Twilight Earth by Ben Winston

away. Marcy narrated. “This is where they were first detected, by accident, when the Hubble telescope was on a different mission. These objects simply crossed the field of vision. On the left is the actual video captured by the Hubble.”
    A bright, clear image of a nebula appeared on the screen. It took the watchers a moment, but they all saw something moving across the frame. It appeared as little more than an area of distortion moving across the image of the nebula.
    Suddenly, the nebula lost focus, and the areas of distortion slowly became clearer as the big telescope readjusted its focus. It revealed a huge cloud of what looked like small objects. Once again, Marcy picked up her narrative.
    “This is what was originally believed to be the remnants of a planet that was destroyed in some type of event millions of years ago. As you can see, they look exactly like what you would expect a meteor swarm to look like. Please let me draw your attention to this star; please remember its relationship to the objects.
    “NASA, JPL, and a good portion of the planet’s astrological community spent the next three days intently watching these objects and, based on distance and direction traveled, concluded that the objects would pass through the outer solar system in roughly thirteen and a half years. That may seem like a long time, but considering that at this point they are almost three light years away, it means they are really moving.
    “Three days ago the images of the ‘swarm’ were mostly obscured by an object appearing between the Hubble and the swarm. Once again the Hubble was adjusted, this time to almost its closest foci, what it found had to have given the astronomers a heart attack and almost panicked the governments.
    “Before we get there though, this is the first pucker-causing event. I asked you to remember the star and its relationship to the swarm? Take another look,” Marcy paused so everyone could see that the star was now on the other side of the swarm.
    “There are only two explanations for that star to appear to be on the other side. One – the HST is looking from a different angle. Two – The objects being observed have altered course. The first thing I checked when I noticed this was the Hubble’s position; there was only a four-degree orbital rotation difference between the first image and this one. That means that those ‘inanimate’ objects, somehow made a course correction that put Earth dead center in their flight path.
    “Now, just as a point of reference; a light-year is a unit of measure for how far light travels in one year. Therefore, the images we just looked at are really almost three years old. Is everyone still with me?” Marcy asked.
    The twins looked confused, but Jorga and Kaitlin were quietly explaining it. When they looked up they nodded, but still looked confused.
    “I’m getting there girls, just hang on. Three days ago, something else obscured the ‘swarm’. After refocusing the telescope, and a hell of a lot of computer analysis, it was found that the new, closer objects were in fact the same ones as the originally observed swarm.
    “Now, here is where Einstein has a stroke. How did those objects travel such distance in so short of an amount of time? Since we can still see them at their original location, they had to have traveled at an average of close-to-light-speed. Something we know can’t happen. The kicker is, the longer we can see them at the original position, the higher their speed of travel to get here.
    “This next image is of one of the larger objects that ‘appeared’ about the same distance from our planet as Saturn is." The image that came up was of an obviously artificial construction. It was a ship, albeit a very large one.
    “If that image isn’t enough to convince you; then consider that all of the roughly two-thousand, five-hundred objects in the... fleet, have been decelerating at well over a thousand gravities since their arrival here, late