A story about distance, time, and the strange order of arrival.
The first ship left Earth quietly.
There were ceremonies, of course. Words spoken into microphones. Flags stitched into sleeves. Smiling faces that did not quite hold. Humanity had always been good at dressing grief in celebration.
But when the engines finally lit and the vessel pulled away from the cradle of Earth, the moment itself was almost simple.
A light departing into dark.
A single, fragile line drawn outward from everything that had ever been home.
The mission was not measured in kilometers. It was measured in centuries.
Five hundred years.
The ship was called the Epoch. A name chosen for what it meant: a beginning. A turning point. The end of one age and the threshold of another.
The people who boarded understood the truth that could not be softened: none of them would ever see the planet they were going to.
They were not traveling to a place.
They were traveling to a future.
Among them was Amara Idris, chief navigator, thirty-two years old. She stood at the observation window as Earth shrank to a blue marble, then a point, then memory. Her daughter, Kiran, age seven, pressed her face to the glass beside her.
"Will we forget?" Kiran asked.
Amara held her hand. "No. We'll remember. We'll teach you to remember."
But she knew the truth. Remembering was not the same as knowing.
The ship was a world built to endure. Air recycled until it forgot it had ever been wind. Water turned endlessly through metal veins. Crops grown under artificial suns. Children born beneath ceilings that never opened.
Generation folded into generation.
The first remembered Earth as a living thing: rain, oceans, soil beneath bare feet.
Their children remembered Earth as stories.
Their grandchildren remembered Earth as myth.
And slowly, the ship became all that was real.
Kiran grew old aboard the Epoch. She became Chief Engineer, maintaining the fusion core that had burned without pause for eighty years. She told her own children about Earth, about her grandmother Amara who had seen the sky.
But the words felt hollow. How do you describe wind to someone who has only known recycled air?
A society formed inside steel. Rituals grew around maintenance schedules. The engine rooms became sacred places. The Day of Launch became less celebration than mourning—a remembrance of the day they left everything behind.
Always, always, there was Landfall ahead.
The planet waiting beneath another sun.
A promise. A myth. A future they would never see.
Then Earth, as Earth always did, refused to stand still.
A hundred years after the Epoch vanished into interstellar night, science advanced. Engines became faster. Designs became sleeker. Patience became less necessary.
A second ship was built.
Its journey would take only three hundred years.
The ship's name was the Ardent, and it carried four hundred souls who knew they were following in the wake of legends. Those who boarded were told of the first mission with reverence, as if speaking of saints already dead.
Commander Yuki Sato was forty-one when she stepped aboard. An engineer by training, a leader by necessity. She had lost her husband to the Pacific Pandemic of 2247. Her sons were grown, with families of their own who chose to remain on a dying world.
She had nothing left to hold her to Earth.
Communication faded quickly into silence, swallowed by distance. The Ardent followed the Epoch like an arrow after a candle flame.
Another century passed on Earth.
Borders collapsed. Resources dwindled. The wars began—small at first, then sprawling, then consuming. Earth discovered ways to go faster still, not from curiosity but from desperation.
A third mission was launched. No longer a slow pilgrimage but a sprint.
Travel time: one hundred years.
The ship was called New Horizon, and it carried three hundred people who knew Earth was dying. They left not as explorers but as refugees, fleeing a world tearing itself apart.
Among them was Dr. Chen Wei, botanist and soil engineer, twenty-eight years old. She boarded with seeds in her pockets and grief in her heart. She had watched the Amazon burn. She had seen the breadbaskets turn to dust.
"We'll do better," she whispered to herself as the engines ignited. "We have to."
The universe does not care about intention.
It only cares about velocity.
So the ships crossed the dark, separated by decades, by ignorance, by the long quiet gulf between stars.
None of them could see the others.
None of them could know.
The first to leave would be the last to arrive.
The New Horizon reached the planet first.
Dr. Chen Wei was seventy-three by then, her hair silver, her hands steady. She had spent forty-five years in stasis, aging only three years for every decade of travel. The rest of the journey she had spent in waking shifts—tending the hydroponics, teaching the younger crew, watching through telescopes as the target star grew from a point to a sun.
When the planet finally resolved in their scopes, she wept.
It was real.
Landfall—the name given centuries ago by mission planners who would never see it—hung in the void like a promise kept. Larger than Earth, its oceans a deeper blue. Cloud patterns swirled across three major continents. And orbiting above, three moons in staggered paths, like shepherds watching over their flock.
"Look at them," breathed Karim Santos, the mission's astrophysicist. "Three moons. Different orbits. Landfall must be at least 1.4 times Earth's mass to hold them in stable configuration."
"Gravity?" someone asked.
"Within tolerance. 1.15 Earth standard. We'll adapt."
Two weeks before the New Horizon entered orbit, they launched their cargo vessel—an automated freighter packed with supplies, equipment, prefabricated shelters, and the heavy machinery needed to build a colony from scratch.
It descended ahead of them, a pathfinder carrying their future.
Three hundred people descended after it in clean, controlled arcs of fire. They landed in a broad valley between two mountain ranges, near the coast of the largest continent. The cargo ship sat waiting, already beginning to unpack itself according to programmed sequences.
They stepped onto soil that had never known a human footprint.
The gravity pulled at them, heavier than the ship's rotation had simulated. The air was thicker, richer. The sun—slightly larger, slightly cooler than Sol—cast everything in a warm amber hue.
They wept.
They laughed.
They breathed air that was not recycled, and it tasted like freedom.
