Friday Flash Fiction 10

LOST TOYS
By Gareth L Powell

When they dropped out of hyperspace, they weren't where they expected to be.

'That's Earth,' said Diego.

Beside him, Carla frowned: They were wildly off course.

'How did we get here?' she said.

They were lying on couches, jacked into the ship's sensors. Beneath them, the planet turned, blue and delicate.

'Something must have happened…'

There were sparks against the planet's night side. And when she looked up, there were sparks all over the sky.

'What the hell…?'

She expanded her view. The sparks were ships, thousands of them. Some were manoeuvring, others drifting. And in between them, there were other objects - buildings torn loose from their foundations, train carriages, sections of highway…

'Comm traffic's off the scale,' Diego said. 'Everyone's shouting at once. They're all as confused as we are.'

Carla didn't reply. She'd focussed on one of the nearer objects – a tower block tumbling slowly through the vacuum, trailing pipes and cables and loose bricks.

And then she saw something that made her reach for her silver crucifix necklace – a small spacecraft with long instrument booms and a large high-gain antenna.

'My God,' she said, 'it's one of the Voyager probes.'

Beside her, Diego swore in Spanish, and crossed himself.

'Look, Carla,' he said.

He highlighted a tower spinning in the void a few hundred kilometres behind them. As soon as Carla saw it, she recognised it for what it was – the spire of the Church of the Blessed Virgin, from her hometown in Hardfall City, a hundred light years away.

'It's not just us,' Diego said with a nervous laugh. 'It's everywhere we've been, and everything we've built…'

He pulled up an image of the Voyager probe, thrust it at her.

'Everything we've ever sent out into space is being returned!'

He pulled off the sensor headset and sat up on his couch. Feeling him move, Carla squeezed her crucifix.

'What are you saying?'

Diego rubbed his face. When he looked at her, she could see the whites of his eyes.

'We're being tidied up,' he said.