Hidden Discovery

As Timothy was nearing the intriguing object floating in space, it was still nearly impossible to even see that it existed with an unaided eye. Where his scanners were picking up an extremely dense ball of matter, his eyes were seeing simple blackness--seeing it was more like seeing a void in space, rather than the actual object in it.

Such properties of various objects in space were nothing new. What was different about this particular ball of matter, however, was the fact that it seemed to have a mind of its own. Several science divisions had been tracking its movement over the course of several weeks, and it had--to the alarm of those versed in the technical details of such matter floating in space, which Timothy Brenton was most certainly not--seemingly been making a series of course corrections on its path, similar to those made by the automated flight computers on their own ships.

Nobody knew if it was being controlled, or maybe even flown. Some radicals even considered the concept that it could itself be or have some form of intelligence. At its approximate trajectory, it was nearly as close as it was going to get to Carantan--and that damn well wasn't very close at all. Timothy had a gut feeling about the object's importance, and wanted to be the one to discover whatever there was to discover; thus he had set out nearly two weeks prior on a non-stop flight to just outside of the calculated point in the object's path.

The meter indicating alien radiation levels was slowly but steadily rising as both the object and Timothy's ship approached approximately the same point in space. They had developed systems to re-route the flow of radiation before it could penetrate the hulls of their spacecraft, and such systems were required in every ship registered to a colony. They could only hold up to very minuscule amounts of radiation before becoming completely useless, however, and Timothy was steadily approaching that limit.

Before the meter triggered an Alarm status, Timothy brought the reconnaissance controls up on the primary display and began acquiring close-range images, as well as performing a spectral analysis of the object and its surroundings. When he started receiving the reconstructed waveform-based image, what he saw was shocking. There was a ship--what could be nothing other than a massive ship of some sort--seemingly floating right next to the object, almost as if they were traveling as one.