Riker
November 2248
Sol
A ding announced the arrival of an email. I swiveled in my chair and pulled it up in the holotank.
From Mario. This could be interesting.
It had been eight years since Mario started on my suggested plan to investigate the Others’ ho system. The lead ti was inevitable, of course. The drones couldn’t fall through the system at interstellar speeds and go unnoticed. And falling in from the Oort was a slow process, otherwise.
Oh, Mario had given them a good push. But hopefully not enough to set off alarms.
I paged through the docunts, scanning the headers, then reading interesting items. When I was done, I sent a video chat request to Mario. He popped up right away.
“Hi, Will. You looked through the stuff?”
“Yeah, looks like they got suspicious in the end.”
Mario laughed. “Uh huh, started shooting down every piece of debris they could detect. Including a lot of just plain old rocks. Which is fine with .”
“But the stuff you did get…”
“Right. Construction of the sphere proceeds apace.” Mario thought for a mont. “What was of more interest was the almost complete absence of death asteroids and cargo vessels.”
“I noticed that, Mario. In fact, the Delta Pavonis expedition would account for every unit we could see.”
“So either that’s all they’ve ever had…” Mario frowned into the video. “…or everything else is out sowhere.”
I nodded. “And you’ve got eyes on every system in the area.”
“Yup. Ain’t no harvesting going on, nohow.”
I sat back, staring into space. “Thanks, Mario. I think that settles it, at least for . I’m going to re-check my detection array.”
Mario nodded and closed the video.
Yep. No question. Sothing wicked, et cetera. Bradbury had nothing on this.
Reviews
All reviews (0)