Oort
Week 2, Day 1
“This is new,” James said, and the note of alarm in his voice tugged my attention away from last week’s activity summaries.
“What’s new?” I walked over to his desk, one of many in the command center, all lined up in neat rows and facing the display wall, with its livestream view of Jupiter and scrolling stats down both sides.
“They’re doing something different,” James said, pointing to the widescreen monitor on his desk, which displayed a zoomed-in view of the moon Europa. Even our best telescopes couldn’t get much resolution at this distance, but I could see a dark smear across the icy surface that hadn’t been there before.
“Oh, wow. I thought they were ignoring Europa.”
James nodded. “They’ve only seemed interested in Io and Callisto.”
“They must need water,” I said.
“Maybe,” James said, in a tone that really said maybe not. “Callisto has ice, so they already have water.”
“Then why?” We both stared at the screen, curious and helpless and scared.
They showed up at the outer edges of our solar system about a year ago. At first we thought they were a comet, previously uncharted. No one paid too much mind — yet another space rock isn’t that interesting to the general public, and even in scientific circles, it was just a blip. But then astronomers noticed that it didn’t move the way it should — it wasn’t just falling in toward the center of the solar system. Something — someone — was steering it. And it was moving fast.
Government space agencies were all broadcasting varying and competing messages in the direction of the object, which people had started calling Oort. But there was no response, or at least no response we could understand. It appeared to be on a collision course with Jupiter, so after months of waiting and watching, all telescopes were pointed at the gas giant, ready for a show.
But Oort didn’t collide with Jupiter. Instead, it slowed at a rate that would have been bone crushing for a human passenger, and then entered orbit near the moon Io. There they lingered, doing we knew not what, until a few weeks later when they branched out to Callisto. Were they mining? Colonizing? Staging an attack on Earth? Every possible theory was tossed around the internet and the 24-hour news networks, and the top brass at NASA had nothing to say on that topic. They did say they were rapidly building a probe that they would launch toward Jupiter as quickly as possible, but even our fastest ships would take two years to get there.
And now the Oortians were expanding again.
I had been transferred to the Oort surveillance team from my previous assignment, the mission to Europa, which had been back-burnered as everyone focused on getting something, anything, launched toward Jupiter so we could see what was really going on. The idea of the Oortians mucking about with my beautiful, pristine moon filled me with panic. If there truly was life on Europa, as we’ve all hoped, what would the Oortians do with it?
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