DSM X7-6102-016 was not an explorer. Shrouded, silent, it was a sentry. And now it was heading for an encounter of the sort for which it had been designed.
As it skimmed over the cloud tops of Titan, the moon’s gravity field slingshot X7-6102-016 onto a new trajectory that would take it out of the plane of the Saturn system, high above the rings. All this in radio silence, without a puff of rocket exhaust.
And DSM X7-6102-016 approached the anomaly.
It detected cascades of exotic high-energy particles. And it was brushed by a powerful magnetic field, a ferocious electromagnetic knot in space. It reported to Earth, sending a stream of highly compressed data using sporadic laser bursts.
The Deep Space Monitor had no means of adjusting its course without compromising its shroud, and so it sailed on helplessly. It should have missed the anomaly by perhaps half a kilometer.
Its last observation, in a sense its last conscious thought, was of a sudden twisting of the anomaly’s strong magnetic field.
DSM X7-6102-016’s final signals showed it receding at enormous, impossible speeds. They were signals the probe’s makers could neither believe nor understand.
Like any sufficiently advanced machine the anomaly was sentient to some degree. The destruction it had been designed to inflict was for the future, and did not yet trouble it. But it was touched by a hint of regret at the smashing of the puppyish machine that had followed it so far, with its laughable attempt at concealment.