Author: Alastair Millar

I should have said something. Today, I know that—but back then, I was still young and stupid. So I’m recording this now that I’m old and hopefully wiser, for all the good it will do.

I was desperate when I signed up for the Settler Corps, with nothing left after a layoff and ruinous divorce but pocket litter and broken dreams; food and a roof over my head while I took the aptitude tests, with a guaranteed job if I passed, was an offer too good to ignore. So what if that job was off-world? As far as I was concerned, Terra had done me dirty, and I had no reason to stay.

I’d never even heard of Knossos-V, but kind of assumed a planet would have a surface. It was only after they’d packed fifty of us into a warprider for a shot across the cosmos, and it was too late to back out, that they told us it was a gas giant. Why were we going? Because of the rare elements, warpdrive propellants and helium for which our beloved home system was eternally hungry.

I was assigned to a mobile construction rig. Robots put stuff together, of course, but humans were needed to make sure they didn’t screw up, break down or get lost. At start of shift I’d suit up, get a list of locations and things to check, and then be lowered down by tether to where the latest automated extraction terminal was being built. The atmosphere fritzed radio comms, so a chestcam captured everything and the footage formed part of my report. As long as you didn’t fall off the platform, it was easy enough, even for an intellectual lightweight like me.

It was on maybe my twenty-fifth terminal that I saw them – things like two-tailed manta rays, about my size, but made out of this weird jelly stuff; I don’t know if it was reflective or transparent, but they were hard to see, clustering around a set of struts. When I got close, they scattered, launching themselves off and disappearing into the all-consuming gas haze. Alien life! And I’d seen it with my own eyes!

When I got back to the rig, I told my supervisor, and he took the vids off me right away. They weren’t super clear on his office terminal, but it was obvious that something was out there.

Then he’d sighed. “Incredible. But it doesn’t change anything, Sam. We got a job to do, and we’ll do it, and maybe one day someone will come and say we should have done things different. But we’re on a deadline, see?” He hit the delete button, and that was that. I needed the job, so I didn’t kick up a fuss. Like I said, stupid.

I kept an eye out for the rest of my indenture, but never saw the rays again – and in five T-years there, never met anyone else who’d come across them. Now there are thousands of terminals on Kay5, and not a hint of life. Did we take what they needed and suffocate them? Drive them deeper towards stranger predators and oblivion? Or are they hiding from us? I don’t know.

Officially, the Settler Corps has never found life anywhere else, either. But maybe we just killed it off and kept quiet, like me and the supe. Nobody believes me, or wants to believe me, if I tell them what happened. If you’re listening to this, just know that we aren’t alone in the Void. But we need the courage to admit it.