I Will Love You Forever

Chapter 1, part 6: Disaster

Ken turned back from the poison ivy he was watering when he heard the bottle open. Lu was standing in the middle of the clearing, holding two bottles of beer. Beer would be good, but it was Lu who held his full attention. How did I get so lucky as to catch her? he asked himself for the thousandth time. I don’t deserve her, that’s for sure.

* * *

The probe was experiencing a full disaster as it entered the upper atmosphere. It had detected no trace of coherent gravitic radiation, but a large burst had just hit it. This species was even more aggressively paranoid than it had seemed. The probe was going to be able to maintain overall integrity when it hit the atmosphere, but not the ground. It had lost all ability to maneuver or navigate. Instead of pretending to be a meteorite, it would actually become one. Its outer skin was already beginning to bubble away from friction.

* * *

“Zack, what do you think we just fired?”

He shrugged. “They said it was just a new kind of radar, to scan something and identify it. But that image … it looked like it was seeing right into that thing, the way sonar would image a ship.”

The outside door banged open, and armed soldiers came in. “You two come with me, right now,” said one of them.

Behind them, on the screen, the image of the pip got blurrier from the flare of light and heat around it, but no one was paying attention anymore.

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