Dr. Chen Wei knelt in the dirt, scooping it into her hands. Dark. Loamy. Rich with organic matter from whatever life had evolved here. She brought it to her face, inhaled deeply.
"It smells like soil," she said, wonder in her voice. "Real soil."
That first night, as they erected temporary shelters and established perimeter lights, the three moons rose.
First came Shepherd—the largest, pale silver, moving swiftly across the sky.
Then Wanderer—smaller, copper-tinted, in a longer elliptical orbit.
Finally, distant Watcher—the farthest, slowest, a pale blue ghost.
Together, they painted the landscape in shifting light. Shadows moved and danced. There were only a few hours each night when all three had set, leaving true darkness. Most nights, at least one moon hung overhead, casting everything in silver or copper or ethereal blue.
"We'll never need streetlights," someone joked.
But Dr. Chen Wei watched the moons and thought: We'll never have true darkness either. We'll have to learn what that means for plants, for sleep, for seasons.
They built quickly, efficiently, with the confidence of the most advanced mission Earth had ever sent. Their first structures were practical—biodomes for agriculture, water purification systems, solar panels drinking in the amber sunlight. Their first farms were careful, soil samples tested and retested.
Their first city grew like a seedling, small but certain.
They dismantled their ships for parts, turning exile into foundation.
But the early years were not easy.
Crops failed. Terran wheat struggled in Landfall's richer soil, the gravity pulling stalks down before they could mature. Potatoes thrived, but tomatoes withered. They had to learn which seeds would work and which belonged only to Earth.
Storms came without warning—massive electrical tempests that lit the sky with purple lightning, generated by complex interactions between Landfall's magnetic field and the three moons. No one had predicted them. The first storm destroyed two biodomes and killed the first crops.
Dr. Chen Wei developed a hybrid strain of quinoa that could withstand the conditions. It took her three years and seventeen failed generations. She named it Landfall Gold.
Three children were stillborn in the first decade, their hearts unable to adjust to the heavier gravity. Fifteen people died in a flash flood that swept through the valley before they understood the planet's weather patterns—the twin seasons driven by Landfall's slightly elliptical orbit, creating a "near season" of warmth and a "far season" of cold.
Karim Santos was among the dead. He had been surveying the river when the water came.
But they learned.
And they endured.
Within a generation, they had mapped the continent. Within two, they had decoded the rhythms of Landfall's twin seasons. Within three, the planet felt less like exile and more like home.
The sky stopped being something to fear or watch.
It was simply sky—though a sky illuminated by three moons that never let true night fully fall.
Their society grew differently than Earth ever had. With vast land and abundant resources, old patterns fell away. Territory meant little when there was room for everyone. Wealth meant little when the moons overhead—when they eventually built the infrastructure to reach them—would hold more rare metals and minerals than they could ever need.
They built councils instead of hierarchies.
They shared labor instead of hoarding it.
Conflict still existed—human nature did not vanish in new soil. There were arguments over land distribution, over whose expertise should guide agricultural policy, over whether to maintain Earth languages or develop a new creole. A group of religious fundamentalists tried to establish a separate settlement based on their interpretation of scripture. It lasted two years before they rejoined the main colony, unable to sustain themselves alone.
But conflict was resolved with words, with mediation, with the patience born of knowing there was nowhere else to go. This was home. These were their people. Forever.
Dr. Chen Wei died at one hundred and seven, surrounded by grandchildren who had never known Earth, who ran easily in Landfall's heavier gravity because they had grown up in it. Her funeral was held in the Founders' Garden, where Landfall Gold grew in abundance, its seeds now the staple grain of the colony.
By the time the fifth generation was born, those who remembered Earth were gone. The planet of their ancestors existed only in stories and archives, a cautionary myth about what happened when unity failed.
No one expected anyone else to come.
As far as they knew, they were the first.
And the last.
Their cities grew gently, curved and organic, blending with the landscape rather than dominating it. Buildings were low and sprawling, with living roofs where gardens grew. They learned to build with Landfall's native stone—a pale grey granite that seemed to glow faintly in moonlight.
Art flourished. With basic needs met, people turned to painting, music, storytelling. Philosophy deepened, no longer constrained by Earth's old arguments. They studied Landfall's ecosystems with reverence, cataloging ten thousand species of life they were now part of.
They sent expeditions to the moons—first Shepherd, closest and easiest to reach. They found it rich with titanium and platinum, and they mined carefully, sustainably, shipping resources down to Landfall only as needed. The moons became their warehouses, their reserves. The planet's surface remained untouched.
Landfall was not conquered.
It was tended.
A hundred years after the first landing, the population had grown to twelve thousand. Seven settlements dotted the main continent, connected by rail lines and communication networks. The archives from Earth remained accessible in the Central Library, but few visited them. The past seemed distant, almost fictional.
Until one afternoon, when everything changed.
It was a child—Yuki, age nine—who saw it first.
She came running through the streets of First Landing, pointing upward with frantic wonder, her words tumbling over themselves.
"Fire! Fire in the sky! Something's falling!"
The adults looked up, shielding their eyes against the amber sun.
A bright wound of fire carved across the daytime sky.
A ship.
Entering atmosphere.
No…
The trajectory was wrong. Too steep. Too fast.
A cargo ship.
Automated.
Dr. Yusuf Kamara, chief of the settlement's observatory, pulled up tracking data with shaking hands.
"It's decelerating," he said. "Trajectory looks good. It's... it's going to make it."
