Skye Object 3270a Read Online Free

an occasional pebble would escape the nebula and wander into the inner-system. The city’s meteor defense lasers were always on guard against bits of debris that might strike the city. Skye had seen them flash hundreds of times before, but never with such brilliance. “Zia, there’s no way the butterfly gnomes would have missed an object that big.”
    â€œHmm. Maybe it was an asteroid that’s been wandering around the inner system for the last few eons. Or maybe it was a chunk from the swan burster.”
    The swan burster was a great ring, 3000 kilometers across, that orbited Deception Well like a dark moon. The dead remnant of an alien weapon, it was estimated to be thirty million years old. Only twenty years ago its surface had been shattered in a collision. Fragments of the swan burster had been spinning through the inner system ever since.
    â€œIs there anything else it could have been?” Zia asked. “There’s not much out there . . .”
    â€œThere is one other thing,” Skye said softly.
    Zia’s voice grew sharp with suspicion. “What are you thinking, ado?”
    â€œWell . . .” Skye hesitated, afraid to say it, afraid that by saying it she might somehow make it true. “We know the butterfly gnomes don’t attack animate matter. . . .”
    Living things were animate, their tissues busily interacting at the scale of atoms and molecules. A lot of manufactured objects were animate too, made of smart molecules that responded to the environment around them. Ord was animate matter. So was a skin suit. So were the hulls of most spacecraft.
    Skye swallowed against a throat made dry by fear. “Zia, maybe it was another lifeboat . . . like the one that brought me here.”

    Skye had dropped out of nowhere.
    No one knew where she had come from. Thirteen years ago an astronomer had seen a gleam on the outer edge of the nebula. Days passed, and the light grew brighter. A solar sail, already a full kilometer across, was growing from the animate hull of a tiny incoming spacecraft.
    The solar sail was huge, but it was thinner than aluminum foil. It was designed to catch sunlight the way a boat’s sail would catch the wind, using the pressure of light to slow the tiny lifeboat that it carried. But as the sail swept through the nebula it was bombarded by pebbles and flecks of dust that tore its fragile sheet faster than the sail could heal and re-grow. By the time a research ship reached the lifeboat a year had elapsed and only a few shreds remained of the once-bright fabric.
    Within the lifeboat, the researchers discovered the frozen body of a nameless two year old girl. All the records aboard her vessel had been erased. There was no way to know how long she had been in cold sleep, if it had been two years or two hundred . . . or more. There was no way to know who had put her in the lifeboat, or why. When the researchers revived her, she had only a two-year-old’s fuzzy memory.
    They had named her after the astronomer’s designation for her lifeboat, Sky Object 3270a, adding only an e to her first name.

    â€œIt wasn’t another lifeboat,” Zia said. “If the object was that big, someone would have spotted it.”
    â€œMaybe.”
    Skye was not at all convinced. Lifeboats were dark. In the lightless deeps of space they were almost impossible to see. They were made that way, because the only reason to use one was for escape.
    For centuries, people had moved outward from Earth, making homes on new worlds that circled alien suns. Now and again, they found fossil traces of long vanished civilizations, but nothing else, until the frontier had been pushed a thousand years from home . . . and then they found the Chenzeme warships.
    It was a terrible discovery. The robotic Chenzeme vessels might have been thousands, even millions of years old. There were no aliens aboard them. Machine minds steered the ships, and ordered them to attack any