motion and have to laugh it off.

Mid-dance, I spotted Ensign Hollinger as he stepped into the lounge. He looked straight at us and shook his head. Kate stopped abruptly. I nearly knocked her over, bumping her hard enough that she rocked to one side. I grabbed her at the waist and pulled her upright, almost losing my balance in the process.

I laughed. “Could you warn me next time? We nearly died.” I glanced around theatrically. “How would they explain that to our families? Death on the dance floor?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled at me. I watched Jeremy Hollinger make his way to the bar and fill a glass with dark beer. When he turned, I waved him over.

“Hey, Jeremy,” I said. “How are things in button land?”

Jeremy gave me the dead stare he was good at. “Y-you know fraternization is against c-company policy, right?”

I spread my arms, gesturing toward the dance floor. “Then why is there a dance floor?” I said. “Besides, who’s going to enforce policy out here? It’s not like the Captain ever leaves her office.”

Kate elbowed me in the ribs. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Besides, she doesn’t care. I asked.”

Jeremy and I both paused and turned to look at Kate.

“Wait, what?” I said, stumbling over the words. “Why would you ask?”

She smirked. “Not for that reason.” She shrugged slightly. “I asked because I didn’t want some write-up just because we all like hanging out. She said the best thing for a crew on an extended mission isn’t procedure. It’s relationships with each other.”

***

Later that week, the astrophysicists and geologists came onto the bridge in a flurry of excitement. They’d identified a nearby system with a planet sitting squarely in the habitable zone of a red dwarf and wanted us to jump close enough to get a proper look.

I found myself hoping the Captain would say yes. Their excitement was infectious, and I could feel it pulling me in with it.

I smiled when the Captain said yes. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Exploration was the point of the mission, and logging the location of a potentially habitable planet was exactly why we’d come all this way.

However, before we could jump, Doctor Hysen decided it was time to install the lens. It wasn’t a lens in any conventional sense. It was an octagonal frame, each inner edge lined with structures that reminded me of the teeth of a comb.

I’d already stopped by engineering earlier in the week. The frame had been fabricated and staged, and the team was deep into the electronics. Most of it looked straightforward enough, assuming nothing unexpected decided to make an appearance.

I directed the drones to move it into position and made a few adjustments to the weld locations. When it came time to tie the frame into the projector, I took manual control of one of the drones myself. I wasn’t about to trust the AI with that step. If we lost the projector out here, we’d be truly dead in the water.

That was when I noticed the cables.

No color coding. No labels. Nothing to distinguish line from neutral.

I paused, then keyed the internal comms. “Excuse me, Doctor,” I said. “Which one of these cables is line, and which is neutral?”

I waited for a reply. Just as I was about to ask again, his voice came back over the comms.

“Um… I thought I labeled that.”

I glanced back at the cables. Still nothing.

“Okay,” he continued, “according to my notes, the line closest to the inside is neutral, and the outside is line. Pretty sure. Hold on.”

There was a pause. Long enough to make me stop moving.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I had the engineers take pictures. That’s the correct order.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Thank you, Doctor. Connecting it now.”

I finished the connections carefully. The comm bus was easy enough to identify—at least that part had been color-coded to match the wires already tied into the projector.

Finally, we jumped.

We emerged just outside the system’s outer boundary, far enough out to begin passive scans before committing to anything closer. Normally, the main display resolved almost immediately after a jump.

This time, it didn’t.

The screen stayed dark a fraction of a second too long. Then another.

I glanced toward Ensign Hollinger. He was staring at his console, not moving, his hands hovering just above the controls like he wasn’t quite sure what they were going to do next.

That look was enough. I turned back to my own station.

My displays were still coming online.

When my console finally came back online, the display didn’t make sense. For a brief moment it felt out of phase, like the data was sliding past itself. Then it snapped into focus.

I scanned the readings. Everything looked fine. Nominal.

I keyed the internal comms to engineering. “This is Commander Younge. Anyone down there have any idea what just happened?”

The Doctor’s voice came over the channel, punctuated by a faint crackle of interference.

“Hold on a second.”

His voice turned away from the mic. “You—yeah, you—get over there and pull that panel. I think we blew a phase converter.”

A pause. Muffled movement.

“Looks like a minor miscalibration in the lens,” he continued, sounding almost relieved. “It reversed phase on us. We jumped into a curvature well instead of flat space.”

Another beat, then, more distant, “I’m recalibrating it now. Next jump should be fine.”

His voice faded again. “You—yeah, you—put out that fire. Don’t ju—”

The channel went dead.

I looked up to find the Captain watching me, her expression neutral, patient. She’d heard every word of that exchange—I was sure of it.

I was also sure she wanted me to tell her something that sounded like good news.

The background noise on the channel told a different story. Raised voices. Rapid callouts. Someone swore, loud and sharp.

“Stop,” Hysen snapped, suddenly back on the mic.

The noise cut almost immediately.

“We’re not losing the projector,” he said, clipped and precise. “You—seal that line. You—kill power to the secondary converter. No one touches the lens until I say so.”

A beat.

“It’s a fire,” he added, calmer now. “Not a catastrophe. Breathe. Then fix it.”

The channel went quiet again.

I glanced down at the comms, then back to my panel. Still nominal.

I swiped to the coil cameras. They looked intact. No visible damage. At least that was something.

I allowed myself a small smile before looking back up at the Captain.

“All systems are nominal,” I said. “No damage to the coils. Power is steady. I’ll dispatch a drone to get a closer look at the ship, but so far, Captain, everything looks good.”

The Captain leaned back into her chair, tapped her pad once, then looked up at the main display.

“All right,” she said. “Everyone knows what to do. Show me the planet we’re here to investigate.”