They watched, breathless, as the cargo ship descended in a controlled burn. The deceleration flare lit the sky, then faded as the ship disappeared beyond the horizon.
"Touchdown signal received," someone reported. "It landed safely. Eastern continent, near the coast."
Relief swept through the crowd.
A cargo ship.
Which meant people would follow.
THE SECOND ARRIVAL
In orbit, the Ardent watched the planet unfold beneath it like a promise fulfilled.
Commander Yuki Sato stood on the bridge, her reflection ghostly in the viewport. She was ninety-three years old, but stasis and time dilation had left her biologically sixty-two. The ship's medical officer insisted she looked fifty.
She felt a thousand.
Three hundred years of confinement—though for the crew, experienced time had been closer to forty years of waking shifts between long sleeps. Three hundred years of purpose, of faith that the destination was real.
And the world was beautiful.
Landfall hung before them, larger than Earth, its oceans gleaming. The three moons moved in their staggered dance. The planet turned slowly, revealing continents, clouds, the sparkle of sun on water.
Sato's hands gripped the railing.
"We made it," she breathed.
Her second-in-command, Lieutenant James Okafor, smiled beside her. He'd been born on the Ardent, had never known Earth except through archived videos and his parents' stories. To him, this planet was the only destination that had ever mattered.
"Beginning final scans," Okafor reported. "Atmosphere composition matches projections. Gravity 1.15 Earth standard. Three moons confirmed in stable orbits. No signs of technological activity—"
He stopped.
"Commander?"
Sato looked at him. His face had gone pale.
"What is it?"
"I'm detecting… angles. Geometric patterns on the surface." His fingers flew over the controls, refining the sensors. "Coastal region, main continent. Resolving now."
The screen shifted, zoomed, enhanced.
Lines.
Straight lines.
Roads.
Buildings.
A city.
For a long time, no one on the bridge spoke.
"It's… impossible," Lieutenant Chen whispered—no relation to Dr. Chen Wei, though both shared ancestors from old Shanghai.
Sato's mind raced through possibilities. Indigenous intelligence? But the scans showed human-compatible atmosphere, and the odds of another species building geometric structures identical to human patterns…
No.
There was only one explanation.
Her hands shook as she opened communications, her voice careful as glass.
"Unidentified settlement… this is interstellar vessel Ardent from Earth. Please respond."
Static crackled through the speakers.
Seconds stretched into eons.
Then a crackle, a pop of alignment, and—
A voice. Hesitant but unmistakably human.
"This is… this is Landfall Settlement One. We read you, Ardent. Please identify yourselves. Who are you?"
Settlement One.
The words struck like a blade between Sato's ribs.
She swallowed, her throat tight.
"We are the colony ship from Earth. We left… three hundred years ago. We believed we were the first mission to Landfall."
A long pause, heavy with the weight of rearranging history.
When the voice returned, it was gentle, almost sad.
"You're not the first to arrive. But you're welcome. Please… come home."
Okafor turned to Sato, his eyes wide with shock and grief.
"How?" he whispered. "How is anyone here before us?"
Sato stared at the planet below, at the cities—plural, she now saw, as sensors resolved more settlements scattered across the continent.
And the pioneers of the Ardent realized, in a single breath, that they had arrived late.
Not by failure.
By progress.
The landing was quiet, reverent. The Ardent descended not to virgin wilderness but to a prepared landing field outside First Landing. They could see it from orbit—a broad plain cleared and leveled, marked with guidance lights.
Someone had been expecting them.
When the airlocks opened and Sato stepped out, she found hundreds of people waiting.
They did not look alien. They looked human—a bit taller perhaps, adapted to the heavier gravity, their skin tanned by the amber sun. They wore simple, practical clothing in earth tones. No weapons. No walls. Just open space and open hands.
An older man stepped forward. He moved carefully, leaning on a carved wooden cane. His hair was white, his face deeply lined.
"Welcome," he said. His accent was strange—English, but softened, the vowels shifted. "Welcome to Landfall."
Sato found her voice. "How long have you been here?"
"A hundred and four years," the elder said. "My name is Jonah. My great-grandmother was among the First Landers. She died twenty years ago, at one hundred and seven. She left instructions that if anyone else came from Earth…" He smiled. "We were to welcome them home."
Sato felt something crack inside her chest.
"We thought…" Her voice broke. "We thought we were bringing humanity to a new world."
Jonah's expression filled with compassion.
"You did," he said gently. "You brought yourselves. And we're so glad you're here."
Yet Landfall did not greet them with hostility.
The First Landers met them with open hands.
There was confusion, grief, awe…
But there was also kindness.
In the days following the Ardent's landing, the leaders gathered. Commander Sato met with the council of the First Landers in the Hall of Founders—a building constructed from the hull plating of the New Horizon, transformed into something beautiful, its metal walls engraved with the names of the first three hundred.
"How is this possible?" Sato asked, her voice still catching on the impossibility of it all. "You arrived before us?"
Elder Jonah gestured to another council member—Dr. Amara Osei, the settlement's chief historian.
"We left Earth one hundred years after you did," Amara explained. "The New Horizon. Earth had developed faster engines by then. Our journey took only a century."
Sato's hands trembled on the table. "Then there may have been others. Before us. Before you."
Amara nodded slowly. "Perhaps. We've wondered. But we've had no way to know."
Lieutenant Okafor leaned forward. "Our ship—the Ardent—we carried archives. Mission records. But they only went up to the year we left." He looked at Sato. "Did we bring… everything?"
"Everything we had," Sato confirmed.
