2026
In a small house in Kilcommon, County Tipperary, Ronan O’Keefe was staring through his telescope. Not in the conventional sense of an astronomer with one eye squinting through the tube, he was in fact looking at the stars on his 26 inch computer monitor, an exact depiction of the image on the dish of the 7 inch reflector he had laboriously constructed on the roof. This was nothing new, as his brother Michael could testify. Better than any TV programme, Ronan would say, if he bothered saying anything at all. Around his half of the room shelves were neatly stacked with star charts, books and manuals of astronomy and astrophysics, computer printouts and photographs, all catalogued and placed precisely so that their outer edges matched up in a ruler straight wall, and the catalogues themselves were printed on 130 gsm card and stacked evenly on a small shelf just to the left of the computer table. Michael, who even at the age of eighteen was still fated to share a room in his parents’ house with his younger brother, would not dare lay a finger on the preciously arranged works or mischievously rearrange a pair of papers, for fear of the tantrum it might spark, but really all he wanted was a brother who would spend the evening talking about Patriots on City Channel, or the Ron O’Connor Show, or go out with him to pick up girls in Rocco’s or the Town Bar. Michael just lay on his bed with his phones on, listening to some rock or Irish band, Ronan did not really care and never even asked, but when the younger boy’s fingers started drumming on the table in a particular rhythm Michael took the phones off.
“Found something?”
“Asteroid.”
Michael could complete Ronan’s sentences for himself, however many times he told his brother he always had to do so again and again for incomprehending visitors and anxious relatives. Or comet. Check back in the stored records for its course then have it registered. If he was the first finder he could name it. Fifth this year, pretty good for an amateur. Ronan was well respected on the channel. Michael listened to his brother searching the vast hard drive to find shots from the exact point in space from previous nights, to get movement and parallax and compute the course. He had seen the software, most of it written by Ronan himself, some shared on the sites but a lot of it specialised for his own idiosyncratic tasks. On day Ronan would put this to use making decent money doing jobs which almost anyone else in the world would find mindbendingly impossible or excruciatingly boring. The drumming changed to an impatient, puzzled tempo. Michael jumped on his chair and wheeled it over gripping the floor with the balls of his feet.
“Problem?”
Ronan pointed at the screen, moused over the offending bright spot.
“No record.”
“So it’s come out of eclipse.”
”Not likely. Not even starting to be likely.”
It was unusual for Ronan to speak in multiple sentences unless immersed in technical jargon and this more then anything had Michael intrigued.
“Maybe one of the cells in your receiver’s burnt out.”
“No.”
Michael stopped trying to think of suggestions. He knew it was going to be a hard problem when Ronan moved himself out of the chair and sat on the bed, hands on his knees, deep in thought. Michael went back to his music, but it meant nothing so he turned it off and went downstairs. An hour and a half later Ronan took his shoes and trousers off and slid into bed. When Michael came up he switched off the monitor and extinguished the bedside lamp.
*
He was not surprised, when he came home the next day, to find Ronan slaving at his computer. He chucked a box containing half a pizza on the table next to him, the other half he held folded in his left hand, grabbing bits of it in his mouth each time they threatened to fall on the floor. From his right pocket he took a can and placed it next to the box for Ronan, then reached round to the other pocket for his own which hissed as he snapped the ring with his index finger. Reaching behind with his right foot he dragged the chair by one wheel and fell into it without dropping a crumb.
“So you gonna tell me.”
Ronan opened the drawer next to his desk and took out a plate, knife and fork. Using the fork he slid the half pizza onto the plate, then pulled out the sliding drawer of the computer table and placed the plate on it. He cut off a small piece and placed it in his mouth. Picking up the can he opened it using both hands and when it had stopped fizzing he carefully poured part of the contents into his glass. During this entire operation he did not look up. Fast and hot and it’s made of carbon. About three times the distance of Pluto.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Cool.”
“And it’s coming straight at us.”
