The ship is quiet.

Always felt to me like a tomb. It doesn't help that there are about three thousand bodies aboard, lining the walls of three equally large rooms. They stare out from behind frosted glass, sightless and silent. Not dead, never dead, but not quite alive.

I sip my coffee and put my feet up.

I always get a little...morbid, about four months into my shift.

Two months to go. By the end of my six months on duty I will be downright terrifying. That's how it goes, when you're alone in space with nothing but a couple artificial intelligences to hang out with. You start going a little crazy.

Our job is to ferry a colonization crew out to a habitable planet. Thousands of years, each year divided into two shifts. Two hundred and fifty ship's crew, paid a fairly enormous bonus for each shift, watching over cold semi-corpses. We will each lose seventeen years of our lives. Each of us medically checked, each of us under the age of thirty-five. Each of us bored out of our minds while we watch the infinite nothingness pass us by.

At least the coffee is good.

Every five years we wake up a cadre of scientists. They review the collected data from our trip, long range scans and information gathered up by a half dozen AI systems. Apparently they made some big discovery on the last one, a whopping three years back now, and sent a pile of information out home. It would have reached home about a month or two ago, by my math.

They were very excited but very hush-hush.

But, if you get a scientist drunk, they tell you everything.

With the data they had, they'd figured it out. The thing that keeps us out here. FTL travel.

That was the good news.

The bad news was we couldn't make it work with what we had here. The scans revealed material sources that could be used. If the scientists at home could find those, or replicate them, they could do it. They could get there before us, and that is entirely unfair.

I'm shocked we didn't have the materials. We have almost everything.

Our colony ship is a behemoth. Stuffed full of the bodies, but also modular habitats and all the supplies we'll need to manage the start up. I will be forty by the time we arrive. Hell of a thing. It will be very cool to be one of the first to step onto an entirely new planet. So there's that.

I sigh and rub my hair. I've already lost four years. Eight shifts and just like that, I'm a different person. Sure gets boring, even with a library as stuffed with books and movies and music as the one the ship has.

"Sir. We have a contact." The voice breaks me out of my thoughts and I start up from the chair, spilling coffee everywhere. The voice is one we're not supposed to hear. Not ever. It's a rough, military voice. Reminds me of my drill sergeant.

"Contact?" I shout, leaning over the console. I see it. It's on approach and it looks big.

Very big.

"Who is it?" I ask.

"I have no identifying information. It appears to be seven kilometers in length and vaguely humanoid in construction. I suggest arming the proximity cannons, sir."

"Yeah, sure. It won't make a difference, but do it."

This ship has some defences, but they're meant to shoot down stray rocks and incoming projectiles that might pierce the hull, not defend the ship from a boarding. It's not that kind of ship.

There aren't any of that kind of ship.

"I have a visual." The AI says. I inspect it and my heart beats hard in my chest. I tilt my head and squint, just because I might be seeing it wrong.

There's no way.

It's impossible.

It's huge. It has a sloping nose and hundreds of compartments that line the sides and top. Heavy guns, smaller guns, what look like hangars. A command superstructure rises up nearer the back, multi-tiered and sleek. It's something out of a fucking movie.

I should wake the crew but I've forgotten myself.

I've forgotten everything.

Because that ship that came out of nowhere, the military looking thing that is bearing down on us, it's from home.

It's from Earth.

And I know that because the video screen reveals a message. It's written in block gray letters on the front of the ship. They must have worried they wouldn't be able to hail us. They're not wrong, we have lots of tech but our channels out are limited.

We weren't ever supposed to talk to anyone. We were supposed to be alone.

My heart is still pounding and I re-read the message. Then I re-re-read it.

Mayday

Trouble Ahead

Earth Sent Us

Mayday