I’ve come to accept that I’m always going to be compared to my two very famous uncles, no matter how far removed from their time in the exploration division we get. I don’t generally have a problem with this, but there are a few times when I wish there was no connection at all.

I made sure that I got my place on the team through hard work, but I have to be realistic and admit that Peter and Andrew were a big help with gaining acceptance for my career choices with the rest of the family. Grandpa Juan was always going to be totally against the idea, but even he eventually came round, at least to the point of grumbling acceptance.

My choice of speciality, communications, was very much to do with my admiration for uncle Andrew as might be expected. He was the one who introduced me to Minerva, the brilliant language AI who decoded the Valatan language and who has now become a good friend and an even better mentor.

I don’t even mind that, when we are actually on mission, the likelihood of my language skills being needed is fairly remote. I’m quite happy spending my time managing the Mesh installations and day-to-day liaison with the press and the broader federal administration. Let’s be honest about the whole thing: generally there’s nothing much to report.

The upcoming mission is one that I’ve been genuinely looking forward to. It will be my third and there’s every expectation that it will be routine enough, but there’s a pretty solid family connection to this one, as there have been to others in the past.

Manannan, one of the first third-generation ships is now just a few weeks away from her primary destination, the star Psi Serpentis and, judging by how many times they have spoken to me, Nexi, the AI currently in charge of the flight is getting uncharacteristically excited.

It's not much of a surprise for me to get a call from them, so I have no problem in accepting the contact.

<Darren, are you in your office still?>

“Yes Nexi, what can I do for you?”

<I need your help, in an official capacity.>

“Really? Well, I’m always here for you, you know that. Bored and looking for a chess partner again? You’ll inevitably win, you know, even spotting me two pieces.”

<No Darren, I mean it this time. Take a look at these charts.> A series of spectrographs and frequency analysis charts appear in my virtual inbox. I take a few moments to glance at them. This quickly devolves into several minutes of deeper study and I fall silent for a long moment while I digest them in a daze.

“These are from Psi Serpentis? That’s impossible,” I manage eventually. “We’ve never heard anything from that part of space – well, from anywhere nearby, really.”

<Clearly, it isn’t impossible though. I think we’ve just reached the point where we can see through the background noise and the interference of the stars’ output. I thought there was something in the signals a few days ago, but this full sweep confirms it.>

“The underlying structures? They look digital?”

<Yes, just not in any encoding that I have access to out here. I’m sending them into the AI network for further analysis as we speak. Axios said to speak to you first, but the commander has been informed and is on her way to your office right now.>

The knock on the always open door comes even as Nexi finishes talking to me. Melina doesn’t wait for a response, coming right into my tiny office and plonking herself down in one of the two small chairs by the large window that makes up the whole of the far end of the small room. She manages a slight shrug of bemused acknowledgement at my wry smile.

“She’s here now, Nexi. You’d better join us.”

Nexi’s avatar, a subtle glow in the vague shape of a humanoid forms from light and takes the other chair by the window, making the already cramped office feel positively claustrophobic.

<Good afternoon, commander. Sorry to be the bearer of this news.>

“You’re not going to classify it as either good or bad news then?” Melina asks.

<No, it’s a little too soon for that sort of decision to be made. It is, as stated, news.>

“Have you been taking lessons in comedy from Argus?” I ask with a grin.

<Well, there hasn’t been much else to do for the last thirty years or so.>

“I suppose that the first and most basic question we should be asking is ‘Does this change anything?’” Melina points out.

“Probably not,” I agree. “If and/or when we analyse these signals, we will know much more about what we’re facing, but I’ve been assuming that we’re committed to a very close approach at least at this point in the flight. We might not have to stop and go into orbit, but we’re doing the flyby no matter what?”

<That’s basically true,> Nexi agrees. <I can, of course, plot and execute a redirect to the alternative destination at any time, even after entering orbit. Right now, we’re going to be cutting it pretty fine to avoid gravitational issues and, if I do make a correction, it’ll make things very obvious from the planet’s surface.>

“It’s nice to have no fuel worries, isn’t it,” Melina smiles. “Still, I feel that we probably should investigate if we can. Unless, of course, the signal is some sort of warning. Then we drive on by and wave as we pass.”

The AIs, in general and individually, don’t ever really panic, but what I’ve witnessed for the last couple of very hectic days comes pretty close to it. Most of this vague panic is, thankfully, not coming from any of my friends. Nexi is very good at dealing with stuff like this. She has vast experience of administration and, of course, has been a pilot on an exploratory voyage before. Even more importantly, that first voyage was made without any real-time communications and no assistance from Earth.

Argus thinks that it’s all another great joke whereas Minerva has spent literally centuries studying ancient languages and is so laid back that she sometimes doesn’t seem to be present in the conversation at all. They’re as different as humans might be in a similar situation.

I can’t say that I’ve ever understood how the AIs work out the hierarchy of their command structure – if that’s even the right description for whatever organisation they might have between themselves. All I know is that whenever something big is happening, Romulus seems to be pretty close to the action. I’m not even sure what title he assumes during any of these events, but he’s always in the mix. What surprises me is that he’s the one who seems to be close to panic.

