For centuries the Dozois had been expanding throughout the fourth arm of the galaxy. In that time they had learned caution when encountering new races. If the new species seemed peaceful and was sufficiently advanced to be of economic value to the empire, they would make contact, offering to establish economic and diplomatic ties.
On the other hand, if the natives appeared hostile or otherwise undesirable, the Dozois had no compunction about destroying them. With a civilization consisting of over eighty thousand worlds, one planet more or less was insignificant, and their members would not establish trade routes through an area that was considered unsafe.
For such occasions, the Dozois had developed a quick and humane solution: a small robot probe which automatically detonated upon entering the atmosphere of the target world, releasing a burst of energy that would sterilize the planet to a depth of a hundred meters beneath the surface.
When the Dozois scout ship encountered the Khar home world, they took less than a week to determine that the Khar were unsuitable neighbors. They were ruthless barbarians, at constant war among themselves. What's more, there was little of economic value in their entire system. The commander of the scout transmitted his recommendation back to the main fleet, and in hours received approval to proceed. He had a probe armed and launched, but the officer in charge had miscalculated the trajectory and the probe skipped off the Kharvian atmosphere and cartwheeled off into space. The commander reprimanded his officer for bungling such a routine task. Another probe was promptly launched, and the Khar were reduced to a brown organic film coating the rocks of their planet. The Dozois proceeded to the next system.
The forgotten probe careened out of the Kharvian system in an orbit that took it into the voids above the galactic plane. There it spun through the blackness for two hundred million years as the great disk of stars wheeled ponderously below. Eventually it was swept up by the curve of the third spiral arm, its orbit deflected repeatedly by the many stars it flashed past. The last deflection aimed it at a small golden star. As it rushed in toward the star, a glowing blue planet arced in to intercept its path. The probe's sensors detected the planet and activated long-dormant systems. Gyroscopes spun up, stabilizing the probe's spin and rotating its heat shield forward to protect it long enough to get deep into the atmosphere before detonating.
The probe slammed into the Earth's atmosphere at sixty thousand miles an hour. The shock wave formed a cone of incandescent plasma around it. The surge of heat buffeted the probe, so long chilled to absolute zero. One of the molecular transistors in the inertial system deformed slightly, sending an inaccurate voltage to a gyroscope. The probe yawed a tenth of a degree to the right, the wind curled behind the heat shield, then it was tumbling violently. The wind instantly tore it to bits and vaporized it in a band of white-hot molten glass a meter wide and five hundred miles long.
"Oh, look, Mommy," shouted Nathan. "A shooting star!"
His mother looked up in time to see a long straight white line just fading to invisibility in the night sky.
"Make a wish, sweetie," she said. "Meteors are supposed to be good luck."
copyright 1996 by Brian K. Crawford