The Worlds Grave

Posted on Tue Jan 17th, 2023 @ 9:46pm by The Narrator

672 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: World Wide Web
Location: Target System, Brown Dwarf Dyson Swarm
Timeline: Day 2

The probe had a choice to make.

Its primary directive, apart from collecting data, was to remain undetected at all costs. Low albedo materials in the outer casing, low emission power sources that really proved Starfleet engineers could make a fusion power plant run on a potato battery. It was all geared towards taking in everything and giving away nothing.

Except…now it was in the gravity well of the dirty brown dwarf. Its orbit was elliptical, the periapsis growing ever closer to the roiling gases and crushing gravities of a planet that really wanted to be a sun. It had reaction mass to burn, or failing that it could set its unfurled sensor vanes to a highly reflective setting that could act as a poor man's solar sails: delta-vee was not the problem.

The problem was that doing anything to alter its fate would be very obvious. So it did nothing, sitting on its digital hands to keep them away from the big red subroutine marked ‘Main Engine Ignition’.

So it focused on the task at hand: the Dyson Swarm surrounding the pustule of a star.

Technically it should have really classified the amalgamation of interstellar detritus as just that, a cloud of debris. But it was debris that held its orbit perfectly, each part tugging and being pulled by its counterparts to keep its position in the swarm. The probe was not fooled enough to calculate the odds of such a thing happening naturally, that way led to paradox equations and dividing by zero. So it jumped to a conclusion: Dyson swarm.

It then passively ran its sensor over the debris in the swarm. The grand majority of the swarm components were rocky orbs, from a few dozen hundred kilometre-wide demi-planets to rubble swarms held together by nothing save spite. But here and there it had detected the telltale signs of machined alloys and exotic particles. Wrecks were hidden in amongst the rocks, most of which were beaten to hell and back by age and the wash of radiation from the star. Some were in better condition, but their hulls were scoured of paint or markings. From shuttles to vessels best described as dreadnaughts, all of them along in their orbits as silent as ghosts. Only trace amounts of radiation leaked from their cold reactors, the trapped fury of anti-lithium stored in magnetic bottles deep within.

And each and every ship shared a single common factor: all of them were open to space. Every docking hatch, airlock, service bay, and shuttle dock was retracted or opened to the void. Vacuum screamed through every deck, and into all the space where life once held sway. Within some of the larger derelicts, the atmosphere had cooled to the point of collecting in snowy drifts, clinging to pipe fittings and vent grills like filigree spiderwebs.

This the probe did not find this creepy. At. All.

One of the larger collections of rocky debris, corraled around the conjoined wrecks of three alien vessels, was the location of the echoing Icarus log beacon. The probe had been able to manage its slow fall into the star's gravity well enough to bring it to close in for an inspection. It almost looked like the rock had grown around the wrecks over time, cementing them into the tomb of this graveyard orbit. One was long, shaped like a trident of red and black metal spars that looked far to lean to be a starship. The second was a glossy black rhomboid that wouldn't have looked out of place in a cemetery overlooking a grand mausoleum.

And the third was an odd shape. A spherical beginning joined to a stubby sphere, with two nacelles riding along its side on pylons. The shape alone was iconic, the database within the probe alighting on design specs centuries old by its own reckoning. What sealed the deal was a symbol emblazoned on part of the spherical hull protruding from the rocky mess it was buried in.

United Earth Space Probe Agency.

 

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