The first ship of the day is always the coffee ship, with its bright flashing signs and ten hour radioactive beacon so anyone who wants coffee can follow the decay trail back to the vending window. It pings the Lighthouse once as it enters Terran space, then once again to pay the day’s toll, a few extra credits making their way into your tip.io jar. They always tip, but they never fly close enough to offer you a cup of coffee or a friendly word. You see their signs on the long-range scanners, the different kinds of metal reading “COFFEE” in Coalition standard even on the scanner bed. Finely engineered, the coffee ship. You’ve never seen the driver.
By midday it’s the freighter fleet, a few acknowledgement pings, a few blips on the long-range scanner, the requisite amount of toll fare, and then nothing. They stream through the very edges of your space for hours, their little blips on the dial flashing only a few times before getting enough lightyears out for even the scanner not to detect them. Every so often they have a Coalition Force escort, but not usually. Usually it’s a blip and it’s gone.
It gets busier in the second half of the solar cycle, your massive Coalition UT+0 clock showing mid-afternoon by the time the speed demons make their cannonball run through the center of space. You don’t report them most days, letting them speed at upward of a parsec/hour. On your bad days you report them, but only to watch the Coalition Force desperately try to catch up to the Galaxy’s fastest Skyrunner Speeders. Once you reported them before they started their run, and the speeder raced the Force cruisers almost neck and neck for half your scanner range before the speeder activated their nitrodrive and with reality-warping speed vanished without a trace. You’ve met the speeders a few times. One stopped to ask to use the bathroom, something about theirs being a ‘composting toilet’ that didn’t incinerate or something. You allowed it and the speeders usually throw a credit your way, sometimes they drop two and a note in your tip.io that says ‘we’re racing the speed of light LOL’. You imagine what they mean is they’re trying to race the speed at which the credit- and their toll, when they remember it- gets into your jar and account. You don’t know their names, but you know their colors. Red speeds close but not too close to the Lighthouse sometimes, enough to rock the station on its gyroscope but not enough to force the gravity generator to compensate, green likes to get as far into your scanners as possible before activating their nitro just to boost away again. Green always tips.
By the evening, when you’ve spent long spans of time building light puzzles, monitoring the emergency frequencies, and fixing up your own speeder in the 0-G Grarage, the Galaxy Class Tourism ships come through, one after another like clockwork. Big hulking monstrosities that take up a good portion of your scanners, and that’s when you really have to do your job. When the ships come through, that’s when smugglers and border-jumpers try to make it through the Lighthouse’s scanners under the guise of space debris. When a little blip could mean an international dispute. When a single piece of Rigellan Mungfruit getting through to Alpha Centauri could mean the collapse of their entire Banana crop and cripple the economy. You sit on those scans for the hours it takes a Galaxy Class ship to get through the boundary and you watch for even the faintest hint of a blip. A tiny ping is all it will take, your hand hovering on the report klaxon.
Most days it’s uneventful. And the Tourism Ships never tip. Then you’ll pay attention again in a few hours when the ‘late night’ crew- the ragtag bunch of miscellaneous unaligned ships makes its way into Terran space in the dead of night.
Most days though, you don’t see the ship flying by, not on the scanner, but on the viewscreen. This is not one of those days.
What balls to fly in such a terrifying ship. Its gun turret looks like its attached with twine and a prayer. Its viewscreen is bulging like the ship itself isn’t calibrated for that level of gravity. It’s painted like someone used a plastic-based paint in Space. You watch it chug desperately through the boundary, a flying hazard, when your console pings.
They tip you ten credits. A large tip alongside their toll payment, in credits with no account.
For this reason you activate your tractor beam, and gently but firmly pull them into the Lighthouse.
This is, of course, against protocol.
You go down to the hangar and take a look at the sad dinky little thing affixing itself to the docking clamps with an old and decrepit adaptor from almost three decades ago.
Out step two Terran adults and a Terran child. They attune their Translators to your frequency and bob a polite bow. You return it.
“Your viewscreen is bulging,” you tell them, and they nod as if they are unsurprised.
“It’s an old ship, but she’ll get us home,” the one with longer hair says, patting the child on the head. “It’s been a long journey.”
“Where have you come from?” You look past them at their ship, even more cobbled together than you’d realized up close.
“Cassiopeia,” the other adult smiles with teeth and you nod even though Cassiopeia is only a few days by even the slowest freighter.
“Is your nitrodrive offline?” You think of your own speeder, the nitrodrive online and powerful. You could get to Earth in… maybe a day? Less if you actually maintenanced your nitro with any regularity.
“We don’t have one anymore,” the first adult laughs as though this is funny and not, in fact, a tragedy.
“Without a nitrodrive it’ll take years to get to Earth,” you wish you had been more diplomatic, but you can’t believe this nonsense.
“We sold it for food and fuel. We get much farther-”
“-years farther-”
“-in fuel without a Nitro.” Both adults are nodding, pleased with themselves.
It will take them years to get to Earth.
“I’ll doublecheck your gravity seal and then you can be on your way.” You smile but from their return smiles they can tell how baffled you are.
They traded for coffee from the coffee ship, and after you cross-check their ship under the child’s supervision you sit down with them in the main scanner room for a cup of coffee. The coffee is… fine. Not quite radiation-polluting good, but fine.
As they leave, thanking you for the tune up and wishing you well, you sit back in the control room and watch the tiniest blip of their ship begin its agonizing trip across the scanner.
Your comm crackles with an incoming message. It’s the child, wishing to say hello to ‘the nice lighthousekeeper’. The sound quality on your communication array is tinny but discernible as speech.
The child tells you that they can see your lighthouse on their scanners.
They will be within scanner range for three years. You have a speeder that would allow you to make that time into days. You consider offering the speeder to them.
But you don’t. And they saw it in the hangar.
The child asks if you can see them on the scanner, which you confirm. You promise you will keep an eye on them. You tell the child that you’ll watch out for them until they’re off your scanner, which seems to be the right thing to say.
You watch their ship, marking their course on your scanner and projecting the time where they’ll vanish into space. What will the child be like in three years? Who will you be?
The child is still talking in your comms. The late-night crowd still isn’t at the toll area yet. Space is still an empty scanner around you.
And you enjoy the company.