Far Horizon (Juggernaut #4)

Interstitial 3

In the Peleg system the courier drone waited patiently eighty kilometres starward of the jump beacon to Itzo.

Departing traffic was light so it had no choice but to wait for a surrogate to open the portal and jump to Itzo. There, the courier drone would transmit it's payload of messages: technical updates, business information, sensor readings, market updates and personal correspondence, to the nearest communications relay for onward transmission.

Then the drone would wait for new messages before jumping back to Peleg.

It was a technically ironic that faster-than-light transport was possible, while faster-than-light communication was not. The fastest way to get information from one star system to another was to ship it via courier drone.

So the drone waited. It was in no particular hurry. It's message buffers were less than half-full. Had it been stationed in one of the inner systems it would have been operating as part of a fleet, each one with full message buffers at all times.

But this was Peleg, where nothing much happened any more.

The courier drones had no artificial intelligence, a technology generally lacking throughout the Commonwealth anyway, but it could perform it's simple tasks without any intervention. The algorithms governing its function were not complicated, and they were constantly being fed sensor and communication information in case a response was needed.

The portal that it saw open on the far side of Peleg was too far away for the drone to notice.

What came through was too silent to be heard.

The drone eventually detected movement and picked up transmissions from the outpost closest to the Verloren beacon, but half the communications were encrypted. The half it could understand were elation, interrogation, confusion, fear and then panic.

But these messages were not directed to the drone, so it recorded nothing.

Over the next fifty hours the same pattern repeated, coming closer each time. The shapes that moved through the system, targeting world after world, colony after colony, and space station after space station, left in their wake only silence and fire.

New messages reached the drone. Cries for help. Desperate calls for assistance. Descriptions of things unknown. The drone recorded them all with quiet and calm efficiency. When it's message buffers were full the communication didn't stop. Some were tagged with an emergency broadcast, so the drone automatically deleted low priority communications to make room.

Eventually the buffer was full of emergency broadcasts, but there was nothing the drone could do except watch, listen, and wait.

In time the messages grew quiet, and the shapes drew closer to the Itzo beacon.