It was a younger woman—Lira, twenty-six, the settlement's archivist—who thought to check.
Both ships had carried historical databases, dusty digital archives that few had bothered to access during the long journey. Records of Earth's final years. Launch manifests. Mission parameters.
Things long forgotten.
"I'll cross-reference them," Lira said. "If there were other missions, they'd be in one archive or the other."
Three days later, she returned to the council chamber. Her face was pale, her hands clutching a data tablet.
"There was a mission before yours," she said to Sato. Her voice shook. "Before the Ardent. Before the New Horizon."
The council chamber fell silent.
"Show us," Amara said quietly.
Lira activated the display. Text scrolled across the screen—mission manifests, crew rosters, launch dates.
The Epoch.
Launched 2251.
Five hundred people.
Journey time: five hundred years.
Destination: Landfall.
"Five hundred years," someone whispered.
"They would still be traveling," another said. "Still out there."
Sato looked up, through the ceiling, as if she could see through metal and atmosphere to the stars beyond.
"They're still coming," she breathed. "Not knowing. Expecting to arrive first. Expecting wilderness."
Okafor's voice was tight. "Their cargo ship should have arrived ahead of them. Weeks ahead, standard protocol. But the Epoch itself won't arrive for another century."
The weight of that settled over the room. None of them would live to see it.
"Then this is a promise we make for our children," Jonah said quietly. "And their children after them. A covenant passed down through generations." He looked around the chamber. "We prepare. We teach the next generation to watch for them. To be ready."
Amara nodded slowly. "When they arrive—when they see what's been lost—someone will be there to tell them the truth." She paused. "To tell them they were always the first. The beginning. The ones who made all of this possible."
"And to welcome them home," Sato added softly, understanding now that this was bigger than any one generation.
A covenant was spoken that day, in a hall built from the bones of ships, on a world lit by three moons.
They would be ready.
And over the decades that followed, the two peoples became one.
The Ardent's crew brought new technologies—advances in energy storage, medical techniques Earth had developed in its final century, agricultural methods refined over their journey. The First Landers shared their hard-won knowledge of Landfall's seasons and soil, their understanding of the three moons' light cycles and how they affected crop growth and human sleep.
Commander Sato worked alongside Dr. Amara Osei to establish the Unified Archives—a repository of all knowledge from both ships, both Earths, both journeys. They recorded oral histories, interviewed everyone who could remember, preserved every scrap of data.
Lieutenant Okafor married a woman named Keiko, whose great-grandfather had been born aboard the New Horizon. Their children were the first of a new generation that had no "first" or "second" in their identity.
Children were born who did not know which ship their grandparents had come from. Marriages crossed the invisible line between arrivals. Languages blended—the Ardent's English mixed with the New Horizon's polyglot creole, creating something new, something distinctly Landfall.
Songs merged. Festivals combined. Grief and celebration intertwined.
Two histories braided into one.
A single settlement became two. Then three. Then five. Then seven.
The population grew—slowly, carefully, mindful of the planet's capacity. They built cities of low, graceful buildings that curved with the land rather than against it. Gardens grew on rooftops. Rivers were tended, not dammed. When they needed resources, they looked to Landfall's three moons—especially Shepherd, rich with metals and minerals—and left their planet's surface untouched.
They learned from Earth's mistakes. Abundance made generosity easy. Space made borders unnecessary. The memory of Earth's burning—passed down through the archives, through stories, through the cautionary lessons taught to every child—became the foundation of their unity.
*This time, we do better.*
Conflicts arose, of course. Disagreements over land use, over governance, over the right way to honor the past. Some wanted to preserve Earth cultures separately; others wanted to blend everything into something new. There were arguments over resource allocation, over whether to expand settlements or keep them small.
But without scarcity, without the weight of old Earth grudges, resolution came through dialogue rather than force. They developed a council system where every settlement sent representatives. Decisions required consensus. It was slow. Sometimes frustrating.
But it worked.
They called themselves Landers. Not First or Second. Not New Horizon or Ardent. Simply Landers.
People of Landfall.
And they waited.
A century passed. Commander Sato died at one hundred and forty-seven, having spent the final years of her life overseeing the construction of a memorial garden dedicated to Earth—all of Earth, the good and the bad, the beauty and the failure.
Generations who had never known the inside of a ship grew old. The three moons rose and set, rose and set, painting the world in eternal silver and copper and blue.
Engineers maintained a network of satellites, watching the approaches to their system with patient vigilance. Not for threats. Not for invasion.
For family.
For the ones who would come last.
For the ones who had left first.
The Epoch.
Their archives said the ship carried five hundred souls when it launched. Twenty generations would have passed by now. How many people would step off that ship? A thousand? More?
The Landers prepared. They built additional landing fields. They stockpiled resources. They trained welcome teams in old Earth languages, in case the Epoch's crew still spoke them.
And they waited.
Until, at last, one morning, the sensors registered a deceleration signature at the edge of their system.
Massive. Slow. Using fusion drives—ancient technology by modern standards, but still functional after five centuries.
The oldest ship had arrived.
THE LAST PIONEERS
Five hundred years after Earth had watched it depart, the Epoch reached Landfall.
Commander Elias Idris—great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of navigator Amara Idris—stood on the bridge that his ancestor had helped design. He was fifty-one years old, born and raised in the corridors and gardens of the Epoch. He had never known Earth. His grandparents had never known Earth.
For his generation, Earth was mythology.
