jeriendhal | FYS: The Visitor

Stepping away from the Red Vixen Adventures for a while, since my creativity in that direction has fled

Colonel Mitterrand, former astronaut to the ESA Exploration Branch, looked at the craft displayed on the screen. It was a large pressure vessel, perhaps two hundred meters long, set on a massive pusher plate and protected by a heavy set of shock absorbers. A classic Orion style interplanetary vessel, of a type never actually built by humanity, back when it was permitted to fly between the worlds of the Solar System.

“This is real,” he asked Aslan, his morph. “Not a CGI creation?”

“Yes, Colonel,” the lionmorph answered gravely. “It is in a parking orbit around the Moon.”

“I'm going to ignore the fact that if it's really ready to fly, that means you've been building nuclear bombs...”

“We prefer to think of them as 'acceleration components.'”

“Bombs. Built wholesale,” Mitterrand corrected firmly. “More importantly it has a pressure vessel. Crew quarters. For humans.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Why? Are you seriously going to let a human crew off the Ring? What for?”

The display changed, showing a fuzzy picture of cylindrical object, almost lost in a white flare of light.

“This was spotted six weeks ago emerging from the inner edge of the Oort Cloud,” Aslan explained. “At its present rate of deceleration it's going to cross the orbit of Neptune in six years.”

“Decel...” Mitterrand began to exclaim. “Wait, it's artificial?”

“Almost certainly. The heat bloom is consistent with a massive outpouring of some form of drive, though the Groupmind cannot identify the nature of it yet.”

He tried to contain his shock. “Where is going?”

“Unless it changes its present course, it is almost certainly heading towards Earth and the Ring.”

“And you're really going to let humans get near that thing?”

Aslan shuddered slightly. “The Groupmind has no choice. Whatever that vessel is, it must intercepted well before it reaches the Earth. The lightspeed communication lag will prevent our ship from communicating with the Ring at anywhere near real time. Which means we will be dependent on human creativity.”

Mitterrand thought for a moment. “How dangerous is this thing, do you think?”

“Very. Even if it is completely unarmed, the drive alone could bore a hole through the Ring large enough to cause a structural collapse.”

“Are you certain? How big is it, anyway?”

“A bit less than a thousand kilometers long.”

“A thousand... kilometers?” Mitterrand said weakly.

“Indeed. I suggest you begin assembling your team with all due haste.”