The Mission Clock

The Daedalus ran 3 timekeeping systems in parallel: Earth's Star Year, the Colony Day, and the Mission Clock — the count started from the instant of arrival, 24-hour, synchronized across the whole ship. Colony Day counted from D+0 on the day of arrival and was written onward as D+1, D+2; a record written out in full reads "Colony Day D+2, Mission Clock 07:14".

The seventh hour after arrival later became a point in time that was brought up again and again. At hour 7, minute 43, a grey box came up on the light panel of the Central Command Tower's observation deck. Boxes of that colour came up three or five times a day, and nine times out of ten it was the probe misreading itself; whoever was on shift glanced at it and moved on. This one was not closed.

Hour 24 was another mark on the scale. The Mission Performance Clause signed before departure required the first arrival report to be issued within 24 hours of arrival, with the timestamp written into the automatic contract log. The report itself would spend 41 years in the deep-space queue before reaching Earth; the status code arrived the moment it was sent.

The clock governed discipline as well. The SOP wrote the numbers down hard: unknown anomalous data, the security officer reports it up to the command tier within 30 minutes of receiving it; an event under investigation may have its report deferred only after master or security-officer level has judged its completeness; the standard containment period for unidentified organic material is 72 hours; a supervision flag hung on a personal portal for another team runs 72 hours at most as well. Every clause had a number hung on it, and once the number passed, the liability changed shoulders. One man reported 30 minutes early, was busted down 1 grade, and from then on a line of red text came up in the page footnote every time he logged into the ship's record board.

Later the clock was put to measuring something more troublesome: delay. Surface-to-orbit communication ran a standard 1.15 seconds one way. The one at 11:24 on D+2 came in at 6.8 seconds, a full round trip of 13.6 seconds, nearly 6 times over standard, and Janus marked it amber. The one at 12:00 the same day took 15 minutes on the uplink. On the panels down on the surface, this situation displayed as a very ordinary line: Awaiting Daedalus Response.

There was no alarm and no incident. Only that from that hour, the seventh, some people began to wonder whether the planet they were reading and the planet actually under their feet were the same one.