Burst Transmission

Day one of the silence, Mission Control logged it as a routine blackout — debris field, solar interference, one of a dozen explanations that required no further action.

By day two, the explanations had dried up.

Analyst Preja Osei had been on comms rotation for eleven years and she had never seen a complete signal dropout last more than four hours. She was the one who filed the formal incident report. She was also the one who stayed at her station through two consecutive shift changes, eating cold rice from a container, watching the static.

On the seventy-second hour exactly, the signal returned.

First the carrier wave. Then telemetry: life signs nominal, hull integrity nominal, trajectory nominal. Everything exactly as it should be, as if the silence had been nothing more than a pause between sentences.

Then Captain Voss's voice, clear and unhurried, as if reading from a prepared statement:

"Mission Control, this is Meridian. We are resuming standard communication protocol. The crew is in good health. There was an anomaly. We are still — " a pause, very brief, the kind that a speech synthesizer would not produce " — processing what occurred. Full report to follow."

Preja played it back three times.

The voice was Voss. Absolutely Voss — every vocal marker matched the baseline recording within acceptable variance. But the mission log timestamp attached to the transmission showed a date that could not be right.

Not 72 hours had passed aboard Meridian.

2,190 days had.