Chapter 51: Prolog (Book 2)
Deep space, 187 light-years from Sol
In the darkness between stars, something moved. Not actively, no power guiding its motion at just that moment, yet the sheer velocity at which it was moving marked it as something decidedly artificial.
After all, what kind of asteroid or rogue planetoid flew through the universe at a full third of light speed?
For a robotic warship built by an ancient (and recently extinct) civilization seeking to eliminate the competition, on the other hand? Accelerating to such a speed and retaining it while traveling from star to star, only activating the engines to decelerate when a suitable target was found, was just good practice.
At a length of four hundred meters and bearing thirty-six heavy lasers and a trio of heavy particle beams, the ship was capable of wiping out a primitive civilization in an afternoon, and obliterating the military of even a spacefaring people in short order … before proceeding to wreck the world that was supposed to be defended by said military.
Though right now, the ship was not doing its usual routine of flying through star systems at travel speed, casually scanning any planets that may be habitable, returning if something dangerous was found, dismissing them from contention if it was not.
No, it had been picking up broadcasts lately, almost certainly not directed at it, not meant for anyone outside of the species sending them, yet the signals had reached the void nevertheless.
The signals had degraded, and it had taken a while to locate their origin, a world that had, apparently, been named after dirt and which it had already passed, but it did feel like the exact kind of thing this vessel had been sent out to stop.
Yet there was a problem … several, actually.