Author: Beck Dacus

One half of the sky brimmed with stars, the Sun at one light-week’s distance barely outshining the rest. The other half was utterly dark, as if the universe ended at a sheer cliff. As I approached the blackness, detail started to emerge, my headlamp casting shadows on icy gravel the color of moonlit fog. I slowed my approach with the cold gas thrusters of my suit and reached my hand out to touch the surface, feeling regolith with the consistency of laundry lint.
“Contact,” I radioed.
“Congrats,” Stan replied. “You are the first person to ever touch OCO-2141-Oph12.”
“My resume will never be the same.”
Oph12 was an Oort cloud object, one of trillions out here. This was where the comets that graced Earth’s sky came from, including comet 614N Canskel, which would be swinging by Earth in a week’s time. Trouble was we’d never found a cloud like it around another star. Some cold comet belts, but not a swarm of *trillions* in a shell around the star. We’d looked with telescopes, we’d even sent unmanned probes to the stars, and they didn’t find a single alien Oort cloud.
So are all those other stars the weird ones, or is ours?
“Okay Siggy, everything looks nominal from here.” Stan knows I prefer “Sig.” “Go ahead and proceed to the crevasse, about 15 meters to your right.”
“Copy.” I pushed right with my thrusters, gliding over the surface in the measly gravity. The edge of the crevasse was a gradual slope; I could only distinguish it from the comet’s horizon by the fact that the darkness around me deepened, the starlight receding into a narrow sliver at my back. Up ahead the wall seemed to end; I let myself get excited by the possibility of a hollow void in the comet’s interior. Instead, I *ran into* the dark— the smooth surface caught the light of my headlamp as I turned to face it. “You seeing this? Or… not seeing? Volcanic glass maybe, except where the hell is a comet going to get lava….” I reached out, felt my palm press against the void, smooth and cold.
My hand was outlined in light. I felt nothing, but I yanked it back like I’d touched a hot stove. Then a circle made of assorted glowing rectangles and triangles formed on the surface, an iris burning bright orange— *Jesus Christ, it’s a screen!*
“Talk to me, Sig! Your vitals are spiking!”
“Look at my feed, Stan! It’s… I don’t know, but it’s sure as hell not a comet!” I maxed out my reverse thrust. “Warm up the engines, we’re—“
My radio started screaming. A second later my helmet computer filtered the signal out to spare my hearing. “Stan, what the hell was that!?”
“Transmission from Oph12,” he replied. “Broadband. There’s a match in the language database, it’s… Sumerian?”
“What the… well, what’s it saying?”
“Three words, on repeat. ‘They have returned.’”
*‘They.’ It means us. But no one’s ever been here before….* I drifted into the airlock and started pressurizing. “I’m back in! Gun it!”
“Jesus… Sig, it’s not just Oph12. The two nearest comets to us just started sending the same message. It’s too early to be sure but… I think the message is *spreading.*”
“Spreading,” I repeated. “Spreading to every comet in the Oort cloud….”
*But why stop there?*
“Oh God!” Stan breathed. “Sig, it’ll reach comet Canskel right when it passes Earth! What the hell do we do?”
I breathed deeply. “Nothing changes. Set course for Earth.
“Whatever they’re planning, we’ll be there to meet them.”