*
In his cell in an over-populated corner of England Matthew Brayne contemplated his accounts and a tax bill of a little over thirty five thousand pounds. He liked the monastic reference to his little study, one of the few retreats where none of his little flock would tread, though it was in fact only a doorless alcove to the library. To make a tax bill that high reflected a decent level of profit, and as the outright owner of The Church of the Nazarene it all belonged to him. But still he would like the bill lowered and constantly searched for creative ways to make projects that could reduce tax while enhancing the buildings. No doubt there would eventually be a huge capital gains tax bill when he sold up but that was a long way off and was not to worry him at the age of thirty-eight, still only on the cusp of middle age, and more successful than almost everyone else of his own age. He had not intended to found a religious order, in his previous life he had been a seaman then a drifter and only when his father died and stipulated in his will that Matthew must purchase a property to inherit did he examine the ruined church and buy it for a song. His intention had been to abandon it and squander the remainder of the money but somehow he discovered a gift for persuading local people to spend time and much effort renovating the place, and thanks to a grant from the local council, and a grant from the Church Renovation Fund, and a grant from a local conservation group, all blissfully unaware of each other, the Church of the Nazarene was born on Christmas Day 2022. From the start he applied a lesson from his days in the Navy, and ensured that his loyal followers were always fully occupied. This meant all the necessary cooking, cleaning, shopping, repair work, services and street canvassing were carried out by willing volunteers, some of whom had parted with their life savings for the privilege. With all the money he made from donations he started up a second branch in Birmingham, comfortably far away, and this functioned more as a hostel, with paid staff, where he sent those who arrived destitute, and the local authority paid for their shelter and upkeep. He also had a house in Birmingham, in the unspoilt Bournville area, totally unknown to anyone in the Church, where on visits to the city he could stay overnight with his mistress, a thirty-two year old divorcee by the name of Carol Clancy. Though he would dearly love to offset this house against tax his accountant, who not being a member of the Church was his sole confidant, told him strictly that this would push it into the public arena, so each year when his tax bill came it gave him agonies of indecision. He picked up the old-fashioned cheque book, they had threatened many times but never managed to abolish them, and he liked to use it from time to time. Stroking his gold-tipped fountain pen he checked his watch. Ten minutes to dinner. Maybe he would part with the money in due course, the deadline after all was weeks away. It would be more spiritual to pray before eating. So he replaced the pen in its holder, put the cheque book back inside the desk, and made his way to the cloister.
*
Michael returned from the gym a little after 9. The smell of cooking permeated the house. As he went into the bedroom Ronan finally looked up from his programming. Overlaying some photos of the night sky. The point of light was not visible in the first, from Wednesday night. Last night’s picture showed it clearly as a bright red dot. Tonight it was a little brighter, and in exactly the same position. But Ronan showed, from a shot he had set to be taken at 3 a.m. that morning, there was a tiny movement relative to the star behind. Michael knew enough about parallax to work out the distance, the only information missing was the distance moved by the telescope as the Earth rotated in the intervening six hours. But he knew he would not need to check Ronan’s calculation.
“What does the spectrograph show?”
Ronan hit a few keys and a chart showed a pretty uniform line, tapering off at the left hand end due to absorption of low energy rays by the atmosphere, and more sharply on the right hand side as the temperature of the object limited the wavelength of light emitted.
“Classic bb radiation. Heated by thermal motion. Probably from hitting the heliopause at such high speed.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s the limit of the Sun’s atmosphere. Very thin but still a few particles per cubic centimetre. Like the reentry of the Space Shuttle.” He zoomed in and at high resolution the chart showed as a series of distinct lines. “Carbon.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.”
Ronan tapped a few keys and brought up a reference chart. “This is the theoretical spectrum of carbon.”
“Is it meant to be a bit to the left? Is that the red shift?”
“Yes. But it’s blue shift. It’s coming towards us.”
“And from that you can tell how fast it is.”
“Yes.”
Michael looked at him.
“Sorry. Full sentences. Yes, it’s about one tenth of the speed of light.” Ronan brought up the next chart, which he had only just taken.
“Nine o’clock, same as yesterday. Same position in the sky.” He changed the window to show the spectrum of this new sighting, underneath the other two. “Hotter and slower. Speed has reduced by about one twelfth.”
Ronan paused to recharge after the effort of saying all this.
“So what speed when it hits us?”
“Nothing.”
“?”
“Wouldn’t be much of us left if it hit at its current speed. “It’s decelerating at standard Earth gravity. Will be here in twelve days. Eleven now. It'll probably use the planets for part of its slowdown as it comes in to land.”
“Aliens?”
“Why not. We’ve waited long enough,” he said with a slight air of grievance.
Their mother called them down to dinner and when they returned to the computer the little point of light had disappeared.