But Landfall... Landfall was real. Approaching. Growing from a distant point to a visible disk. The crew had begun waking from stasis twelve years ago, preparing the ship, training the younger generation, conducting final systems checks.
Everything was proceeding according to plan.
The cargo vessel had launched two weeks earlier—the Provision, carrying the heavy equipment, the seeds of industry, the foundation of everything they would need. It should be landing right now, unpacking itself, preparing the site.
"Coming up on initial orbit," reported Navigation Officer Zara Okonkwo. She was young, twenty-six, and brilliant. Her specialty was celestial mechanics. She'd spent years simulating this exact approach.
"Landfall is beautiful," she whispered.
It was.
Larger than Earth—the archives had predicted this, but seeing it was different. The planet hung before them, oceans gleaming, three moons in their eternal dance. The amber star cast everything in warm, golden light.
"Scanning for the Provision's beacon," said Communications Officer Marcus Liu.
Silence.
"Scanning," he repeated, adjusting frequencies.
More silence.
"Provision, this is Epoch. Respond."
Nothing.
Idris felt the first cold touch of unease. "Expand the search grid. They might have landed off-target."
"Expanding," Liu confirmed. "Scanning all beacon frequencies. Running atmospheric telemetry. Looking for entry signatures."
Minutes passed.
Then Liu's face went pale.
"Commander... I'm picking up debris. High atmosphere. And... there's a surface signature. Impact crater. Fresh. Maybe... maybe a week old."
"Show me."
The image resolved on screen. A scar on the planet's surface, on the far side from their current orbital position. Heat signatures still cooling. Debris scattered in a radius pattern.
"No," Idris breathed.
"It's the Provision," Liu said, his voice hollow. "I'm matching the debris spectrography. It's our ship."
The bridge went silent.
Their cargo vessel. Their supplies. The machinery, the tools, the prefabricated habitats. The genetic banks. The seed vaults. The medical equipment. Everything they needed to establish a foothold on an alien world.
Gone.
Destroyed.
"What happened?" someone whispered.
"Analyzing the trajectory data," Zara said, her hands shaking as she worked. "It looks like... guidance error. Atmospheric entry angle was too steep. The automated systems tried to correct but overcorrected. The ship broke apart at 47 kilometers altitude."
"Five centuries," Engineer Dmitri Volkov said softly. "Five hundred years that ship traveled. And it failed in the last hour."
Idris stared at the screen, at the scar of their future burning on a planet they'd never seen. His mind raced through options, contingencies, backup plans.
They could salvage some systems from the Epoch itself. They could synthesize basic tools. They could—
"Commander," Zara said suddenly. "I'm detecting additional heat signatures. Not from the crash. These are... active. Multiple sources. Artificial."
"What kind of sources?"
"Energy generation. Grid patterns. Buildings, maybe? They're along the coast, main continent. Let me refine—"
The image zoomed, enhanced.
And Idris saw them.
Cities.
Multiple cities.
Roads connecting them.
Fields laid out in geometric precision.
Lights.
Human geometry written across the planet.
For a long moment, no one spoke. No one breathed.
"That can't be right," Volkov said. "That can't... how?"
"It's impossible," Liu whispered.
Idris's mind spun. Indigenous intelligence? But the scans showed human-standard construction patterns. Besides, the probability of another sentient species in the exact system they'd been traveling to for five centuries...
No.
There was only one explanation.
And it was impossible.
Before Idris could formulate a response, before he could even process what he was seeing, a transmission crackled through the speakers.
Clear. Calm. Familiar.
"Unknown vessel in orbit, this is Landfall Unified Settlement. We see you. Please identify yourselves. Are you from Earth?"
The voice spoke English—strangely accented, the vowels softened, but unmistakably English.
Idris found his voice, though it came out raw.
"This is... this is the colony ship from Earth. We left five hundred years ago. We are the Epoch."
A pause.
When the voice returned, it was soft with something like sorrow.
"We know. We've been waiting for you."
Idris's hands clenched the console. "Waiting? How can you be waiting? How can anyone be here?"
"It's... a long story, Commander. One we'll explain when you land. But know this—you were the first to leave. You were the beginning. And now you're home."
"We thought..." Idris couldn't finish. His throat closed around the words.
"We know what you thought," the voice said gently. "And we're so sorry about your cargo ship. We just watched it come down. The trajectory... we tried to warn it, but there was no response. We're sending teams to the crash site now."
"Our supplies—"
"You won't need them. We have everything you'll need here. Prepared. Waiting. You're not arriving to wilderness, Commander. You're arriving home. To family."
Idris looked around the bridge. His crew—people he'd known his entire life, people whose grandparents had known his grandparents, families intertwined through twenty generations—stared back at him with expressions of shock, grief, and desperate hope.
Below them, the world they had dreamed of for twenty generations turned patiently in the sun.
And on its surface waited not strangers...
but humanity.
Not divided by ships.
Not separated by arrival.
One people.
One planet.
The pioneers had come at last.
The last to arrive.
And the first to be forgiven.
The hours between that first transmission and the landing were the longest of Idris's life.
They spent them in orbit, watching the settlements below through sensors, listening to transmissions that explained—impossibly, unbelievably—what had happened.
How Earth had sent other missions after the Epoch. Faster ships. How those ships had arrived first. How the people below were descendants of those later missions, and they had been waiting. Preparing.
How Earth itself was gone.
"Destroyed?" Idris asked, his voice hollow.
