For an outside observer it may not look as if the great white shape moved at all through the deep blackness of space. The shadows cast on it from the distant sun were unmoving, safe for those that hit one of the two massive rotating rings that rotated around the main keel of the great ship, connected to a large blocky aft and an equally large circular frontal section.
Yet it whizzed by in just the blink of an eye to any fixed observer as its large engines pushed it through space at a low relativistic speed, towards a target that had been fixed weeks ago.
Within one of the rings a set of eyes blinked as it looked at information scrolling down a thin, nearly holographic screen.
"This is funny," the owner of the eyes noted and turned around to face her partner. "Could you please take a look at this?"
The partner craned his neck and looked back at her, for the moment ignoring his own workspace.
"What is it?" he wondered.
"I'm getting a wired signal near the hydrogen line. Looks almost artificial."
"I'll take a look."
Across the large radio astronomy laboratory, windows were closed and others were opened, calling up a display of the hydrogen baseline. There was a silence for a few minutes, before he looked back up.
"It is," he noted." An artificial signal. High quality frequency modulation with additional signals within the sidebands."
Turning around, his face twisted into something resembling a grin as he all but jumped up from his seated place in front of his workspace. His eyes gleamed and his partner blinked her eyes in quick succession.
"Alien lifeforms! An unknown civilization! Someone who..."
"Uhm, you know that the scout that mapped this system left a beacon..."
He visibly deflated, before perking back up again.
"Wrong frequency. And the beacon was left nearly four decades ago. We have to tell MCOM."
His partner shook her head and her plume ruffled lightly.
"We should confirm this and then we take it to MCOM. We don't have time for your speculative fiction stuff. This is a scientific mission."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Just a thought that wouldn't leave me. We know of the alien probe the Miranda encountered. I'm pretty sure they left one of theirs as well. Quite possible to have the aliens stumble over it.
I would like to do an experiment of how aliens encounter Fenspace and are quite possibly wireded out...
No set date as a decade of theirs can be quite different to one of ours.
Yet it whizzed by in just the blink of an eye to any fixed observer as its large engines pushed it through space at a low relativistic speed, towards a target that had been fixed weeks ago.
Within one of the rings a set of eyes blinked as it looked at information scrolling down a thin, nearly holographic screen.
"This is funny," the owner of the eyes noted and turned around to face her partner. "Could you please take a look at this?"
The partner craned his neck and looked back at her, for the moment ignoring his own workspace.
"What is it?" he wondered.
"I'm getting a wired signal near the hydrogen line. Looks almost artificial."
"I'll take a look."
Across the large radio astronomy laboratory, windows were closed and others were opened, calling up a display of the hydrogen baseline. There was a silence for a few minutes, before he looked back up.
"It is," he noted." An artificial signal. High quality frequency modulation with additional signals within the sidebands."
Turning around, his face twisted into something resembling a grin as he all but jumped up from his seated place in front of his workspace. His eyes gleamed and his partner blinked her eyes in quick succession.
"Alien lifeforms! An unknown civilization! Someone who..."
"Uhm, you know that the scout that mapped this system left a beacon..."
He visibly deflated, before perking back up again.
"Wrong frequency. And the beacon was left nearly four decades ago. We have to tell MCOM."
His partner shook her head and her plume ruffled lightly.
"We should confirm this and then we take it to MCOM. We don't have time for your speculative fiction stuff. This is a scientific mission."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Just a thought that wouldn't leave me. We know of the alien probe the Miranda encountered. I'm pretty sure they left one of theirs as well. Quite possible to have the aliens stumble over it.
I would like to do an experiment of how aliens encounter Fenspace and are quite possibly wireded out...
No set date as a decade of theirs can be quite different to one of ours.
