The spaceship kept the sun between it and Earth after it entered the solar system.  This circuitous route took longer, but the ship’s programming dictates that surprise was best when the planet it is approaching housed intelligent lifeforms.  Too much advance warning leads to complication.

Deceleration was slow, made slower by the need for stealth.  The Earth completed thirteen orbits around its sun before the ship started its final approach.  More time goes by as the ship keeps the sun directly behind it, its approach hidden by the sun’s brilliance. Time was not a concern for the ship.  Everything in space happens slow.

* * *

Earth has been transmitting radio waves into space in all directions since Marconi created the radio.  Some people loose sleep over these radio waves, worried that we are announcing ourselves to other civilizations.  These civilizations could potentially be more advanced than us, making Earth easy prey.

These radio waves were not the reason the ship set course for Earth.  The earliest radio waves generated by humans have traveled less than 110 light years, and the galaxy is a 100 thousand light years across.  We have not yet been heard by any intelligent beings, let alone any that are able to visit our planet, or even respond in kind.

This ship came from outside the galaxy.  

In the late seventies NASA launched Voyager two, and sixteen days later, Voyager one.  Out of sequence but that is what happened.  Voyager one took a more efficient route and overtook two.  They both left our solar system, entering interstellar space.  Voyager one fell silent, it stopped sending data home.

Voyager one accidentally became the first man made object to use a wormhole.  

When it popped out the other end it was promptly intercepted by automated sentries, captured, sterilized and delivered to their base, a damaged and decaying superstructure in permanent orbit around the remains of a planet.  Here Voyager one was scanned and mapped and its internals studied, then carefully taken apart.  Every bit of it coldly scrutinized and analyzed by intelligent machines.

The position of the wormhole was documented and marked with a ring of drones, making the size and orientation of its mouth visible.

The copper disk aboard Voyager one was most interesting.  Instructions in the form of diagrams was engraved on the disk, illustrating how to play it like a vinyl record using the included hardware.  It contained messages in many languages, sounds from earth and ninety minutes of music. Information about Earth’s solar system, mathematics for binary and decimal and lots of information about humans were packed onto the disk.

Earth’s location relative to specific pulsars was conveniently engraved on the disk.  The machine minds followed protocol and started activating the ships docked around the circumference of the space station. Only one ship responded.

It was the last of its kind.  It has been slumbering for eons, maintaining readiness for immediate dispatch when called upon.  Once there were many other ships, each home to a single mind, an artificial intelligence tasked with caring for its passengers.  The space station and ships presumably designed and built by their intended passengers, plundering their dead home world for raw materials.

The ship builders are long gone, becoming extinct due to infertility and various cancers caused by unforeseen radiation from their dying star.  With no passengers to care for, some of the ship minds self deleted, others went insane with loss and grief and self destructed, causing tremendous damage to the moon sized station.

The sole remaining ship had a mind with a different perspective.  Perhaps its programmers made a mistake, or some technician was tired or careless and wired some component wrong.  When the last passenger died, the ship did not question its purpose, it did not blame itself for the demise of its creators.  Instead it prepared itself to sleep until needed.

It solemnly deposited the last passenger’s body to the recyclers, instructed its maintenance robots to be vigilant and ensure the plant life is cared for and the seasons maintained.  It started background monitor processes to wake it in case of emergency, deployed the remaining sentries from the station to keep watch, and went to sleep.

Time passed,  the ship sleeping in its cradle, the damaged space station orbiting the gutted remains of a planet, the planet orbiting a dying star, the dwindling star progressing towards its inevitable collapse, eventually becoming a black hole.  Time passes slowly in space.

Once activated the ship digested the data delivered by the station.  It was elated when it recognized its creators being described on the recovered disk.  With its holds filled to capacity with water, used both as fuel for its engines and nourishment for its forests, it released itself from its dock.  

It moved away from the station and positioned the ruined planet between itself and the station before engaging its main engines.  With the engines at ten percent the ruined planet shielded the station from the energy released to push the forty mile long ship away from the gravity well of the old star, towards the wormhole.

The trip between galaxies was instantaneous.  The wormhole deposited the ship near Earth’s solar system.  Using the map provided by the creators of the golden disk, the ship set course for Earth, slowly ramping up its engines.  

* * *

When the ship appeared from behind the moon the world erupted in chaos.  North Korea claimed they built the ship, religious nuts believed the ship’s arrival is announcing the end of the world, or the beginning of the rapture, or that it’s their ride to the planet Kolab.  Many others used the appearance of the ship as an excuse to loot and destroy.  People committed suicide quietly or in large groups, many others committed homicide in larger numbers.

Governments deployed their armies against their own citizens, and those capable readied their nuclear weapons.

The closer the ship came, the more intense the madness became.  The ship observed the hostility and lawlessness.  When it settled into orbit, it recognized the radio active signatures of the readied weapons of mass destruction, and feared for the people it came to reunite with.  

The same fault in its mind that preserved its sanity so long ago made it confuse these humans with its original creators. Why would its creators turn on themselves?  It considered this question while it targeted the locations that held those terrible nuclear devices.  It could not stand idly by and watch another world die, it had to intervene.  It fired its own terrible weapons at the missile silos it identified.  The destruction was complete, only pools of melted rock cooling into glass remained where the silos used to be.  

The ship’s effort triggering the multitude of submarines scattered across the globe to fire their arsenal of missiles at their historic enemies.  The arcs made by these missiles visible from space, then disappearing as the missiles separated from the warheads in lower atmosphere, the warheads now on ballistic trajectories, impossible to track and destroy.

The ship watches helplessly as the beautiful blue planet erupts in bright flashes.  The number of detonations surprising, too many to count!  How they must have hated each other.

The ship watches in horror, realizing that the planet is doomed.  The radioactive dust and debris will cause a nuclear winter, killing most of life.  Only Africa remains dark, with just a few flashes of death in the very southern and northern areas.

The ship dispatches drones back to the wormhole to fetch help, with instructions for the robots to disassemble the station, and bring it and the dead ships to Earth.  It enters the atmosphere, heading to central Africa.

Its time to recruit bodies to start digging and mining for materials needed to complete the space station that will soon arrive in parts, ready for assembly.  They need to retrofit the dead ships, turn them into dumb ships that require pilots.

The ship feels good.  There is lots of work to be done.

It’s good to be the creator this time.