Fiasco
“As usual in such systems, there were drifting remnants of old comets, comets stripped of their gas tails and broken into frozen boulders by repeated passages past the Sun. Among these scattered rocks and patches of dust, DEUS noticed, four thousand kilometers away, an object unlike a meteor. Touched by the radiolocator, it gave a metallic reflection. It could not be a hunk of magnetite with a high iron content: the shape was too regular. It resembled a moth with a short, thick abdomen and blunt stubs of wings. Four degrees warmer than icy rock, it did not rotate as a meteor or the fragment of a comet core should have, but traveled straight, with no sign of propulsion. DEUS examined it in all the spectral bands until it discovered the reason for the thing's stability: a faint outflow of argon, an attenuated stream and therefore barely visible. It could be a space probe or a small ship.
"Let's catch that moth," Steergard decided. So the Hermes was set on a trajectory of pursuit.
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