Minimum Safe Distance
The contact is human. The vessel is silent.
Deep in space, a mapping crew finds another human vessel on a silent trajectory. Their calls go unanswered. The crew has the tools and procedures to approach uncertainty carefully, but every conclusion still has to be earned from what they can actually observe.
Minimum Safe Distance is a compact work of procedural science fiction built around close attention to people, systems and evidence.
What to expect
- a five-person professional crew
- procedural deep-space science fiction
- close attention to evidence and uncertainty
- restrained worldbuilding
- a compact standalone story
From Minimum Safe Distance
The contact appeared halfway through a pass I had already decided was going to be boring.
The first return sat low enough in the noise that I let the mapper keep it. It collected things like that. Ice with the wrong reflectivity. Dust where the local model preferred empty space. Calibration edges that looked interesting until the next pulse made them disappear.
The second return came back where the first one should have been by then.
The third gave me the same track and a material flag I had not expected.
NON-ORGANIC.
If this worked for you
Succession is not a sequel to Minimum Safe Distance. It is the longer work for readers who want the same patience, procedural reasoning, controlled uncertainty and human pressure at novel length.