Invaders

As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again.

The colony possesses something; Adam doesn’t know what to call it. Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness—something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.

As they orbit they might as well be intergalactic travellers chancing upon a virgin frontier. It seems uninhabited Captain, they say when they glance out before breakfast. We believe it could be the remnants of a collapsed civilisation. Prepare the thrusters for landing.

Adrift on a hostile planet, the captain knew he would die. Collapsed on the deck, doomed, he looked up. He did not see the churning ice-sea of nature’s riot, lit by perpetual lightning and ecstatic aurora. Instead, he saw a girl with a owl on her shoulder. She pointed past him to a corner in the ship’s research lab. The owl rotated its head to look