"We don't know the details," the voice from below replied—Idris had learned her name was Mara, one of the council leaders. "Our ancestors left records. Wars. Resource collapse. When we finally got our instruments powerful enough to look back, sixty years ago... there was nothing left. We're all that remains."
The Epoch carried one thousand, two hundred people. Twenty generations of births aboard the ship. Children and elders, families and friends, all bound by centuries of shared confinement.
Now they learned their entire purpose—bringing humanity to a new world—had been accomplished by others. And their starting supplies were ash and twisted metal.
Idris visited the observation decks, walking among his people as they processed the news.
Some wept.
Some celebrated—they were not alone; there was already a thriving civilization below.
Some sat in stunned silence, their sense of purpose shattered.
Idris found young Zara in Navigation, staring at the planet below.
"We spent five hundred years traveling here," she said quietly. "My great-grandmother to the seventh generation started this journey. All those lives, all those generations, living and dying in the ship..." She looked at him, her eyes wet. "Were we pointless, Commander?"
Idris sat beside her. He had no easy answer.
"The people below say we were the first," he said finally. "The beginning. Without the Epoch, there would have been no other missions. We proved it was possible." He gestured to the planet. "Every person down there exists because we left."
"But they got here first."
"Yes. And they've been waiting for us. For a century." He put a hand on her shoulder. "We're not pointless, Zara. We're the reason any of this happened. And now we get to be part of what comes next."
She nodded slowly, not entirely convinced, but willing to hope.
The descent was slow, deliberate.
The Epoch's shuttle—one of eight, built to ferry people and supplies between ship and surface—cut through the atmosphere in a sheath of fire. The same ancient physics their ancestors had trusted five hundred years ago. The same design, barely modified, because when you're building for centuries of reliability, you don't innovate unnecessarily.
Idris sat in the pilot seat, though the descent was largely automated. Beside him sat Dr. Yuki Nakamura, the Epoch's chief physician and de facto spiritual leader. She was seventy-three, one of the oldest people on the ship.
"Scared?" she asked him.
"Terrified," he admitted.
"Good. Means you're sane."
Below them, Landfall spread wide and green. The gravity pulled harder than the Epoch's rotation had simulated—they'd all feel heavy for the first few months, the medical staff had warned. But children would adapt quickly. Bones would strengthen. Hearts would adjust.
When the clouds broke, Idris saw it.
Not wilderness.
Not emptiness.
Not the pristine planet they'd expected to tame and terraform.
A living world. A human world.
The landing field came into view—broad and smooth, built with obvious care. Guidance lights marked the approach. And there, waiting at the edge of the pad, stood people.
Not hundreds.
Thousands.
They filled the landing field, spilled into the surrounding plaza, lined the roads leading to the settlement visible in the distance. Banners rippled in the wind, and even from the descending shuttle, Idris could read the words written in twenty different scripts:
WELCOME HOME.
"Oh," Dr. Nakamura breathed beside him. "Oh, look at them all."
The shuttle settled onto the pad with a soft thud. The engines spooled down. For a moment, Idris just sat, his hands shaking on the controls.
This was it.
Five hundred years.
Twenty generations.
The end of the journey.
The hatch opened.
Air rushed in—warm and real, carrying scents Idris had only read about in archives. Soil. Growing things. Wind. The faint salt-tang of distant ocean. And underneath it all, the strange amber quality of light from a star that was not Sol.
Idris stood. His legs trembled—partially from fear, partially from the heavier gravity already pulling at him.
He stepped out onto Landfall.
The crowd erupted in cheers—joyful, tearful, overwhelming. For a moment, Idris was paralyzed by the sound, by the sight of so many faces, so many people who looked human but were already different. Taller. Adapted. At home in this world.
An elder woman stepped forward from the crowd. She moved carefully, aided by a younger woman on one side. Her hair was white, her face deeply lined, but her eyes were sharp and kind.
"Commander Idris?" she asked.
He nodded, unable to speak.
She smiled, and it was like sunrise.
"I'm Councilor Mara. My great-grandmother was Commander Yuki Sato of the Ardent. She left me a message to give you, if you ever arrived. She said..." Mara's voice caught. "She said: 'Tell them we saved them a place. Tell them they were always the first. Tell them welcome home.'"
Something broke inside Idris's chest. The weight of five hundred years, of twenty generations, of all the lives lived and lost in that long journey—it crashed over him like a wave.
He sank to his knees on the landing pad.
"We lost our cargo ship," he said, and his voice was raw. "We have nothing. We're supposed to be bringing humanity to a new world, and we have nothing."
Mara knelt beside him, her old bones creaking. She put a hand on his shoulder.
"You brought yourselves," she said firmly. "You brought your knowledge, your stories, your DNA diversity, your cultures that we've lost. You brought the proof that humans can survive five hundred years in deep space. You brought—" her voice softened—"you brought the beginning of all of this. We've been one people here for two hundred years, Commander. But we've always known we were incomplete. We've been waiting for you. For the Epoch. For the first mission."
She helped him stand.
"Welcome home," she said again. "Let us help you. Let us show you what you made possible."
Behind Idris, the shuttle door opened wider, and his crew began to emerge. Dr. Nakamura, crying openly. Engineer Volkov, looking stunned. Young Zara, her mouth open in wonder. One by one, then in groups, then in a flood, the people of the Epoch stepped onto Landfall.
And the people of Landfall welcomed them with open arms.
Later, in the Hall of Assembly—a building constructed from the hull plating of all three ships, their metal walls intertwined and engraved with names—the leaders sat together.
Three ships' histories at one table.
Mara spoke first, her voice steady despite her age.
