The first thing she had done was disable the beacon. She didn't
want anyone finding the lifeboat, not right away, especially not the
aliens who had built the lifeboat and the spaceship she was fleeing.
The boat read her biology and headed silently toward the nearest
compatible planet. Behind her, the alien ship exploded: a brilliant
light fragmenting, then dousing as the oxygen dissipated in space.
Brian was on that ship. All the aliens...but they had to be
destroyed, all of them, in order to keep them from reporting back
what they had learned of Earth. With whatever bizarre powers Brian
had, they had driven off one alien ship. But Brian was gone now.
There were probably some enclaves with some tactical nukes left on
Earth, but Earth was so damaged that there was no way to withstand
a larger assault.
Which meant that all the aliens had to die. How many lives?
Five hundred? A thousand? It seemed right - *was* right - but
those people...
Old Sooty spent the first few days after her escape sitting on
the floor leaning against a bulkhead, too numb with horror at her
own actions to do anything. Then she started tinkering. She didn't
touch the navigation controls, but worked on the environment controls
until the lifeboat produced edible and drinkable substances. Cool,
she thought.
Once that was settled, she tweaked the oxygen/nitrogen/carbon
dioxide ratio to something a little more comfortable. She learned
how to control the little boat, how to modify its parts, but let it
fly her where it chose. She knew how to steer the thing, but had no
idea where to point it.
And one day a star grew brighter. And the next she was in its
gravitational field, and the little egg's engines started again. By
the end of the day, the ship had aerobraked on one of the planets,
and then she was passing the star. The day after that, the food ran
out. The next day she aerobraked on a gas giant, skipping along the
surface and then heading toward another gas giant. Then she was
skipping and swinging around that planet and heading back to the
first gas giant.
"Well, little egg," she said, "I hope you don't hatch me into a
toxic atmosphere." It felt strange to vocalize after these weeks of
silence.
Little Egg used the gas giant to slow down, plowing though the
atmosphere and heating up unpleasantly, then out, then back in to
slow down some more. Then it skipped of the gas giant and threw
itself at its largest moon.
The moon was blue, and once Little Egg neared it enough to scan
the surface, Sooty could see that it was covered in forest - blue
forests. Little Egg's computer scanned, looking for a clear, flat
spot in a livable climate, found one, then penetrated the atmosphere
and plunged toward the surface. Retro rockets fired and Little Egg
lowered itself slowly into the clearing.
Sooty unstrapped herself and unsteadily to her feet. I'm too old
for this, she thought. She made her way to the hatch and wrestled it
open, then stared silently at what she saw.
And the multitudes stared silently back.