THE LAST PASSENGERS OF ANDROMEDA - Yusuf Mehmet Sarışın - Part: 1

THE LAST PASSENGERS OF ANDROMEDA

A Science Fiction Story in Four Parts

Yusuf Mehmet Sarışın

Spaceship: Asteria

The Asteria carried passengers between inhabited planets in the Andromeda Galaxy. It did not travel at anything close to the speed of light, but it could use the network of passages within the galaxy. A large civilian transport ship, it carried 480 passengers and a crew of ten.

Crew

1. Captain Joseph Blondy — Senior captain and commander of the voyage

2. Captain Elena Voss — Second captain and stellar navigation specialist

3. Dr. Adrian Cole — Chief medical officer and space biologist

4. Maya Chen — Chief engineer

5. Liam Ortega — Communications and signals officer

6. Nora Kepler — Astrophysicist and science officer

7. Victor Hale — Head of security

8. Amara Okoye — Passenger services and life support officer

9. Elias Renn — Pilot and maneuvering specialist

10. Sofia Maren — Artificial intelligence systems and archives officer

PART ONE — THE PALE BLUE LEGEND

There was no night in Andromeda, only hours when the stars seemed fewer.

As the Asteria departed from the silver port of the planet Nerya, hundreds of billions of stars shone in the sky. The galaxy’s visible stellar disk stretched far beyond a hundred thousand light-years. Yet through the ship’s windows, Andromeda looked less like a vast city than an ocean of light extending forever.

Captain Joseph Blondy sat quietly in the command chair. In sixty years of space travel, he had seen countless planets, passed between the rings of gas giants, and carried children born in systems with two suns. But no journey had moved him as deeply as a planet he had never seen.

Earth.

A blue dot in humanity’s distant memory…

It lay in the neighboring galaxy called the Milky Way, roughly 2.5 million light-years away. Everyone in Andromeda knew of Earth. Children learned about its oceans, forests, and skies at school. The old archives held images of cities called Istanbul, İzmir, Cairo, Paris, and New York. But traveling to Earth was impossible.

Even a hypothetical craft capable of moving at exactly the speed of light would take approximately 2.5 million years to cross that distance, as measured by an outside observer. And no ship with mass could reach the speed of light. Humanity had conquered the distances between planets, but the gulf between galaxies remained impassable.

“Looking at the Earth archive again?” Captain Elena Voss asked.

Joseph did not close the image of the blue sphere on the screen before him.

“Looking is the oldest way of going,” he said.

Elena smiled. She was forty-two: calm, resolute, and attentive enough to notice the slightest deviation in the sky. She commanded the ship alongside Joseph, sharing equal authority over every critical decision made during the voyage.

The Asteria’s route ran from Nerya to Talassa, then onward to Orpheon, a planet known for its red deserts. The journey would take eighteen days. Among the passengers were merchants, students, migrant families, diplomats, and people hoping to begin a new life.

Six hours after departure, communications officer Liam Ortega’s voice came over the bridge speakers.

“Captains, we’ve picked up an unusual signal from the outer halo.”

Joseph turned to the screen.

Andromeda’s immense halo of gas was known to extend more than a million light-years beyond the galaxy. This sparse fortress of gas had already begun to touch the Milky Way’s halo. Though their stars had not yet collided, the two galaxies were meeting at their invisible edges.

“The source?” Elena asked.

“From the direction of the Milky Way,” Liam said. “But the signal isn’t natural.”

Silence fell over the bridge.

Sofia Maren instructed the artificial intelligence to analyze it. From the noise came irregular pulses, then a mathematical sequence. Prime numbers… Then an ancient voice recording emerged.

A muffled, broken human voice:

“If anyone can hear us… this is Earth.”

Joseph Blondy rose to his feet.

A planet he could never reach was calling out to him.

TO BE CONTINUED