The reasons for the excitement are fairly obvious and I do understand them, perhaps as well as anyone might. Nexi has continued to gather recordings of the signals coming from our destination and they are confounding our experts, human and AI alike.

There’s now no doubt that they are digital signals, with all that this implies. There are technologically advanced, presumably sentient intelligences present on our destination world; ones that understand and use binary digital protocols.

This world is the fourth planet orbiting the primary, an earth-sized rocky planet that is close to the outside edge of the habitable zone for this star at about 1.2AU. We’ve given it the tentative name of Thermia, a really not very subtle pun on the lack of what we would consider to be comfortable temperatures.

The primary star, Psi Serpentis is, as with most of our exploration targets, a very close analogue of our own sun. It is of similar mass and age and very close in spectral type and colour. Of course, the fact that it is a binary – well actually a three-star system – sets it apart from all of our previous targets. Still, the two small red dwarfs that orbit with it are a long way from the primary and orbit one-another closely. From the surface of Thermia, they will simply be very bright planet-looking bodies in the night sky and not visible in daylight.

Our own local space telescopes had confirmed the presence of potentially suitable rocky planets, but they gave inconclusive results regarding the possibility of life on any of them. The plane of orbit as seen from Earth excludes the possibility of us observing planetary transits of the star and getting good spectroscopic analysis.

Planet three is right at the inside edge of the habitable zone, but was determined to be too hot to be a reasonable target. Planet four was touch and go as well, but the reflective atmospheric absorption spectra that we did manage to capture showed the presence of chlorophyll. Now, from close by, planet three is indeed a bit of a fireball, similar in many ways to Venus.

The Earth-based results that we did have, however, were enough to send the Manannan on their way. Over the last two years, as Nexi has been decelerating hard towards an orbital insertion, they have taken endless scans and recordings of the approach, trying to find out as much as possible about this new world.

From the ship’s current distance of about a 200 million kilometres, the best images of Thermia reveal a stunningly beautiful planet. Apparent surface temperatures manage a comfortable sixteen to eighteen degrees at the equator, but the polar ice-caps extend across fully thirty degrees over both the north and south poles.

The rest of the world appears to be land and sea with expanses of green and blue and a lack of desert regions. It promises to be cool, moist and lush. There’s very little axial tilt and there don’t appear to be appreciable seasons other than a slight cooling of the whole world at apoapsis caused by a moderately eccentric orbit.

So, long before we started to detect radio-wave signals, we knew that there was, at the very least, plant-based life on the planet. Now, all this is in a state of flux. I should be grateful that we now have our experience with the Valatan to help guide our actions. Unlike when my uncles did this without a manual, we have extensive documentation to help guide our next steps.

Even this, however, doesn’t seem to be enough to settle the nerves of our AI friends in power. I know that much of it is because they are having trouble making any sense of the signals we are now receiving in abundance.

<We’ve gone through everything from 20th century radio and television – long before digital signalling – right up to the protocols we use for singularity communications and Mesh transmissions,> Minerva told me this morning. <There are some very obvious patterns within patterns, but nothing that we can be sure resolves into something meaningful to us. It’s as if we can see some markers, but can’t read the bulk of the data.>

“I get that, but it does mean that I can’t be of much help. You and I deal primarily with language analysis and, without even a hint of what that might look or sound like, we can’t really do anything.”

<Well, I’m sure you can imagine how much processing power we have dedicated to this over the last few days. It’s a good job we have virtually limitless energy, as we’re burning gigawatts on this.>

“Is there a feeling that they – whoever they might be – are using a level of technology that’s beyond us?” I ask after some thought.

<Some of us seem to think that this might be the case, but there’s a larger group who suspect that the main problem is that literally everything is encrypted. We’re not, in this scenario, struggling with the signals themselves, just with the degree to which they are scrambled by the encryption and we can’t decode them.>

“Quantum decoders?”

<Working overtime. We have such a stable society that quite a bit of this infrastructure is lost in the distant past. Once we no longer had governments spying on other governments or their own people, much of it has been forgotten. We just don’t really need this type of encryption to be broken anymore.>

“Well, let’s hope that once we get into orbit, we can at least try and send some unencrypted communications into their networks. We will need to start a good old-fashioned dialogue to get anywhere.”

<That will mostly be up to you, but I’ll be tagging along right with you.>

I did get the point, but it left me with more questions than potential answers. As Minerva had pointed out, we’d done away with most of this encryption – not entirely, to be sure – but the knowledge should have still been readily available to us. Still, if we don’t have the dedicated hardware, we would just have to make do with what we do have.

It did leave us with the more burning question of why this level of security might be needed on this distant world. What was making such security not only necessary, but seemingly universal. Again, without the ability to decode even the most mundane of signals, we were left in the dark about everything.

For much of an afternoon, I found myself lost deep in the study of the history of secret codes, cyphers and encryption. Earth was once a much more secretive place than I ever imagined. Digital communication moved very quickly from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, culminating in a range of quantum-built encoding systems that are still considered virtually impossible to crack. If this is what we were facing, then we’d never break their codes before the heat-death of the universe.

Such encryption remains ubiquitous in personal communication, we just don’t even think about it and have no need to break into it.

While I did understand some of the basic principles, it was so far out of my area of expertise that I could do little more than glance through the timeline and wonder where on this timeline, if anywhere, our targets were.