"We were the Third Mission. The New Horizon. We left Earth as refugees, fleeing a dying world. We arrived first. We've been here two hundred years. When my great-great-great-grandmother saw your people's lights in the sky, Commander Idris, she thought she was seeing ghosts."
A younger man spoke next—Kenji Okafor, grandson of Lieutenant James Okafor of the Ardent.
"We were the second ship to leave. The Ardent. We traveled for three hundred years. When we arrived and found the First Landers already here..." He shook his head. "It shattered our sense of purpose. But they welcomed us. Over a century, we've become one people."
Idris sat at the table, still processing. Still trying to match his expectations with reality.
"We were the Epoch," he said quietly. "The first to leave. The last to arrive. My ancestor, Amara Idris, was chief navigator on the original mission. Her daughter was born aboard. Her daughter's daughter. On and on. Twenty generations, all telling the same story: we're going to a new world. We're bringing humanity to Landfall." He looked around the table. "But humanity was already here."
"You *are* humanity," Mara said firmly. "As much as any of us. More, perhaps. You represent the longest unbroken human journey in history. Five centuries. Can you imagine what that means?"
Dr. Nakamura, sitting beside Idris, spoke for the first time.
"What happened to Earth?"
The heavy quiet fell again.
Mara gestured, and a display activated, showing an image.
A brown sphere. Scarred. Lifeless. Continents that Idris recognized from archives, now unrecognizable beneath clouds of ash.
"Sixty years ago, we managed to turn our instruments back toward Sol," Mara said softly. "This is what we saw. The best we can tell from the archives, the final wars happened about two hundred years ago. There were no survivors."
"They didn't make it," Kenji added. "Everything our ancestors feared came true. The resource wars. The climate collapse. The borders treated as weapons instead of lines on a map."
Mara spread her hands on the table.
"There was only one path that could have saved Earth—unity. Earth as one home, one people. They couldn't achieve it. But we have. Here. On Landfall."
She looked around the table, meeting each person's eyes.
"So this is what remains. Three missions. Three histories. One humanity. The last of our species."
Idris's hands clenched. "Then we have a responsibility."
"Yes," Mara agreed.
Dr. Nakamura leaned forward. "On the Epoch, we preserved everything we could from Earth. Music. Literature. Scientific knowledge. DNA banks of plants and animals we couldn't bring aboard. Cultural records from every nation that contributed to the mission." She paused. "We weren't just traveling to a future. We were carrying the past."
"Then we combine them," Kenji said. "The Ardent carried records too. And the New Horizon. Three ships, three archives, three perspectives on Earth. We make sure none of it is lost."
"Agreed," Mara said. "But more than that—" she gestured toward the windows, toward the city beyond, toward the planet—"we have to make sure we don't repeat Earth's mistakes."
Idris looked out at Landfall. Through the window, he could see the amber sun setting, and the three moons beginning their nightly dance. Shepherd rose first, casting silver light across the buildings. Then Wanderer, copper and warm. Finally, distant Watcher, pale blue.
The city—he'd learned it was called First Landing—glowed softly in moonlight. No harsh electric lights. Just gentle illumination from bioluminescent panels developed from local species. Buildings that curved with the landscape. Gardens everywhere.
"Tell me," Idris said. "Tell me about this world. About how you've built it."
And they did.
They told him about the councils, not hierarchies. About shared resources and communal decision-making. About the three moons rich with metals they mined carefully, sustainably, leaving Landfall's surface pristine. About the focus on art and philosophy and understanding, now that survival was assured.
They told him about conflicts resolved through mediation. About the blending of cultures. About children born who had genetic heritage from both ships, from a dozen Earth nations, speaking a creole language that had evolved naturally over the past two centuries.
They told him about Landfall itself—the twin seasons, the purple lightning storms, the ecosystems they were still cataloging. About the discoveries they'd made, the species they'd named, the mysteries still unsolved.
"It's not perfect," Mara said honestly. "We still argue. We still have disagreements. Some people want faster expansion; others want to keep our population small. Some want to preserve old Earth cultures separately; others want everything to blend."
"But we talk," Kenji added. "We debate. We compromise. And we remember—" he gestured to the hull plating walls, engraved with names of the dead—"we remember what happens when unity fails."
Idris felt something shift inside him. Not the loss of purpose, but a transformation of it.
"Our cargo ship," he said quietly. "The Provision. It's gone. But maybe... maybe that's fitting. We don't need to arrive with all the answers, all the equipment. We can integrate. Learn. Add what we know to what you've built."
"We've prepared housing for your people," Mara said. "Temporary at first, until you decide where you want to settle. Some might want to stay here in First Landing. Others might want to join other settlements. Some—" she smiled—"might want to found a new settlement entirely. There's room."
"And the Epoch?" Idris asked. "The ship itself?"
"That's your decision," Kenji said. "Some will want to dismantle it, use the materials. But I'd vote to preserve it. Make it a museum, maybe. A monument. It's the oldest surviving human spacecraft. Five hundred years old and still functional. That's something worth keeping."
Dr. Nakamura nodded. "A reminder. Of where we came from. Of what we're capable of."
"Of the journey," Idris added softly.
They talked late into the night, as the three moons crossed the sky in their eternal dance. They talked about logistics and philosophy, about genetics and culture, about the practical and the profound.
And slowly, Idris began to understand.
The Epoch had not arrived to an empty world.
They had arrived to join a story already in progress.
Not as conquerors or pioneers, but as family returning from a very, very long journey.
