Some interesting developments in the last week!
The control hub was pretty easy to find. I had obviously realised straight away that it must have motive power, to remain aligned with the Earth while closer to the Sun than Venus is. I also reasoned that they were probably using the stealthiest form of acceleration possible. I did an optical scan for stray light, and sure enough, it was there. A solar sail – very sneaky! They were sailing the solar wind to exert a suitable force vector on the motion and keep the hub in place.
I cloaked the minicruiser before approaching, of course. Since I was coming in along the radius, the reflected sunlight would have made me very visible otherwise. I passed the sail and managed to get within a few hundred metres of the hub, then slowed down for a look.
The design was extremely elegant, apparently based on the same hyperspatial structure it generated, which I have to admit I found rather beautiful. Certainly it wasn’t any kind of Utnepi design, though I had already kind of ruled out those particular Galactic pranksters, since this was hardly their style. They prefer harmless fun with low risk to bystanders. That said, I still haven’t quite forgiven them for building that anomaly that I foolishly wandered into one time, ending up halfway around the Earth!
I wondered about the Gorpulonians, but it didn’t look like their construction style either, and the direct and dangerous meddling seemed uncharacteristic of them as well: they prefer to lurk.
For a brief moment, the idea flickered across my mind that this might be the work of my former nemesis, Professor Maria Thessifus. But she was dead. Surely, she was dead! I knew that with 99% certainty, and the only reason it wasn’t 100% was that I’m a good Bayesian.
Perhaps, then, this was somebody new.
Passive scans showed no signs of life. I wasn’t keen on using an active scan in case I made my presence known. For a moment I thought of vaporising the thing, but the problem with that was that I wouldn’t ever discover what had been going on. Knowledge is the best defence.
In the end, I used a robotic probe. I sent it on a curved trajectory, cloaked until it was on the other side of the hub, to give the impression that it had come from the other direction. It soon found a hatch, and I was able to collaborate through an encrypted hyperwave link to get the thing open. There wasn’t a whole lot of security, which surprised me. The other thing that surprised me was that there was no airlock inside the hatch: it was simply a corridor that led to a control room, and the place was completely airless. Watching the whole thing remotely through the probe, I was fascinated. I’d never seen anything quite like this! There was no interior lighting, at least in the usual wavelengths. I wondered whether the beings that built this thing used infra-red, or similar, to perceive their environment.
Whoever they were, they were not here. The probe took only five minutes to verify that the place was deserted, it being quite a small structure. I decided to go and investigate, though of course I took suitable weaponry on the outside of my suit – in this case, a modified Quantum Disruptor that would cause severe damage to internal structures without resulting in any sort of explosion (the lack of air would make it even safer).
It took me a couple of hours to figure out the tech, this being something very new and different. In the end, I discovered the shutdown sequence for the hyperspatial structure, and managed to activate it. It took about ten minutes to collapse – it was a rather difficult operation, due to the unstable nature of entropic n-hedra. Once I had it shut down, I found the structure generator, and indulged in a bit of light but irreversible sabotage with my disruptor gun.
I was not disturbed during my investigations, so I’ve now concluded that the whole thing is automated. This does not mean, of course, that whoever built it will not eventually return, and for this reason, I’ve not destroyed it. I want to be able to observe them if they come back to check up on things, so I’m leaving the hub in safe mode, as bait. I’ve set up a few early warning devices to alert me if anyone approaches it, but I’ll also begin regular scans farther afield so I get the most warning possible if anyone enters the Solar system.
So, there you have it. No fights to the death, no space battles, just a mystery and an extreme danger… to Scotland. That part baffles me a little! Why would an alien species pick on Scotland as a particular part of Earth that they wanted to damage or destroy? Have they picked up old TV or radio broadcasts and decided they hate the sound of bagpipes? (Personally, I quite like it.) Perhaps tartan patterns hurt their eyes… who knows? Personally, I doubt any of that applies. For an alien species to pick up radio signals and single out Scotland from all the strange and horrific news reports from around the world that they would contain seems bizarre.
Maybe they just don’t like mountains.
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