What could it be but them? “A new threat.”
Myra’s face crumpled with hurt. “You’ve been away for nineteen years. The first thing you ask about is the Firstborn. I’ll come see you when you’re fully revived.”
“Myra, wait—”
But Myra had gone.
The new doctor was right. It hurt. But Bisesa had once been a soldier in the British Army. She forced herself not to cry out.
2: Deep Space Monitor
June 2064
Mankind’s first clear look at the new threat had come five years earlier. And the eyes that saw the anomaly were electronic, not human.
Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016 swam through the shadow of Saturn, where moons hung like lanterns. Saturn’s rings were a ghost of what they had been before the sunstorm, but as the probe climbed the distant sun set behind the rings, turning them into a bridge of silver that spanned the sky.
The Deep Space Monitor was not capable of awe, not quite. But like any sufficiently advanced machine it was sentient to some degree, and its electronic soul tingled with wonder at the orderly marvels of gas and ice through which it sailed. But it made no effort to explore them.
Silently, the probe approached the next target on its orbital loop.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, was a featureless ball of ocher, dimly lit by the remote sun. But its deep layers of cloud and haze hid miracles. As it approached the moon, DSM X7-6102-016 cautiously listened to the electronic chatter of a swarm of robot explorers.
Under a murky orange sky, beetle-like rovers crawled over dunes of basalt-hard ice-crystal “sand,” skirted methane geysers, crept cautiously into valleys carved by rivers of ethane, and dug into a surface made slushy by a constant, global drizzle of methane.