Three months later, Idris stood in the Founders' Garden—a memorial built by the First Landers to honor all who had come from Earth.
The garden was vast, covering several acres. Each section represented a different ship, a different journey. The New Horizon section held plants descended from seeds brought by Dr. Chen Wei—including rows of Landfall Gold, the hybrid quinoa that had saved the first generation from starvation.
The Ardent section featured a fountain built from the ship's water recycling systems, still functional, still purifying water in an endless loop.
And now, the newest section: the Epoch memorial.
Idris walked slowly through it, reading the names carved into stone markers. All the people who had been born on the ship, lived on the ship, died on the ship during that five-hundred-year journey. Amara Idris, his ancestor, was near the beginning. Her daughter Kiran. Her granddaughter. On and on, generation after generation.
Beside him walked Mei Lin—a child born just three years before the Epoch arrived. She was twelve now, and she'd appointed herself Idris's personal guide to Landfall.
"My teacher says your ship is the most important," Mei said as they walked. "Because without the Epoch, none of the other missions would have happened."
"Maybe," Idris said. "Or maybe they're all equally important. The Epoch proved it was possible. The Ardent brought new knowledge. The New Horizon taught everyone how to actually live here."
"But you traveled the longest," Mei insisted. "Five hundred years! That's forever!"
Idris smiled. "It is forever. And no time at all. Do you understand relativity yet?"
"A little," Mei admitted. "Time moves slower when you go fast. So even though it was five hundred years for the planet, it was less for the ship?"
"Exactly. For us, counting only the time we were awake between stasis cycles, it was maybe sixty years. Still a long time. Still many generations. But not quite forever."
They reached the center of the Epoch memorial, where a sculpture stood—a representation of the ship itself, carved from Landfall's pale stone, seeming to glow faintly in the moonlight of Shepherd and Wanderer overhead.
At the base of the sculpture, new names were being added. People from the Epoch who had died since arriving. Old age, mostly—the journey had been hard on the elderly, and Landfall's heavier gravity had taken its toll.
But also one name that hit Idris hard every time he saw it:
Dr. Yuki Nakamura.
She had died two weeks ago, peacefully, in her sleep. She'd had just enough time to see Landfall, to walk in the gardens, to breathe real air under an open sky.
At her funeral, she'd been buried in a grove of Earth trees—oaks and maples brought as seedlings by the New Horizon, now towering and strong. The First Landers had a tradition: every death was mourned, but also celebrated as a return to the soil, a completion of the cycle.
"Are you sad?" Mei asked, watching Idris's face.
"Yes," he said honestly. "But also grateful. Dr. Nakamura made it. She saw Landfall. That was all she wanted."
They stood in silence for a moment, surrounded by the names of the dead and the living plants that honored them.
Finally, Mei asked the question Idris knew she'd been holding back.
"Are you glad you came? Even though you weren't first? Even though you lost your cargo?"
Idris considered this. Truly considered it.
"Yes," he said finally. "We thought we were bringing humanity to a new world. But really, we were bringing ourselves home. To a family that was waiting. To a place prepared for us." He looked down at her. "Do you know what Commander Sato—Mara's great-grandmother—said to my great-to-the-seventh grandmother, in the last message she left in the archives?"
Mei shook her head.
"She said: 'We are not separate anymore. We are not First or Second or Last. We are Landers. We are one people. And we are enough.'"
Mei smiled. "That's a good message."
"Yes. It is."
As they walked back toward the settlement, the three moons rose fully above the horizon. Their combined light was bright enough to read by, bright enough to paint shadows on the ground. The city ahead glowed softly, and Idris could hear music drifting from somewhere—a blend of instruments from all three ships, playing something that sounded both ancient and entirely new.
His crew—no, his people—were scattering across Landfall. Some stayed in First Landing. Others had joined the settlements called Hope's Landing and Crescent Harbor. A few dozen had decided to found a new settlement in the northern highlands, where the three moons could all be seen simultaneously from a particular mountain peak.
Young Zara had enrolled in Landfall University, studying not navigation—which was no longer needed—but xenobiology. She wanted to understand this world's ecosystems, to catalog the species they'd barely begun to discover.
Engineer Volkov was working with the mining operations on Shepherd, developing more efficient extraction methods that would leave even less impact on the moon's surface.
And Idris...
Idris had accepted a position on the Unified Council. Not because he wanted power, but because he wanted to help guide what came next. To be part of building something that would last.
"What do you think happens now?" Mei asked as they approached the city gates. "What's next for everyone?"
Idris smiled. "Everything. We're still exploring this world. We're still learning. We're still growing." He gestured to the sky, to the stars visible between the three moons. "And someday, maybe, we'll reach out again. Not because we have to. Not because Earth is dying. But because we're ready. Because we're united. Because we want to."
"To other planets?"
"Maybe. Or maybe just to understand the universe better. Maybe just to see what's out there." He paused. "But this time, we'll do it together. As Landers. As one people."
Mei considered this as they walked through the gates. The streets were busy even this late—people from all three ships, all mixed together now, impossible to tell apart without asking. Children playing. Adults talking. Music and laughter and life.
"I like that," Mei said finally. "I like that we're all together."
"So do I," Idris said.
And he meant it.
Five hundred years after leaving Earth, the Epoch had come home.
Not to wilderness.
Not to emptiness.
Not to a world they had to conquer.
But to family. To community. To a place where they belonged.
The first to leave had been the last to arrive.
But they had arrived.
And that was enough.
End — Landfall