She sat in a couch in the bridge, and pulled a set of goggles on. She knew where to go in the menus, which icons meant to tap, how to find the data that she needed. The knowledge was crisp and fresh, as if she'd just been revising for an exam. It somehow felt artificial. But then, so much about her experience had felt so strange over the last few days.
She paused. How long have I been awake? Two days? Three?
'I sent two probes ahead. The first was launched sixty five days ago, and the second forty five days ago,' Pilgrim said.
A diagram jumped up in front of her, dots and lines in space: the trajectories of the ship and the probes, the orbits of stars and planets and moons.
'These are the probes?' she asked, pointing to two gold dots.
'Yes, exactly. Oh I'm so glad you're back, Mia. Well, as you can see, the first one passed Halliman's Star ten days ago. Or at least, it would have, but it went dark when it was supposed to get there.'
'That's weird. Did it just fail?'
'Maybe. There's a huge asteroid field around Halliman's. There was no indication of that when we set off. It's possible that the probe hit something and was destroyed.'
Mia paused, amazed at how easily the knowledge popped into her mind.
'Show me the field,' she said.
The view zoomed in. A great disk spread out around the star, thin and flat, a circle carved out at its centre.
'There,' Pilgrim said. 'That's based on observations that the probes took. You can see that it starts from just outside the orbit of Misenus, and then goes way, way out.'
She frowned, and gestured to bring the image closer. It hung in front of her, sparkling in the darkness.
'That's not an asteroid field, Pilgrim.'
'What?'
'It's an accretion disk. When a star forms, it starts with a huge disk orbiting it, made of dust and gas. That slowly coalesces into planets, or falls into the star, or gets ejected, until there's almost nothing left. For whatever reason, this star still has a large chunk of its original disk. The inner planets formed normally; that's why it has a circular hole cut out in the middle. But the rest is still just primordial stuff, gas and dust and ice and chunks of rock. Did you fly the probe straight into it? It would never have survived, and neither will we unless we're very careful.'
'OK, well, that's good to know. But, no. The probe came in at this angle. It would never have intercepted the accretion disk.'
Pilgrim drew a golden line, straight down from above the disk, heading towards its centre, through the central void.
'There. You see, it should have been fine.'
'OK, great. But there still might be debris. This is a weird solar system.'
She stretched in the couch. Her body was still suffering the effects of the sedative, but her mind was like a drill, quick and sharp. I guess that's what happens, she thought. It's because this body isn't connected to my mind.
Am I really in a freezer with my arms and legs cut off?
'Mia, there's more. The second probe also disappeared,' Pilgrim said.
Mia shrugged. 'If the system has loads of junk in it, that's all there is to it. But I agree, we need to be careful how we come in. If we're braking, the engines will blast away whatever's in our way, but only in the direction they're pointing. Manoeuvring will be risky.'
'No, that's not the thing. This is what the second probe filmed, before it disappeared.'
The model disappeared, and was replaced with a view from the probe.
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.