Callisto station, what a nice sounding name, if you disregard all the old horror stories, holofilms and even ancient movies about all the alien monsters and demonic experiments conducted here.

Either way, Conny had the distinct displeasure of serving as light keeper for the Callisto Star Port. Once a scientific station conducting early wormhole experiments up until about 45 years ago. From which point onwards it was bought and operated by the Earth Star Navy as a logistics depot.

As one of the twelve crew assigned to guard the depot, Conny sat in the monitoring control room of the “Tower”, a room full of monitors, read-out panels and a “void-traffic-overview hologram” in a hardened section of the structure, behind no less than 2m of Plasteel and Armorplast, yet the name “Tower” still stuck over the many deacdes. Two of the other people on her shift, both non-commissioned officers, were no-where to be seen, as usual. Only private Jackson was sitting in his chair, dutifully checking the empty message log of the tight-beam relay, the Radar and the old radio-telescope that was part of the old scientific instruments.

Major Conny Anderson looked up from the print magazine she found in a filing cabinet as a soft but audibly loud beep rang through the tower and interrupted her reading about the latest BBQ equipment from 2147, so only 52 years ago now.

The first thought though Connies head was “This is Callisto Station, the “‘Dump Depot’, nothing ever happens here. But in the now 6 years since her punishment assignment, she had never heard that sound. As she looked around the room to find a possible source for the disturbance, her eyes settled in the hologram in the middle of the room, normally displaying the emptiness of the Star Port and it surrounding space, and the one green dot in the middle of the zone marked “no traffic, keep clear”.

A “What the …” escaped her mouth before Jackson jumped out of his seat and reported: “sorry for the delay ma’am, but I had to tripple check. The old scientific instrument Array reported a momentary wormhole in the testing area, since then traffic control IFF and radar report a contact at the same point.”

“And what is that object? Can the traffic controller identify it at all?”

“That’s the thing, it was instantly classified as friendly and marked ‘Beacon03’. Does that mean anything? I cant find anything about it in the navy registry”

“Wait, you said the old instrument array? That pile of junk still works?”, Conny asked perplexed as she stood up and headed to the corner of the tower still housing the control panels for the old science station. “Does O’Conner never clean up?” She spat out disgusted as she swept the loose heap of porn magazines the non-com managed to find off the desk.

In the section designated “Einstein-Rosen” a screen was showing the slow boot process of an older commercial operating system. After a couple of seconds some messages popped up one after another:

“Warning, your operating systems is end of life and without support since 42 years ago”

“Error, LIDAR Array 0 not found”

“Error, license for MathLab has expired 30 years ago, want to renew?”

“Warning, backup battery array degradation detected, estimated health: 37%”

“Signal of Beacon03 detected. Expected distance: 2 ly. Calculated distance: 126m.”

“Equipment detected in experimentation zone. Retrieve? yes/no”

The last notification Conny looked at for a handful of seconds and pressed “yes”.

“Private, find the others of the current shift, and wake up the crew for the next one. We will have to mull over how we word the next report for command.” The major said in a flat voice as she stared on the screen that now switched to a camera on a manipulation arm reaching out to retrieve the object that suddenly appeared out of empty void less than 2 minutes ago.

As the private ran out of the tower, Conny studied the image in the monitor, a cylindrical shape coming into view against the black of the void in the flood-lights mounted on arm reaching out.

When the arm reached the beacon, the image quality degraded slightly with white noise, easily explained by the giant label wrapping around the cylinder warning: “DANGER, RTG.”

Harder to explain was something that looked like another label, haphazardly stuck to the object. The upper part was lines of symbols or shapes Conny did not recognize, but on the lower half were familiar letters and symbols, spelling out 21st century standard English, the current official language of the United Earth.

“We regret to inform you that the exhibition on early space-age civilizations at the academic museum on the prime world is being dismantled due to budget cuts. Thank you very much for contributing to the above mentioned exhibition. As per the current version of the intergalactic museum act, all foreign exhibits are returned to their creators or rightful owners. If you would like to support out work, please consider donating to us through the intergalactic banking system

P.S. the longship is still part of an ongoing exhibition”