Sylvia lost all of the games of Go Fish. We only played 8 games, but it was startling, and I thought you might want to know.

That was how the time passed. The alien vessel continued its approach at terrifying speed, we continued to nervously check the screen for any new startling developments, and I slowly acquired most of the cards into their sets. We worked out the time delays exactly and found that the ship had entered the system just before out shift began, and was going to arrive within good communication range of Echo station about 10 minutes after the broadcast we’d sent would arrive, 55 minutes after we sent it. From there, it would still take about an hour for any response to arrive back to our little outpost, depending on how quickly they gave their response. In other words, we will see their response right before the end of our shift. Aren’t games wonderful when they’re quietly designed with player-centric timings?

...They were very tense games of Go Fish, anyone would’ve played badly, and Sylvie definitely isn’t a spontaneous master of exactly that one game and no others. Definitely.

Sylvie does find one very interesting thing, though. After the third game, she calls up an untouched image of the ship, including some of the empty starscape around it. “See, there! I thought there’d be something like that.”

I lean in close over her shoulder, letting my chin rest lightly there. The image doesn’t hold any new details to my view. “What do you see?” I ask quietly.

She traces a faint line that makes an oval around the ship. I hadn’t noticed it, but after she marks it at one point, I can follow it around easily enough.

“Oh, huh. That is interesting.”

“They’ve got bubble-speed!” Sylvie announces.

“That can’t be the official name?”

“It isn’t,” she replies, turning and rolling her eyes. “I think the name is Alcubierre drive? But yeah, you make a little bubble of spacetime and set it moving, and you go faster than light normally could. And right there you can see the little bit of warping at the bubble’s edge. Those are tiny images of stars being bent around the ship, like a little bit of a black hole’s craziness.”

I smile down at her. “Don’t take this wrong, but that was delightfully nerdy.” I turn back to the image. “Does it tell you anything in particular about this ship?”

“Well,” Sylvie slumps against my side. “Not really. They’re more advanced than we are, but we knew that already. We are actually perhaps on a good track for achieving it ourselves, since we’ve theorised about it already. But, info we can actually use? Not much.”

“I guess, if we’ve theorised about it, it suggests they aren’t crazy powerful deity aliens?”

Sylvie brightened. “Yes! That it does suggest. They still could be, but they’re using very mundane tools for space travel at that point, which still suggests they’re less crazy powerful than we sometimes tell stories about.”

“I mean... I’ll take it. Want to play another game?”

== * ==

The time-delayed pictures that we're observing are nearly at the point of contact. The alien ship appears to have decelerated kindly, re-entering the known laws of physics just beyond the expected range of good-quality communication with Echo station. Any time now, the information would arrive at our outpost, and we would find out just how friendly these aliens were.

“I hope they don’t just slag the station,” I whisper into the silence of waiting.

“Mm.”

“I hope the scout ship is okay, too.”

“Who knows where it went,” Sylvie replies with a nervous giggle. “The next system could be a nexus with eight different gates, and who knows really, right?”

“Or this could somehow be a retaliatory strike? Or maybe even the crew of that ship, here with a freely upgraded craft? Or,” but I am stopped in my rambling by the computer linking in the record of communication that the station had sent back, playing back in step with the equally delayed image.

“...This system,” announces the first-contact message in a calm, clear voice, “is part of Human-settled space. We seek peace, and cooperation with anyone we find in the universe. We greet you with eagerness, to meet you and learn about you. Any wrongs against you were done out of ignorance, and we will attempt to rectify them. Please, respond, so we may work together and achieve more than we could alone. This system...”

The ship slows further, and comes to a relative standstill. The message repeats again. Then, with a burst of static, another signal joins – coming unexpectedly, sounding like a cacophony of noise, utterly inhuman. But, for that, I could hear some definite structures to the sound, and repetitions of specific noises. No human could make those noises, but they were noises, that were being made.

Without any real warning, the ship spun upwards, in-place, and began to accelerate back towards the outbound gate. The alien signal, with a final few syllables, ends as well, leaving a lingering bit of static.

I stand in silence, Sylvie right next to me, unmoving as we try to understand what we just saw and heard.

“They didn’t attack,” Sylvie breaks the silence.

“I think they listened to the message, and responded,” I agree. “But very quickly, so who knows if they understood us? They didn’t translate back for us.”

“I don’t think we can assume anything about them. Their behaviour is weird, whichever way you look at it.”

“That was definitely language, though, and in a format our computers immediately recognised as sound. Whatever they were saying, they were saying something to us, and when they had finished saying it, they left. I couldn’t repeat any of it for the life of me, but there were consonants, and pauses and everything in there, right?”

“I think so, yeah,” she nods. “It sounded totally different.”

“And that contrast was really startling when put so close to English!”

“The next shift is going to get the hard work, though,” Sylvie says, grinning. “They get to try to break it down into symbols.”

“I’m sure I don’t envy them the task, but I’m going to have a hard time sleeping, I think,” I say, as the door opens to admit the next shift. I turn and smile widely at them. “We got first contact, you get the task of starting to make any sense of the message!”