Eric Thomson - Like Stars in Heaven

War, now entering its seventh year, still raged across the stars. Humans and Shrehari kept dying as their admirals and generals struggled to find a weakness, a lever, anything that could break the stalemate.

The log buoy, a large, torpedo-shaped, unmanned spacecraft, did not care about the conflagration that had claimed so many lives already. Nothing actually concerned it. It had long since lost what little machine consciousness it might have had.

Centuries spent hurtling through interstellar space had completely drained its energy reserves, and its trajectory had not come close enough to any stars that might have helped recharge them.

Carrying the final message from colonists who had landed on a distant world after a long voyage, it had been aimed at what they guessed was the general direction of their home system. They had programmed the buoy to accelerate to a very high fraction of the speed of light over the course of many years before coasting to its destination.

The colonists did not believe that anyone would ever read the message it carried, let alone act on it, but since the buoy had one function and one only, it had cost nothing to launch it.

And so it sped on, for much longer than the brief centuries during which humanity had progressed from the first artificial satellite to a Commonwealth spanning more than fifty star systems, and now battling another sentient, space-faring empire.

It would have kept going until some natural phenomenon destroyed it, or until the universe eventually died. The course it followed would not have come close to its intended destination, but it would eventually enter human-controlled space and not that of the Commonwealths deadly enemy.

The buoy did not notice. It had not noticed anything for a long, long time.

Even if the impossible happened and it reached the descendants of its makers, the craft would be unable to account for its voyage. Only the data etched into its memory circuits by those who launched it remained.

The buoy did not realize that had it slipped by a Shrehari patrol ship, unseen and undetected, years before the Empires feckless leadership planned a war while trade still crossed the nebulous boundary between the two future foes. Nor did it notice the abrupt end of a long peace followed by the plunge into killing on a galactic scale.

By then, it had reached the rim of human controlled space. From there, it would coast across the Commonwealth for several centuries, still undetected, before vanishing into the Coalsack Sector.

A scavenger, one with sensors more finely tuned than most, and blessed with a hefty dose of good luck, was looking for opportunity far from the fighting. In due course, it detected a mass of cold metal traveling at something approaching relativistic speeds.

Sailing along the far edges of the frontier and with little to show for the voyage so far, its captain decided to tackle the tricky process that would slow the object down sufficiently so they could recover it.

The operation failed, but had the buoys mind still been active, it would have noticed a distinct decrease in velocity.

A second try by the same ship a year later, after Nabhka and Cimmeria had fallen into Shrehari hands, reduced the little crafts speed even further. A third attempt, in the weeks before Siobhan Dunmoore, acting captain of the battleship Victoria Regina , made her last stand against Brakal, attracted the attention of a Navy survey cruiser, which took over from the scavenger.

It managed to bleed off the log buoys remaining velocity and, upon inspection, claimed it for the government.

Against all hope and indeed against all probability, the log buoy had made it home, bearing a final message from a colonization ship launched centuries earlier, during humanitys first exodus to the stars, and believed lost without a trace.

Unfortunately, with a war raging, no one cared that the buoys long voyage should have been impossible, that it defied humanitys understanding of space and time.