Theo Marchetti

She logged it anyway. 0600. Receivers nominal. Noise floor minus one-oh-eight. No candidates. She had written those words so many times that her hand did them without her, which was, she supposed, the point. The contract had been very clear about the point. Four hundred and fifty days. One operator. Listen, log, maintain, do not drink the water from tank two, come home. Nobody had said what to do if you heard something, because nobody, in the sixty years the Halden station had sat on the dark side of this moon, ever had.

Theo Marchetti

She went up to the dome at local noon, which was a courtesy term, since the sun never rose here. The planet did. Halden's primary filled a third of the sky, striped in amber and cream, its rings a blade of light laid across the black. She had hated it for the first month and then one day she had come up and found she was talking to it.

"Nothing today," she told it. "Nothing yesterday. You'd tell me, wouldn't you. If there was something."

The planet turned, slowly, and said nothing, which was its way.