The Fermi Silence

Three hundred and twelve years into a four-hundred-year voyage between the stars, the generation ship Meridian intercepts a transmission from the Sojourner — the sister ship that launched eighty years earlier, and went silent without explanation four decades into her own journey. The signal isn't a distress call. It's an archive. And buried in its header is a single line that signals technician Corin Vahl was never supposed to read: Mission status: concluded. Ratified. Unanimous. No FTL. No aliens. No convenient rescue. Just a sealed can of eleven hundred people, four generations removed from the world their ancestors left behind — and a ship-year clock that's about to reach the exact same number the Sojourner reached, right before she stopped.