The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

okay with it. He urgently needed the money. Even an auction could not be organized so quickly. Deuer from the bank explained that it would take a few weeks to set up a mortgage on the house before the money could be paid into the account.

He didn’t have that much time, so he’d accepted the shrewd realtor’s offer. His mother had always been proud of her house. She would have loved to see her son and his family move in there, but now she was lying in an urn in the cemetery. Peter didn’t believe in an afterlife, so he didn’t feel bound by his mother’s wishes.

His smartphone vibrated, telling him the tracking program had once again failed to find the entered destination—the rule rather than the exception with his current candidates. Peter checked the position and determined the ascension and declination were set correctly.

He pressed his eye to the eyepiece. Several stars were visible, but he could not see the object he was looking for in the center of the image. His rod cells were not sensitive enough. With the push of a button, he started taking individual photos. The photons, which had been traveling for more than 50 years, now only had to hit the telescope’s high-sensitivity chip at the right moment.

March 15, 2026 – Passau

There was a tiny dot in the center of the photo. Good. That star was still shining. Peter drew a checkmark in the box on his list, and swiped to the left on the screen. The next image appeared. This photo also showed a bright dot in its center. He checked the position, then placed its checkmark in the list, too.

Where would Franziska be right now? Before, on a sunny-weather day like this, the two of them would have surely been out for a walk somewhere. Instead, he had lowered the blinds to better concentrate on the star photos.

Next.

Peter pulled the notebook a little closer and squinted his eyes. The dot was correct, but he could see a thin trace of light in the lower-left corner. What was that? He memorized the coordinates and the time and looked them up in a database. It was an Earth observation satellite, owned by India, that had wandered through the image during the individual shots.

Such traces were not uncommon. He could simply ignore them. Peter looked up every single one anyway. It might, just maybe, be a comet that no one else had found yet. Many comets were discovered this way. He imagined Franziska coming back to him after he managed to get a celestial body named for her.

The next image showed only emptiness in its exact center. Peter enlarged the image and the contrast, but that didn’t change anything. Had the image possibly slipped? He compared the data at the bottom of the photo with the values in his list. A match. He clicked on ‘Print,’ only to cancel the process immediately. Why should he print a black area?

The list. So far it contained only checkmarks. Now he drew a cross. First a vertical line, then a shorter, horizontal one that crossed the vertical line in its upper half. The result looked mysterious and dramatic.

By late afternoon, he’d managed to look through all the shots from the previous night. In the last work step, he once again inspected each of the photos that had received a cross. There were five. The number seemed surprisingly high, after it had taken him so long to track down the first missing specimens. Was it because he had limited himself to the spherical shell this time? And didn’t this preselection affect the validity of his data?

It was conceivable that, outside of the spherical shell, many more stars had been lost in the same time period. Then his theory would, so to speak, stand on clay feet. He already knew what this meant: In the coming nights, he must randomly select an area of the same size that was not located on the spherical shell, and search there in an identical way. If he then discovered a similar number of losses, that was probably it for his theory.

But first he wanted to look at how the new finds matched the old ones. He ran downstairs to the living room. It still smelled like burnt pizza. With a wave of his hand, he started the astral projector. He called up the simulation he’d designed four days ago to determine the deadline—how much time they had left until the sun died.

First, as usual, appeared the spherical shell, on which everything seemed to take place. He added the new data, which was evenly distributed over the northern and southern hemispheres. Then he started the actual simulation. The roller ran over the spherical shell from different directions, over and over again, erasing one star after the other, except for those that gave off signals in the right frequency range.

The program took longer, with the new data, to determine the most likely scenario. Peter closed his eyes because he was getting a headache from the flickering of the roller. Finally, the simulation stopped. Last time—four days ago—it showed the sun having three months left.

Now it had only three weeks!

13 13 37 56 +42 29.76

Biresybjvat fxvrf bs jnfgrq fgnef fcyraqbe bire gur fbeebj.

Vafgrnq bs vagb gur phfuvbaf, jrrc hc.

Urer, ng gur jrrcvat nyernql,

ng gur raqvat snpr,

gur enivfuvat fcnpr ortvaf.

Jub vagreehcgf,

jura lbh chfu gurer,

gur pheerag? Ab bar. Hayrff,

gung lbh fhqqrayl fgehttyr jvgu gur zvtugl qverpgvba

bs gubfr fgnef nsgre lbh. Oerngur.

Oerngur gur qnexarff bs gur rnegu naq ybbx hc ntnva!

Ntnva. Yvtug naq yvtugyrff,

yrnaf sebz nobir qrcgu gb lbh.

Gur ybbfrarq avtug snpr tvirf fcnpr gb lbhef.

March 16, 2026 – Passau

SigmaLaunch was taking its time with their answer. Peter made himself breakfast in the kitchen and then took it outside into the garden, because the sun was already pleasantly warm at seven o’clock in the morning, and it still