章 130: PC: Switch

From the outer regions of the solar system, it now took almost a year for a new message to reach them. They were still receiving regular messages, but the gap between them had slowly widened, and there were more errors in their reception.

The pinpoint beam, that had traveled over 10 trillion kilometers to reach them, shone across a vast field of space that was all too easy to drift out of with a few minor course corrections. Tiny objects far behind them, and even their own ion trail obscured the transmissions. 

The rugged little scout ship also lacked the enormous reception array of a light net station, so they couldn't compare the data received from one region of it to another to increase the accuracy of their own ears.