She exhaled a breath of laughter, relaxed against him a little, eyes mirrors to all she saw, "This would be set sometime during the Terraforming Age; ships were primitive, and there were no faster-than-light engines. So, it would take decades for ships to travel from one place to another, and decades more to return. Crews would sleep most of the journey in pods— like those there, see how they're waking now that the ship has received signal?— which would slow their bodily cycles to such a crawl that they wouldn't even age..." Her explanation drifted off as the very small crew began to interact.

The air was tense; it was clear the messages the ship had received were unexpected, unable to be translated, and caused division, seeds of dissent. Long silences were set to the background of the ship's sterility. The ship's computer was 'Mother', called so either affectionately or resentfully by the crew, and an outward pan revealed their destination: a planetoid dark enough to seem threatening, spinning slowly, the suggestion of surface-storms blurred in its shadows.