The astrophysicists, biologists, and geologists had been conferring quietly among themselves before one of them turned toward the Captain.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said, her voice carrying a faint country drawl. “We found something interesting.”

She tapped her console, and the main display shifted. Not one planet filled the screen, but two.

“Both bodies sit within the habitable zone,” she continued. “But they’re… unusual. The larger planet appears to be stripping atmosphere from the smaller one.”

She stepped closer to the display and gestured toward the luminous arc between them.

“It’s a binary planetary system. The barycenter lies just above the larger planet’s upper atmosphere, and the smaller body is moving fast enough that we’re seeing material exchange.” She paused, then added, “The shimmer you’re seeing here is ice crystallization forming between the two atmospheres.”

The Captain stood and stepped closer to the display, her expression softening.

“It’s breathtaking,” she said. Then she looked back to the scientist. “But this isn’t the planet we came to see, correct?”

The scientist stepped back toward the display.

“No, ma’am. I just thought you should see it,” she said. “I’ll log it. We can study it remotely while we’re in orbit around the other planet.”

She tapped her console, and the image shifted. A bluish marble rotated slowly into view.

“This is the planet we’re here to see,” she continued. “As you can see, it has a substantial atmosphere. Transmission spectroscopy suggests carbon dioxide and oxygen. We can’t say much more from this distance, but it looks like a strong candidate for colonization.”

She hesitated briefly, then added, “The host star is a red dwarf, which means it could produce significant solar flares. That said, based on the planet’s magnetosphere, I believe it’s well protected.”

After nearly two hours had crawled by, I noticed Lieutenant Owens bent over a spectrum analysis, her attention locked in place. I turned, taking in the bridge at large. Lieutenant Commander Borne stood rigid, posture ramrod straight, eyes fixed on the main screen. Ensign Hollinger fidgeted at his console, fingers moving without rhythm, as though he was giving himself something to do.

The comms chimed, cutting through the low hum of the bridge.

Doctor Hysen’s voice came through, steady and precise. “The calibration is complete. Engineering is ready for the next jump. You may proceed when ready.”

I glanced down at my console. The capacitors were sitting at seventy-three percent. Power generation was nominal. Plenty of charge to make it to the planet.

The only remaining hurdle was Ensign Hollinger plotting a straight course.

That was easier said than done. We weren’t moving through space the way intuition wanted to pretend we were. Causality, inertia, and general relativity all had their say out here, and they rarely agreed with human ideas of direction. A straight line wasn’t something you drew. It was something you calculated, accounting for how space itself bent and dragged beneath you.

Hollinger knew that. Straight meant straight through curved space, not around it.

Ensign Hollinger turned from his console and looked at the Captain. “I-I am ready when y-you are, Captain.”

The words caught me off guard. He must have been replotting the course the entire time, keeping the solution warm, ready to jump at a moment’s notice.

The Captain turned and looked at me, waiting.

“Oh. Right, Captain. All systems are nominal.” I tapped quickly at my console, recalling the drones one by one. “We’ll be ready to go in four minutes.”

The Captain nodded. Once the drones were back in their holds, she gave the order.

We jumped.

This time, the transition was smooth. No hesitation. No distortion. When the displays resolved, we were roughly six hundred thousand kilometers from the planet, and Ensign Hollinger was already engaging the reactionless drives.

The ship eased into a stable orbit.

Hollinger turned from his console. “W-We are in a s-stable orbit, Captain.”

I glanced over my console and ran through my normal checks. Everything looked fine. When I looked up, I noticed the scientists gathered around their stations, eyes moving quickly as they compared data, talking over one another in short, excited bursts.

I turned to the main screen.

From this distance, the planet read more purple than blue. Large patches of violet covered the continents, unevenly distributed rather than uniform. As the planet rotated, the night side came into view.

It wasn’t dark.

The surface glowed faintly, broad regions lit by cyan bioluminescence, interspersed with deeper purple patches scattered across the hemisphere. Whatever was producing it was widespread, not localized.

Then I noticed the moons.

There were two of them. One was smaller and close in, the other larger and farther out. Their orbits placed them nearly opposite one another, holding a rough balance as the planet rotated beneath them.

I frowned slightly and glanced back at the magnetosphere readings. Strong. Unusually so.

I wondered if the configuration was related.

The Captain tapped her pad and pushed herself up from the chair.

“Everyone not conducting science, take a break. Return in four hours. We’ll be continuing on our course at that time.”

With that, she turned and headed for her office.

I glanced over at Kate, but she was already lost in whatever she was listening to, her attention sealed off behind the headset. I let it go and turned toward Ensign Hollinger instead.

“Hey, Ensign,” I said. “Want to go play some pool?”

He looked up at me, clearly caught off guard. His eyes flicked to Kate’s console, and something clicked. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he pushed himself to his feet.

“Sure,” he said. “I-I could use a break.”

As Jeremy and I headed for the elevator, one of the biologists called out from behind us.

“This planet is teeming with life. We need to get an atmospheric drone down there now!”

It didn’t take long for us to reach the lounge. I grabbed the rack and started setting the balls while Jeremy lined up the cues.

“That was some nice flying back there,” I said. “This ship’s a beast, and you locked into geosync in no time.”

“Y-you know,” he said, “I-I was top of m-my class at the a-academy.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Want to break?”

He shook his head, so I stepped up and lined the shot. The break cracked loudly, the balls scattering across the table, and I moved aside.

“So,” I said, watching the layout, “you’re secretly some kind of ace pilot, then?”

He didn’t answer right away. He leaned in, took the shot, and sank two balls cleanly. Solids.

“Y-Yeah,” he said with a smirk. “S-something like that.”

He lined up again. Two more balls dropped in quick succession.

I stared at the table. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

Kate came running into the lounge.