I Fell From The Dark

12

It was dark. Halliman's Star was much brighter than it had been when Pilgrim had shown her before: through the probe's camera it was an angry red pinpoint of light. Its planets were visible as bright stars: and beyond them the accretion disk spread out, concentric rings of orange and brown, darkening as they stretched out from star. It looked smooth and pristine, like a record.

Mia glanced at a reading. The probe was travelling around two percent of the speed of light. However, the image was static: they were too far away to see the ring or the planets spinning, and moving too slowly to see visible progress.

'Wow, that's beautiful,' she said, surprised.

'Well, yes, it is. But keep watching,' Pilgrim replied.

The probe was scanning ahead, systematically sweeping a laser in a rectangle in front of it. So far it had been turning up nothing. But then, a blip appeared. It was drawn on the screen as a tiny gold dot, a hundred thousand kilometres away, superimposed over the visible image. Moving at the speed they were going, they would get to it in about sixteen seconds, and they were flying straight at it.

'Well, that must be what it hit... woah.'

A blue light blossomed around the object, a fuzzy halo brighter than anything else in view. This anomaly attracted the probe's attention, and it commenced scanning properly: the camera zoomed in, the laser focussed on it. Various readings scrolled up. Then, without warning, everything went black and the recording ended.

Mia frowned. They had still been a good five seconds from impact.

'Was that an engine? That blue light? It looked for the world like a drive signature.'

Pilgrim rewound the footage and paused it. Then she zoomed in, so that the pixels were the size of coins. There was the dirty blue smudge. Without needing to think, Mia ran an analysis on the last data that the probe has sent.

'I think so,' Pilgrim said. 'Yes, I think so. That's another ship.'

'But, no one's ever visited this system before, right? We're the first. That's what you said earlier. The furthest that humans have ever been.'

'Yes.'

'So that's... what? My god. Aliens?'

She couldn't remember anything about aliens.

But then, I can't remember what I look like, she thought. So the fact that I can't remember about aliens doesn't mean much.

'I don't know,' Pilgrim said. 'It can't be. They don't exist. Maybe it's not a drive.'

'What about the first probe? What did it see?'

The picture disappeared, and was replaced by a similar view. This time, the probe was much closer to the star. The accretion disk stretched away as far as she could see, and the star glittered sullenly in its cleared area, an evil twinkle at the centre of a massive eye.

This time the blip was down and far left of centre. Once again, there was a flare of engines, a blue copper smudge against the bronze of the disk. Then, nothing.

'Pilgrim, when did this first probe send this?'

'Ten days ago.'

'And the second one?'

'Well, I got it about five hours ago.'

Mia paused. I wonder if that's what Pilgrim had been talking about, when she said that she'd been dealing with something else. So I was out for, what four hours?

'How long was I unconscious for, Pilgrim?'

'I... does it matter?'

'No, I suppose it doesn't.'

Huh. Pilgrim's still not willing to tell me stuff, she thought. Is she hiding more things, or is this just how she always is?

I wonder what this 'game' is. She said that I'd lived in a virtual reality while I was asleep. Maybe that's what I'm dreaming of.

But her mind was like a clock that had been overwound: it was spinning on mechanical tracks which she couldn't stop. Whenever she let her attention wander, she found that she was solving the problem that she'd been given. It was almost like her subconscious had been given the job without the need for her conscious to be involved.

'So in those ten days, this thing had manoeuvred itself to be directly in our path, right?' she asked, shaking herself out of self-examination.

'Yes. We can guess its trajectory, like this.'

The view jumped back to the line diagram of the solar system. The strange object was in red. It had risen up from the disk, and was sitting on the golden line which represented the ship's and the probes' trajectories.

'How fast did it have to go to get there?'

'Maybe half a percent of c when it was at maximum velocity?'

That was two hundredth of the speed of light. Nothing in nature goes that fast. This had to be a ship: and it was shooting anything which came near.

'Pilgrim, this is a problem, isn't it?'

'Yes, it is.'

Mia wondered what else Pilgrim wasn't telling her.