#SciFriday

Challenge 1 - Escape

She checks her screen for the third time in about as many minutes, anxious it will show that strange life sign again. Everything is quiet. Exhausted she leans back in the transfer chair and tries to calm down. After all, this is what she wanted. A ship of her own, absolute freedom. She smiles as she thinks of her dad and how she manipulated him into trusting his only daughter with one of his small freighters. She will prove to him that she can do this. He will give her the chance to pilot a real ship one day, a big one on the long distance runs, with a real crew. For the time being she got all she cares for. Even if it's just running supplies to the mining stations in gamma-3 quadrant.

So far everything went smooth. She even managed to break the record in supply runs for G-Corp last month, never spending more time on the station than absolutely necessary to unload her freight, fuel up, and reload. Yesterday she decided to celebrate her record in the spacer bar on freight deck in G3-central station. That's where she heard about the alien ship. If it is even a ship. The rumour varied and got wilder the longer the evening dragged on. She laughed a lot with her fellow pilots. Everybody knows that there are no alien ships out there. The evening was long and she certainly drunk one or two too many. And somehow she ended up with the creeps.

Only half a day out from G3-central she discovered that strange signal for the first time. Her sensors insisted that there was an unidentified life form out there. Suddenly the stories from last night didn't seem so funny any more. She tried her best to analyse the signature. Her sensors were not exactly state of the art, like her ship. But the readings were constant: Alien live form, probably space ship, approaching slowly on interceptive course, impact in 257.4 minutes. Suddenly, after six minutes, the contact was gone without a trace. She couldn't locate it again.

Sure that she was hallucinating after last nights spree she went to sleep and left the ship on automatic control. The collision alarm woke her only fifteen minutes ago: same alien signature, same interceptive course, impact in 32.2 minutes. Seven minutes later, the signal was gone again. Since then, everything is quiet. She tries to remember the drunken stories from the bar, to separate the more probable from the definitely fantastic. Talk was about an alien ship in G3-270 up to 320. That's where she is. Someone described a sleek silver vessel. An old miner called that rubbish, said knowingly the stranger let himself never be seen, kept himself cloaked or something.

She shakes her head and heads for the coffee maker. The alarm interrupts her before it reaches running temperature. She lets herself drop into the chair. Same alien signature, approaching, impact in 7.8 minutes.

Cold panic grips her. She calls herself a realist. In her universe there is no room for aliens. Space is all about mining and business. And now that. She tries to calm down and takes over manual control, revs up main engine for evasive speed and adds secondary thrust. She learned this in basic training for mining pilots. The manoeuvre is called asteroid evasion. She always liked the thrill of it and most of the time even beat the simulator. Minutes drag by while she follows one evasion pattern after the other. A small smile appears on her lips as the alien signal fades away, 2.1 minutes to impact. She continues the erratic manoeuvring for another seven minutes. The screen stays blank. Slowly she rightens her course and lets the automatic take over.

She finally picks up her coffee and tries to relax, to tell herself that everything is fine. She escaped. That is when she hears the faint scraping sound on the hull.